{{Short description, 1900 treaty between Great Britain and Germany
The Yangtze Agreement was an agreement between
Great Britain
Great Britain is an island in the North Atlantic Ocean off the northwest coast of continental Europe. With an area of , it is the largest of the British Isles, the largest European island and the ninth-largest island in the world. It is ...
and
Germany
Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...
signed on October 6, 1900, signed by Prime Minister
Lord Salisbury
Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (; 3 February 183022 August 1903) was a British statesman and Conservative politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom three times for a total of over thirteen y ...
and Ambassador
Paul von Hatzfeldt
Melchior Hubert Paul Gustav Graf von Hatzfeldt zu Wildenburg (8 October 1831 – 22 November 1901) was a German diplomat who served as ambassador to the United Kingdom from 1885 to 1901. He was also envoy to Spain and the Ottoman Empire, foreign s ...
respectively. It stated both parties' opposition to the partition of China into
spheres of influence
In the field of international relations, a sphere of influence (SOI) is a spatial region or concept division over which a state or organization has a level of cultural, economic, military or political exclusivity.
While there may be a formal al ...
.
The agreement was signed in accordance with the
Open Door Policy
The Open Door Policy () is the United States diplomatic policy established in the late 19th and early 20th century that called for a system of equal trade and investment and to guarantee the territorial integrity of Qing China. The policy wa ...
, which all major nations supported. The policy involved equal access to Chinese markets. The Germans supported it because a partition of China would limit Germany to a small trading market, instead of all of China. Paul M. Kennedy, ''The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism: 1860-1914 '' (1980) pp 243, 354.