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PACIFIC COMMUNITY
an agreement was signed by Mr. Chen Yu-jen, then Minister for Foreign Affairs in the Nationalist government, and Mr. Owen O'Malley, for the United Kingdom government, for the rendition of the British concession at Hangkow. A similar agreement was made over the Kiukiang concession on the following day.
But the most interesting of these agreements, from the point of view of the future of Hongkong, is surely the Convention for the Rendition of Weihaiwei, which was negotiated on April 18, 1930 and came into force in October of that year. It was negotiated by Mr. Changting T. Wang and Sir Miles Lampson. The former was the Foreign Minister of the Republic of China, the latter King George's Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Government of China. A rather special interest attaches to the earlier agreements, the so-called Chen-O'Malley agreements, because Mr. Chen's son Percy is now a lawyer living in Hongkong and is one of the "unofficial" leaders of the Chinese community there loyal to the People's Republic. But the Weihaiwei agree- ment has more meat in it from the point of view of shades of dif- ference between total and partial rendition back to Chinese sover- eignty.
The 1930 Convention on Weihaiwei begins with an outright statement returning the territory to China and abrogating the Con- vention concluded in July 1898 for its lease to Britain. A series of articles follows in which the British government unconditionally hands back various properties to the Chinese government. But Article XI introduces a new note by committing the Chinese government, after taking Weihaiwei back, to maintain as far as possible "the existing regulations, including land and house tax, sanitary and building regulations, and policing." In Article XII it is stated that all documents of title to land, and deeds of con- veyance and mortgage issued to Chinese owners by the British, shall be recognized “as being of the same validity as during the British administration." Similarly, in Article XIII, documents of title to land issued to non-Chinese by the British administration were to be exchanged for Chinese deeds of perpetual lease. In any case, all leases issued by the British in Weihaiwei "will be rec- ognized" by the Chinese government.
In Article XIV the Chinese government is committed to "main- tain the existing public service," and all decisions of the British High Court and Magistrates Courts in Weihaiwei were to be con- sidered after rendition as having the same force and effect as if