On June 22 all of the Nationalist government’s German advisers were called home; any who disobeyed would be judged guilty of high treason. Ever since the First World War, there had been a special relationship between those two fledgling republics, the German Weimar and the Chinese. Both were weak and not in full control of their own sovereignty. As part of the Versailles Treaty of 1919, the Germans had lost their extraterritorial rights on Chinese soil, but that disadvantage meant that they could deal with the Chinese as noncolonialist equals, and therefore found themselves more welcome in
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