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 Manchuria, the Japanese were to surrender extra-territoriality and the Chinese were to permit the Japanese to lease land freely. But the negotiations were unsuccessful.

This long-standing Sino-Japanese controversy over the right of Japanese to lease land arose, like the other issues already mentioned, out of the fundamental conflict between rival State policies, the allegations and counter-statements concerning violation of international agreements being less consequential in themselves than the underlying objectives of each policy.

The presence of about 800,000 Koreans in Manchuria, who possess Japanese nationality under the Japanese law, served to accentuate the conflict of policies of China and of Japan. Out of this situation there arose various controversies, in consequence of which the Koreans themselves were victimised, being subjected to suffering and brutalities.

Chinese opposition to Korean acquisition, by purchase or lease, of land in Manchuria was resented by the Japanese, who claimed that the Koreans were entitled, as Japanese subjects, to the privileges of land-leasing acquired by Japan in the Treaty and Notes of 1915. The problem of dual nationality also arose, as the Japanese refused to recognise the naturalisation of Koreans as Chinese subjects. The use of Japanese consular police to invigilate and protect the Koreans was resented by the Chinese and resulted in innumerable clashes between Chinese and Japanese police. Special problems arose in the Chientao District, just north of the Korean border, where the 400,000 Korean residents outnumber the Chinese by three to one. By 1927, these questions led the Chinese to pursue a policy of restricting the free residence of Koreans in Manchuria—a policy which the Japanese characterised as one of unjustifiable oppression.

The status and rights of Koreans in Manchuria are determined largely in three Sino-Japanese agreements—viz., the Agreement relating to the Chientao Region, September 4th, 1909; the Treaty and Notes of May 25th, 1915, concerning South Manchuria and Eastern Inner Mongolia; and the so-called "Mitsuya Agreement" of July 8th, 1925. The delicate question of dual nationality in the case of the Koreans has never been regularised by Sino-Japanese agreement.

By 1927, the Chinese authorities in Manchuria generally came to believe that the Koreans had become, in fact, "a vanguard of Japanese penetration and absorption "of Manchuria. In this view, so long as the Japanese refused to recognise the naturalisation of Koreans as Chinese subjects, and especially since the Japanese consular police constantly exercised surveillance over Koreans, the acquisition of land by Koreans, whether by purchase or lease, was an economic and political danger "which threatened the very existence of Chinese people in Manchuria".

The view was prevalent among the Chinese that the Koreans were being compelled to migrate from their homeland in consequence of the studied policy of the Japanese Government to displace Koreans with Japanese immigrants from Japan, or to make life so miserable for them, politically and economically, especially by forcing them to dispose of their land holdings, that emigration to Manchuria would naturally follow. According to the Chinese view, the Koreans, being an "oppressed race "ruled by an alien Government in their own land, where the Japanese monopolised all the important official posts, were forced to migrate to Manchuria to seek political freedom and an economic livelihood. The Korean immigrants, 90 per cent of whom are farmers, and almost all of whom cultivators of ricefields, were thus at first welcomed by the Chinese as an economic asset