SHANTUNG QUESTION

at the Versailles Peace Conference ending World War I, in 1919, the problem of whether to transfer to Japan the special privileges held by imperial Germany in the northeastern Chinese province of Shantung. The final decision to validate the transfer produced a tremendous outcry in China and resulted in an outpouring of Chinese nationalist sentiment. In 1898, when the Western imperialist powers were rushing to extract concessions from the weakened Ch'ing dynasty, Germany obtained the use of Chiao-chou Bay, on the southern coast of the Shantung Peninsula, and the right to construct a naval base, Tsingtao, there. After World War I began, Japan joined the Allies and took over German interests in the peninsula. At the same time (1915), it presented China with a list of 21 demands, including Chinese recognition of Japan's special position in Shantung. Since its Western friends were preoccupied with Germany, China had no choice but to accept the Japanese demands, but it expected the Versailles Peace Conference to restore Shantung. The Japanese and the other Allied powers, however, had made secret treaties in which Japan agreed to second other nations' claims to German possessions in other parts of the world in return for support on the Shantung issue. The Chinese warlord government secretly agreed to Japanese terms in return for a loan, and the Shantung question was decided in favour of Japan. Many Chinese, particularly students, impressed by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson's statements on self-determination and world democracy before the conference, were stunned by the conference's decision. Students organized a mass demonstration on May 4, 1919. The intellectual revolution then going on in China was renamed the May Fourth Movement, and this iconoclastic reform movement eventually brought about the replacement of traditional Chinese ways with Western ideas and methods.