The above showsethe great injury that has been done to the China!
Merchants Steamship Company and the root of the trouble is the failure to fix a date for a meeting of shareholders. To sum up, the China Merchants Company is, first and last, purely a mercantile concern. Seeing that the Executive Committee Publicly announced its wish that the shareholders would bestir themselves and the official Directorate stated time for.gonvening the meeting of shareholders and permitting the management to revert to private control. can it, before the seat on which it sat when making this decision is cool, reverse this policy?
If the Government can, at its pleasure, give or take away positions of trust in a purely mercantile com-any, then who will guarantee that any industry of any importance will not be placed in the same position? If the laws cease to give protection and the people's property be utterly destroyed, those who have invested capital tremble and those who have not done so will hesitate before Other Victims Will Follow The sacrifice of the China Merchants Company is indirectly the! sacrifice of innumerable other companies. Our ind infancy. encouragement it will have di in prospering but this arbitrary, and idol, policy of the Government directly. contradicts our late Preident's injunction to foster popular control of industry in order to promote national stability; it is against right and leads to destruction, What is needed at present is to call a meeting of shareholders and revert! to the original constitution of the company in order to avert irretri able disaster.
At this. moment the period of tutelage under the Nationalist] Government has just been inaugurate ed. The five Yuans have been set up and all things are becoming new. The China Merchants Company is! the first of China's shipping lines. It is necessary to stimulate it that we may recover the control of our] shipping trade. The 146th section of the law regulating limited tiability companies enacts that 10 per} of the shareholders may at any time demand thet a meeting of shareholders be called. The shareholders represent din this appeal hold 8,000 shares, about the number necessary to demand that a meeting be called, and we beg the government to order the Board of Communications to take action in accordance with the rules governing limited liability companies and call a meeting shareholders s0 as to promote shi ping interests and remove all obstructions to further progress—Signed Chiang Tsun-kwei, Tongkang and Wang Vu-ling.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.