by Hew Strachan
Both Müller and Spee had earned the respect and admiration of their foes; but Müller was a prisoner of war by 11 November 1914, and Spee was dead a month later. Ultimately, neither of the differing interpretations of cruiser warfare that each had embodied was vindicated. By January 1915 the Germans had sunk seventy-five merchant vessels or a total of 273,000 tons; of this the largest proportion, 215,000 tons, was accounted for by surface vessels. But these losses represented a mere 2 per cent of British commercial tonnage.63 It would require a great many Müllers (and no other German cruiser captain displayed his flair for the conduct of guerre de course) and a great many Emdens before such action would be more than disruptive. Spee, on the other hand, did not sink a single merchant ship. But his effect had been felt in a different and— to Mahanites—more direct way. British warships had been thrown onto the defensive and their effects dissipated. It is tempting to argue that if the East Asiatic Squadron had been broken up and had fought independently, as Emden did, even more would have been achieved. But then there would have been no Coronel. Jellicoe would not have been forced to disgorge his battle cruisers without the effect of that defeat. Spee’s policy did, therefore, directly weaken the Grand Fleet, albeit temporarily. But, although this had been a major aim of German pre-war cruiser policy, Pohl did not take the opportunity thereby offered him. Instead, the loss of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau confirmed in the cautious minds of the German naval leaders the unwisdom of Kleinkrieg. Spee’s own offensive spirit turned, ironically enough, into an argument for increasing defensiveness. Such a policy, questionable enough in 1914, became mandatory in 1915, now that the Royal Navy was free to concentrate in home waters.
EMPIRE IN THE PACIFIC
On 12 August 1914 the Japanese military attaché in Washington declared that ‘Japan now had a free hand in the Far East’.64 The occupation of Micronesia was the first manifestation of Tokyo’s intent. The 2nd South Seas squadron became the ‘Provisional South Seas Islands Defence Force’, and readied itself for a possible engagement with the United States. By the end of 1914 the naval ministry had dispatched teams of scientists to survey the islands and assess their resources. Occupation became settlement: cut off from the outside world, the local population was accorded ‘brotherly racial equality’ while being taught Japanese and Japanese ways. To their existing exports of phosphates and copra were added sugar and coconuts. But even economic development had a strategic end: the profits accrued to the navy as the islands’ administrators. And with its consolidation of Japan’s outermost possessions, the navy’s claim on the defence budget multiplied faster than that of the army: between 1914 and 1918 the army’s share rose from 87.7 million yen to 152 million, whereas the navy’s soared from 83 million to 216 million. By the war’s end it had secured approval for its programme of eight battleships and eight battle cruisers.65
Even after the battle of the Falkland Islands the British Admiralty remained far too dependent on the continuance of Japanese naval assistance for the pursuit of anything other than conciliation. In November 1914 Grey suggested to Kato that the occupation of the German Pacific territories should be temporary pending the final peace settlement. If Germany was then still in a dominant position on the continent of Europe, the islands would be bargaining-chips for the restoration of Belgium. Kato accepted the principle, but concluded that ‘the Japanese nation would naturally insist on the permanent retention of all German Islands north of the equator’.66
Thus, the removal of the German threat in the Pacific had been achieved by the activation of that from Japan. For Australians and New Zealanders the exchange was a poor one. The Dominions contended that the surrender to them of New Guinea, the administrative centre for all the German Pacific islands, implied Australian control of the entire network. But, though an explanation for the antipodeans’ slowness to act themselves, their argument carried little weight when compared with possession.67 Lewis Harcourt, the colonial secretary in London, switched from being the spokesman of Dominion concerns in Britain to being the emissary of the Anglo-Japanese alliance in Australia. Nor were his efforts without success. Australia’s complaints tended to obscure its recognition that the alliance had actually worked to defend it from attack. Even more importantly, Australia moaned about what it had not got rather than what it had. With considerable ease and minimal expense the German south Pacific islands had been added to the bounds of the British empire and formed a fresh defensive buffer to the north.
All this made nonsense of the CID subcommittee’s renunciation of annexationism at its meeting on 5 August 1914. London’s efforts to contain Japan or to argue that the occupation of Germany’s Pacific colonies was temporary were vitiated by the determination of its Dominion partners to turn conquest into commercial exploitation. Furthermore, the colonization of New Guinea was not moderated, as it was in Micronesia, by attention to the welfare and education of the indigenous population.
In New Guinea, Australia handed the firm of Burns Philp and Co. a virtual monopoly of imports and exports. The company’s turnover and profits all but doubled between 1914 and 1918. Copra production was the key. The German planters were not expropriated until after the end of the war. Instead, they were encouraged to continue trading, and palm tree plantings were doubled. The value of New Guinea’s trade rose from £225,416 in 1915–16 to £1.2 million in 1919–20, almost all of it copra exports carried through Australian ports. This achievement was built on the backs of the Melanesian population, forcibly recruited and then kept in check with corporal punishment. British observers were appalled as Australian entrepreneurs and German planters drove forward a policy determined primarily by racism and profit-making.68
Outwardly, affairs were better managed in Samoa, where the indigenous population welcomed the New Zealanders’ discrimination against the Chinese, even when it entailed the forcible separation of mixed families, as well as the closure of all German businesses by April 1916. As in New Guinea, Burns Philp was granted a virtual monopoly, and copra production was emphasized to the detriment of other produce: by 1916 copra accounted for 66.5 per cent of all Samoa’s exports, and by 1918 80.4 per cent. But, unlike New Guinea, military administration remained in place. Determined ‘to procure for the men absolutely the best quality beer that is on the market, at the lowest possible price’,69 the New Zealand military government pursued a populist policy that was ultimately self-defeating. Its costs were covered by an export tax on agricultural products which reduced the profits paid to Samoan producers, while the price of imports rose. Many Samoans withdrew from the market. Furthermore, what trade remained was increasingly carried in American ships owing to the lack of British tonnage: by 1918 only 14.5 per cent of Samoa’s trade was with New Zealand, but 59.5 per cent was with the United States.
The perceived benefits of sub-imperialism eased the Dominions’ sense of loss. Australia and New Zealand accepted the de facto division of power at the equator. In 1916 British war aims policy included the retention by Australia and New Zealand of their south Pacific acquisitions and by Japan of theirs in the north Pacific. Therefore, although the secret Anglo-Japanese agreement of February 1917 continued to embody a caveat allowing for the outcome of the peace negotiations, each of the contracting parties—Britain with Australia’s and New Zealand’s concurrence—recognized the permanence of the other’s possessions. What had begun as the defence of trade had been transformed into colonial annexationism.70
However, Britain, for all its double-standards in the matter, was at bottom a satiated power, committed to maintaining the status quo in the Pacific, and only responding to the allocation of the German colonies because the circumstances of war forced it to. Japan, on the other hand, was an emergent empire, which had entered the war in pursuit of its Pacific policy, not shaped its policy around the fact of its being at war. In August 1914 it faced no threat to its territory or to its vital interests. But some thought it to have reached the zenith of its powers. Short of capital at home and having difficulties in raising lo
ans abroad, it struggled to make the investment necessary for modernization. Britain boxed in Japanese commercial expansion in the Yangtze valley; Russia looked set to recover its status as a Far Eastern power; and to the east the United States disputed hegemony of the north Pacific. Then the First World War, by emptying the Far East of Europe’s exports and by making the European powers dependent on Japanese support, provided Japan with opportunities for penetration and expansion. The only problem was that Japan’s attentions were not focused primarily on Germany: the north Pacific islands were an incidental bonus. Japan’s aims lay in China, a neutral state whose integrity was a declared objective of the Anglo-Japanese alliance.
On 18 January 1915 the Japanese ambassador in Peking presented Yuan with Japan’s Chinese shopping list, the so-called twenty-one demands.71 The demands were organized in five groups. The first required that China accept Japan’s right to settle the future of the Shantung lease with Germany; the second aimed to consolidate Japan’s hold in southern Manchuria and eastern Inner Mongolia, and in particular to extend the Japanese lease of Kwantung for a further ninety-nine years; the third asked China to admit Japan to joint ownership of the Hanyehping iron and coal company; the fourth reflected Japan’s worries about the possibility of an American installation at Fukien, opposite Taiwan, and obliged China not to give or lease any harbour to foreign powers; the fifth group were dubbed ‘wishes’ rather than ‘demands’, and became the focus of most of the subsequent debate. Japan’s ‘wishes’ were that China should accept Japanese political and military advisers, that Japanese should have the right to own land in China, that Japan should—in short— exercise indirect control over those portions of China over which it did not already have direct control.
The timing of the delivery of the twenty-one demands, soon after the fall of Tsingtao and in the immediate context of a debate with China over the extent of the Shantung war zone, suggested that Japan was doing little more than tidy up after its defeat of the Germans. China cancelled the war zone on 7 January 1915. Although it did not ask Japan to withdraw from Tsingtao for fear of creating the impression that it had used Japan to defeat Germany for its own ends, it argued that Japan’s occupation of Tsingtao was temporary, pending the reversion of the German lease to China. Japan, of course, believed that the German lease should be bestowed on Japan, and feared that reversion to China would not preclude the re-emergence of Germany in China after the war. The dispute over Tsingtao provided the immediate context for the formulation of the twenty-one demands. However, their origins were of a piece with the development of Japanese foreign policy since 1905.
The conclusion to the Russo-Japanese War, the Treaty of Portsmouth, had not been generous in its handling of Japan, although the latter was the victorious power. The basis of Japan’s foothold in China, the lease on Kwantung, was due to expire in 1923; defeated Russia had consolidated its hold in Outer Mongolia, while victorious Japan had not achieved the same in Inner Mongolia. Japan’s economic weakness meant that in the scramble for railway concessions and for capital investment in mainland Asia the European powers consistently came out on top. And yet China’s proximity made it proportionately more important to Japan than to any of the other treaty powers: in 1914 it took a fifth of all its exports, 92 per cent of its exported yarn, and 70 per cent of its exports of cotton piece goods.72 Nor was China simply a market. Ethnic kinship stoked a sense of Asian nationalism to which Chinese such as Sun Yat-sen responded. In this form, a common cultural identity imposed on Japan an obligation to aid in the modernization and reinvigoration of its larger continental neighbour in order to save China from the exploitation of western imperialism. On 29 November 1914 Uchida Ryohei, the far-right leader of the nationalist Black Dragon society, submitted to Okuma and Kato a memorandum ‘for a solution of the China problem’: it was, to all intents and purposes, a first draft of the twenty-one demands.73
A precondition of Uchida’s programme was the replacement of the Yuan government. In 1913 the Hanyehping company had agreed to repay a Japanese loan with deliveries of 17 million tons of iron ore and 8 million tons of crude iron over a forty-year period; the effect would be to foster Japan’s industrialization while retarding China’s. On 22 November 1914 the Chinese government nationalized China’s iron ores. Both in this and in the dealings over Shantung Yuan demonstrated a healthy suspicion of Japan. Given time, he might even establish a secure government for China, thus further restricting Japan’s opportunities. His external strength lay in the network of treaties which bound the commercial interests of the great powers to the stability and integrity of China. The war, by weakening the leverage of the treaty powers, gave Japan the opportunity to try to establish by a diplomatic coup what it had failed to do by largely economic means.
Whether or not Japan’s attempt was successful largely depends on the interpretation given to its aims. Japan’s industrialization was reliant on foreign capital. By establishing an enclave of its own in China, it hoped ultimately to end that dependence. Between 1902 and 1914 Japan’s share of the total foreign investment in China rose from 0.1 per cent to 13.6 per cent. But in the short term it had to balance its economic imperialism with its own domestic need for overseas investment. Thus, compromise was implicit in its foreign policy.74 The twenty-one demands were a maximum programme. Kato had incorporated the views of all interested parties, including the army, the navy, big business, and the pan-Asiatic nationalists. But Kato himself reckoned to do no more than consolidate Japan in Shantung, southern Manchuria, and eastern Inner Mongolia. This, after all, was what he had gone to war for, and what he had concluded—from various statements by Grey—that Japan’s ally would support. The fifth group was therefore redundant. By including it he appeased Japanese nationalists, but at the same time—by calling its contents ‘wishes’, not ‘demands’—he earmarked it as clearly negotiable. The fact that the Diet had been dissolved in December 1914, and that no new assembly convened until May, gave the government a free hand in the conduct of what Kato hoped would be secret diplomacy. By the time the apparent crisis was reached in the Sino-Japanese negotiations, at the end of April, China had actually conceded to Kato most of what he had set out to achieve. The dispute was over the residue, not over the twenty-one demands as a whole.
On 26 April Kato presented the outstanding issues, and in particular the fifth group of objectives, in a revised and moderated form. China responded by persisting in defence of its sovereignty. At a cabinet meeting on 6 May the Japanese decided to drop group five in its entirety. Yuan has been given the credit for persuading the genro to force Kato to this step. However, more important to the cabinet’s decision must have been Britain’s protest that group five contravened the terms of the alliance treaty. Kato, as a defender of the alliance, was too shrewd not to have predicted such an outcome. Therefore the demands contained in the ultimatum served on China by Japan on 7 May, although far milder than those contained in the original draft, can have been no more mild than Kato himself originally anticipated. China duly accepted their terms two days later. The Sino-Japanese treaty of 25 May secured Japan’s hold on southern Manchuria and eastern Inner Mongolia, ceded Germany’s economic rights in Shantung to Japan and left the settlement of the leasehold to the final peace settlement, established the Hanyehping company as a Sino-Japanese concern, and embodied the non-alienation of Fukien.
The only legitimate Japanese objection to Kato’s diplomacy was that he might have achieved as much with greater stealth if he had proceeded gradually and waited until 1919 for confirmation of what he had gained. But that argument assumed a knowledge that the war would not end sooner, and that when it did the European powers—in particular Russia and Germany—would not be in a position to press their Asiatic claims with greater strength.
If Kato failed, therefore, it was not as a diplomat but as a domestic politician. The nationalists, led on by the inclusion of their aspirations in group five, were frustrated by the length of the negotiations and their final outcome. The genro, a
lready alarmed by Kato’s bellicosity in August 1914, were annoyed at their exclusion from the processes of diplomacy; they saw Yuan’s appeal as evidence of the damage done to relations with China and Britain’s protests as a blow to Japanese prestige. By sidelining the genro Kato ran the risk of empowering the army, which the genro had hitherto held in check and which saw force as a solution to the crisis. Caught between competing pressures that even the most successful foreign policy could never truly reconcile, the government weakened, and in August Kato was removed, ultimately to be replaced as foreign minister by Ishii Kikujiro.
Kato’s handling of the twenty-one demands, and in particular of group five, came to be seen as a diplomatic blunder in part through these domestic divisions but also in part through Yuan’s self-advertisement. Yuan liked to believe that his conduct of the negotiations had been outstandingly successful. Committed to secrecy, particularly in relation to group five, he spun out the talks sufficiently long to enable Britain and the United States to become conversant with the terms of the twenty-one demands. He then, so his defence runs, forced Japan to the ultimatum, and thus made it evident that China’s submission was the product of force majeure. Finally, what he gave away were chunks of China which he had never fully controlled. In reality, Yuan lost all down the line. The initial secrecy over the twenty-one demands proved enormously hard to rupture. Not until 10 February did the British Foreign Office know the demands in full, and even then incredulity over group five’s existence persisted. In the United States William Jennings Bryan, the secretary of state, initially welcomed group five as extending to Japan the ‘open door’ in China already enjoyed by the United States and Europe. His department, anxious not to reawaken the issue of Japanese immigration to California, looked to Britain to restrain its ally. But Grey, given the military situation, felt ‘our proper course is to lie low’.75 The response of both powers slowly grew as the crisis developed, but neither made up for this initial delay. If Kato had always recognized group five as negotiable, its inclusion thus became a stroke of genius. British and American attentions focused on it rather than on the substance of the demands; the abandonment of group five gave Yuan the opportunity to save face at home while at the same time conceding the essence of what Kato wanted. Britain, having been instrumental in the Japanese decision to drop group five, then advised China to submit to the Japanese ultimatum. The United States, when it made a belated attempt to rally the Entente powers behind China, got no support. At bottom, the United States seemed as ready to allow limited Japanese expansion into China as was Britain. Thus, Yuan’s delaying tactics could not gainsay the fundamental weakness of his position. The day on which the Japanese issued their ultimatum, 7 May 1915, was dubbed ‘national humiliation day’, evoking in the Chinese people a genuine sense of nationalism. But popular sentiments were a threat to Yuan’s regime, not a springboard to reform and regeneration. The net effect of Yuan’s so-called successful diplomacy was to weaken the fragile links between the leader and his people, while not fully awakening him to the pusillanimity of the powers on whom his policy resided.