Office of the Historian

793.94/7463: Telegram

The Ambassador in China (Johnson) to the Secretary of State

Peiping, December 2, 1935—3 p.m.
[Received December 2—11:49 a.m.]

191. Department’s 63, November 29, 2 p.m.65 Such an inquiry will probably produce either denial by the Japanese Foreign Office or a [Page 461] statement that autonomous movement in North China is spontaneous on part of local population. We would have to accept denial or statement and stand before the East as accepting something that is essentially untrue. I do not, therefore, see any value in such an inquiry.

2.
Please see my 72, November 11, 2 p.m., from Nanking. If any inquiry is to be made it would be more to the point, in my opinion, if all the powers party to the Nine Power Treaty could inquire of Japan as to the nature of the policy announced as having been accepted by the Japanese Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Finance, War and Navy and indicated in the Japanese press as being based on the three principles mentioned in my telegram above referred to and whether those principles are compatible with the respect for the sovereignty of China covered by the Nine Power Treaty. But in this connection consideration must be given to the views which I expressed in my No. 288 of June 17, 8 p.m., which I still hold.
3.
This autonomous movement in North China is, in my opinion, being engineered by the Japanese who are supporting Doihara with the Kwantung Army. Japanese soldiers using Boxer Protocol66 as authority are now stationed at railway junctions at Tientsin Central and at Fengtai where they interfere with freight traffic southward on the Tientsin-Pukow and Peiping-Hankow Railways. Japanese military are thus in a position to control railway communication between Peiping and Tientsin and even to points south. These activities are in my opinion one phase of a vastly larger scheme having for its final aim the eradication of every vestige of European and American influence in China and ultimately Asia. This policy has been frankly outlined in the statements of Amau in Tokyo and General Tada more recently in Tientsin and I confidently believe that the Japanese military will consistently and persistently pursue this scheme until it has been attained or until they have exhausted themselves in the effort.
4.
Japanese activities here are in my opinion directed to force China to accept the policy outlined in my telegram above referred to with all that it implies as to the future. Acceptance of the three principles therein set forth will place China almost completely under Japanese control; the presence of Japanese armies in China will have been legalized, China will have consented to Japan’s supervision of her finances and of her relations with other countries. Reluctance to accept those principles will mean Japanese encouragement of autonomous movements such as the one now being witnessed in North China [Page 462] and later elsewhere accompanied by invitations on the part of such autonomous areas to Japan to send into such areas troops and advisers to combat communism and organize finances. Japan will in the end identify what is left of Nationalist China with communism and will include therein Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang. No one is in a position to stop this scheme unless it be the Chinese and it is doubtful whether even they have achieved sufficient unity to present any effective resistance.

Repeated to Tokyo, paraphrase by mail to Nanking.

Johnson
  1. See footnote 61, p. 454.↩
  2. Signed at Peking, September 7, 1901, Foreign Relations, 1901, Appendix (Affairs in China), p. 312.↩