[This Document is the Property of His Britannic Majesty's Government.]
CONFIDENTIAL.
(11724.) (AMENDED.)
328
C. U
7
9085
REC
:
REG 25 FB 22
Remission of the Boxer Indemnity.
AFTER the Boxer rising of 1900 the Chinese Government were called upon to pay an indemnity to the Powers concerned for damage sustained or military expenditure incurred.* By article 6 of the Final Protocol of 1901 the amount was fixed at 450,000,000 Haikwan taels. This sum constituted a gold debt calculated for the different currencies at rates of exchange fixed in the protocol (e.g., in calculating the amount of the gold debt the tael is to be taken as representing 3s.› 742 gold dollars, 3-750 fr., 1-407 yen, &c.).
The gold debt was to bear interest at the rate of 4 per cent., and was to be redeemed in annual instalments spread over thirty-nine years, terminating at the end of 1940. A proportionate amount was to be paid monthly to a commission of bankers representing the interested Powers, and certain revenues were assigned as security.
The indemnity was made up between the different Powers as follows:--
Twels.
Per cent of
Totalt
Russia Germany
180,371,120
29-0
90,070,515
20-0
France..
70,878,240
15-75
Great Britain
50,620,545
11-23
Japan
94,793,100
7-7
United States
82,939,055
7-8
Italy
26,617,005
5.8
Belgium..
8,484,345
1-8
Austria..
Netherlands Spain Portugal Sweden.. Other claims
4,008,920
0.9
782,100
0.2
185,315
92,250
0.1
62,820
149,670
Total
450,000,000
100-0
In 1908 the United States Government bad the amount of their indemnity claim reviewed by a special claim's court, and according to a statement prepared by Mr. Morse, the author of the standard work, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire," for the China Association, it was decided to demand from China not the entire cost of the expeditionary force, but a sum to cover the This difference between the war cost in the field and the peace cost in garrison. difference added to the private claims amounted to about 2,800,000., as compared with the estimate of about 5,000,000l. provisionally made in 1901. The balance of 2,200,000l. was remitted by proportionate deductions from future payments. This The United States Minister was done without any conditions being imposed.
at Peking, Mr. Rockhill, a persona gratissima with the Chinese Government, induced them to continue voluntarily to issue the American quota of the indemnity without deduction and to pay that portion which was renounced by the United States Government to a Commission of Education for the purpose of sending Chinese students to American Universities. The net result, therefore, was that the Chinese Government devoted the amount by which the original American claim was over- estimated to the education of Chinese students in America.
* For fuller details and for some secount of the machinery for the payment of the indemnity instalments. see Appendix I.
To nearest decima).
477-6 [6823]
B