793.003/5578/9
Memorandum by the Minister in China (Johnson)53
I called upon Dr. C. T. Wang, Minister for Foreign Affairs, this morning and I read to him as coming from the Secretary of State paragraph one of Department’s telegram of May 8, 6 p.m. to Nanking, being the Secretary’s reply to Dr. Wang’s communication to me in my conversation with him of May 6th. Dr. Wang said that reading between the lines he interpreted this as an admission on the part of the Secretary of State that the American Government had attempted to persuade the British Government not to go too fast in its negotiations with him on the subject of extraterritoriality. He said that he was gratified to know that the American Government had been and would continue to be frank in regard to these matters. He said that all he wanted to do was to prevent any unfriendliness being injected into the situation.
I told Dr. Wang that I of course could not prevent his drawing any conclusions which he might choose to draw but that there was nothing in my records to convince me that my Government was attempting to play politics in this matter, that all along we had been ready, willing and anxious to work out with the Chinese Government some practical method of bridging the gap between extraterritoriality and non-extraterritoriality; that we had never attempted to deceive the Chinese [Page 854] Government as to what we thought this practical method should be. I then read to him paragraph two of the Department’s telegram giving the Department’s attitude on the questions of reserved areas and the term[s] of the treaty.
- Copy transmitted to the Department by the Minister without covering despatch; received June 11.↩