The Wilsonian Moment by Manela Erez;

Author:Manela, Erez;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA - OSO
Published: 2007-02-25T16:00:00+00:00

9

Empty Chairs at Versailles

On November 26, 1918, shortly before Wilson left the United States for Europe, Wellington Koo, as the Chinese minister in Washington, came to see the president at the White House. He wanted, Koo tells us in his memoirs, “to ascertain the American attitude toward China’s hopes at the conference.” Secretary of State Lansing had already assured him of U.S. sympathy, but he wished “to get a direct reaction” from the president.

When I was received at the White House, President Wilson in reply to my question confirmed the sympathetic attitude of the U.S. towards China’s desiderata. He was delighted that I was going to Paris and he hoped that I would keep in touch with the U.S. delegation. But evidently he was more preoccupied with his program for the peace conference. He talked at length about his hopes in the Conference and he reiterated what he had already stated in his famous Fourteen Points; if the world was to have permanent peace, he said there must be a new order.

The Chinese people, Koo told Wilson, had the greatest faith in his principles, which “had given expression to the ideals of the world and kindled the hearts of all.” Wilson admitted that applying his principles to the Far East would be difficult, but added that “mere difficulty was no good reason for not applying them there.” The meeting was congenial, and though the president gave him no specific assurances, Koo nevertheless left the meeting convinced that the president would support China at the peace conference.1

After their arrival in Paris, however, the Chinese delegates discovered that the political realities there were considerably less accommodating than they had hoped. In its preparatory work for the conference, the Chinese delegation had planned to use the international forum to challenge the full gamut of privileges enshrined in the “unequal treaties” that China had signed with foreign powers over the preceding decades and demand the abolition of such provisions as legal extraterritoriality and limitations on its tariff autonomy. These practices abridged China’s political and economic sovereignty, and if the new international order were to be based on justice and self-determination these arrangements could not remain in place. Such demands, however, were quickly put aside by the great powers in Paris, which were not inclined to forgo the territorial and commercial advantages that the unequal treaties gave them. They had already agreed at the outset that only issues directly emanating from the war would be on the table at the conference, and the broad Chinese claims for the abrogation of the unequal treaties did not. Any discussion of comprehensive readjustments to China’s international status, Clemenceau later informed the Chinese delegation, did not fall within the province of the peace conference. China, if it wished, could bring them up later for adjudication at the League of Nations.2

The Chinese demands for a general readjustment of China’s international status toward full sovereignty were accordingly shelved for the time being. The issue that moved to the top of the

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