Department Of Foreign Affairs And Beijing Politics: 1922-1927

Around 1920,by participating in the Paris Peace Conference and the Washington Conference,the Peking government evolved a pro-American foreign policy,and China's international status began to rise again after a permanent fall since the Opium war in the mid-nineteenth century.In consequence,a group of pro-American diplomats including W.W.Yen,Wellington Koo,C.T.Wang,Wang Chung-hui,and so on,had expanded their power and influence.Meanwhile,the Northern system was declining in the furious struggles between the Northern and Southern warlords.Accordingly,the Peking government had been greatly weakened,thus highlighting the importance of foreign affairs to domestic politics,namely,the value of diplomacy in maintaining the legitimacy of the central government.Under such circumstances,those pro-American diplomats became an acknowledged political force and was given the title “the foreign-affairs clique”.Following the end of the first Chihli-Fengtien war in 1922,the foreign-affairs clique stepped on the political stage.Encouraged by the changes taking place in the post-war political situation,some liberalist intellectuals,the most famous of whom was Hu Shih,presented the so-called good-government doctrine.Under the auspices of General Wu Pei-fu,a new cabinet was established,with Wang Chung-hui as its Premier,Wellington Koo as Foreign Minister and Lo Wen-kan as Financial Minister,which was popularly known as the “able men cabinet”.While the liberalist intellectuals counted on Wang,Koo,and Lo to implement the good-government doctrine,the foreign-affairs clique had been always in the shadow of Wu Pei-fu and thus degenerated into an instrument of the Luoyang faction to manipulate Peking politics.As a result,the “able men cabinet” became the target of political attack and was eventually overthrown.Being a particularly political group during the warlord period,the foreign-affairs clique was characterized by the fact that despite their assertion to keep away from politics,they had been deeply involved in factionalism.Such a paradox in their political characters was rooted in the dual nature of thepolitical resources held by the foreign-affairs clique.After the fall of the “able men cabinet”,the Peking politics became more and more shaken.Early in 1923,the nomination of Alfred Sze to be Foreign Minister was denied by the Parliament,and then Huang Fu,who was not a professional diplomat,temporarily took the office of the Foreign Ministry.However,Mr.Huang soon felt it difficult to deal with all the diplomatic crises and resigned.Wellington Koo was appointed the Foreign Minister again,but he refused to assume office over a long period.At the beginning of June,in the chaos brought about by the Chihli party's action to remove Li Yuan-hung from his Presidency,the names of W.W.Yen and Wellington Koo suddenly appeared on and soon disappeared from the list of Premiership candidates.With President Li's retirement into Tientsin,a large-scale anti-Chihli movement was spreading across the country.In order to confront the dissidents,the Chihli party attempted to buy the support of Wellington Koo,W.W.Yen,and C.T.Wang,while the dissidents spared no efforts to persuade Yen,Koo,and Wang to leave Peking for the south.Nevertheless,none of them decided to do so.Dr.Koo even assumed office as the voices of opposition culminated and was heavily scolded by the public opinion.The honor of the foreign-affairs clique was injured.It was a turning point in the political career of the foreign-affairs clique.The foreign-affairs clique survived their political honor.In 1926,along with the defeat of Feng Yu-hsiang's Kuominchun by the combined actions of Wu Pei-fu and Chang Tso-lin and the consequent downfall of the Tuan Chi-jui's regime,the foreign-affairs clique came back to the center of the Peking political stage.W.W.Yen formed a regency cabinet in the name of reinstating,but he had to resign in a short time due to lack of Chang Tso-lin's assent and was later succeeded by Wellington Koo,who substantially succumbed to the Mukden party but assumed the mask of a mediator between Chang Tso-lin and Wu Pei-fu.In the field of China's foreign relations,the treaty revision policy had been made more and more radical,characterized by the action of Dr.Koo's cabinet to unilaterally terminate the Sino-Belgian Treaty.Such a drastic stance should be demonstrated in the context that the crisis of Peking government's legitimacy was being magnified and the politicalstatus of the foreign-affairs clique was shaken to a great extent.The foreign-affairs clique,by their domestic and diplomatic activities throughout the 1920's,can be regarded as a political group dependent on the Northern system.As such,describing words like non-affiliation or neutrality have nothing to do with the foreign-affairs clique.