ABSTRACT
China had been penetrated by a foreign railway, and the precedent of a railway concession to foreigners was established. Britain and Germany and the United States had been excluded from the foreign loan with which China was to pay the first instalment of the China-Japanese War indemnity. As regards the British, they were anxious to prevent the Russo-French group increasing its power and influence at Peking by becoming the creditors of the Chinese Government in this new loan. When the French banks undertook to negotiate the Franco-Russian four-hundred-million franc loan of 1895 they had arranged for Russo-French financial and political co-operation in the Far East. Thus the Russian Government had succeeded in launching its programme for the peaceful penetration of China from the north. The terms of the first Franco-Russian loan to China, as pointed out previously, had provided that there could be no control or supervision of Chinese revenues unless Russia was a party to that control.
