DIPLOMATS AT PEKIN

Evening Post, Volume CXIII, Issue 30, 5 February 1927, Page 9

DIPLOMATS AT PEKIN

ARE THEY NECESSAftY?

WHY THEIR PRESENCE IS

HARMFUL

No one can any longer deny that the European diplomatic situation at Pekin has become untenable (states Count Sforza in the "Manchester Guardian." Even dignity, one fears, is compromised: how could it be still retained after so long a period of passivity and insignificance? I do not use the word "passivity" in the sense which the,diehards of the Shanghai clubs would give it, dreaming still, of the mailed fist of the style of the Pekin Treaty of 1901 and blind to the absolute sterility which a policy of violence would very quickly reveal. But even when we renounce the mailed fist,- a diplomatic situation which can offer no change of policy and methods in face of new realities perforce becomes one of passivity. In the face of the failure of so much wise counsel, may a word of advice be offered by one who spent several years as a young diplomat at Pekin, who lived there with Sir Eobert Hart, and who returned later as the Envoy of a Groat Power to witness the fall of the Clung dynasty and the ephemeral dictatorship of Yuan Shi-kai? I mention these points not as entitling me to advise but because my suggestion concerns diplomats.

I am profoundly convinced that, now that the civil war has attained such dimensions, the presence of tin Diplomatic Corps at Pekin is producing a not effect which is much more harmful than useful. It is not the fault of those honourable Heads of Missions whose technical competence is as entirely beyond question as their high moral character. They are harmful in spite of themselvSs, as every organ becomes which, though still healthy no longer has any real and serviceable function. The Government of Pekin is no longer of any account; the Wai-Chiao-pu (Foreign Office) has for long been a mere screon covering a -Roid. Yet the diplomats continue to carry their condolences to this screen with the naivete of a Japanese, peasant woman bowing and clapping her hands in a Shinto temple to attract the attention of the distant god to her prayer. The diplomats' action in the void is harmful not only as lacking seriousness but because it has provoked complications which otherwise would not have arisen. THE BELGIAN TREATY. It would, for instance, have been difficult for Mr. Wellington Eoo^to dream of denouncing the treaty with Belgium if he had not had at his side an envoy of King Albert. What would it have mattered if a Government whose arm reaches no farther than the gates of its capital made an urgent matter of the modification of a. general treaty with a European Power if the European agents had not themselves lent this Govern- , ment, by their pressure, the importance which'it lacked? Mr. Koo, friend and enemy of Canton, and acute enough to foresee the Cantoneae advance, sees in the denunciation of the Belgian Treaty a means of acquiring merit in the eyes of the probable masters of tomorrow. He would not have dreamed of taking that action if these masters of to-morrow had had the Belgian

agent, or even a second Belgian agent, living and working in their midst. Nor would the Cantonese on their part, as the de facto Government, have been at all anxious to raise a theoretic.l question of minor importance at the present moment.

At tho Washington Conferenc, again —that conference which is so recent and already seems so distant—there was more than one ground for realising that in making certain concessions to Pekiu the Powers wore defeating their own ends by rousing provincial iealousies and greeds. The recognition by the Powers of .the evanescent shadow of Pekin has lately been merely one more cause of civil war, for the prestige lent to Pekin by this recognition and the solid advantage of the loans which it makes possible, with the profits from advances from the Maritime Customs are too tempting a prize for the condottien ivho have sliced up Northern China between them.

WHAT SHOULD BE DONE.

It is useless to ask the impossible from their excellencies the diplomats of Pekin—tliat they should recognise their anutility. That is too rarely seen among human beings. Besides, these are matters that can only be seen clearly from without.

But if the Cabinets are convinced of the supreme advantage of a return of Ouna to unity and peace, it would be well for them to recall that it is no ?rV- IU- nf ~for Pekin t0 be impotent. Its Ministries were never more so than under the Middle Empire of a few decades ago. The Viceroys were virtually independent, and great and long continued was the dismay of the Ministries when .the envoys of the European Powers came to the Tsong Li-yamen to demand explanations or reparation for some happening in Yunnan or Kwantung. Those days have returned, to our misfortune.

The simple dispatch of de facto diplomatic agents to the various masters of the unfortunate China and the administration (not unduly advertised) of no more than a de facto soporific to the brand Diplomatic Corps at Pekin might be of substantial advantage to Europe and to China, even if against the reality of the gam there must be set a fading of the shadows of to-day which have conveyed the illusion of reality The reality of to-mororw will be the acceleration of the reeonstitution of a more or less united China, if only because the condottieri once brought into constant contact with the agents of foreign countries, will quickly realise how much more useful it would be, when speaking with foreigners, to be China. For that matter, there is no lack among the agitators of young China' of sincere patriots, who will also desire the more strongly to reconstitute a fatherland on the day of the disappearance of the existing mirage of the China which is mirrored in the Diplomatic Corps—a mirage which, in the Chinese way, saves their faces and stills tneir consciences through a fiction.'