WAR AND PIRATES

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 580, 5 February 1929, Page 12

WAR AND PIRATES

SHIPPING OF CHINA

A HARD YEr.iv PASSED

Taking conditions as a whole, 192 S was a better year for the shipping industry in China than the preceding year, so far as actual figures are concerned. The whole situation, however, can be summed up in one word—‘‘difficult.” For 1928 has been a year not so much of depression—though it has been a depressed year undoubtedly—as of difficulty. Difficulty has arisen from many directions, and in many forms. Tt almost goes without saying, of course, that shipping, as much as any other industry to do with the prosperity of China, has reflected the chaotic conditions that again have ruled throughout the country.

It is true that for some months China has nominally, if not actually, been more or less unified under one government; but in many cases and in many places that unification has been more abstract than concrete, and difficulties which have existed to the hindrance of the progress of legitimate trade and business since 1920 vrere practically as much in evidence as ever, particularly on that great shipping and commercial waterway, the Yangtze River. Inland Transport

Owing to the difficulty, in many instances the impossibility of moving goods for export from the interior to shipping ports; to the many and various, and oft-times grievous method of taxation, legal and illegal, but mostly illegal, to which the cargo has been subjected even when it has been possible to move it to river or coastal ports; to the constant political and military changes that have occurred in some of the chief districts from S which goods are sent to foreign countries; to government restrictions; to banking difficulties and fluctuations in exchange, and to a host of other reasons, not all of them minor; the export trade of China during the year has again been in a bad "way, and on both the Pacific and European lines there has been a surfeit of tonnage and a lamentable lack of cargo.

Competition in freights has mostly been very keen, and in some cases fierce, and though a few of the big lines on the European run are reputed to have done not so badly, especially in the first six months of the year, the shipping business from China in 1928, taken as a whole, may be taken as having been bad.

Improvement, however, can never really materialise till the restrictions on the movement of cargo from the interior, the oppressive and illegal taxation, and the general policy of obstruction in the movement of cargo which obtains in some provinces, have either been eliminated or brought within a reasonable degree of control. Coasting shipping, besides suffering from the same disabilities as have affected ocean shipping, has had to contend against further disadvantages, largely to do with the political situation which seems always to be changing, and to other causes, of which perhaps that most in the public eye and mind is piracy.

As regards freights, the year opened ''ii tra ? e oa the coast being very dull all round, though after the China New Year, which fell on January 23, there , sliglu general improvement, te„tw haS e ? me aru;l gone intermittently ever since.

if there is one question that is causmg deep concern iu coastal shiptime C . hiua at the Present time it is that ot piracv. Piracy is an outcome—one might almost say with perfect truth, a ditiols ; J h Ut . CO , me^f lhe chaotic conditions that have obtained in China since the middle of 1920. n ,,3' h ® 0 la ® t time «l la t Piracy was a seriwhen » 1 B WaS m the ear] y ’nineties, (h ’ rt a . long series of attacks on mernominated in the terrible h , the Namoa, when the pirates behaved with brutality.