701.4193/72
Memorandum by the Counselor of Embassy in the United Kingdom (Atherton), Temporarily in Washington
The day I left London (July 2) I had an after-lunch talk with Sir Alexander Cadogan, who, at the end of July, will become one of the two permanent Under Secretaries of State in the Foreign Office. (It will be recalled that Sir Alexander was recently recalled to the Foreign Office from his post as British Ambassador to China.) I told him that I had purposely asked him to lunch to discuss the Far East with him and that I felt that he would possibly be able to talk to me more freely as to his personal views before he assumed office rather [Page 242] than later and also that I was on the point of going home and I should be glad to have some idea of how he viewed the Far Eastern situation, particularly in view of the announcement made recently in the House of Commons that the British Embassy was to be removed from Peiping to Nanking.66
He said that he had no idea of the British policy in regard to the Far East; he could only tell me the general lines along which he intended to advise his Government; and asked me whether I had any views in the matter. I told him that I felt that the time was coming when western nations must, at least in their own council rooms, clarify their position. Were they prepared to continue a guard at Peiping and Tientsin and maintain all the adherence to the past that such decisions involved or with the removal of embassies from Peiping to Nanking should nations assume a new policy which dropped some of the pomp and circumstance of Peking in the old day? (I made these observations not so much with a view to expressing any definitive ideas but with a view to defining my own reflections and enlisting from Cadogan comments on these phases of the Far Eastern situation.) He told me that he felt that the removal of the British Embassy from Peiping to Nanking would not be effected for four or five years, since the work had not even been seriously undertaken, and that even later he should advise against the abolition of the Peiping Embassy and would favor maintaining it as a residence in north China for the British Ambassador. He said that he felt that outside nations must maintain and uphold their rights insofar as possible, conscious, however, that his country certainly felt, and he was inclined to believe that that sentiment was the same in the United States, that neither nation would fight in the Far East. He had replied to all British interests in China who had sought him out: “Give me a good clear-cut case in which British interests have been destroyed or even jeopardized by the Japanese or the Sino-Japanese influence in China” and he would be prepared to make a strong diplomatic case, but where only border-line questions were involved he thought that a rear guard action should be sought with such limitations as the situation and the nature of the issue necessitated. He was not in favor of attempting to cooperate with Japan for a profitable exploitation of China; neither was he in favor of an attempt to short-circuit Japan in China unless Japanese policy tread on British interests. If the Japanese were concentrating say on trying to persuade China to recognize “Manchukuo”, that was an issue he did not feel that he was prepared to meet; it was one that must be left to the Chinese, with the realization that if China recognized “Manchukuo” possibly the Japanese position there would be entrenched by the recognition of “Manchukuo” by other [Page 243] countries. He felt that there were economic considerations as well as military ones that would guide Japan in her policy in China, certainly if not at the moment as the months went by, and that it was on that line that one must envisage Japan’s interests rather than a permanent occupation of China, which would economically be more of a liability than an asset.
I said to him that I felt that everything he said was very interesting and that of course there was one factor: both countries should realize that in the same way that nature abhorred a vacuum the Japanese would abhor an Anglo-American front against them and they would avoid any action, I thought, that would tend to unite us. I was particularly struck by the fact that Cadogan in no way attempted to inspire me with an idea that he or his Government favored a day-today Anglo-American front, which would merely possibly make the Japanese harder to work with.
With particular reference to the withdrawal of troops from China he said much as the British Army would welcome the additional battalions freed by the withdrawal of the Peiping and Tientsin guards he personally was not prepared to advocate such a course to his Government, certainly not at the present time and in the present circumstances.