Animosity of this sort is latent] among Chinese merchants as well students and politicians. Ever since foreigners began to trade in 'China, certain commodities have been worth more for the export than for the local market. The Chinese thas a notion that if he is making so much! simply by coming down to the coast, then the foreigner, who thas been' tempted all the way across the sea, must be amassing unholy fortunes, 'To their minds, the final proof of, this is that a compradore can often' enhance prices against his own firm, thus making a rapid fortune on his rake-off beside which his buying!
If there is one necessity to which trade conditions in China point, it is to the abandonment of the compradore system, where all buying! and selling is done through a man who is strictly speaking a retained commission agent. The system is slveudy in decay. Not infrequently. when an export firm is itself out of the market—perhaps because the! compradore ring has been jacking up prices—its compradore holds stocks of his own, which the firm will con-ign for his account, charging him conffnission on the selling price, This reversal of the original position of broker and buyer indicates the true trend of conditions—towards amalgamation of the two. The yang hang buying agents, as I have described them at Kueihua, combining their own credit and buying ability with a practical use of foreign eapital, are an experiment in the same direction. and gradual concession.
The issue is, however, obscured by a more extreme state of feeling. This is an outgrowth of an economic fallacy which has persisted since the earliest foreign intercourse, It is a suspicion that every penny turned by an honest foreign merchant is robbed from the Chinese— that every pound of wool exported from China is looted from China, and that every dollar paid for imported seeds or machinery is stolen from Chinese pocket, If this blind Drejudice were analysed, the formula might run something as follow: "Let us, if needs we must, learn to make our own machinery and sct Up our own manufactures, Then we will. buy our own product from each other: and as for you, please go back to America and Germany and England and swap te and motorcars and Bibles and Bul! till you are blue in the face—but do not come back here, because you are barbarians and we don't like you.
That, in the jargon of the day, is the Chinese Infe Complex—the feeling that foreigners can do. certain things which the Chinese want to be able to do, but cannot. A favourable export balance and exchange posit stand, but take advantage of simply chance opportunities. As a matter of business, they are willing to trade for the immediate profit, When, inowever, it comes to a controversy they can seo only the, increased cest of living caused by the export of, Chinese. products." Chinese econo mists blandly demonstrate their en-incapacity to appreciate that an increased purchasing power results from the same processes which cause tthe rise in the cost of living. Whenever the Chinese have had power Over another race, they have mover shown themselves enpuble of a bet~ ter government than goes wita the extortion of money and the expr. nation of land. They regard th foreign presence in China as essentially-a sign of foreign force, and are unable to credit the foreigner With transport conditions as chaotic as they are, and with even! "efficient" local governments, like the Kuominchun, making continual efforts to tap the foreigner as a source of revenue, it may seem a counsel of folly for the foreign mer. chant further to implicate his capital with Chinese interests. Foreign trading in semi-recognized and unrecognized marts like Kueihua and Lanchow, is kittle business. In some places the foreigner has no treaty right to be where he is—and there he usually works through Russians, as in Lanchow and Urumchi, and in others his treaty rights are up in the air, with few guiding Brecedents and no accessible Consul.
Tuchun Hate In the meantime, however, win the interior under thes us, CLY pressure of their Une privileged states, gaining 2 foothold Against the coming of, the Golden Age when Chinese administration] and justice shall be evenhanded. At time like the present, when thera fg a Tuchun at each end of every Tailway, with hate, malice, envy and 'SH uncharitableness in between and no cargo moving either way, foreign firms in the ports ate heavily burd-ined by their overhead, "Yet there i would be a return, of a kind, on their "Capital if some of their young. "men were immured at places ike Kalan Kueihua and. Paotow, learning Chinese language, business and ties in a strenuous school Our Consulates have their student interpreters, and it would pay many a foreign fern to. have ite. future department managers stationed the Interior as student interpret ers. When they returned to. te head office they would not only understand Tientsin market conditions, {but interior buying conditions, me-tags of tauartment, cleaning sed aching. They would have in addition the enormous advantage of being in the best sympathy with the Chinese organization. If every lyang-kang in Kueihua had a young!
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.