The Twenty-One Demands

The Manchuria Question and Japan’s Entry into the War

After the Russo-Japanese War Japan took over Russia’s leasehold on the Liaodong Peninsula and the South Manchuria Railway, but these rights were time-limited: the Liaodong lease was due to expire in 1923 and the railway in 1939. According to the Japanese historian Sōchi Naraoka, extending these terms was a major outstanding problem for Japanese diplomacy, and one that Katō Takaaki, who became foreign minister in Ōkuma Shigenobu’s cabinet in 1914, took especially seriously. On 23 August 1914 Japan declared war on Germany, citing the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, and then occupied the German leasehold around Jiaozhou Bay in Shandong. Naraoka argues that Katō’s “foremost objective was to use the return of the newly acquired German interests on the Shandong Peninsula as a bargaining chip” to settle the Manchuria question, while the “expansion fever” that swept Japan after the outbreak of war led the Foreign Ministry to pile every pending issue into the list.

The Demands Presented

On 18 January 1915 the Japanese minister in Beijing, Hioki Eki, handed Yuan Shikai a list of demands, “pledging the President and Ministers of State not to divulge the character of the demands to other Powers on pain of serious consequences to China.” The list had five groups and twenty-one articles. Group 1 required China to accept whatever disposition Japan agreed with Germany concerning German rights in Shandong; Group 2 extended the Port Arthur–Dalian lease and the South Manchuria and Andong–Mukden railways to 99 years and gave Japanese subjects rights to lease land, reside and mine in South Manchuria and eastern Inner Mongolia; Group 3 would make the Hanyeping company a joint enterprise; Group 4 barred China from ceding or leasing any coastal harbour or island to another power; and Group 5 required the central government to employ influential Japanese as political, financial and military advisers, called for jointly administered police in certain places, and covered arms purchases, railways in the Yangzi valley, Fujian province and missionary rights. The American minister, Paul Reinsch, reported on 24 January that the demands were recognised in Beijing as “the greatest crisis yet experienced in China.”

The Negotiations

Foreign Minister Lu Zhengxiang and Vice-Minister Cao Rulin led the talks for China. The memorandum Japan gave the United States and other powers on 8 February listed only Groups 1–4, omitting Group 5; the Chinese government then instructed its ministers abroad to pass the full text of the 18 January demands confidentially to the governments concerned. On 22 February Japan supplied a supplementary memorandum, and Katō told the American ambassador that these matters had been presented to China only as “requests” or wishes. Naraoka judges that “Tokyo’s attempt initially to keep the Group 5 demands secret from the Western Powers played a major role in hardening the attitude of Britain and the United States,” and that “by skillfully leaking information regarding the talks to the public at home and abroad, the Yuan administration succeeded in fomenting domestic public opinion against Japan and increasing the Western Powers’ wariness toward Tokyo.”

The United States was at first restrained. In a note of 13 March Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan wrote that the “United States frankly recognizes that territorial contiguity creates special relations between Japan and these districts,” raising no question for the time being about the articles on Shandong and South Manchuria, but stating that the Group 5 provisions on purchasing arms from Japan and on Fukien would, if put into effect, violate the principle of equal opportunity for other nations. In mid-March Beijing was informed that Japan’s second squadron had sailed with 30,000 men for Manchuria, Tianjin, Shandong and Hankou. On 26 April Japan tabled revised demands: those on Manchuria and Shandong were unchanged, and Group 5 was formally withdrawn but was to be dealt with separately by note.

Ultimatum and Acceptance

On the afternoon of 7 May Hioki handed the Foreign Minister an ultimatum requiring a categorical reply to a further revised set of demands by 6 p.m. on 9 May; all of the original Group 5 except the article on Fujian was marked “discussion postponed.” On 9 May the Chinese government accepted. On 11 May Bryan notified Japan that the United States “cannot recognize any agreement or undertaking which has been entered into or which may be entered into between the Governments of Japan and China, impairing the treaty rights of the United States and its citizens in China, the political or territorial integrity of the Republic of China, or the international policy relative to China commonly known as the open door policy”; an identical note went to China. On 14 May Yuan issued a secret instruction to officials describing China as fish on Japan’s chopping board and urging that the nation could survive only by strengthening itself.

On 25 May the two governments signed a treaty on South Manchuria and eastern Inner Mongolia, a treaty on Shandong and a series of exchanges of notes. The Port Arthur–Dalian lease and the South Manchuria and Andong–Mukden railway terms were extended to 99 years, the notes fixing expiry of the lease in 1997 and of the South Manchuria Railway in 2002. On Jiaozhou Bay, Japan declared that once the leasehold came under its free disposal after the war it would restore it to China on certain conditions.

Boycotts and National Humiliation Day

As news of the demands spread, protest meetings were held in Shanghai and elsewhere, a boycott of Japanese goods and a national salvation savings movement were launched, and many Chinese students in Japan returned home. Naraoka calls it “the first time that such large-scale and organized anti-Japanese protests had happened.” After China accepted the demands, some killed themselves in protest, such as the Baoding military cadet He Guanglie. The National Education Association designated 9 May as National Humiliation Day for schools, while many northern groups marked 7 May; according to the historian Peng Nansheng, those who commemorated 7 May blamed Japan, while those who chose 9 May blamed the Yuan government for accepting. The commemorations continued year after year, and Naraoka sees the May Fourth Movement of 1919 as the eruption of this nationalism.

Differing Views of the Negotiations and of Yuan Shikai

Mainstream accounts in mainland China treat the demands as the starting point of Japan’s aggression against China—one 2013 academic article describes them as “aimed at subjugating China” and the 1915 agreements as “traitorous treaties” accepted by Yuan—and some earlier historians held that Yuan made concessions to win Japanese support for his imperial ambitions. Tang Chi-hua of National Chengchi University in Taiwan, drawing on British and Japanese diplomatic archives, argues instead that Yuan refused from the outset to yield on Group 5 and that Japanese records treat the negotiations as a failure; the resulting treaty was humiliating, but Japan did not achieve all its aims. Naraoka concludes that “militarily weak, the Yuan government had no choice but to concede, but it had resisted Japan using all the powers it had,” attributing the disorder of the talks to agitated Japanese opinion, Katō’s clumsy leadership and skilful Chinese resistance. He also cites the former Japanese Air Self-Defense Force chief of staff Tamogami Toshio, who has argued that compared with the colonial practices of the great powers at the time “there was nothing terribly unusual” about the demands.