While late Qing China's legations and consulates employed a significant number of foreigners as secretaries, counsellors, consuls, and legal advisors, past research has not adequately probed the reasons for their employment, nor the specifics of the functions they performed. This paper examines Divie B. McCartee, Secretary to the Qing Tokyo legation from 1877 to 1880, and considers the importance of private interventions he made into the diplomatic affairs of the legation and dynasty he served. Specifically, this paper demonstrates how McCartee's private actions sought to benefit the Qing position in the dispute on Japan's unilateral annexation of the Ryukyu Kingdom and sought to help reinstate the erstwhile kingdom as a Qing tributary.　The paper divides McCartee's private actions into the three categories of （1） private research into the Ryukyu question, （2） informal interactions with ex-American President Ulysses S. Grant, and （3） media strategy, and reveals three key points of significance. First, that McCartee was intimately involved in devising two compromises that suggested a two-way and three-way split of Ryukyu. Second, that he communicated these solutions to Grant, who mediated the crisis on behalf of the Qing and Japan. Third, that a series of articles he published anonymously in the Japan Gazette newspaper succeeded in seriously undermining Japanese propaganda efforts surrounding its historical claim to Ryukyu.　These private interventions were, I argue, highly significant. Believing the idea of a two-way split to be an idea supported by Grant, Japan came to propose the idea of compromising by such a means to the Qing in 1880. In addition, the articles McCartee published in the Japan Gazette, which undermined Japanese historical claims to the islands, may well have been a critical factor behind the Japanese decision to compromise in the first place.　Through the above analysis, this paper seeks both to provide a new perspective for considering the importance of private diplomatic initiatives　pursued by subministerial or subambassadorial actors, and for considering how the efficacy of such interventions could be buttressed by these actors'skillsets, sociability, access to or membership of specific networks, and even social standing. In doing so, the paper seeks to make the case that actors who have previously appeared peripheral to diplomatic issues require revisiting as legitimate agents of potentially substantial change.

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In the research to date on the Army Pamphlet of 1934, the political conflict that arose over the publication has been assessed as political intervention on the part of the Army, and the praise for the pamphlet by Shakai Taishu-To 社会大衆党 （STP） socialist party Leader Aso Hisashi has often been regarded as stemming from the Party's intentions to partner with the Army. However, this politically oriented understanding fails to consistently explain the fact that the STP soon withdrew its support for the Army's economic policy, but not its plan to partner with the Army in other aspects.　In order to clarify this issue, the author of the present article focuses on the process of the formulation and development of the STP's “mass inflation”（taishu infure 大衆インフレ） policy and analyzes how the Army's concept of “broadly-defined national defense”（kogi kokubo-ron 広義国防論） fits into the context of that policy, while emphasizing how the events unfolded on the regional level, in order to focus on the STP's overall ideas rather than the personal opinions of its leadership. His findings are as follows.　To begin with, although the “mass inflation” policy was formulated by Party leaders, it was also supported by STP rank and file members interested in overcoming the Depression through local initiatives, and thus became a unifying policy at the end of 1933 after the conclusion of the second Party Congress.　Secondly, given the fact that the Army became interested in organizing and mobilizing industrial workers and farmers in early 1934, the leaders of the STP secretly contacted the Army in order to participate in the formulation of its “broadly-defined national defense” agenda.　Therefore, the STP's support of the 1934 Army Pamphlet was not limited to the personal opinions of its leaders, but rather a party-wide attitude rooted in its unified “mass inflation” policy.　These new facts suggest that the STP possessed a certain degree of cohesiveness as a unified socialist party, supported by a rise of populism in Japan's local communities following the Showa Depression. The STP's support for the Army Pamphlet also suggests the existence of an alternative for representing the economic demands of workers and farmers outside of parliamentarism.

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