In 1920 US poll, China evoked sympathy

China was the centre of attention in 1920, as it is now for different reasons. China elicited sympathy for being abandoned by the West, especially America, in favour of Japan. However, the Democratic Party faced resentment over President Wilson’s overindulgence with world affairs at the expense of America.

Poll run-up: History has a strange habit of pitting the same actors in changed roles.

Vappala Balachandran

Ex-Special Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat

Global attention will now be on the 2020 US presidential elections. History has a strange habit of pitting the same actors in changed roles or events in contrasting situations. In 1920, the American electorate was as tired as in 2020 for different reasons. Like now, the country was in deep recession after the First World War boom. The reasons were demobilisation of thousands of soldiers and strikes in meat-packing and steel industries. Now, Covid-19 has wrecked the economy. The social fabric was destroyed by the 1919 ‘Red Summer’ race riots in 36 cities, like the police excesses on African-Americans in 2020. Anarchist bombing on the Wall Street had generated fears of foreign interference after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Now, the fear is about China.

India should closely watch Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden’s campaign rhetoric. In his campaign paper ‘Agenda for Muslim American Communities’, Biden has called to “restore the rights for all people in Kashmir” as “restrictions on dissent, preventing peaceful protests or shutting or slowing down the internet weaken democracy.” This is more or less the same language as the House of Representatives Resolution No. 745 introduced by Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal on December 6, 2019. At that time, our External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar had refused invitation from the House Foreign Affairs Committee for a meeting on the ground that Jayapal would be present in the meeting.

Biden was also ‘disappointed’ with the measures taken by New Delhi in the aftermath of the passage of laws on the National Register of Citizens in Assam and the Citizenship Amendment Act. “These measures are inconsistent with the country’s long tradition of secularism and with sustaining a multi-ethnic and multi-religious democracy.”

On China, the Biden campaign has not taken a stand. However, there are contrary indications. One section feels that he would be ‘tough’ on China. Ron Klain, a longtime Biden adviser, indicated that Biden would ‘seize’ former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s revelations portraying Trump as subservient to China as he urged “Xi Jinping to help him win re-election.” However, another assessment in The Diplomat (June 15) predicted that Biden might follow a pragmatic policy towards China, replacing Trump’s personalised whimsical strategy in consultation with European allies, as Obama had.

China was the centre of attention in 1920, as it is now for different reasons. In 1919, China elicited sympathy for being abandoned by the West, especially America, in favour of Japan. American historian, the late Barbara Tuchman says in her Pulitzer-winning biography of General Joseph Stilwell (1971) that sympathetic headlines like ‘Rape of Shantung’ or ‘Shame of Shantung’ had dominated newspaper headlines during the 1920 campaign. Sympathy with China was also generated by American missionaries due to the Great Northern China Famine (1919-21) which had made President Woodrow Wilson declare that China “looks to us for counsel and leadership to an unusual degree.”

However, the Democratic Party was facing national resentment in 1920 over President Wilson’s overindulgence with world affairs at the expense of America. A perusal of the Senate debates during this era would reveal deep resentment against the President for allowing the Great Britain and colonial powers like France and Italy to dictate terms in the Treaty of Versailles. America, the “country which saved Europe”, was given only one vote in the League of Nations while the Great Britain obtained six because of her colonies.

Senate ‘Irreconcilables’ and ‘Reservationists’ like Senator Henry Cabot Lodge attacked Articles 10 and 11 of the Treaty on the ground that it had modified the US Constitution’s Article 1(8) (11) by ceding war powers to the League of Nations from the US Congress: “In case of any such aggression or in case of any threat or danger of such aggression, the Council shall advise upon the means by which this obligation shall be fulfilled.”

The Current Opinion (June 1919), then a leading journal, published a long report — ‘Japan in the Jekyll-and-Hyde Character’ — exposing how stealthily Japan had acquired the title on Shantung (China), which it presented to the 1919 Paris Conference. Although America had affirmed that the Far East was the territory under its control, Japan hoodwinked President Wilson even as it was pretending to support the allies.

Japan, which joined the war on August 7, 1914, in pursuance of its 1902 treaty with Britain, demanded Germany on the 16th to vacate Kiaochow (Jiaozhou) in Shantung by the 23rd. On August 22, the United States cautioned Japan that its intention of acting against Germany in the Far East should not be for territorial expansion into China and that the “United States should be consulted before further steps are taken outside the territory of Kiaochow.”

In clear violation, the Japanese minister in Beijing met Chinese President Yuan Shikai on January 18, 1915, and presented a secret list of demands on its control of Manchuria and Inner Mongolia as well as control over China’s military and financial policies. In May 1915, Japan gave 51 hours’ ultimatum to Shikai to accede to these demands. A weak China had to agree to most of these demands. From then onwards, Japan started claiming Shantung as a conquered province.

The journal blamed the Wilson administration for sacrificing China at the altar of Japanese expansionist greed by concluding the Lansing-Ishii Accord in 1917 between Japanese Foreign Minister Viscount Ishii Kikujiro and the US Secretary of State Robert Lansing. In what was a clear contradiction, they agreed on an ‘open door policy’ on China, while at the same time, accepting that Japan had ‘special interests in China’ due to territorial proximity. It asked: “Is America ready to put the fate of almost 40 million Chinese in Shantung and the rest of China into the hands of Japan?”

Barbara Tuchman says that the abandonment of China loomed so large in the 1920 elections that they elected Warren Harding, a very low-profile Republican as President, whose only slogan was ‘Return to Normalcy’ after the domestic upheaval caused by the Wilson administration. His allegation that Wilson had ‘delivered’ several millions of Chinese, who had placed faith in the American democracy, to a rival nation in Paris, also triggered an emotional response.