893.74/390
The Secretary of State to the British Chargé (Chilton)
Sir: I have the honor to acknowledge the receipt of the note (No. 951) under date of November 8 in which you were so good as to advise me of the tenor of the Japanese Government’s reply to the inquiry of your Government as to Japan’s acceptance of the recommendations, on the subject of wireless communications in China, put forward by the American, British, French and Japanese experts at the time of the Washington Conference, on February 4, 1922.
From your note I gather that the Japanese Government is disposed to accept and expedite the plan of cooperation recommended by the experts of the four Governments in their memorandum of February 4, 1922, subject to two conditions, relating to paragraphs 2 and 6, respectively, of that memorandum.
With respect to the latter of these conditions, I note with pleasure the statement made in your note in behalf of your Government to the effect that the Great Northern and Eastern Extension Cable Companies do not ask for any monopoly or preferential rights after the year 1930, and are willing to abandon their exclusive rights immediately, provided that the other recommendations put forward by the experts are carried out; so that it would appear that paragraph 6 of the memorandum should not offer any difficulty.
The Japanese Government’s acceptance of the experts’ recommendations would therefore seem to be conditioned upon the reconsideration by this Government of the position taken by its representative on the committee of wireless experts and incorporated as paragraph 2 in the recommendations of that committee. If I am correct in that understanding of the purport of the Japanese communication to the British Government, I must regretfully indicate the impossibility of this Government’s renouncing the position that it has hitherto taken in this matter, namely, that while not unwilling that its nationals should cooperate by means of appropriate traffic agreements and other business arrangements with any international combination which might be established for the development of radio telegraphic communications between China and other countries, it is [Page 824] not prepared to become a party to a combination for that purpose, desiring in particular to retain independence of action with respect to communications between the United States and China. The suppression of paragraph 2 of the experts’ recommendations, which appears to be implied in the statement of the Japanese Government’s views, would involve a reversal of the fundamental policy of my Government in this matter, and an abandonment by it of such advantages as it might hope to derive from the adoption of the experts’ recommendations of February 4, 1922. Insistence upon the deletion of paragraph 2 would therefore make impossible the acceptance of those recommendations, which, as you will recall, were drawn up by the technical experts of the four interested countries with a view to providing a practicable means of accommodating the views of the several governments. The experts’ recommendations, as understood by this Government, are fair to the several commercial interests of the four Powers, and adapted to bring about a practicable working arrangement among them under the complicated circumstances of the case; they constitute, moreover, the only fair and practicable plan thus far suggested for that purpose. This Government would be greatly disappointed if it were compelled to forego the hope of finding in those recommendations a basis upon which to effect an accommodation of the views of the several interested Governments with respect to the means of electrical communication with China.
Accept [etc.]