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its purpose, so far as I could gather from his explana- tion, is to convey that we should bind ourselves not to recognise any other government in China, at any rate until such time as stalemate was reached either by de- feat of Canton government or its withdrawal from the Yangtse or by division of China and emergence of more then one government.
I then enquired whether there was no possibility of merely confining ourselves to first half of his suggested formula. I had had no time to receive a reply to my telegram sending it to the Foreign Office (see my telegram No.7) but I thought there could only be one answer to it, viz: that His Majesty's Goverment could have their action fettered in those areas which were not under the control of Nationalist government.
Chen then commenced an almost impassioned harangue
in the course of which he made three points
(1) That Nationalist government was the government of China from the point of view of size of country it controlled and still more so if a plebiscite could be taken everywhere in China
not
(2) That British interests were almost entirely centred in the Yangtse Valley and South China and that so far as His Majesty's Government was concerned dealings with a government that controlled these arees were all that really mattered
(3) That a decisive moment had now been reached when we should realize that there had been complete breach with the past and when we should by a bold gesture capture the imagination of Nationalist China and swing the relations of our two countries into new channels.
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