Feb. 16.
THe annual meeting of the Ewo Cotton Mills gave the chairman an opportunity. for some exceedingly serious remarks on the decline in Chinese business morality, which deserve wide attention. The steady rise in the price of all cotton during the past few months found sellers in the position of having to deliver the raw material at figures much inferior to what they could have got if their contracts had been made in, say, December instead of October. They solved the difficulty by simply refusing to honour their signatures. All millowners, we are told, suffered in this way, the Chinese possibly worst of all, and Mr. Johnstone urged that all leaders in the Chinese cotton industry should take the matter firmly in hand and find some way of putting a stop to these pernicious malpractices which, while not only a very serious handicap to growing trade, are a reflexion on Chinese business morals, reverse from pleasing.''
Unfortunately dishonesty of this kind is not confined, to cotton: during the last few years,'' Mr. Johnstone said, it has been the bitter experience of most of us engaged in various branches of China trade of note."' Even more unfortunately, it is the rising generation which shows the worst disposition to default. The sound old Chinese traders are not at fault, ''in fact they are the principal sufferers in the matter of this general repudiation of cotton contracts." But there appears of late years to have been an invasion into local business circles of a body of unprincipled gamblers who while quite willing to complete any venture that goes profitably for them, repudiate their contracts or dis—appear entirely if the reverse be the case.
This is a sad departure from the old days when '"'a Chinaman's word was good enough for a transaction running into lakhs.'' As regards cotton, the wildness of recent gambling on the Chinese exchange has been notorious. It reached such a pitch, we believe, that in order to make a settlement in January even possible, some compromise became absolutely necessary in order to avoid a crash, book entries having run into figures far beyond the capacity of any of the gamblers to meet. But with few, if any, exceptions the influence of the exchanges which were springing up like mushrooms a year ago has been deplorable. Less is heard of them now than was the case a few months back, because many of them have simply disappeared: But occasionally' some particular instance occurs, as now in connexion with cotton, to show that institutions which if the West have proved of the greatest advantage to trade by maintaining supply and steadying prices have merely helped to foster the Chinese inordinate love of gambling and stifle the consciences already sufficiently indurated by the get-rich-quick mania.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.