YANGTSE NAVIGATION

Wairarapa Times-Age, 30 December 1938, Page 5

YANGTSE NAVIGATION

JAPAN’S BID FOR SOLE CONTROL INVASION OF TREATY RIGHTS. STORY OF BRITISH ENTERPRISE. Some time ago (writes Mr H. B. Elliston, in the “Christian Science Moniter”) a reader posed me a question which I suspect must have been in the minds of a good many other readers as they read Secretary Hull's protests to Japan agaihst Japanese interference with American shipping on the Yangtse River. “What in the world,” asks he, “are American ships, warships too, doing in an inland waterway of a foreign country, hundreds of miles from the coastal port?” In a private letter I

explained why, whereat he now responds with the suggestion that others might welcome the same enlighten‘ment. Perhaps he is right, Anyway, the subject is uppermost in the notewriting between the United States and Japan, and that is sufficient justification for a ‘column’ without this revelation of a reader’s interest.

It is true that in general intercourse among nations the rights of inland navigation are reserved for citizens or subjects of the national owner. You cannot imagine British boats, for instance, competing for the night traffic between New York and Albany. Or American shipping taking a hand in the excursion business off the Thames. Indeed, a fuss was made several years ago, as I recall, about British boats shuttling back and forth between New York and Bermuda and other West Indian ports in the intervals of trans-At-lantic runs.

But China’s relations with foreigners are governed by treaties allowing foreigners special privileges. For instance, foreigners maintaining their own law courts in China, and they have special concessions and settlements, which are leased to them either as individuals or as governments. Another special relation is this treaty right accorded to foreigners of plying the Yangtse to dcr coastwise business and to protect it. When the Chinese before the Japanese invasion were bent upon being treated like a sovereign power, they used to take exception to this foreign privilege among others. It was a matter of pride more than anything else. The Chinese haven’t the boats for doing the thriving port-to-port business on the “great river” and therefore are not deprived of revenue by foreign competitors. In fact, they would be losers if foreign boats were withdrawn. Prestige, however, has a non-pecun-iary motivation. All these treaties conferring special privileges came to be regarded as “unequal.” The Soviet Russians prior to 1927 even taught the Chinese to call them “servitudes.” That was a wrong use of the word. A servitude is something imposed upon another without his consent. The treaties whereby the inland, waterways of China are available to foreign shippers are all two-party affairs, though a good deal of “gunboat diplomacy” had to be-employed in order to produce the Chinese signature indeed, to persuade China to live with the outside world at all. It was because of China’s xenophobia that these special treaties were forced upon the Chinese. The first treaty' that opened up the Yangtse to trade was signed by the British in 1858. Forty years later regulations were issued. Then in 1902 foreign steamship owners actually won the right to lease warehouses and jetties on the banks of ■ waterways for terms not exceeding 25 years. As usual, the privilege was obtained by Great Britain.

The treaty also opened up the prospect of business under the Chinese flag. Foreigners did not want to hog the shipping; they wanted to develop trade, and a Chinese ship could do that as well as a foreignn ship. So we find this clause in the British Treaty of 1902: “The main object of the British Government in desiring to see the inland waterways of China opened to steam navigation being to afford facilities for the rapid transport of both foreign and native merchandise, they undertake to offer no impediment to the transfer to a Chinese company and the. Chinese flag of any British steamer which may now or hereafter be employed on the inland waters of China, should the owner be willing to make the transfer.” Nevertheless the river traffic remained mainly foreign—except for the junk trade —right up to the outbreak of Sino-Japanese hostilities. The Yangtse is an amazing waterway, rising in the Tibetan highlands, behind Chiang Kai-shek’s new capital at Chungking, and cutting China in two for 3200 miles. It is unusually beneficient. Unlike the Mississippi, which carries good soil away from hardworking Americans, and dumps it into the Gulf of Mexico, where it serves no earthly purpose at all, the Yangtse brings down rich land from places where no man farms, and obligingly deposits it in the Shanghai delta, where man is toiling and spinning incessantly. The whole of the Shanghai region is the gift of the Yangtse. Indeed, the tourist from America feels that his boat is cutting through mud instead of water long before he reaches the river mouth.

A century ago the British saw this great waterway as an avenue of illimitable trade. They have done magnificent work in making the rough places navigable. By the turn of the century they had become so identified with it that the whole Yangtse Watershed was called a British sphere of influence. Even their gunboats had passageway. So, incidentally, had American gunboats, for the United States has a most-favoured-nation clause in its treaties with China, and always has come along to pick up Chinese favqurs. In point of fact, the Americans have even gone further than the British. Years ago they insisted formally on their right to do such things as chase pirates to their lairs aid work on the hydrography of the Yangtse ports. All invasions of China’s sovereignty, the Chinese Nationalists used to contend. But those same Nationalists, now immured in up-river Chungking, would be delighted if the invaders stuck up for their rights in China against Japan as valiantly as they originally stuck up tor them against China itself.