the position that Great Britain could not give up certain exclusive rights, confirmed by agreements with China, in what was then known as the British sphere, in the valley of the Yangtze, because other nations held rights to their spheres, and as long as British subjects were excluded from them Great Britain could not surrender her own rights; that stage had now been passed, and an endeavor should be made to define and make clear the new position.

Mr. Balfour said he did not wish to discuss then the correspondence of 1917, to which Mr. Root had referred, as it was of very little immediate relevancy to the question. It was, however, worth while for him to state, in order that it might appear on the records of the committee, that on October 31, 1921, the parliamentary undersecretary of the foreign office had made the following declaration in the House of Commons:

The policy of spheres of influence in China has been superseded by one of international cooperation, and the further development of this policy will no doubt form one of the subjects of discussion at Washington.

Commenting upon the statement which Dr. Wang had made at the fifteenth meeting of the Committee, Mr. Root said that, as he understood it, China asked to be released from the effect of certain restrictions and stipulations that were collateral to certain grants or negative stipulations (undertakings given to particular powers not to alienate or lease specific portions of her territory).

This, it is to be observed, was not exactly what Dr. Wang had asked for. However, upon being

requested to do so, he furnished the Committee at its sixteenth meeting a list of so-called "restrictive stipulations," which included not only China's nonalienation agreements, and the various agreements that had been entered into by the Powers relating to China but to which she was not a party, but also the group of treaties and exchange of notes of May 25, 1915, that had resulted from the Twenty-One Demands that Japan, in that year, had made upon China.

Resolution Adopted. No formal or definitive action was taken by the Committee of the Whole or by the Conference in plenary session with reference to the various restrictive stipulations, the list of which Dr. Wang submitted. However, at the twenty-third meeting of the Committee, held January 21, a resolution was unanimously adopted which was later approved by the Conference in plenary session and embodied, with unimportant verbal changes, as Article IV, in the final Nine Power Treaty Relating to Principles and Policies to be followed in Matters Concerning China, signed February 6, 1922. This Article IV reads:

The Contracting Powers agree not to support any agreements by their respective nationals with each other designed to create Spheres of Influence or to provide for the enjoyment of mutually exclusive opportunities in designated parts of Chinese territory.2

"This resolution originated in connection with the matter of listing by the Powers the commitments claimed by them to have been made by China to them or to their nationals and will again be referred to in the chapter dealing with that subject.

It will be observed that this agreement upon the part of the Powers has only a prospective and not a retrospective operation. At the same time, when regard is had to the other declarations made by the Powers at the Conference and to the other Principles and Policies to which they have committed themselves, especially with reference to the Open Door, it may fairly be said that, if these Policies and Principles are faithfully followed, there will be little opportunity in the future for any Power to claim, within any particular region of China, upon the basis of any agreements it already has with that country, such preferential or exclusive rights as will amount to a claim, within that region of what, in the past, has been known as a Sphere of Interest or of Influence.

'Article III, paragraph designated (a) of the Nine Powers Treaty Relating to Principles and Policies to be Followed in Matters Concerning China provides that the Power will not seek nor support their nationals in seeking "any arrangement which might purport to establish in favor of their interests any general superiority of rights with respect to commercial or economic development in any designated region of China."

CHAPTER XIV

LEASED AREAS

That China should desire to obtain an abandonment of the leases held by certain of the Powers of important portions of her territory was but a natural result of her general effort to free herself from the various limitations upon her sovereign freedom of action. Relief in this specific matter was brought before the Conference by Dr. Koo, of the Chinese Delegation, at the twelfth meeting of the Committee of the Whole, held December 3. Dr. Koo, as reported in the minutes of that meeting, made the following statement:

The existence of the leased territories in China was due in the original instance to the aggressions of Germany, whose forcible occupation of part of Shantung Province constrained the Chinese Government on March 6, 1898, to grant a lease for 99 years of the Bay of Kiaochow in the Shantung Province. This was closely followed, on March 27, 1898, by a demand on the part of Russia for the lease of the Liaotung Peninsula, in which are found the ports of Port Arthur and Dalny, along with the demand for the right of building a railway to be guarded by Russian soldiers traversing the Manchurian Provinces from Port Arthur and Dalny to join the Trans-Siberian Railway and Vladivostok. This was later the cause of the Russo-Japanese war which resulted in 1905 in the transfer of those territories to Japan with the consent of China. Following the lease of Kiaochow Bay to Germany and that of Port Arthur and Dalny to Russia, France obtained from China on April 22, 1898, the lease of Kwangchow-wan on the coast of Kwangtung Province for 99 years. Great Britain on June 9, 1898, secured the lease, also

for 99 years, of an extension of Kowloon and the adjoining territory and waters close to Hongkong, and on July 1, 1898, the lease " for so long a period as Port Arthur should remain in the occupation of Russia" of the Port of Weihaiwei on the coast of Shantung. Both Great Britain and France based their claims for the leases on the ground of the necessity of preserving the balance of power in the Far East.

While the measures and extent of control by the lessee powers over the leased territories varied in different cases, the leases themselves were all limited to a fixed period of years. Expressly or impliedly they were not transferable to a third power without the consent of China. Though the exercise of administrative rights over the territories leased was relinquished by China to the lessee power during the period of the lease, the sovereignty of China over them had been reserved in all cases. The leases were all creatures of compact, different from cessions both in fact and in law. As stated in the beginning, these leaseholds were granted by China with the sole purpose of maintaining the balance of power in the Far East, not so much between China and the other powers, but between other powers themselves concerning China.

Twenty years had elapsed since then and conditions had entirely altered. With the elimination of German menace in particular, an important disturbing factor to the peace of the Far East had been removed. Russia had equally disappeared from the scene and it could be hoped with confidence that she would eventually return, not as the former aggressive power, but as a great democratic nation. The misrule of the Manchu dynasty which had aggravated the situation had also disappeared. The very fact that this conference was being held at Washington for the purpose of arriving at a mutual understanding on the part of the powers, provided an added reason for dispensing with the necessity of maintaining the balance of power in the Far East, which was the principal ground on which the original claims of the different powers were based. In the absence of that necessity the Chinese delegation believed that the time had come for the interested powers to relinquish their control over the territories leased to them.

The existence of such leased territories had greatly prejudiced China's territorial and administrative integrity, because they were