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CHINA.
CONFIDENTIAL.
[F 959/959/10]
No. 1.
February 1, 1927.]
SECTION 1.
Mr. Lampson to Sir Austen Chamberlain.—(Received February 1.)
(No. 27.) Sir.
Peking, January 11, 1927. WITH reference to Sir Ronald Macleay's despatch No. 723 of the 30th September I have the honour to submit the following review of developments in the political situation during the past three months --
2. With regard to the position of the Peking Government, mention was made in the postscript to the above despatch of the replacement of the Acting Premier, Admiral Tu Hsi-kuei, and the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Admiral Tsai Tʻing-kan, by Dr. Wellington Koo, who vacated the Ministry of Finance to take over the Premiership and the Wai-chiao Pu concurrently. The Peking Government has since consisted in the main of Dr. Koo, supported by the shadowy remnants of the Cabinet, shorn of the representatives of Wu Pei-fu and Sun Ch'uan-fang, who had retired to join their patrons at Chengchow and Nanking respectively. Dr. Koo's most important colleague, Mr. P'an Fu, the Minister for Finance, has flitted to and fro between Peking and Tien-tsin chasing elusive loan schemes which would furnish the necessary funds to enable him to assume office on behalf of his military masters; he did in the end nominally take up his post, but without, it seems, actually functioning in his Ministry. Dr. Koo himself is generally credited with having transferred his allegiance from Wu Pei-fu to Chang Tso-lin, who has, however, so far shown a cautious reluctance to take Dr. Koo and the Peking Government formally under his wing. The long expected reconstruction of the Cabinet as a Fengtien Administration has therefore so far failed to materialise, and it is no exaggeration to say that the last quarter of 1926 has seen the absolute low-water mark in the history of the so-called Central Government at Peking, which has never been more shadowy, powerless, and unrepresentative since the establishment of the republic fifteen years ago. When I arrived in Peking towards the end of the year. the Cabinet had ceased to function altogether, and the façade of Government appeared to consist solely of Dr. Koo and the Wai-chiao Pu
3. The attitude of the Powers towards this fiction of a Government has been anything but well defined or uniform, varying on the one hand from the attitude of extreme reserve adopted by His Majesty's Legation, who, since the collapse in April of the Tuan Ch'i-jui régime (to which it will be remembered de facto recognition had been formally accorded a year or so before), have carefully refrained from any act implying recognition, to that of the Chilean Minister, who formally presented his credentials to Dr. Koo as Premier performing in the absence of a President the functions of the Head of the State. Yet it was during this period that Dr. Koo abrogated the Sino-Belgian Treaty by formal notification to the Belgian Minister. who, perhaps unwisely, had entered into a prolonged correspondence with him on the subject in a manner which seemed to imply the existence of normal diplomatic relations between the Government of Brussels and that of Peking. The Japanese, on the other hand, were more reserved, and in their carefully worded reply to the Chinese demand for the revision of the Sino-Japanese Treaty, refrained from any expression involving their recognition of anything beyond the Wai-chiao Pu.
4. The same question regarding recognition came up in connection with the presentation of my own credentials. It was originally decided in November that I should communicate a copy of them to the Minister for Foreign Affairs in Peking and explain to him that the formal presentation of the letters themselves would be deferred until there was a President, to whom His Majesty's Government could accord recognition. During my conversations at Hankow with Mr. Chen, however, I made much play with the fact that at the moment His Majesty's Government recognised no Government, either Northern or Southern, and I felt, with ever- increasing force, that we should do nothing which might be construed as the communication of copy of the credentials would be as even quasi-recognition of the North. A suggestion was then put forward from the Legation, with which as a matter of fact I did not agree, that I should communicate copies to both the Peking
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