長崎上海間「帝国線」をめぐる多国間交渉と企業特許権の意義

二〇世紀アジア広域史の可能性

抄録

It was a the end of 1912 when the communication concession that the Japanese government granted to The Great Northern Telegraph Co., Ltd. (GNT) and The Eastern Extension Australasia & China (EEA&C) expired, posing a challenge for the first time to their predominant positions over their operations of telegraph communication in East Asia. Taking this opportunity, the Japanese government began to construct its first external submarine cable line; “the Imperial Line (Teikoku-sen)”. With GNT's submarine cable line (hereinafter called the Great Northern Line) that was constructed in 1870 between Nagasaki and Shanghai, “the Imperial Line” was to play a vital role in the telegraph communication between Japan and China. For the Sino-Japanese negotiations to reach an agreement, it took as long as two years from the end of 1912. And, from January 1st, 1915, the communication with Japanese code telegraph was made available through the line. The author of this paper examined earlier the negotiation process on the construction of the Qingdao-Sasebo Line that lined Japan and China with Japanese code telegraph six months after the completion of the Imperial Line (Kishi 2002). The first task of this paper, then, is to clarify the negotiation process of the Imperial Line, which turned out to be a larger diplomatic issue than that of the Qingdao-Sasebo Line. At the same time, it purports to explore the historical significance of the communication concessions granted to GNT and EEA&C.
The second task of this paper relates to the situation in which the dominant positions of GNT and EEA&C were placed again in jeopardy at the end of 1930. At this point, the communication concessions grated by the Chinese government to other countries and firms were to expire, which eventually necessitated that the treatment of the submarine cable lines between Japan and China would be thoroughly revised. The second task of this paper, therefore, is to explore how the Imperial Line's operation was transformed in the course of the negotiations for the revision, and also to investigate the role of communication concessions grated by China to Japan, such as the cable landing right, throughout the negotiation process. Further, the paper will clarify how the Imperial Line was utilized in 1931 when the Manchurian Incident broke out, and also during the period of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937.
To investigate these issues, this paper relies on three historical sources; the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archive documents at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica in Taiwan; Diplomatic correspondences of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs; and the historical materials archived at the Japanese Ministry of Communications.