793.003/1080: Telegram
The Ambassador in China (Gauss) to the Secretary of State
[Received 1 p.m.]
79. In conversation last evening Dr. Wong Wen Hao, who is active here as one of trustees of China Foundation for Promotion of Education and Culture, commented that the new American treaty would seem to raise the question whether the balance of Boxer Indemnity payments is eventually to be paid by China for remission to the Foundation which, as the Department knows, was established with Indemnity funds and which has been borrowing from the Government banks on security of future payments due from China but suspended during the war. He asked my opinion on the point. While I had in mind the conversation at the Department on October 26 with the Minister Counselor of the Chinese Embassy as communicated to me in your instruction 158 of November 20,13 I offered no opinion, feeling that perhaps the point may not have been studied specifically and in detail by the Department. Am I authorized to give any expression of opinion, formal or informal, on the point?
But for the conversation at Washington referred to, I would have concluded that our relinquishment of rights under Boxer Protocol14 did not affect the bond given under that Protocol, the payments under which have already been remitted by us for the benefit of the China Foundation. I doubt whether British consider treaty as affecting Boxer Indemnity but have not deemed it advisable to discuss point with my British colleague without prior consultation with the Department.
- Instruction not printed; for text of memorandum of October 26, 1942, by the Assistant Chief of the Division of Far Eastern Affairs, see Foreign Relations, 1942, China, p. 337.↩
- Signed at Peking, September 7, 1901, Foreign Relations, 1901, Appendix, (Affairs in China), p. 312.↩