711.933/206
The French Embassy to the Department of State31
The French Government has been informed by a note of the Chinese Legation in Paris, dated November 26th, of the desire of the Chinese Government that the privileges of extraterritoriality be suppressed as from January 1st 1930. The Government of Nanking has requested the Government of the Republic to designate a plenipotentiary to negotiate on this subject. This step would seem to indicate that the favorable answers made by the interested Powers on November 1st to the Chinese note of September 7th did not have for effect, as was expected, to bring the Nationalist Government to renounce to his [its] project of arbitrary denunciation of the treaties on January 1st next.
Under these conditions, the French Government deems it advisable to remind the Chinese authorities of the obligation which befalls them to endeavor to solve only by pacific means and judicial methods such a question as extraterritoriality which involves in the first place a point of law and concerns the statutes of persons and property.
It is the intention of the French Government to reply shortly, in this direction, to the Chinese Minister, reminding him that the French Envoy in China has already entered into negotiations on this subject with the Chinese Government and also calling his attention to the attitude adopted following the French notes of October 9th 1928, and October [August?] 10th and November 1st 1929. In stating the impossibility in which it finds itself to accept for the solution of the question of extraterritoriality a date imperative and arbitrarily chosen, which is justified neither in fact nor by right, the Government of the Republic would specify that only an agreement established by mutual consent between France and China may intervene to that effect, adding that at all events its consent could not be given to the immediate total suppression of extraterritoriality, the guarantees accorded to the French citizens in China, particularly by the Treaty of 1858 containing dispositions which may be modified only by the process of gradual devolution and in conformity with article 40 of said Treaty. The French Government will conclude in stating that it does not doubt that the Chinese Government shares this point of view and agrees entirely with the Government of the Republic in its endeavor to solve exclusively by judicial methods and pacific means this important point of law.
[Page 635]The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of France is studying the suggestions made by the representatives of the various Powers at Peking to apply articles 13 and 15 of the League of Nations [Covenant] in the event of the denunciation of the treaties by the Chinese Government. It finds preferable however, for the present at least, to have recourse to the Permanent Court of Justice at the Hague.
M. Briand believes that the time has come to call the attention of the Government of Nanking upon the responsibility which befalls it in the event of its endeavor to solve the question of extraterritoriality by means other than judicial and pacific./.
- Transmitted to the Secretary of State as an enclosure to a personal note dated December 3, 1929, from the French Ambassador; received December 4. The note said in part: “Please find enclosed a résumé of the instructions of M. Briand to our Minister in Peking about extraterritoriality. I should be pleased to have your point of view about this question.”↩