BRENT CRANE
How China’s bitter disappointment at the Paris Peace Conference sparked the outrage that would lead to the country’s long revolution—and the grudges that persist today.
Published on June 22, 2014
Betrayal in Paris: How the Treaty of Versailles Led to China’s Long Revolution
by Paul French
e-Penguin, 2014, 81 pp., $3.38
On November 18th, 1918 Peking was given over to riotous celebration. The most devastating and far-reaching war the world had ever seen had officially come to an end seven days earlier. President Hsu, the newly sworn-in leader of the barely seven-year-old Chinese republic, called for a three-day holiday to celebrate the Allies’ victory. A massive parade was organized, with more than 100,000 in attendance, including 10,000 uniformed men from the British, French, American, and Chinese forces. Airplanes flew overhead, dropping Chinese flags and peace messages, and fireworks lit up the cityscape. China celebrated “Western-style democracy as its great hope, and the end of the Great War as a victory over tyranny.” But such optimism would be pitifully short-lived, cut short as it was by an unexpected but painful letdown at the Paris Peace Conference, where it failed to regain territory lost to Japan during the war. That betrayal is the subject and title of the latest book by acclaimed China hand Paul French.
Out of the heap of literature on the Treaty of Versailles, only a few books contribute more than a brief discussion of China’s role in the Paris Peace Conference. French’s book, then, is a welcome addition, not least for his well-crafted knack for nonfiction storytelling and extensive knowledge of modern Chinese history. French describes how Japan coerced Woodrow Wilson into betraying China, and how that betrayal put Japan on the path to war and China on the path to Maoism.
China had enjoyed centuries of regional domination and prestige, but was remarkably weak at the turn of the 20th century. The Qing Dynasty, toppled by a bloodless coup in 1911, had been replaced by a nationalist republic made up of intellectuals and idealists. The first President of the republic, a former Qing General and megalomaniac named Yuan Shih-kai, died quickly after reaching power, leaving an ineffectual government divided between north and south. Large swaths of the nation soon fell under the control of competing strongmen, thrusting China into an era of warlordism that would last for nearly two decades. With its economy smoldering, its people afflicted with disease and opium addiction, its territory splintered by imperialist land grabs and warlordism, and its political elite split in two, China was in desperate need of a pick-me-up by the end of World War I.