893.74/365a: Telegram
The Secretary of State to the Ambassador in France (Herrick)
293. Telegram from Embassy at London, 304, July 19, 1 p.m. Please inform Owen D. Young and General Harbord of the Radio Corporation that in correspondence with the Government of Denmark regarding the Federal wireless contract, this Department has consistently maintained that under the terms of article 15 of our treaty of 1844 with China,24 and like provisions in later treaties, the Government of China has effectively renounced any right to create either for itself or for any foreign interests such a position as would bar citizens of this country from the possibility of having a share in such enterprises as electrical communications. It has been the position of this Department that the Government of China had, therefore, no power to grant to Danish interests a monopoly such as is claimed on behalf of the Great Northern Company. Without questioning the validity of the particular positive grants vested in the Great Northern Company by its contract with the Chinese Government, the American Government insists that no stipulation in a [Page 814] contract made by the Chinese Government could divest American interests, for that company’s benefit, of their existing right given by treaty not to have their business impeded by monopolies or other harmful restrictions.
You may add that the Danish company was aided by the representatives of the treaty powers at Peking in obtaining its original rights in China in 1871 and that when in 1881 it sought the grant of a monopoly for 20 years, our Minister made a protest and was given an assurance by the Chinese Government that it was not intended that the rights granted to the Great Northern Company should work to exclude an American company.25
With the understanding that the international wireless convention at London leaves the Radio Corporation with the option of declining traffic with the Mitsui Company’s station at Peking, the Department makes the suggestion that you might give your consent to the making of the tests upon the explicit understanding that thereby you would not be placed under obligation to exchange traffic with the Mitsui station unless and until the Department gives its approval thereto.
- Miller, Treaties, vol. 4, p. 559.↩
- See Foreign Relations, 1881, pp. 275–318, passim; and ibid., 1882, pp. 115–117.↩