793.003/85
The French Embassy to the Department of State
While the French Government entertain liberal views concerning encouragements to be given for the establishment, on modern bases, of a Chinese Government exercising its authority on the whole of China, they do not believe that it is in the interest either of the Chinese people, or of foreigners, to prematurely put an end to present guarantees of judicial and residential order. These guarantees allow French nationals to do useful work which has already contributed to bringing closer together Chinese and occidental civilizations. Their suppression, in the present state of administration and justice in China, would disorganize the economical life and would be more [Page 444] detrimental than favorable to the gradual development of a normal administration. Efforts made by several nationalists to establish a central civil authority and subordinate to it the military chiefs, so numerous and so unstable, have in fact remained up to now inoperative. The suppression of extraterritoriality privileges can be only considered without danger in the measure as, in the practice of their policy, the Chinese people will be inspired by modern principles and when experience shall have demonstrated that the actual modernization of Chinese administration and justice render valueless the dispositions of the present treaties.