Page:The A B C's of the Twenty-One Demands.djvu/7



Intelligent persons who are trying to follow the issues of the Conference on the Limitation of Armaments and Far Eastern and Pacific Ocean Questions at Washington hardly can have failed to notice the repetition by responsible Japanese statesmen, by the Japanese press, and with great frequency by writers of other than Japanese nationality, of the assertion that the policy of the Japanese Government is in no sense threatening to China, and is not conceived in a spirit of aggression upon the territorial integrity and political autonomy of China.

It is in the acts of the Japanese Government that a true exposition of Japan's policy in China is to be found; and the most recent expose of the real policy and objects of Japan visavis China is contained in the famous "Twenty-One Demands" made by the Japanese Government to the Chinese Government in 1915.

The true content of those demands is discovered in a reading of their text, but before giving the text of the demands in full, a brief preliminary explanation will help in understanding their meaning and purposes. In 1914, soon after the Great War began (disregarding the efforts of China and neutral nations which would have neutralized the German leased port at Tsingtau, China, without embroiling China in the scope of hostilities and thereby eliminated it as a factor in German operations for the period of the war), Japanese military forces had occupied, against the protest of China, the territory of the German leasehold