Office of the Historian

393.1163 Property/36

The Acting Secretary of State to the Minister in China (Johnson)

Washington, March 7, 1930.
No. 28

Sir: The Department has received the Legation’s despatch No. 2544 of January 21, 1930,99 reporting that an instruction has been issued by the Chinese Government ruling that foreign missionary societies are no longer to have included in leases of land the term “leased in perpetuity”.

Until the stipulation found in Article XIV of the American-Chinese Treaty of 1903,1 that American missionary societies shall be permitted to lease land in perpetuity shall have been modified by agreement, the Legation should use all appropriate means to obtain for American organizations the enjoyment of the right as granted in the treaty. Should the Legation consider it advisable, as suggested in the despatch under acknowledgment, to defer a protest until some denial of the right of perpetual lease in a particular case is encountered, the Department would feel no objection to that course.

I am [etc.]

For the Acting Secretary of State:
Francis White
  1. Not printed.↩
  2. Foreign Relations, 1908, p. 91.↩