861.77 Chinese Eastern/245
Memorandum by the Assistant Secretary of State (Johnson)
In the course of conversation today the Chinese Minister stated that he called on me not under instructions from his Government but merely because he thought he ought to keep us informed in the matter. He said that he had been informed by his Government that the reason for the rupture in the conversations which had been going on between Chinese and Russian representatives at Manchuli was due to the fact that the Russians had demanded the appointment of a Russian manager and a Russian assistant manager before negotiations could be commenced. The Chinese Minister stated that such a demand was hardly reasonable, that the Chinese were perfectly willing to agree that such a point was a proper point for negotiation, but to demand it as a condition preceding negotiations was unthinkable from the Chinese point of view.
I remarked that in reading the press accounts of this matter I observed a conflict between the statement which he had made to the Associated Press and one which the Associated Press quoted C. T. Wang [Page 287] as making. I read the statement appearing in the “Washington Post of August 19, which stated that Minister Wu said that the cause of the disruption had been due to the Soviets’ demands for the reinstatement of the Soviet manager of the railway and his assistant, while the Associated Press report from Nanking of August 18, appearing in the New York Times of August 19, quoted C. T. Wang as saying that “the Soviets tried to induce Chang Hsueh-liang, Manchurian war lord, to agree to the appointment of new Russian railway officials while the Sino-Russian preliminary conversations were under way. Chang refused, properly referring the question to Nanking. This Soviet proposal was unacceptable because it is the Nationalist Government’s decision to reject all Soviet proposals brought forth before the formal parley is convened. The Nationalist Government wants guarantees regarding future Soviet actions before the Soviet presents any conditions concerning the settlement of the present issue.” I pointed out that in C. T. Wang’s statement it was indicated that the Soviets were prepared to send new appointees to take the place of those dismissed by the Chinese. The Chinese Minister stated that he had no reason to doubt this, that his information could be interpreted either way. I stated that it seemed to me that if the Soviets were prepared to accept this situation and appoint new personnel in the place of that dismissed by the Chinese, the Chinese had won quite a point and I could not see why this should be unacceptable to them as it would put the railway back into running order and lay the way to negotiation. The Minister stated that he could not agree with me, that such a condition was entirely unacceptable to his Government; that to accept it would be to admit that they were in the wrong which they were not prepared to admit. I stated once more that I thought this was rather overstating the case and could not see how this would be an admission of wrong on their part, as, on the contrary, it was an admission on the part of Russia that the Chinese had been right in firing the men.
The Chinese Minister stated that the other matter he wanted to inform me about was that his Government had informed him that they had ordered 60,000 troops to the Chinese Eastern Railway for the purpose of policing the line; that this did not mean they wanted war. He said there were still over 9,000 Russians employed on the line and many of these people were causing trouble by acts of sabotage and it was necessary for China to order the military to the line in order to protect it from those activities. I asked the Minister where things were leading in Manchuria and he said that the outlook was gloomy.