Wellington Koo

So after the capture of Jiaozhou Bay and Tsingtao in the autumn of 1914, Japan made a bold diplomatic move to extend its influence massively over China.

The Japanese ambassador handed a list of 21 demands to Chinese President Yuan Shikai.

In contravention of the spirit of the Anglo-Japanese alliance and others, the Japanese wanted the 21 demands kept secret.

In spite of this, they'd already been leaked to an American journalist by the Russian ambassador in Tokyo.

The press and the Russians, eh? Who can be trusted? Having taken Tsingtao from the Germans in the autumn of 1914 and imposed significant control over Shandong province, the Japanese wanted to extend that elsewhere, in particular into Manchuria and Mongolia.

Without going into the detail of each one, here are some of the major points.

This was a legacy from the short North-South civil war in 1913 as the new Chinese Republic was emerging.

A military government was established in the South and they sent their own people.