893.01/676: Telegram
The Consul General at Shanghai (Gauss) to the Secretary of State
[Received March 19—12:50 p.m.]
230. My 217, March 16.85 According to this morning’s press, Shanghai Japanese Embassy spokesman at press conference yesterday stated with reference proposed Wang government that questions regarding military operations would be referred to Tokyo but other matters would be handled by new régime and would be of no concern to Japanese Government. He is quoted as saying that “there must have been a number of questions which were taken up by the powers with the former Nanking Government. They will have to do the same now.” He said that question of whether Japanese authorities would hand over to new government responsibility of preserving law and order would have to be settled after formation of that government.
All questions involving third powers would be considered on their [Page 298] merits, “principally” by the new government: “If a British firm wanted to establish a new factory in Manchukuo, it would have to negotiate with the Manchukuo authorities and not the Japanese. The same applied in China,” the spokesman said.
The press account continues: “Japan had announced that she intended to respect the independence and sovereign rights of China, and the new government, which had this independence and sovereign rights, in turn had announced that it intended to respect the ‘lawfully acquired rights of the powers in China’. International relations,” the spokesman went on, “were only established when there was recognition but there could be de facto dealings with the new government.”
Asked what he meant by “lawfully acquired rights”, the spokesman stated that these were rights acquired under treaties. Further questions as to whether or not the new government would respect these treaties, which had been signed with the former government in occupied areas, he stated that treaties might be compared with old clothes, which [one?] ceased wearing when they no longer fit.
With particular reference to the Nine Power Treaty,86 the spokesman said that at time of signature Japan was still growing; he then stated, replying to a correspondent’s observation that a state signing treaty with Japan therefore could expect such treaty to be but temporary, that “reality imposed the necessity of revision [of] international law.” Regarding validity of treaties entered into by National Government, he said that “there is general consent under international law as to which obligations a new state will succeed to or which obligations it will not succeed to.”
A party of some 18 press correspondents, including several Americans, left for Nanking this morning by invitation of the Wang Kuomintang Department of Publicity. The general program is that they shall remain in seclusion for about a week, [at] which [time] it anticipates that the scheduled political meetings shall have been terminated, and that they shall then return to Shanghai to wait for “about 10 days” before returning to Nanking for the ceremony of the establishment of the government itself; however, another version purports that it may prove feasible for the correspondents to remain in Nanking for the ceremony, which would follow immediately after the aforementioned meetings, with the formal establishment perhaps on March 28 or April 2.
Repeated to Peiping, Chungking; air mail to Tokyo.
- Not printed.↩
- Signed at Washington, February 6, 1922; Foreign Relations, 1922, vol. i, p. 276.↩