Then and There Search

China, 1895 to 1916, episode 12

Twenty-One Demands

With Europe at war, Japan takes Germany's base at Qingdao, and in January 1915 its minister hands Yuan Shikai in person a secret list of demands that would make China close to a protectorate, with a hint that Yuan's own position could be secured if he settled. The episode follows Yuan through four months of bargaining, the leaks he made hoping protest would force Japan back, the ultimatum and the surrender, and asks what it cost China among the powers and Yuan at home. It leans on foreign observers and on the republic's own diplomatic replies; the public anger that followed is heard only thinly.

Jiaozhou Bay Leased Territory Beijing
Map drawn by Then and There on Natural Earth's public domain coastlines, rivers and lakes

Transcript

Yuan Shikai
Yuan Shikai. Photo by Rio V. De Sieux, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Last time, Yuan Shikai broke the republic's first parliament, and ruled under a new constitution that put every power in the president's hands. He even had the names of his successors sealed in a gold box, inside a stone house, in his own residence. And out on the coast of Shandong, with Europe at war, Japan took Germany's base at Qingdao. That left Japan holding a list, and Yuan holding a problem. Before we open the list, I want to go back a few months, to the summer the war began, and watch it arrive from where Yuan sat. When Europe went to war, China stayed neutral. In Beijing, the British and German diplomats could still mingle at the same official functions. But the war came to China's door all the same. Germany still held its leased territory at Jiaozhou, in Shandong, and German cruisers were loose in the Yellow Sea. And Yuan, as it happened, had been working on the Germans. He was in the middle of quiet talks with the German legation about handing the Jiaozhou territory back to China. That was when the news reached him. Japan, after some quick talks with its British ally, had sent Germany an ultimatum, demanding everything Germany had taken by force in Shandong, in the great year of leases, 1898. Japan had been Britain's ally since 1902, and now it pressed China to support the Allies too. Yuan saw at once what it meant. The foreign observer in Beijing you met last time wrote that in the Japanese attack, Yuan foresaw a web of complications that even his unrivalled diplomacy might not be able to untangle. He knew from bitter experience, the observer said, that wherever Japan set its foot, it stayed. From that August on, in this observer's eyes, the fear of Japan hung over Yuan like a black cloud, and governed every move he made for the rest of his life. Bitter experience is the right phrase. It went back a long way. You will remember Yuan as Li Hongzhang's man in Korea, in the years before the war of 1894. In those years, his talent for diplomacy let him beat his Japanese rivals again and again, and keep China's word supreme at the Korean court, right up to the moment the first shots of that war were fired. In Japan, they never forgot it. By 1914, the observer wrote, the old dislike had grown into a consuming hatred, a fixed idea, shared by Japanese of every class. And between 1911 and 1914, that hatred pushed nearly everything else in Japanese statecraft into the background. There was a pull the other way, too. Ordinary Japanese, fed by an excited press, had cheered the young China that made the revolution, so much of it schooled in Tokyo. But of the two feelings, the observer judged, the hatred of Yuan was the one that decided things. What had held Japan back was the rest of the world. There was the opinion of the other powers, and the need to act together with them whenever China borrowed money. In August 1914, the rest of the world went to war with itself. Inside Japan, oddly enough, the war against Germany was not popular. Many Japanese felt the balance of power among the European nations was no business of theirs, and that was all Britain's war with Germany looked like to them. And there was an awkward family tie. Japan's navy was the child of the British navy, but its army was the child of the German army, and the army chiefs had no wish to spoil their army in a fight that did not interest them. There was grumbling, too, that Britain, by calling on its ally, had got the better half of the bargain. And official Japan was irritated that the British Foreign Office had quietly backed Yuan's regime all along, and seemed to treat the whole Chinese experiment as more amusing than worrying. One document in particular stuck in Japanese throats. In 1913, the British government had printed, among its official papers on China, a statement from Yuan denying that he had any wish to be emperor. In it, Yuan said that from his student days he had admired the example of the ancient emperors Yao and Shun, who treated the empire as a public trust, and that in middle age he had come to admire the republics of France and America. Yao and Shun were the legendary sage kings of China's earliest age, who were said to have passed the throne to the worthiest man rather than to their own sons. In Japan, they called Yuan's statement a studied lie. And they noticed that it was written with its back turned on Japan. Keep that denial in mind. It is going to be tested. Yuan did what a neutral could. He proclaimed a small war zone in Shandong, and announced that inside it, and only inside it, the Japanese were permitted to fight the Germans. In Tokyo, that was read as an insult, proof that Yuan did not respect the majesty of Japan. Yuan was playing another game as well. It was well known that he was spending large sums in Tokyo, paying certain Japanese newspapers and trying to win friends among the members of Japan's parliament. None of it slowed Japan down. With the Europeans busy killing one another, Japan had a clear field, and barely three months after the war began, it had taken over Germany's whole position in Shandong. And having taken Germany's fortress by assault, Tokyo made up its mind about the man in Beijing. China, it decided, was in fact a dictatorship. Very well. Japan would deal with the dictator. It was time, the feeling went in Tokyo, to give a proper definition to the relations between the two countries. And somewhere in Tokyo, a plan for that definition had already been written.

The plan came from the Black Dragon Society. The Black Dragon Society was a Japanese patriotic society, founded in 1901, that pushed for Japan to expand onto the Asian mainland. Its name came from the Black Dragon River, the Amur, on Manchuria's northern edge. Late in the autumn of 1914, it seems, the society wrote a long memorandum on what it called the Chinese Question, and presented it straight to the Japanese government. This was no crank's pamphlet. It was cool, well informed and logical, and the observer in Beijing was sure that distinguished Japanese had helped to draft it. So let me walk you through it, because it explains almost everything that happened next. It began with the war in Europe. The present gigantic struggle, the memorandum said, had no parallel in history. Nobody could say yet who would win. But when peace came, the powers of Europe would certainly turn back to China, to enlarge their spheres there, and Britain, France and Russia might even combine to coerce it. If Japan stayed passive, its influence in China would be checked for good, and the very existence of the Japanese empire might be at risk. And so: "Now is the most opportune moment for Japan to quickly solve the Chinese Question. Such an opportunity will not occur for hundreds of years to come." It was, the memorandum added, Japan's divine duty to act now. What did solving the Chinese Question mean? The memorandum spelled it out. Japan should take this chance to seize the reins of political and financial power in China, and bind China to it in a defensive alliance, on secret terms. There were ten terms. Whenever China had trouble at home, or a war abroad, Japan's army would come in to guard its territory and keep order. China would recognise Japan's special position in South Manchuria and Inner Mongolia, and cede its sovereign rights there to Japan. Japan would inherit every right the Germans had held in Shandong, in railways, mines and everything else. China would lease Japan strategic harbours on the coast of Fujian, for naval bases, and give it the railway and mining rights of that province. China would hand the training of its army to Japan, and the training of its navy. It would adopt Japanese pattern firearms, and build its arsenals with Japanese help. Japanese experts would reorganise its finances, as first class advisers to the government, and Japanese educators would advise on its schools, which would teach Japanese. And the tenth term: before China borrowed money from another power, or leased or ceded territory to one, it would have to consult Japan and get Japan's consent. Add those up and there is not a great deal of China's independence left over. Then the memorandum turned to the man who would have to sign. Could Japan get all this by ordinary, friendly diplomacy with Yuan Shikai? It thought not. Yuan, it said, had always resorted to the policy of expediency. He might smile at Japan now, but he would really rely on the other powers as a check against it, and refuse its demands. And look ahead, it said, to China after the war. An empty treasury, no money to pay the officials or the army, bandits stirring up the poor, revolutionaries waiting for their chance, and no loans to be had from anyone. Yuan, alone, could never hold that country together. So should Japan prop him up? No, said the memorandum. Most Chinese had lost all faith in him already, and he was attacked by the whole nation for having sold his country. Yuan, it said, was a politician "fond of employing craftiness and cunning." "He may be friendly to us for a time, but he will certainly abandon us and again befriend the other Powers when the European war is at an end." To back him, the memorandum concluded, would be a blunder indeed. And here, in the society's own words, is what it proposed instead. "Since the Imperial Japanese Government has considered it imperative to support the Chinese people, we should induce the Chinese revolutionists, the Imperialists and other Chinese malcontents to create trouble all over China. The whole country will be thrown into disorder and Yuan's Government will consequently be overthrown." By imperialists, it meant the loyalists who still wanted the Qing emperor back on his throne. Once Yuan fell, Japan would pick a man from among the most influential of China's four hundred million, and help him organise a new government and pull the country together. Meanwhile Japan's army would help restore order and protect lives and property, so that the people would gladly give their allegiance to the new government. And that government would naturally confide in Japan, and rely on it. The revolutionaries, the memorandum noted, were only quiet because they were short of money. If Japan lent them some, and told them to rise all at once, there would be commotion all over China, and Japan could step in and easily adjust matters. Underneath it all ran a simple bet, as the observer read it: that bankruptcy would sooner or later wreck the government in Beijing, and that the moment for Japan to seize was when the risings began. Whether Japan would get there by persuasion or by force, the memorandum left open. But force, the observer thought, always beckoned, because it was the simplest formula. There was one more thing. The new China would not be a republic. The memorandum wanted the republic turned into a constitutional monarchy, and it was very precise about which kind: one "identical, in all its details, to the Constitutional Monarchy of Japan, and to no other." Who would sit on the throne, it left open. It might be the boy emperor of the Qing restored, or the ablest of the monarchists, or the worthiest of the revolutionaries. That could be decided later. Hold on to that idea, a monarchy for China. It is going to come back, from a direction the society did not expect. Did this memorandum become Japan's demands? The observer, setting the two documents side by side, was in no doubt. The plan, he wrote, had been handed to Kato, and passed through the diplomatic filters again and again, until the grit was gone and it looked harmless. The foreign minister was Kato Takaaki, a former ambassador in London and a firm believer in Japan's alliance with Britain. What came out of the filter, the observer said, was five compact little groups of demands. And the most vital ones, the ones that went straight at China's sovereignty, were labelled as mere wishes, so that Japan's ambassadors could assure every foreign office that nothing Japan wanted clashed with anyone else's treaty rights in China. As far back as November, rumours were running around Beijing that Japan had a surprise of an extraordinary kind in its files, and that within weeks it would be sprung.

The Twenty One Demands, in a Luther Daniels Bradley piece, Chicago Daily News, 1915
The Twenty One Demands, in a Luther Daniels Bradley piece, Chicago Daily News, 1915. Bradley, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

It was sprung on the eighteenth of January 1915. That day, Japan's minister in Beijing, Hioki Eki, went to see Yuan Shikai, and served the demands on him in person. A minister, in those days, was what we would call an ambassador. Demands from one government to another normally went to the foreign ministry, and handing them to the head of state himself was a deliberate breach of form. And Hioki, the observer heard, took the chance to use language unheard of even in Beijing's long diplomatic history. A summary of what Hioki said that day later leaked out. Its opening lines had been cut, replaced by rows of asterisks, and from what followed, the missing words almost certainly dealt with bringing back the empire. There is every reason to think Hioki told Yuan that, as he was already virtually emperor, it lay within his power to settle the whole business, and to secure his position at one blow. What survived was blunt enough. Chinese revolutionaries, Hioki said, were in close touch with many irresponsible Japanese, some of them men of great influence. Japan's government, of course, had not been swayed by them. But, he said, "if your Government does not quickly agree to these stipulations, it will be impossible to prevent some of our irresponsible people from inciting the Chinese revolutionists to create trouble in China." You have just heard who in Japan had been writing that very plan down. Most Japanese, Hioki went on, were against Yuan. They believed he followed a policy of "befriending the Far", meaning Europe and America, and "antagonizing the Near", meaning Japan. Agree quickly, and the Japanese people could say Yuan had never been anti Japanese after all. And Japan's government would be inclined to help Yuan's government whenever help was needed. After all, Hioki said, Japan's government had always, from first to last, done its very best to help the government of China. Sign, in other words, and we will keep the revolutionaries off your back, and perhaps do more for you. Refuse, and we may not. To the observer, Japan was saying in so many words that unless Yuan bowed his head to Tokyo, the duel that began in Seoul twenty five years before would be openly resumed. So what was on the list? There were five groups of demands. The first was about Shandong. China would agree in advance to whatever Japan and Germany might one day settle between them about Germany's rights in the province, and would cede or lease no part of the province or its coast to any third power. Japan could build a railway there, and China would open more of Shandong's towns to foreign trade. The second group was about South Manchuria, and the eastern part of Inner Mongolia next to it. Inner Mongolia was the band of Mongol country south of the Gobi, much closer to Beijing than Outer Mongolia, and much more tightly held by China. Japan had taken over Russia's railway south of Changchun after their war, and had been allowed to build a line of its own from Shenyang to Dandong, on the Korean border. Now it wanted the leases on Port Arthur and Dalian, the South Manchuria Railway and the line from Dandong to Shenyang all stretched to ninety nine years. Japanese subjects would be free to live, travel, trade and manufacture anywhere in the region, to lease or own land, and to open mines. Before China let any other power build a railway there, or borrowed against the region's taxes, it would need Japan's consent. And before it hired political, financial or military advisers there, it would consult Japan. The third group was about a single company: the Hanyeping Company. It was the huge iron and coal enterprise of central China. It joined the ironworks at Hanyang, the ones Sheng Xuanhuai had run, with the iron mines at Daye and the coal mines at Pingxiang. Japan had very little coal or iron of its own, and it had been lending the company money for years, which gave it a claim. Now it wanted the company made a joint concern of the two nations, with nothing done to its property without Japan's consent, and no one allowed to work the mines around it without the company's say so. The fourth group was a single line. China would not cede or lease any harbour, bay or island along its coast to a third power. It sounded protective. The observer read it as Japan appointing itself guardian of China's coast, a role that history had never given it. And then there was the fifth group. It had seven articles, and the first one went like this: "The Chinese Central Government shall employ influential Japanese advisers in political, financial and military affairs." The police in important places would be run jointly by Japanese and Chinese, or would employ large numbers of Japanese. China would buy a fixed share of its munitions from Japan, half or more, or else set up a joint arsenal, with Japanese experts and Japanese materials. Japanese hospitals, churches and schools in the interior would have the right to own land, and Japanese subjects would have the right to preach in China. The preaching meant was Buddhist. Japan would get a network of railways running from Wuchang, on the Yangzi, out toward the coasts of the south. And in Fujian, across the strait from Japan's colony on Taiwan, Japan would be consulted first before any foreign money went into mines, railways or harbours. Advisers in every department, Japanese police, Japanese guns, Japanese railways cutting through the middle of the country. Small wonder, the observer wrote, that Chinese who learned of it said the fate of Korea was going to be theirs. You will remember what happened to Korea: Japan made it a protectorate, and then annexed it outright. The fifth group, the observer said, was mostly a repeat of the measures Japan had taken there, on the road to annexation. Accept it, and China would have been, in effect, a Japanese protectorate. To the observer, the whole list was meant to serve every need of Japanese policy, present and future, and to turn China into a vassal. Yuan had used foreign advisers for years. They were handy, a back channel to their own governments. But Japanese police and administrators inside his own government, he certainly did not want. And here is the uncomfortable part. The Chinese were horrified, but by the standards of the age, much of the list was hardly startling. Foreigners already ran a good deal of China's tax system. Japan wanted all of this kept quiet. For weeks, nothing got out. Diplomats in Beijing tried everything, and still could not get reliable details. Slowly, the reason came out: Japan had warned that publicity would be met with the harshest reprisals. Yuan had other ideas. For once in his political career, he tried to make use of public opinion. He deliberately leaked the contents of the demands, hoping that protests would force the Japanese to back off. A few days after the demands were handed over, a newspaper in Osaka put out a special edition with the text. After that, the veil was lifted. The press took it up, in China and abroad, and foreign ambassadors began asking questions in Tokyo. Tokyo's answer, even to its own ally, was remarkable. There had never been twenty one demands, Japan's ambassadors said, but only fourteen. The seven items of the fifth group were mere wishes, things it would be in China's interest to accept, but which Japan had no intention of forcing on it. The observer in Beijing called that flatly false. The whole aim of the negotiations, he wrote, was to force through the fifth group. Japan would gladly have put off all the other groups for ever, if only China had accepted that one. Meanwhile, the bargaining ground on at the Chinese Foreign Office, conference after conference. By the time Japan rethought its terms, it had held twenty four of them. China gave ground on Manchuria. It agreed to stretch the leases there, and to let Japan take over Germany's rights in Shandong. But on the Hanyeping Company, and on the fifth group, China stood absolutely firm, and refused even to discuss some of the items. And the noise from outside started to tell. With anger rising in the newspapers, and British diplomats pressing, Japan found it had to change some of the most important items. Without that publicity and that British push, the observer believed, Japan would have forced matters so far that Chinese independence would have become virtually a thing of the past. Now set that beside Yuan's leak. Months later, in a formal memorandum to Japan, Yuan's government would say this, with a perfectly straight face. "The Chinese Government has never carried on any newspaper campaign and the Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs has repeatedly declared this to the Japanese Minister." Which was true, I suppose, in the narrowest sense. Whether a deliberate leak counts as a newspaper campaign, I will leave to you.

The man who said that, over and over, across the table from Hioki, was China's foreign minister, Lu Zhengxiang. Lu was a career diplomat from Shanghai who had spent most of his working life in the legations of Europe, many years of it in Saint Petersburg, and he had married a Belgian wife. He had already been the republic's foreign minister in its first year, and at the end of January 1915 Yuan brought him back, in place of Sun Baoqi, the man who had signed the Mongolian declaration. So the talks with Hioki were Lu's to carry almost from the start. And he carried them hard. China held as many as three conferences a week, to hurry things along. By the twenty fourth conference, on the seventeenth of April, the whole list had practically been talked through. Then Japan changed the list. On the twenty sixth of April, acting under direct instructions from Tokyo, Hioki presented a revised list for China to consider afresh. It had grown, from twenty one articles to twenty four, largely because the talks had shown that some of the original articles needed to be broken into smaller pieces. And it came with a sweetener. If China accepted the revised list, Japan would, at a suitable opportunity, and on fair and proper conditions, give back the Jiaozhou territory it had won from Germany. On fair and proper conditions. Not so different from terms to be settled. Most of the revised list was the old one, with the corners filed and the edges sharpened. The lease of Port Arthur and Dalian would run until 1997. The list even named the places in South Manchuria, coal fields and an iron district, where Japanese could start prospecting and open mines straight away. Japanese living there would obey police rules and tax regulations, but only the ones the Japanese consul approved. In South Manchuria, when a Japanese was the defendant in a civil or criminal case, the Japanese consul would try it. That was extraterritoriality, the old privilege of foreigners in China to answer only to their own courts, carried out of the treaty ports and deep into the Manchurian countryside. But the real change was in the fifth group. It was no longer a group at all. Its heading had disappeared entirely, and in its place stood an innocent looking exchange of notes. And there was something stranger still. Several of Japan's old demands now appeared, not as demands, but as statements made by the Chinese foreign minister himself. Under Lu's name, the revised list read: "The Chinese Government, shall, whenever, in future, it considers this step necessary, engage numerous Japanese advisers." Whenever Japanese wanted to lease or buy land in the interior for schools or hospitals, China would consent at once. And when a suitable chance arose, China would send army officers to Japan to discuss buying arms, or setting up a joint arsenal. Hioki's own statement was a single line. The right to preach in China would be taken up again for negotiation, in the future. So the fifth group no longer stood in the list under its own heading. Its advisers, its land for schools and hospitals, and its arms now sat there as the Chinese foreign minister's own statements, and its preaching as Hioki's. Then came what the observer called an ominous silence. The Chinese Foreign Office had already worn itself out in three months of argument. Now, on instructions from the presidential palace, it sat down to write a long memorandum. By then, it was understood in Beijing that every foreign office in the world was watching, and that all of them thought the situation very serious.

On the first of May 1915, Hioki came to the Foreign Office by appointment, and Lu read him the memorandum. It was addressed to Hioki. But it was quite plainly written for the record as well, for the world, and above all for Japan's ally in London. It began with what Japan had first asked for: Shandong, South Manchuria and eastern Inner Mongolia, the Hanyeping Company, the coast, and a fifth group about advisers, police, arms, preaching, railways in the Yangzi valley, and Fujian. Out of profound regard for Japan, it said, China had weighed those momentous demands with grave care, and decided to negotiate, frankly and sincerely, whatever could be negotiated. Then it went through the groups, one by one, and set out everything China had already given. Here is how it described Manchuria. China, it said, had made a painful effort, without hesitation, to agree to stretch the twenty five year lease of Port Arthur and Dalian, the thirty six years of the South Manchuria Railway and the fifteen years of the line from Dandong to Shenyang, all to ninety nine years. And it had given up its own cherished hope of getting those places back when the old leases ran out. All of that, the memorandum said, was a painful effort to meet the situation, and the Japanese government must know it. Then it came to the fifth group. Every one of those demands, it said, infringed China's sovereignty, the treaty rights of other powers, or the principle of equal opportunity. Japan had never marked them as any different from the other four groups. But China, seeing how plainly objectionable they were, had persuaded itself that Japan could only have meant them as friendly advice. It was a polite fiction, and a sharp one. Because the memorandum was built, line by line, to pin on Japan the guilt of having hidden from its British ally demands that cut straight across the purpose of their alliance. And then came the sentence the whole memorandum turned on. "Much as she desired to pay regard to Japan's wishes, China cannot but respect her own sovereign rights and the existing treaties with other Powers." So China had said again and again why it would not negotiate on any of the articles in the fifth group. All it offered, out of regard for Japan, was to state that no foreign money had been borrowed for harbour works in Fujian. And then a question, with an edge you can still hear a century later: "Was there, then, evasion, on the part of China?" After that came China's answer to the revised list. China, it said, was reconsidering the whole question, since Japan had now presented a revised list and promised to restore Jiaozhou. On Manchuria, it tightened the police clause, and agreed that a Japanese consular officer could sit in on cases about land and leases. Of the four demands about eastern Inner Mongolia, it accepted three. And it accepted the article on the Hanyeping Company, as Japan had revised it. This, the memorandum said, was China's final concession. The way it was worded, the observer noticed, made a quiet point all the way through: that China was not a subordinate state dealing with an overlord. It answered the first three groups, briefly and seriously. And then it simply stopped. The rest of Japan's list was left without a word. On Jiaozhou, China asked for the territory back without conditions, and asked Japan to pay for all the losses its fighting there had caused. It also claimed the right to take part in any future talks between Japan and Germany. And it closed by hoping the talks would soon be over, so that whatever misgivings foreign countries felt might be quickly dispelled. It was a stiff answer, from a government in Yuan's position. Tokyo did not like it. In its eyes, China had not given the revised list any careful thought at all. Japan had offered to give back Jiaozhou, a place for which, Tokyo said, it had sacrificed much blood and money, and which it had no obligation to return. And China had not shown the least appreciation. Worse, Tokyo said, China knew perfectly well that Japan could never accept giving Jiaozhou back unconditionally, or paying for the damage, and it had asked for both anyway, and called its answer final. And on Manchuria and Mongolia, Tokyo complained, China had freely altered articles that Japan had drafted from what China's own negotiators had said, turning their statements into empty talk. Conceding with one hand and withholding with the other, Tokyo said, the Chinese made it very hard to credit them with any sincerity. As for the advisers, the schools and hospitals, the arms and the railways in the south, those had either been made to depend on the consent of the power concerned, or were only to be recorded in the minutes, from the statements of the Chinese delegates. Either way, Tokyo said, they did not conflict in the least with China's sovereignty. Remember whose statements those were said to be. The Chinese reply, Japan's government decided, was "vague and meaningless."

Within forty eight hours of that meeting on the first of May, a feeling ran through Beijing that Japan was about to do something serious. And a word began to be whispered. Ultimatum. Nobody was very surprised. China had held to its rights to the utmost, with valuable indirect support from Britain and the United States. But with the world as it was, it would be hard to stop Japan going to extremes. At three o'clock in the afternoon on the seventh of May, the Chinese government received the ultimatum, with an explanatory note of seven articles. It began by recalling why Japan had opened the talks at all: to clear away the complications of the war, and to set the friendship of the two countries on solid foundations, so that the peace of the Far East might be preserved for good. Since January, it said, twenty five conferences had been held, in perfect sincerity and frankness. It regretted, it said, that there was no room for further negotiation. But Japan was warmly attached to the peace of the Far East, and still hoped for a satisfactory settlement. Coaxing had failed, the observer wrote, and now Japan stated its case very defiantly. Then it made its one concession. With the exception of the article on Fujian, which would be settled by an exchange of notes, Japan would detach the fifth group from the present negotiation, and discuss it separately in the future. Everything else, all the articles of the first four groups, and the Fujian notes, China was to accept immediately, without any alteration, as they stood in the revised list of the twenty sixth of April. If it did, Japan's offer to return Jiaozhou would still hold good. China was to reply by six o'clock in the evening on the ninth of May. That gave it forty eight hours. And then the last sentence. "It is hereby declared that if no satisfactory reply is received before or at the specified time, the Imperial Government will take steps they may deem necessary." Nobody in Beijing needed those steps spelled out. Japanese troops already stood in Shandong and in South Manchuria. The explanatory note had a few small lessons of its own. Some of the clauses about police and taxes in Manchuria, it said, could be put into a secret agreement. Where the revised list let Japanese lease or purchase land in South Manchuria, the words could become a temporary lease, or a perpetual lease, which the note explained meant a long lease, renewable without conditions. And on loans in eastern Inner Mongolia, China could promise to consult Japanese capitalists, rather than the Japanese government. And the Japanese version of the final agreement would be the official text, or else both the Chinese and the Japanese versions would be. Small courtesies of wording, with the deadline still running. Did Beijing panic? Not quite. But there was certainly very acute alarm. So much alarm, in fact, that the Japanese legation cabled Tokyo urgently that even better terms could be had, if the matter were left to the men on the spot. But Tokyo had been through an anxious time of its own, and held certain unmistakable warnings about what might happen once the world war was over, if it pressed too far. So nothing more was asked. Now put yourself in Yuan's place. The newspapers had printed the demands, British diplomats had pressed, and Japan had changed some of the most important items. And none of it had stopped the clock. Facing the ultimatum, Yuan agreed. And the fifth group had only been put aside, to be discussed in the future. The observer called it the sword of Damocles, still hanging over China's head.

On the eighth of May, the day after the ultimatum, the foreign minister delivered China's answer to the Japanese minister. China, it said, "with a view to preserving the peace of the Far East", accepted all the articles of the first four groups, and the Fujian notes, as they stood in the revised list of the twenty sixth of April. The five articles of the fifth group, put off for later negotiation, were left out. It hoped that all the outstanding questions were now settled, so that the cordial relations between the two countries could be further consolidated. And it asked the Japanese minister to name a day to call at the Foreign Office, polish the wording of the text, and sign. So ended, the observer wrote, one of the most extraordinary negotiations ever carried on in Beijing. Then the country found out. A foreigner in Beijing caught the moment. "A shiver of impotent rage passed over the country when the nature and acceptance of the Japanese Ultimatum became generally known." People cried out at the shame of the diplomacy that had been forced on them. As he put it, "One and all declared that the day of shame which had been so harshly imposed upon them would never be forgotten and that Japan would indeed pay bitterly for her policy of extortion." They meant it. In the years that followed, the anniversary was kept across China as National Humiliation Day. Two movements started at once. One raised a National Salvation Fund, money to strengthen the nation in whatever way the government saw fit. The other was a boycott of every Japanese product. Both soon grew to formidable size, and the whole nation threw itself into them. The boycott did not move Japan. But it showed something else. For a moment, the country was ready to rally behind someone. Yuan's oldest enemies said openly that if, from now on, he worked honourably and with his whole heart in the nation's interest, they would support him, and every black mark against his name would be wiped out. Had Yuan answered that call, the observer thought, the nation might have carried him to the very summit of his ambitions, without any effort on his part. So what did Yuan take from that May? Think back to the first meeting with Hioki, and the lines that were cut. Yuan had been told, in so many words, that since he was already the master of all China, he had only to accept the principle of Japanese guidance, and his throne would be as good as established. His throne. Remember that phrase.

On the twenty fifth of May 1915, in Beijing, the treaties were signed, settling the Twenty One Demands. Lu Zhengxiang signed for the president of China, and Hioki Eki for the emperor of Japan. There were two treaties, and thirteen notes exchanged between the two men. The first treaty was on Shandong. China agreed to give full assent to whatever Japan might one day agree with Germany about Germany's rights in the province. And China declared that no territory or island in Shandong or along its coast would be leased or ceded to any foreign power. The second treaty covered South Manchuria and eastern Inner Mongolia. The leases on Port Arthur and Dalian, and the terms of the South Manchuria Railway and the line from Dandong to Shenyang, were all extended to ninety nine years. In the notes, the dates were written out. Port Arthur and Dalian would be Japan's until 1997. The South Manchuria Railway would come back to China in 2002, and the line to Dandong in 2007. And the old clause that would have let China buy back the South Manchuria Railway after thirty six years was cancelled. Japanese subjects were now free to live and travel in South Manchuria, and to engage in business and manufacture of any kind whatsoever. And when a Japanese was the defendant, the case would go to the Japanese consul. Note after note, China's side of the exchange carries Lu Zhengxiang's signature. It could have been worse. The observer judged that Japan had failed, in a very signal fashion, to win its main objective. China had lost something, but in its hour of need it had found many willing to help it. And he thought Japan's victory a Pyrrhic one. Chinese suspicion and hostility toward Japan, he wrote, now ran so deep that nothing would ever completely root them out. And that first clause, China's promise to accept in advance whatever Japan and Germany might agree about Shandong, would come back to haunt China when the war in Europe ended. But in China, none of that felt like an escape. One writer, with the crisis still fresh, put it plainly. The great crisis, he wrote, had only just passed, and the country had not yet had time for a respite. "By the pressure of a powerful neighbour we have been compelled to sign" what he would only call a certain treaty. Floods, drought, epidemics and locusts were visiting the country, he went on, the land was full of suffering, and robbers plundered the people. And then he asked a question. And it was not addressed to Japan. "In ancient times this would have been a day for the Imperial Court to remove their ornaments and live in humiliation. What do the people of our day mean by advising and urging the President to ascend the throne?" Because some people were, in fact, urging the president to ascend the throne, and the writer told the members of one society in particular to think hard about it. At this point, with the humiliation barely signed, Yuan made his fateful decision. He would try to found a new dynasty. He had his reasons. Japan was itself a constitutional monarchy, and Yuan calculated that giving way on the demands would assure him of Japan's support. And a throne, perhaps, might give him the standing to resist the next round of pressure, from Japan or from the West. Remember the Black Dragon Society, which wanted China made a constitutional monarchy identical to Japan's, and Japan's envoy, who by every sign told Yuan he was already virtually emperor. Yuan was about to give China a monarchy. Whether it would be the one anyone in Tokyo had in mind is another question. Next time, Yuan Shikai reaches for the throne. And Liang Qichao, of all people, refuses to help him get it. And we will find out what a throne is worth, to the man who signed the treaties of May.

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