The were a series of loans made by the

Japanese government The Government of Japan consists of legislative, executive and judiciary branches and is based on popular sovereignty. The Government runs under the framework established by the Constitution of Japan, adopted in 1947. It is a unitary state, ...

under the administration of

Prime Minister A prime minister, premier or chief of cabinet is the head of the cabinet and the leader of the ministers in the executive branch of government, often in a parliamentary or semi-presidential system. Under those systems, a prime minister is ...

Terauchi Masatake Gensui Count Terauchi Masatake ( ja, 寺内正毅), GCB (5 February 1852 – 3 November 1919), was a Japanese military officer, proconsul and politician. He was a '' Gensui'' (or Marshal) in the Imperial Japanese Army and the Prime Minister o ...

to the

Anhui clique The Anhui clique () was a military and political organization, one of several mutually hostile cliques or factions that split from the Beiyang clique in the Republic of China's Warlord Era. It was named after Anhui province because several of its ...

warlord A warlord is a person who exercises military, economic, and political control over a region in a country without a strong national government; largely because of coercive control over the armed forces. Warlords have existed throughout much of h ...

Duan Qirui Duan Qirui (; ) (March 6, 1865 – November 2, 1936) was a Chinese warlord and politician, a commander of the Beiyang Army and the acting Chief Executive of the Republic of China (in Beijing) from 1924 to 1926. He was also the Premier of the R ...

from January 1917 to September 1918 to persuade him to favor Japanese interests in China. They were named after Nishihara Kamezō, Masatake's secretary. In January 1917, Prime Minister Terauchi sent a personal envoy, a private businessman named Nishihara Kamezo (1873–1954) to negotiate a series of eight loans totaling 145 million yen to the leader of one of the splinter groups of the former

Beiyang Army The Beiyang Army (), named after the Beiyang region,Hong Zhang (2019)"Yuan Shikai and the Significance of his Troop Training at Xiaozhan, Tianjin, 1895–1899" ''The Chinese Historical Review'' 26(1) was a large, Western-style Imperial Chinese Ar ...

, Duan Qirui. Nishihara was backed by

Finance Minister A finance minister is an executive or cabinet position in charge of one or more of government finances, economic policy and financial regulation. A finance minister's portfolio has a large variety of names around the world, such as "treasury", ...

Shoda Kazue, formerly the president of the

Bank of Chosen A bank is a financial institution that accepts deposits from the public and creates a demand deposit while simultaneously making loans. Lending activities can be directly performed by the bank or indirectly through capital markets. Because ...

Korea Korea ( ko, 한국, or , ) is a peninsular region in East Asia. Since 1945, it has been divided at or near the 38th parallel, with North Korea (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) comprising its northern half and South Korea (Republic ...

. The loans were ostensibly private loans made by private banks as investments in the development of China; however, in reality the loans were underwritten by the Japanese government in assisting Duan Qirui in his civil war to overcome his rivals for control of northern China. In return for this financial support, Japan received confirmation of its claims to the former German

Kiautschou Bay concession The Kiautschou Bay Leased Territory was a German leased territory in Imperial and Early Republican China from 1898 to 1914. Covering an area of , it centered on Jiaozhou ("Kiautschou") Bay on the southern coast of the Shandong Peninsula ...

Shandong Province Shandong ( , ; ; alternately romanized as Shantung) is a coastal province of the People's Republic of China and is part of the East China region. Shandong has played a major role in Chinese history since the beginning of Chinese civilizatio ...

, control of the railways in Shandong Province, and additional rights in

Manchuria Manchuria is an exonym (derived from the endo demonym " Manchu") for a historical and geographic region in Northeast Asia encompassing the entirety of present-day Northeast China (Inner Manchuria) and parts of the Russian Far East (Outer M ...

.Wasserstrom, Twentieth Century China: New Approaches, page 49 When the loans and details of the

Sino-Japanese Joint Defence Agreement The Sino-Japanese Joint Defence Agreement was a series of secret military pacts between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan, signed in May 1918. Drawn up following China's entry into the First World War on the part of the Allied Po ...

were leaked to the public, Duan Qirui was virulently attacked for having made traitorous deals with the Japanese. Some of the rights granted to Japan were very similar to the 5th clause of the recently rejected

Twenty-One Demands The Twenty-One Demands ( ja, 対華21ヶ条要求, Taika Nijūikkajō Yōkyū; ) was a set of demands made during the First World War by the Empire of Japan under Prime Minister Ōkuma Shigenobu to the government of the Republic of China on 18 ...

. This popular discontent grew into the

May Fourth Movement The May Fourth Movement was a Chinese anti-imperialist, cultural, and political movement which grew out of student protests in Beijing on May 4, 1919. Students gathered in front of Tiananmen (The Gate of Heavenly Peace) to protest the Chin ...

References

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Notes

{{reflist Foreign relations of the Empire of Japan Warlord Era Loans China–Japan relations