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Updated: June 21, 2025
East of Shantung lies the city of Dongschou. There rises an observation-tower with a great temple. At its feet lies the water-city, with a sea-gate at the North, through which the flood-tide rises up to the city. A camp of the boundary guard is established at this gate. Once upon a time there was an officer who had been transferred to this camp as captain.
He doubtless foresaw that he would also yield on the momentous issue of Shantung and the Chino-Japanese secret treaty. In a word, some of his more important abstract tenets professed in words were being brushed aside when it came to acts, and his position was truly unenviable. Naturally, therefore, he seized the first favorable occasion to apply them vigorously and unswervingly.
What occurred between the time of my conversation with the President and the plenary session of the Conference on the Preliminaries of Peace in the afternoon, at which the Covenant of the League of Nations was adopted, I do not actually know, but the presumption is that the Japanese were promised a satisfactory settlement in regard to Shantung, since they announced that they would not press an amendment on "racial equality" at the session, an amendment upon which they had indicated they intended to insist.
An even better measure of western unconsciousness may be found perhaps in such a trifling incident as this: An English friend long resident in Shantung told me of writing indignantly home concerning the British part in the Shantung settlement. The reply came, complacently stating that Japanese ships did so much in the war that the Allies could not properly refuse to recognize Japan's claims.
Japan is simply the first object to be affected. The concrete working out of economic rights in Shantung will be illustrated by a single case which will have to stand as typical. Po-shan is an interior mining village. The mines were not part of the German booty; they were Chinese owned. The Germans, whatever their ulterior aims, had made no attempt at dispossessing the Chinese.
As the German delegates, awkward and rather defiant in their long black frock coats, marched to the table to affix their signatures, they were obviously, in the eyes of the Allied delegates and the hundreds of spectators, always "the enemy." The place of the Chinese at the treaty table was empty; for them it was no peace of justice that gave Shantung to the Japanese, and they would not sign.
Of all the important decisions of the Peace Conference, none worried the President so much as that relating to the Shantung settlement, and in a speech at Des Moines, on September 6, 1919, he expressed his dissatisfaction in the following words: There is the settlement, which you have heard so much discussed, about that rich and ancient province of Shantung in China.
As I looked and wondered, scarcely daring to interfere, the Shantung man had pushed his face, after the native manner, close into that of his enemy and was muttering taunts at him, which were hissed like the fury of a snake in anger. This could not last my man was carrying it too far. It was so.
The Chinese Government engages, in the interest of trade and for the residence of foreigners, to open by China herself as soon as possible certain suitable places in the Province of Shantung as Commercial Ports.
It seems to me that it would occur to every American that we would then have the opportunity that we have long desired to force Germany to correct, in favor of China, the great wrong which she began to do to the latter in 1898. What moral right has Japan acquired by her conquest of Shantung assisted by the British? "Second.
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