**  If  would  appear  that  Viscount  Uchida,  Minister  of  Foreign  Affairs,
was  willing  that  Japan  should  give  unconditional  adherence  to  the  plan,
but  that  he  could  not  carry  with  him  his  Cabinet,  the  majority  of  which
were  controlled  by  the  opinion  of  (Jeneral  Tanaka,  Minister  of  War,  and
of  some  of  the  so-called  "  Diplomatic  Council."  See  The  Japan  Advertiser,
August  16,  1919,


516      FOREIGN  RIGHTS  AND  INTERESTS  IN  CHINA

In  reports  of  the  negotiations  published  in  the  New
York  Times  of  November  23  and  November  30, 1919,  and
which  bear  all  the  earmarks  of  accuracy,  the  following
statements  occur:

In  the  report  under  date  of  November  23,  it  is  said :

There  is  no  intention  upon  the  part  of  the  United  States  Gov-
ernment to  encroach  upon  the  vested  interests  of  Japan  in  Man-
churia, according  to  an  authoritative  statement  made  today.  In
taking  its  position  against  the  exclusion  of  Southern  Manchuria
and  Eastern  Inner  Mongolia  from  the  scope  of  the  international
consortium  for  financing  China  the  State  Department  assumes  that
the  Japanese  Government  has  misapprehended  the  purposes  of  the
consortium.
The  department  maintains  that  its  position  is  clearly  indicated
when  consideration  is  given  to  the  w^ording  of  the  inter-group
agreement  of  May  12,  which  in  Article  X  specified  that  only  those
industrial  undertakings  are  to  be  pooled  on  which  substantial
progress  has  not  been  made.  This  wording,  in  the  opinion  of  the
department,  plainly  includes  those  enterprises  which  are  already
developed  and  thus  constitute  vested  proprietary  interests,  such  as
the  Southern  Manchuria  and  Supingkai-Chengchiatun  Railways,
the  Fushun  Colliery,  etc.,  and  may  be  interpreted  to  include  the
existing  options  for  the  extensions  of  railways  already  in  operation,
such  as  the  proposed  continuation  to  Taonan  of  the  Supingkai-
Chengchiatun  Railway  and  to  Hueining  (Hoiryong)  of  the  Kirin-
Changchun  Railway.
