Office of the Historian

793.94/9816: Telegram

The Consul at Geneva (Everett) to the Secretary of State

Geneva, August 30, 1937—9 p.m.
[Received August 30—8:15 p.m.]

262. Consulate’s 255, August 16, 4 p.m. Hoo informs me by telephone that acting on instructions from his Government he has just handed a note to the Secretary General containing a statement regarding the sequence of events in the present conflict with Japan and China’s position in relation thereto. The conclusion which the note presents is that Japan’s present action is a continuation of her aggressive program started in 1931 and that China is acting in self-defense, Japan having resorted to aggression in violation of the Covenant,10 the Kellogg Pact11 and the Nine Power Treaty. The note, Hoo says, does not constitute an appeal to the League in the technical sense but is merely a statement of China’s case consisting mainly of an historical résumé of the circumstances stipulating the various incidents. Hoo has requested the Secretary General to communicate the note to the members of the League and to the members of the Advisory Committee set up under the Assembly’s resolution of February 24, 1933.12 The note will probably be published within the next few hours.

Hoo tells me in confidence that there were two reasons for his request that the note be communicated to the Advisory Committee: (1) In order to ensure that it be communicated to the United States Government; and(2) that it is China’s policy to consider the present conflict as a continuation of the Manchurian conflict.

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Hoo said that China would probably make a formal appeal to the League during the Assembly and intimated that the policy mentioned under (2) above implied that China might possibly attempt to utilize the Advisory Committee. He said that utilization of the Committee was a door which remained open but that his Government had not yet definitely decided in regard to its approach in placing the matter before the League.

Subsequently the Secretariat has informed me that it is preparing to transmit the note to Committee members and to the United States, presumably through the Legation at Bern.

The Secretariat is looking into past procedures to determine the exact form of such transmission.

The question arises as to whether the Advisory Committee is an organ in being. Hoo evidently so considers it and presumably the Secretariat also, at least by implication through its action in communicating the note to Committee members.

Everett
  1. Foreign Relations, The Paris Peace Conference, 1919, vol. xiii, p. 69.↩
  2. Signed at Paris, August 27, 1928, Foreign Relations, 1928, vol. i, p. 153.↩
  3. Foreign Relations, Japan, 1931–1941, vol. i, p. 113.↩