ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Shidehara Kijūrō’s first term as foreign minister from 1924 to 1927. During this period, the ongoing issues stemming from the First World War such as the Siberian Expedition and the Shandong Question had been, at least tentatively, resolved. Nevertheless, the arrival of the second wave of international changes exposed the flaws in the Washington System, most importantly the failure of the powers to come to any agreement over policy towards the Soviet Union or to take internal Chinese conflicts – such as the existence of the rival Nationalist government in the south – into account. The first half of the chapter discusses the Japanese responses to the rise of Soviet influence in northeast China and how the Beiyang government’s diplomatic efforts to revise the unequal treaties caused divergences in how Britain, the United States, and Japan saw the Washington System – and China’s place in it – leading to a decline in collaborative diplomacy among them. Special attention is paid to their interactions at the 1925 Special Conference on the Chinese Customs Tariff to illustrate this. The second half of the chapter looks at how the increasing intensity of Chinese domestic conflicts produced an increasing lack of policy consensus among the various Japanese groups involved in China, making it more difficult for Shidehara to maintain control and continue to cooperate with the West.
