INTRODUCTORY NOTE.

Approximately sixteen years ago-to be accurate, in 1904-the Honorable William Woodville Rockhill, an American diplomat of large experience, issued a volume of Treaties and Conventions with or concerning China and Korea, 1894-1904, together with various State Papers and Documents affecting Foreign Interests. The collection was official in its nature, and it was official in its publication, in that it was set up by the Government Printing Office, and appeared as a public document. It would therefore have been in keeping with precedent if Mr. John V. A. MacMurray, a younger diplomat but already of large experience, had issued as a public document, his collection of Treaties and Agreements with and concerning China, 1894-1919, which he has industriously brought together and intelligently edited. The Department of State, however, was unable to issue Mr. MacMurray's collection as a public document, owing to the many demands upon it; hence the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has the good fortune to render this public service through its Division of International Law.

It will be observed that Mr. MacMurray's collection is not a supplement to Mr. Rockhill's volume. It covers the same field for a decade; but it covers it, as was to be expected, more fully and completely, in that additional documents are included, which were not at Mr. Rockhill's disposal, and which then did not seem to possess the importance which they now have. Mr. Rockhill's collection is therefore merged in Mr. MacMurray's, and it is enlarged and enriched in the process. From 1904 to the end of the World War in 1919, Mr. MacMurray blazes his own trail and does not tread in the path of a predecessor.

These two stately volumes, which no student of the Far East can afford to overlook for many a year to come, are a labor of love. They are the free offering to the public on the part of Mr. MacMurray, who has given to the Carnegie Endowment his manuscript without any compensation other than the reward that sometimes comes from a good deed. And it is proper to mention in the same connection, that they are issued by the Endowment in the same spirit, inasmuch as many copies will be placed in public libraries, and the copies which are not so placed, but are purchased in ordinary course, can never be expected to make good the original outlay.

It is a source of pleasure to the good people of these United States, that the policy of their government has invariably been one of sympathetic interest in and toward the Far East, and that it has never sought to make of the needs and distress of the peoples of Japan and China, a source of profit. It is worth while recalling that as a consequence of the Boxer troubles an indemnity equivalent in round numbers to $333,000,000 United States gold was exacted from China under the Protocol of September 7, 1901, which sum was to be paid with interest at 4 per cent per annum, by installments running through a period of thirty-nine

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years. The sum of $24,440,778.81 was allotted to the United States. But as this sum was found to exceed the actual losses to American interests and property, the amount in excess of $11,961,121.76 was remitted by the Government of the United States. It was felt that the sum originally allotted might exceed American claims, but it was feared that if the United States should refuse to accept it, it would not be credited to China, but would be apportioned among the other Powers. In communicating the intention of the United States to remit the payment of the balance of the sums to which the United States was entitled under the agreement of 1901, Mr. Elihu Root, then Secretary of State, said in his note of June 15, 1907, addressed to the Chinese Minister in Washington:

It was from the first the intention of this Government at the proper time, when all claims should have been presented and all expenses should have been ascertained as fully as possible, to revise the estimate and account against which these payments were to be made, and, as proof of sincere. friendship for China, to voluntarily release that country from its legal liability for all payments in excess of the sum which should prove to be necessary for actual indemnity to the United States and its citizens.1

The remission was gratefully accepted by the Chinese Government, on behalf of which the Prince of Ch'ing, President of the Chinese Foreign Office, said in a note dated July 14, 1908, to the Honorable William Woodville Rockhill, then American Minister to China:

The Imperial Government, wishing to give expression to the high value it places on the friendship of the United States, finds in its present action a favorable opportunity for doing so. Mindful of the desire recently expressed by the President of the United States to promote the coming of Chinese students to the United States to take courses in the schools and higher educational institutions of the country, and convinced by the happy results. of past experience of the great value to China of education in American. schools, the Imperial Government has the honor to state that it is its intention to send henceforth yearly to the United States a considerable number of students there to receive their education.2

This is not an isolated case. Many years before, in 1863, the Strait of Shimonoseki, improperly closed to commerce, was opened by the joint action of France, Great Britain, Holland and the United States. An indemnity, amounting to $3,000,000, was exacted from Japan, which was paid, as the late General Foster says in his admirable little volume entitled American Diplomacy in the Orient, "after some delay and great embarrassment, because of the poverty of the treasury." Each participating nation received an equal share. The action of the United States and the action of the other Powers is thus stated by General Foster: 3

The sum paid to the United States remained in the treasury unused for twenty years. The public conscience was troubled as to the justness of the exaction, and in 1883 by an act of Congress the amount received was returned to Japan, and accepted by that government as a strong manifesta

'Foreign Relations of the United States, 1907, pt. 1, p. 174.

'John W. Foster, American Diplomacy in the Orient (1903), p. 194.

tion of that spirit of justice and equity which has always animated the United States in its relations with Japan." None of the other three nations partaking of the indemnity have seen fit to follow this example.

It is also to be said that none of the Powers partaking of the Chinese indemnity-France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan and Russia—“have seen fit to follow this example."

Other illustrations might be given of the policy of the United States toward the peoples of the Far East. They will be found, however, in Mr. MacMurray's two volumes. It is therefore sufficient to remark in this place that the United States has invariably framed its policy in such a way that it should be just to China-to speak specifically of this one country,—that the policy of China should be just to the United States, and that the door of opportunity should be open to the United States and to all other countries upon a footing of equality.

It is a pleasure to publish Mr. MacMurray's volumes, and none the less a pleasure because they are the work of a former student and a constant friend.

WASHINGTON, D. C.,

January 8, 1921.

JAMES BROWN SCOTT,

Director of the Division of International Law.

EDITOR'S PREFACE.

THE present compilation of documents relating to the affairs of China, as involving foreign interests, during the period beginning with the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, is an outgrowth of the collection edited by the late Mr. William Woodville Rockhill under the title "Treaties and Conventions with or concerning China and Korea, 1894-1904, together with various State Papers and Documents affecting Foreign Interests" (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904).

The underlying principle of Mr. Rockhill's collection was his appreciation of the fact that, with the Japanese War, China entered upon a new course of national development, the history of which is to be read not only-nor even primarily in the Treaties and other formal international engagements, but rather in the arrangements of nominally private character, with syndicates or firms of foreign nationality, under which the Chinese Government then began to incur a complex and far-reaching set of obligations and commitments, in which the financial or economic element is often merged indistinguishably with political considerations.

Up to that time, the whole purpose of Chinese statesmanship, in relation to the outer world, had been to maintain the traditional isolation of the country; and against that aloofness, the foreign nations had struggled to establish the right of free intercourse. The results of that struggle, as embodied in the earlier Treaties, may be roughly summarized under three headings, namely:-Extraterritoriality, or the right of foreigners to be exempt from the processes of Chinese law and amenable only to the jurisdiction of their national tribunals; the right of residence in designated places, and of access to the interior of the country; and the right to trade freely, unhampered by monopolies, subject to a fixed tariff of import and export duties, and with the privilege of commuting by a single fixed charge all local taxes and levies upon commerce. These rights were essential, and even to-day are fundamental to the whole system of foreign intercourse with China; but they were and are, from the view-point of the development of the nation, rather negative than positive.

The conditions-particularly the financial requirements-incidental to the war with Japan compelled a readjustment of China's attitude towards foreign nations and towards their resources and their influences. The Chinese nation found itself perforce face to face with the world, and under the necessity of accommodating itself to a relationship with it. Thenceforward, the problem of China was to avail itself of the material resources and experience of the West, while retaining what was vital in its own institutions and preserving as best it could not merely the integrity of its territories, but its political and national entity. How clearly this problem of assimilating the new conditions to the old

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