Tanaka Diplomacy and Its Pro-British Orientation 1927–29

Abstract

The Washington system, instituted as a regional cooperative system between Japan, Britain and the United States to cope with the rise of Chinese nationalism and the threat of Soviet Bolshevism, did not work well after the mid-twenties. There was serious Anglo—American discord. It surfaced at the Peking Tariff Conference in 1925. Professor Ian Nish argues that ‘Britain and the United States did not see eye to eye after the Nanking incidents in 1927 and over tariff concessions in the following year’, and ‘Anglo-American co-operation could not be relied on in east Asian affairs’.¹