The three articles summarizing the mew factory laws recently published in "the "North-China Daily News" sufficiently indicate the intelligence with which the Ministry of Industries has studied modern industrial practice in the West. The mew laws display an appreciative grasp of the principles which the International Labour Office of the League of Nations has been endeavouring to instil. It has been evident from Miss Hinder's sympathetic but critical analysis that, in point of fact, the application of these laws to China under present conditions is physically impossible. The announcement that the Government intend to bring them into force on February 1 must be regarded as proof of a belief in the virtue of having on the statute book a law the enforcement of which cannot be taken literally. It will be recalled that a few days ago the Chinese Cotton Mill Owners' Association pressed on the Nanking Government the point that the enforce-' ment of the law would affect their output and render it difficult for them to compete with foreign cotton mill owners. This is an argument, of course, which frequently being used in all countries to justify delay in ratifying international conventions regarding hours of labour and the like. To come nearer home, six years ago when the Shanghai Municipal Council desired to create minimum standards for the employment of children, factory owners within the Settlement deprecated the limitation which it was proposed to place upon them, while factories outside the boundaries of the Settlement were immune from the operations of the proposed regulation. It may also be remembered that at the International Labour Conference of the League of Nations in 1929 the representative of the Chinese Government declared it impossible for China to give full effect to international labour conventions as long as she did not possess the necessary authority over the whole of her territory. That protest appeared to be made more with the object of pressing the extraneous case of extraterritoriality om the attention of the League of Nations than with the assertion on behalf of China.of an intention to introduce up-to-date legislation.
On the question of the factory laws it may reasonably be asked whether the foreign jurisdictions have been addressed by the Chinese Government with the object of establishing the necessary machinery for the application of the factory laws. While it is safe to say that present conditions do not permit of the enforcement of the law; it is also
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.