Ch'en Lu 陳籙 Tcheng Loh Ch'en Lu (24 April 1876 - 19 February 1939) was known as the chief Chinese negotiator of the 1915 Treaty of Kiakhta, which defined the international status of Outer Mongolia. From 1915 to 1917 he was Chinese high commissioner at Urga (Ulan Bator). From 1920 to 1927 he was Chinese minister to France. In 1939 he served as foreign minister in the Japanesesponsored government at Nanking. He was assassinated.
A native of Minhou, Fukien, Ch'en Lu was born into an educated family of modest means. His early education followed traditional classical lines. In 1891, when he was 15, he began the study of Western languages and studied for the next three years at the Foochow Shipyard School, where his instruction consisted mainly of courses in French. In 1894 Ch'en Lu's father sent him to Wuchang, where he continued his language studies. From 1894 to 1897 he studied English at a school attached to the Salt Administration, and from 1898 to 1901 he studied French at the Tzu-ch'iang Academy, established at Wuchang in accordance with the ideas of Chang Chih-tung (ECCP, I, 27-32). At the Tzu-ch'iang Academy, Ch'en ranked first in his class. He was graduated in 1901, at the age of 25, and was invited to teach French there. His decision to remain in Hupeh despite other teaching offers reportedly attracted the favorable attention of Chang Chih-tung. During the years 1902-3 Ch'en became greatly interested in the ideas of the political reformer Liang Ch'i-ch'ao. Ch'en's father was disturbed by his son's enthusiasm and enjoined him to be more restrained in political outlook. While in Wuchang, Ch'en Lu was selected by the imperial government to go abroad to study in Europe. He traveled first to Berlin with a group of Chinese students and then went alone to Paris, where he arrived in the spring of 1903. There he began legal studies at the University of Paris and served as a part time attache in the Chinese legation. Thus, his law studies were supplemented by practical diplomatic experience. In 1905 he was assigned as interpreter to accompany the special mission sent by the empress dowager to Europe and the United States to investigate foreign governmental systems. After resuming his studies, Ch'en was graduated from the faculty of law of the University of Paris in 1907. In the same year, with the title of secretary of legation, he accompanied Chinese delegate Lu Cheng-hsiang (q.v.) to the Second Peace Conference held at The Hague. Ch'en Lu returned from Europe to his home in Fukien in December 1907. In 1908 Tai Hung-tz'u (see Hsu Shih-ch'ang), who had been one of the leaders of the 1905 Chinese mission to study foreign constitutional systems, summoned him to Peking. There Ch'en held various positions concerned with legal and constitutional reforms and the post of counselor in the Board of Foreign Affairs. He made a brief trip home to Fukien at the time of his father's death in 1909, and then returned to the capital to become a compiler of the Hanlin Academy. In 1910-11 he was director of political affairs in the Board of Foreign Affairs.
The revolution of 1911-12 had little apparent effect upon Ch'en Lu's position at Peking. After the reorganization of the Board of Foreign Affairs into the ministry of foreign affairs, Ch'en remained as head of its political affairs section. In December 1913 he was appointed the first Chinese minister to Mexico; previously, a consulate had handled all Chinese affairs there. Ch'en Lu, who had been increasingly disturbed by the confused political situation in China, was glad to have the opportunity to visit the West again. However, when Ch'en was winding up his affairs and preparing to leave Peking, Sun Pao-ch'i, then foreign minister, requested that Ch'en defer his departure for Mexico and go instead to the Sino-Russian-Mongolian conference which was scheduled to be held at Kiakhta in Siberia.
Ch'en Lu, not without protest, took up his new assignment and became the chief Chinese negotiator at the Kiakhta conference, which met from September 1914 to June 1915. Ch'en attempted to press for maximum extension of Chinese authority in Outer Mongolia, but his bargaining position was undermined by Russian and Mongol opposition, by the general domestic debility of China, and by the heavy Japanese pressure on the government at Peking as manifested in the Twenty-one Demands. The Kiakhta conference did mark a new stage in the delineation of the international position of Outer Mongolia. The tripartite Treaty of Kiakhta, which was signed on 7 June 1915 by republican China, Tsarist Russia, and Outer Mongolia, incorporated Outer Mongolia's acknowledgment of Chinese suzerainty and also included agreement between China and Russia that Outer Mongolia should enjoy autonomy in its internal affairs.
On his return to Peking in the summer of 1915, Ch'en Lu was informed by the ministry of foreign affairs that he was to go to Outer Mongolia and serve as Chinese high commissioner at Urga (Ulan Bator). Ch'en demurred, but his protests were smothered by official praise for his patriotic service at Kiakhta. In the end he had no alternative but to go to Urga. He reached the capital of Outer Mongolia in September 1915 and set about the task of implementing the rights and duties granted under the Kiakhta agreement. In July 1916 he was successful in obtaining Mongol acceptance of the ts'e-feng [formal investiture] by which the Mongols acknowledged the suzerainty of republican China. However, this ceremonial increase of Chinese prestige was not accompanied by any significant growth of Chinese power in the area, and Ch'en failed in his attempt to obtain approval from the government at Urga for the establishment of a Chinese bank in Outer Mongolia. After almost a year of correspondence with Peking regarding his desire to be relieved of the Urga assignment, he finally left that post and returned to Peking in May 1917. In the spring of 1918 Ch'en Lu became vice minister of foreign affairs under Lu Chenghsiang, whom he had first served a decade earlier at the Second Hague Conference. Concurrently, Ch'en held the position of chief of the frontier defense affairs office, which had jurisdiction over Mongolian and borderland affairs. Late in 1918 Ch'en took charge of the ministry when Lu Cheng-hsiang went to France as China's chief delegate to the Paris Peace Conference. As a result of pressures brought upon the ministry during the May Fourth outburst, Lu Cheng-hsiang was relieved of his post in June 1919, and Ch'en Lu formally succeeded to the position for a brief period. Three months later, however, Lu was restored to office, and Ch'en Lu again became vice minister.
In September 1920 Ch'en Lu was appointed Chinese minister to France, where he remained head of the Chinese diplomatic mission until 1927. As the accredited representative of the Peking government in Paris, Ch'en Lu encountered there the animosity of some Chinese students studying in France with whom the policies of the Peking government were unpopular. One evening in March 1922, as he was returning to the Chinese legation from a private dinner party, Ch'en was fired on, but not hit, by a Chinese student who apparently was a leftist. On two other occasions, once in June 1925, and again in March 1927, groups of Chinese students forcibly entered the Chinese legation in Paris to register their protests against foreign interference in China's affairs. During Ch'en's residence in Paris he served in 1923 and again in 1927 as the Chinese delegate to the League of Nations. In 1928, before returning to China, he acted as president of the Council of the League of Nations and attended the International Labour Conference in Geneva. The new National Government was established at Nanking in 1928, and Ch'en Lu's effective diplomatic career came to an end. After his return to China he lived for a period in retirement in Peiping and then practiced law in Shanghai. Early in 1934 he was appointed adviser to the ministry of foreign affairs at Nanking, and in mid-1936 he was made vice chairman of the treaty commission of the ministry, under Chang Ch'ün (q.v.). Following the capture of Nanking late in 1937, the Japanese instituted a so-called reformed government of the republic of China in March 1938 under the nominal leadership of Liang Hung-chih (q.v.). Because of his status as former Chinese minister to Paris and delegate to the League of Nations, Ch'en was called upon to serve as foreign minister in this regime. Beginning in 1938 a band of patriotic Chinese terrorists, the so-called Iron and Blood Army, undertook the assassination ofvarious prominent Chinese who were collaborating with the Japanese. On 18 February 1939 Ch'en, accompanied by a heavy bodyguard, traveled from Nanking to Shanghai to be with his family for the Chinese New Year celebrations. The following day, as he sat at the head of the family dinner table, he was shot by a band of gunmen who broke into his home on Yu Yuan Road in Shanghai; he died on the way to the hospital. Ch'en Lu kept a personal record of some of his travels abroad, thus continuing a practice that had been observed by many of his predecessors during the Ch'ing dynasty. Ch'en's journal of his experiences during the negotiations of 1914-15 at Kiakhta was entitled Ch'ia-k'o-t'u i-yueh jih-chi; and in the Feng-shih k'u-lun jih-chi he described his life from 1915 to 1917 while he was Chinese high commissioner in Urga. These works were published together in 1917 by the Commercial Press under the title Chih-shih pi-chi.
