Introduction:
What effect did the Paris Peace Conference have on the international politics of East Asia? At first glance, this question seems too broad to challenge any particular historiographical trends. However, an extensive review of the literature teases out disagreement over the nature of Chinese and Japanese politics in the wake of the 1919 Conference. In the traditional popular narrative of post-Versailles East Asia, the Conference immediately set Japan on an irreversible course toward imperial expansion and anti-western attitudes, which inevitably led to the Manchurian Incident of 1931 and Japan’s full-scale invasion of China in 1937. Likewise, historians have often projected China’s later developments (the weakening of the Guomindang and Republic of China, and the rise of Communism) onto the country’s immediate post-Versailles history. Much of the historiography treats the Paris Peace Conference as a failure both for Japan and China.
All of this also ignores another trend in older historiography of the post-war era: to leave out East Asia entirely. The Paris Peace Conference was, after all, only really a resolution of a European war—right?
Of course not. This paper will show the competing and often seemingly irreconcilable politics that emerged within China and Japan after the Conference, and it will also analyze the unease and uncertainty with which western powers new and old sought to understand and control the East Asian world in the years after 1919. This was an age of new nationalisms and rival ideals; as such, there is no room for one simple narrative. This paper will trace the various currents in the history and the historiography of post-war East Asia.
Firstly, it is prudent to lay out what this paper will choose to not address, because such choices stem directly from the historiography. It will not trace an inevitable or even likely path from Versailles to the Mukden Incident of 1931. As we will see later, Japan did not emerge from 1919 on a warpath, and China did not emerge as a failed state destined to be overrun by a fundamentally antagonistic new world order. Unlike the recently explosive theses of historians like Erez Manela, this paper will not trace China’s total disillusionment with western liberalism to the immediate post-war years, nor will it see the Chinese Communist Party’s rise as inevitable from the vantage point of the early 1920s. Finally, it will not examine in-depth Soviet soft- and hard-power incursions into East Asia in this period, because Russia was not a player at Versailles.
In the usual historical narratives of the post-Versailles world, East Asia is mainly a backwater with China floundering about in internal instability, and Japan trying (and inevitably failing) to out-imperialize the West. It is easy to project the Sino-Japanese power dynamics of the 1930s onto our understanding of these countries’ international outlooks in 1920, but to do so would be to avoid the truth: the Paris Peace Conference made the future of East Asia look more uncertain, as many East Asian actors fought to attain their seat at the new international table.
Part 1: Japan
No debate highlights the historiographical inconsistencies of post-war East Asia as well as the debate over Japan’s place in the new world system and the League of Nations after the Paris Peace Conference. Two examples illustrate this disagreement perfectly. In Britain, Soviet Russia and the Collapse of the Versailles Order, 1919–1939 (2009), Keith Nielson attempts to separate the post-1919 Great Powers into “those status quo powers who wished to defend… the settlements reached at Paris in 1919” and “those who wished to change them by force.” Japan, according to Nielson, fell firmly in “the latter.”[1] Nielson uses the examples of polarized states such as Britain (on the status quo side) and Japan (on the “revisionist” side) to illustrate that only the Soviet Union stood in the middle of the road. Curiously, as this paper will show, Japan actually serves as another example of a middle-of-the-road power, as its leaders approached the status quo with a mixture of resentment (and a bit of Nielson’s ‘revisionism’) and cautious compliance.
Frederick Dickinson, in his World War I and the Triumph of a New Japan, takes the opposite stance. Dickinson argues that, in response to the system of internationalism set up at the Paris Peace Conference, “Japanese policy-makers and opinion leaders in the 1920s” pushed “for a new receptivity to the ‘trends of the world,’ and ‘warmly embraced what they perceived to be the new standards of ‘civilization’: democracy, internationalism, and peace.”[2] This argument, while certainly against the grain of older historiography, creates a bizarrely utopian view of a Japanese polity in the 1920s that in fact was still reeling from perceived humiliation at Versailles. If Nielson’s and Dickinson’s thesis both straddle the historical truth, then how did the Paris Peace Conference actually influence Japanese international politics and outlook? The short answer is, in multiple and competing ways.
As Noriko Kawamura illustrates, Japan had three aims at Versailles: “1) succession to the German rights and concessions of Shandong, 2) acquisition of the German islands in the Pacific north of the equator… and 3) securing safeguards against racial discrimination” in the League of Nations.[3] This third aim, which sought to add a Racial Equality Clause to the Versailles treaties, failed utterly; the British Dominions, and more so Woodrow Wilson, opposed any such clause. This humiliated the Japanese representatives and alienated the Japanese from the new global project of international re-ordering. As Jon Thares Davidann illustrates, this “outrage” created a “skepticism about Wilsonian internationalism and the League of Nations” in Japanese ideology from the get-go.[4]
But the issue of the Racial Equality Clause was not the only element of the Versailles treaties from which Japan came away frustrated. A coalition of China and the western powers tried to deny Japanese rights to Shandong, which the Japanese had taken during the war. This issue, like the Racial Equality Clause, became a veritable crisis of East Asian international affairs playing out in miniature in Versailles. Kawamura shows that the Japanese saw Shandong as more than a geostrategic concern; “they regarded it as a matter of national prestige in the broader context of East Asian politics,” in part because the West’s refusal to grant Shandong had resulted from a “breach of faith on the part of China and its hostile propaganda against Japan.”[5] Kawamura refers here China’s breaching of the Sino-Japanesev21 Demands, in which China had already signed away many of its rights to Shandong in 1915. At Versailles, the western powers initially supported China in its attempt to reclaim Shandong; however, by the end of the Conference, all of the western powers except the US had begun to favor Japan in the issue.
Combined with tensions over the Japanese acquisition of Pacific mandates, the Japanese representatives came away from Versailles with a feeling of diplomatic frustration not felt since the Tripartite Intervention over two decades prior—despite their moderate success in the Shandong and mandate issues. Wilson’s government was at best uninterested in Japanese national aims and appeared to be actively antagonistic. Meanwhile, the West appeared to be propping up China’s claims and blocking Japanese goals at most junctures. Thomas Burkman shows that the Japanese had already “stood aloof from the movement” toward a new international system before Versailles, but among many Japanese, the desire to pursue a separate path increased after the conference as well.[6]
The beginning of the 1920s thus found Japan at particular odds with the US. In the world of highest-level diplomacy, this manifested most clearly in the decline of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, which had been brought to the fore as a result of the Conference and the rise of American global authority. As Robert Thornton illustrates, between Versailles and the Washington Conference of 1921, the alliance became a “three-sided controversy” involving Britain, Japan, and the US. Australia desperately fought for the maintenance of the treaty so as to provide a safeguard against Japanese aggression toward Oceania.[7] Although Australia and the US had sided against the Japanese over the Racial Equality issue, the two governments split here. The US government resented Japanese imperial claims at Versailles and believed that a continuation of the Alliance would give Japan “an effective diplomatic shield for her political and commercial designs on Asia.”[8] US-Japan disagreements at Versailles over the new international order now led to the official dissolution of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance less than two years later. In the end, the British valued the input of their American allies more than their Japanese allies.
It is remarkable to note, then, that Versailles did not cause Japanese policymakers to leap toward anti-western policy. Although many frustrations dominated the Japanese outlook after Versailles, many wanted to address their frustrations within the new international system—hence the ‘optimism’ that Dickinson sees. In addition to the anti-western Japanese “particularism” explained above, Kevin Doak sees a movement toward “internationalism” in Japanese politics—a desire to assert Japanese ethnic-national agency at the new post-Versailles diplomatic table, and a renewed drive toward equal recognition and status as the pre-eminent power in East Asia.[9] Furthermore, it is incredibly revealing that Japan helped found the League of Nations as a major power, and remained an active participant in the League’s order for over a decade after the conclusion of the Paris Peace Conference. Versailles may have given the Japanese the language with which to speak of their own international mistreatment, but it did not make Japan go rogue. Rather, the Versailles order kept pressure on Japan to work within the League’s system for years to come.
Part 2: China
As in Japan, Versailles had competing and seemingly irreconcilable effects on the international politics of China. Historiography has long claimed that China came away humiliated from Versailles, and historians have tried to trace a line directly and inevitably from this humiliation to the rise of communism in China and the subsequent Chinese turn away from the western international order.
Indeed, the Chinese delegates came away just as frustrated over the Shandong issue as Japan; China felt it absurd for Japan to maintain any control over Shandong, a province that was ‘rightfully’ Chinese. To the dismay of the Chinese delegates, the Versailles council allowed Japan to keep its “economic interests” in Shandong while forcing Japan to abandon its “political interests.”[10] Many across China saw this decision as an issue of national humiliation, and Chinese from across the country rose up in popular protest now referred to as the May 4th Movement. Unsurprisingly, the Versailles resolution of the Shandong issue inflamed Chinese antagonism not only toward Japan, but toward the other powers who many Chinese believed had sold out China at the Conference. In perhaps overly lurid prose, Qi-hua Tang argues that “when China heard of this result, it was as if it were stricken by a thunderbolt in the blue sky. The Chinese felt deeply that they had been betrayed by the US… in addition, the anti-Japan sentiment was high at the time. All these led to the May Fourth Movement, whose slogan was ‘striving for sovereignty without and eliminating traitors at home.’”[11] The internal strife that Tang notes would come to influence and severely limit China’s international operating power in the wake of the Conference.
But what was China’s international outlook after Versailles? Here, the story gets more complicated. Alison Adcock Kaufman notes that the Chinese Republican government (the strongest political force in China at the time) helped found the League and took a vested interest in the new Versailles order as a potential supporter of Chinese international issues in the 1920s. And despite the Shandong frustration, China’s outlook remained cautiously optimistic. Not only did the Republic of China help found the League of Nations; at Versailles, the Republican delegates also exerted their authority in refusing to sign the German-Japanese treaty handing Shandong rights to Japan, “which led to a separate Peace treaty with Germany, the first new equal treaty for China.”[12] The Chinese delegates took part in many other negotiations that formed an important “Chinese demonstration to revise the unequal treaties and gain equal status in the international community,” Tang argues. He writes that, “on the whole, the Chinese diplomacy at the conference could not be considered a failure.”[13] Likewise, Kaufman shows that China’s international affairs in the aftermath of Versailles constituted a major step toward Chinese international national empowerment. Many Chinese saw the Versailles order as the best method to achieve this: “the reaction was to seek greater integration of China into the international system, continuing and accelerating the process that had begun in the late 1800s.”[14]
Although many Chinese at the time would not have agreed with Tang’s claim that Versailles “could not be considered as a failure,” Tang’s and Kaufmann’s points here otherwise stand. It is difficult to imagine China helping found a new world system at any point over the previous century, taking into account the suite of unequal treaties, failed reforms, and military defeats that dominated the cultural memories of many Chinese by the early 20th century. This is not to mention that the Qing empire had collapsed catastrophically less than a decade before Versailles, and Republican China (still in its infancy) had at best a weak hold on its own domestic politics. Certainly, China at this moment could not claim global supremacy as its empires had in the past; but its delegates could at least claim that the Republic walked a promising—if not exhilarating—path toward international legal parity. Even the Chinese national outrage over the Shandong incident can even be seen in a different light: it inspired, among many Chinese actors, a desire to bring China’s national voice even more loudly to the League of Nations table.
Notably, while many historians have traced later anti-western policy in China to the post-Versailles years, the historiography of post-Versailles anti-western sentiment in China has focused mainly on the writings of “intellectuals” rather than policymakers. For example, Erez Manela argues that “the disappointments of the [Versailles] peace…sealed the postwar indictment of Asian intellectuals against the West”; conveniently absent from this analysis is, of course, the fact that these “intellectuals” did not have any influence on their countries’ policymaking until a decade or more later. [15]
However, one issue with Chinese optimism after the Paris Peace Conference remains. Versailles may have given hope to Chinese policymakers. But it did not make East Asia a place of particular concern for western policymakers. Other than the Shandong issue, the League of Nations did not interfere in East Asia for over a decade after its founding because of the “chaotic situation in China,” as Harumi Goto-Shibata illustrates.[16] The very domestic political issues that made China’s relative success at Paris seem like a miracle also made the western powers view China as a high-risk, low-reward theater of operation. This, in addition to the Chinese movement against pro-Japanese traitors and frustration over the Shandong issue, presented many seemingly irreconcilable issues in China’s international politics in the early 1920s.
Conclusion:
Depending on whose book one reads, it may appear to the 21st-century historian that Japan emerged from Versailles either a triumphant member of the new imperial order (having succeeded in arguing for its economic rights in Shandong at the Conference) or a second-class power that the western empires had once again given the diplomatic shaft. Likewise, one can read the history of China in the wake of Versailles and see a new nation with unprecedented voice in the western international order, or a humiliated people on whose sovereignty the world seemed intent upon infringing.
In reality, this can be understood with a simple logic problem: if both Japan and China came away feeling defeated by each other, then both countries must have gained or at least retained something. And clearly, since both countries came away as willing participants in the post-Versailles international order, they must have seen some potential in the new system that the Conference created. Both countries may have come away feeling somewhat defeated by the Euro-American powers, but it certainly also inspired hope. No evidence suggests that the Versailles treaties would inevitably or even likely lead to an Axis Japan 20 years later, nor a Soviet-Communist China in the 1940s.
Historians may rightly view East Asian investment in the League of Nations as misplaced, and East Asian hope in new internationalism as unfounded. But, in the eyes of many East Asian political actors, many paths emerged from Versailles that led toward international integration.
Essay word count: 2999 words
Bibliography:
Burkman, Thomas. Japan and the League of Nations. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008.
Davidann, Jon Thares. “‘Colossal Illusions’: U.S.-Japanese Relations in the Institute of Pacific Relations, 1919-1938,” Journal of World History 12, no. 1 (2001).
Dickinson, Frederick R. World War I and the Triumph of a New Japan, 1919-1930. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Doak, Kevin M. “Particularism and Universalism in the New Nationalism of Post-Versailles Japan.” In ed. Urs Matthias Zachmann. Asia after Versailles: Asian Perspectives on the Paris Peace Conference and the Interwar Order, 1919-33. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017.
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Nielson, Keith. Britain, Soviet Russia and the Collapse of the Versailles Order, 1919–1939. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
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[1] Keith Nielson, Britain, Soviet Russia and the Collapse of the Versailles Order, 1919–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) 4.
[2] Frederick R. Dickinson, World War I and the Triumph of a New Japan, 1919-1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) 36.
[3] Noriko Kawamura, “Wilsonian Idealism and Japanese Claims at the Paris Peace Conference,” Pacific Historical Review 66, no. 4 (1997): 512.
[4] Jon Thares Davidann, “‘Colossal Illusions’: U.S.-Japanese Relations in the Institute of Pacific Relations, 1919-1938,” Journal of World History 12, no. 1 (2001): 165.
[5] Kawamura, “Wilsonian Idealism,” 523.
[6] Thomas Burkman, Japan and the League of Nations (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008) 63.
[7] Robert Thornton, “The Semblance of Security: Australia and the Washington Conference, 1921–22,” Australian Outlook 32 (1978), 66.
[8] Qi-hua Tang, Chinese Diplomacy and the Paris Peace Conference (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) 287; and Thornton, “The semblance of security,” 67.
[9] Kevin M. Doak, “Particularism and Universalism in the New Nationalism of Post-Versailles Japan,” in ed. Urs Matthias Zachmann, Asia after Versailles: Asian Perspectives on the Paris Peace Conference and the Interwar Order, 1919-33 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017) 180.
[10] Tang, Chinese Diplomacy, 306.
[11] Tang, 306.
[12] Alison Adcock Kaufman, “In Pursuit of Equality and Respect: China’s Diplomacy and the League of Nations,” Modern China 40, no. 6 (November 2014), 606.
[13] Tang, Chinese Diplomacy, 311.
[14] Kaufman, “In Pursuit of Equality and Respect,” 606.
[15] Erez Manela, “Imagining Woodrow Wilson in Asia: Dreams of East-West Harmony and the Revolt against Empire in 1919,” The American Historical Review 111, no. 5 (2006), 1330.
[16] Harumi Goto-Shibata, The League of Nations and the East Asian Imperial Order, 1920-1946 (London: Palgrave Macmillan) 33.
Aidan Lilienfeld, Summative Essay for “East Asia in the Age of Imperialism, 1839-1945” at the London School of Economics, March 2022
Haus Lilienfeld 