YOUNG MEN IN PEKING, OLD MEN IN PARIS
A crowd of students appeared before the legation gate on the 5th of May clamouring to see me. I was absent, that day, on a trip to the temple above Men Tou-kou and so missed seeing them. Their demonstration, as it turned out afterward, was the first step in the widespread student movement which was to make history. Their patriotic fervour had, on that morning, been brought to the boiling point by the first inkling of the Paris decision on Shantung.
The first reaction of the Chinese people as a whole to this news was one of dumb dismay. It was a stunning, paralyzing blow. It seemed that all the brazen intrigue through which Japan had been seeking to strengthen her hold on Shantung, all the cunning by which she had prepared the basis of her claim to permanent possession of the German rights, had been endorsed by the Versailles Conference.
The Chinese people, discouraged in Peking, had centred their hopes on Paris. When hints of a possible acceptance of Japan's demands were received in Peking, the first impulse of the students was to see the American minister, to ask him whether this news was true, and to see what he had to say. I escaped a severe ordeal.
When they were told that I was absent there was at first a hum of voices, then came the cry: "To the house of the traitor!" They meant the house of Tsao Ju-lin, where the schemers had assembled to make the contracts which China hated. Tsao Ju-lin, the smooth little plotter whom most people regarded as the guiding spirit of the humiliating business, was the most despised; but they associated with him Chang Ching-hsiang, who had been Chinese minister at Tokyo when the secret treaties were drawn up. The students rushed over to the house and broke down the door and trooped inside. They found both men there. No time was lost, either on the part of the students or their prey. The students breaking up chairs and tables and using pieces of them for weapons went after the two diplomats. Tsao, still smooth and slippery, managed to escape through a window and into a narrow alley where he eluded his pursuers. Chang, however, was beaten into insensibility. Lu Tsung-yu, the other plotter whom the students would have "treated rough", was not to be found.
For four days we were without foreign news. The first brief telegraphic intimation of the Paris decision was followed by the cutting of the wires; Japanese agents, the people surmised, did this to prevent the universal Chinese protest from influencing the decision or causing its review.
Primarily the cause of the student violence lay in the proximity of the fourth anniversary of the Japanese ultimatum of 1915; but they were also anxious and stirred because of the reported action of the old men at Paris.
While other telegraphic communication was cut off I got information of what was actually done by wireless. I found it hard to believe that President Wilson would be compliant to the Japanese demands, in View of the complete and insistent information the American Government had had from me and all other American officials in China as to what would result from such action. The Shantung decision constituted a wrong of far-reaching effect; no general benefits bestowed by a league of nations could outweigh it. Indeed, as I stated to the Government, it destroyed all confidence in a league of nations which had such an ugly fact as its cornerstone.
To any one who had watched, day by day, month by month, the unconscionable plotting for these claims, the decision was a lamentable denial of every principle put forward during the war. President Wilson brushed aside the unanimous opinion of the American experts, it would seem, for two reasons: first, he believed that if only the League were established, all difficulties of detail could easily be resolved; and, second, he had not given enough attention to the Shantung question to realize that this was not a matter of detail, but a fundamental issue.