Jonathan Clements - Wellington Koo: China

China

Jonathan Clements

For Aaron Sorkin

Decisions are made by those who show up.

Names in this book reflect current usage, not the variant spellings utilised in 1919, Hepburn romanisation for Japanese and Pinyin for Chinese hence Lu Zhengxiang instead of Lou Tseng-Tsiang, Beijing not Peking, and Shandong not Shantung. The book retains Western names where Chinese use them in dealings with foreigners, hence Wellington Koo, not Gu Weijun (in Pinyin romanisation), or Ku Wei-chun (in Wade-Giles romanisation). Overseas Chinese who use a non-Mandarin dialect are called by their preferred romanisation with a Mandarin gloss where known, hence Oei Hui-lan. Beijing was renamed Beiping (Peiping) during the period when Nanjing (Nanking) was Chinas capital, but is referred to as Beijing throughout to avoid confusion.

Stephen Bonsal, secretary to the American diplomat Colonel Edward House at the Paris Peace Conference, had every sympathy for the Chinese delegation, if not for their putative leader. He confided to his diary, a work not published until a generation later, that he had no confidence in the integrity of the leading Chinese delegate, Lu Zhengxiang a man whom he suspected of taking bribes during the Boxer Rebellion negotiations of 1900, and whom he all but accused of being a Japanese patsy at the Peace Conference.

It is a thousand pities that Wellington Koo and Alfred Sze are not the leading delegates of China here, wrote Bonsal. Like many of the delegates, he had been deeply impressed by the dashing young Wellington Koo, an American-educated ambassador whose mastery of debate and diplomacy had charmed the Council.

Quite by accident, Bonsal was to get his wish. The Chinese delegation did not represent a unified nation, and conflict among its members was to push aside its supposed leader. Even the argumentative Chinese delegates could see that Wellington Koo, a former Chinese minister in Washington, enjoyed a special relationship with Woodrow Wilson they had even arrived in Europe on the same ship. With Lu Zhengxiang failing to achieve much of merit, Koo was pushed into the limelight, firstly as a prominent speaker, and then as the delegations official spokesman.

The Chinese homeland was already carved up between numerous interest groups: republicans, rival warlords claiming to be old-school monarchists, and a dozen European powers intent on clinging to colonial concessions on Chinese territory. China risked complete collapse, and its delegates represented two rival governments. Koo, based in Beijing and famous for refusing to take sides in local conflicts, rose above factionalism to plead Chinas case, particularly in the controversial topic of the Shandong Peninsula.

Perilously close to Beijing, and with a population, area and natural resources easily the match of a major European power, Shandong was a ready-made princedom. The ancient birthplace of Confucius himself, a fact that Koo slyly parsed with emotive language as Chinas Holy Land, it had been a German colony until wrested from its occupiers by the Japanese. Now, in the aftermath of the First World War, the question remained: to whom should Shandong be restored? The Germans had been railroaded into giving up all territorial claims beyond continental Europe, but the Japanese claimed to have received wartime promises that Shandong was theirs for the taking.

Shandong was one of the hottest topics in Paris. Radical Chinese students threatened to break up any public discussion with demonstrations of their own. An ill-advised smear campaign against the Japanese filled the press with stories (many of them true) of atrocities committed against civilisation itself by these supposed allies of the Great Powers, with China as the victim. As the Conference went on and the Shandong debates appeared to favour Japan, America got the blame, since many Chinese felt that Woodrow Wilson had broken a promise.

Wilson had looked the Chinese in the eye and said: You can rely on me.

We did, complained Koo to his adviser, and now we are betrayed in the house of our only friend.

In early May, Koo paid a personal call on Colonel House at the American headquarters, where he played the last of his dwindling cards. He revealed that the conditions of the Peace Conference were veering so far away from Chinas interests, that he was seriously considering not signing the Treaty of Versailles at all. The threat of non-signature, when wielded by the Japanese, had been sufficient to sway many concessions in their favour; but with an ineffective and weak nation, ironically regarded as one of the small countries participating, Koo did not enjoy the same power.

If Peking orders me to sign the treaty, he said, I will sign otherwise not.

Colonel House tried to cheer him up. The Japanese were sure to move out of Shandong, he said. The League of Nations would make sure of it, and when that inevitably happened, Koo would be seen as the hero of the hour.

But Ill be a dead hero, Koo replied. If I sign the treaty even under orders from Peking I shall not have what you in New York call a Chinamans chance.

Koo genuinely feared for his life, for what might be done to him by Chinese radicals if he let his country down before the watching world.

I am too young to die, he said as he left. I hope they will not make me sign. It would be my death sentence.

Wellington Koo (18881985) was born and raised in Shanghais International Settlement, a foreign enclave in which the Chinese themselves were regarded as second-class citizens. He experienced first-hand the injustices of Chinas Unequal Treaties with foreign powers, and was one of the handful of young scholars in whom late imperial China invested all its progressive hopes.

By the time Koo was recalled to his homeland in 1912, after his studies in America, a newly acquired doctorate of law in hand, the imperial system had been swept away and replaced with a chaotic, corrupt series of bickering republicans, grasping warlords and embittered restorationists. Koo was sent abroad again as Chinas minister to Washington, where he fostered a respectful relationship with the American President, Woodrow Wilson. At the close of the First World War, he was one of the bright intellectuals sent to plead Chinas case before the Paris Peace Conference. While most countries had sent their elder statesmen and great diplomats, many of the Chinese delegation were a full generation younger than those from the Great Powers. Moreover, they were a squabbling cabal that reflected the lack of unified government back home. Thrust into the limelight by his personal connections with Wilson and by internal disputes among the Chinese, Koo became his countrys most outspoken and eloquent champion at the Paris Peace Conference.

While Paris was a swan-song for many careers, Koos was only just beginning. It also saw his attempt to rebuild a shattered personal life. Newly widowed by the influenza pandemic of 1918, Koos sojourn in Paris saw his whistle-stop pursuit of and betrothal to the woman who would become his third wife, the sugar-cane heiress Oei Hui-lan. The 32-year-old diplomat made his maiden speech at the Conference, initiating three further decades in politics that would see him briefly appointed President of China, before serving in further diplomatic posts in Britain, France, Mexico and the United States.