The Story of International Relations, Part One by Jo-Anne Pemberton

Author:Jo-Anne Pemberton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030143312
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

At the same time, the Chinese group willingly conceded their lack of expertise in the field of international treaties and the obligations attendant upon them, assuring the audience that Chinese experts in this field would be present at the next meeting of the IPR.255 Such an assurance was seriously meant: from the outset, Chinese delegates viewed IPR conferences as an opportunity to publicise and win sympathy for the Chinese perspective on the concessions accorded foreigners in China, hoping that their IPR audience might ‘exercise some influence on the men who directed policy in the countries from which they came.’256 In relation to this, the following statement by David Z. T. Yui, general secretary of the Committee of Young Men’s Christian Associations of China, in an opening address to the 1927 conference given on behalf of the Chinese national group, should be noted: ‘Our people also deeply appreciate the fact that at this Institute all delegates not only meet on an absolutely equal basis, but are capable of discussing and are going to discuss all Pacific problems and relations in a frank, unreserved, fair-minded, constructive and fraternal spirit.’257

Chinese representatives were not entirely wrong in calculating that within the confines of the IPR they might find an audience receptive to the airing of Chinese grievances. Condliffe, an enthusiastic regionalist who would undertake extensive work in various parts of China, seeking while there to organise and encourage research by Chinese scholars, recounted not long after the 1925 Honolulu conference that those assembled had listened with ‘sympathy and appreciation’ to the Chinese delegation’s statement of the aims and its ‘explanation of the aspirations’ of ‘Young China.’258 Davis conveyed a similar impression, stating that the Chinese delegation won the ‘sympathy of the whole Institute,’ adding that its members had impressed their IPR audience with their ‘great personal charm and Christian idealism’ and with the intensity of their devotion to the ‘task of building a new China based upon a fusion of Eastern and Western culture.’ Indeed, Davis stated that the most ‘outstanding impression of the Institute carried away by its members’ was that of how a ‘little group of Chinese idealists is successfully grappling with the giant problem of Chinese illiteracy.’ In relation to this, Davis observed that not only the members of the IPR ‘but all of Honolulu had thrilled with the story’ of China’s Mass Education Movement as told by its founder and director, Y. C. James Yen.259 Stanford University’s Wilbur, who had been made chairman of the IPR, had been similarly enthused by the story of China’s Mass Education Movement, the headquarters of which, according to the IPR’s News Bulletin, were at ‘22 Shih-Fu-Ma-Ta-Chieh Peking,’ describing it as ‘one of the most significant movements in the history of education.’260

Like the Chinese delegates, Japanese delegates presented a case for peaceful change at the 1925 meeting. Indeed, as Henry Forbes Angus, a member of the Canadian Council of the IPR, suggested in The Problem of Peaceful Change in the Pacific Area: A Study of

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