893.00/11836
Memorandum by the Consul General at Nanking (Peck) of a Conversation With the Chinese Minister for Foreign Affairs (Chen)32
Mr. Peck inquired whether the National Government had actually decided to invoke Article XVI of the League Covenant33 against Japan. Mr. Chen replied that the matter had been referred to the Chinese delegation in Geneva for preliminary investigation, and that the Government had not formally come to the decision referred to.
Mr. Peck made the same inquiry in regard to the matter of inviting a conference of the Nine Power Treaty signatories and Mr. Chen said that the decision had not been come to formally, as yet.
Mr. Peck then brought up the subject of the reported intention of the National Government to sever diplomatic relations with Japan. Mr. Chen explained that the Chinese military leaders, General Chiang Kai-shek, for example, were extremely loath to take any step that remotely suggested that China might be drawn into war with Japan, [Page 37] and consequently they were balking at the plan to sever diplomatic relations with that country.…
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Mr. Chen said that if diplomatic relations between China and Japan were to be severed he then would be at liberty to discuss Japanese foreign policies freely. His subsequent remarks apparently were intended to indicate the sort of remarks he would make under those conditions. He said that although the Shogunate had been abolished as an institution, it persisted in practice in the Japanese General Staff, which was the agency through which Japanese militaristic policy acted. It is impossible, or difficult, for one having a mind living in the modern world to realize the ambitions cherished by Japanese militarists. Manchuria they want, because in the future war for the mastery of the Pacific, which will be waged principally with the United States they will need the material resources of Manchuria. But what they are really aiming at is Australia, a vast empty area in which Japanese can colonize and from which Japanese are now excluded. Of course they would be unable to acquire Australia, unless they were first to defeat the United States. Mr. Chen said that the Japanese militarists were systematically planning this vast program and were consciously carrying out their plans, as for instance, in Manchuria at the present time.
Mr. Chen said he did not think that men like Shidehara entertained these ambitions, and it was because of this conviction that he went to Japan in the summer of 1931, but his experiences with and observations of the Japanese General Staff on that occasion convinced him of the truth of what he had just said, and now Shidehara and his party were no longer in power and the Japanese militarists were in no sense controlled by what the world considered the Japanese Government, but rather controlled it. He regarded the Inukai Government as the “Prisoner” of the Japanese General Staff.
(Note: Mr. Eugene Chen spoke with the utmost conviction and Mr. Peck could not but feel that Mr. Chen’s account of what he believed to be the plans of the Japanese military party was based on some documentary evidence, and not on mere conjecture or hearsay.)
- Transmitted to the Minister in China as an enclosure to despatch dated January 22; copy of despatch and enclosure were transmitted to the Department by the Legation in China without covering letter, and were received on March 12.↩
- Treaties, Conventions, etc., Between the United States of America and Other Powers, 1910–1923 (Washington, Government Printing Office, 1923), vol. iii, pp. 3336, 3341.↩