The two semi-official Japanese development companies for North and Central China, however, are unable to pay the scheduled 5.5 and 6 per cent, dividends for 1939, and. applied to the Tokyo Government for special dividend subsidies. These companies now are the holding concerns of some 24 subsidiary firms which administer he railways, bus lines, canal and river shipping, coal, iron and salt mines, iron industries, power works, gas plants, waterworks and fisheries of occupied China. Most of the North China companies have been unable to earn any profits, but have suffered substantial losses; 6 per cent. dividends paid by some of the Central China companies have been insufficient to cover overhead expenses of the parent companies. A year and a half after their establishment, the two development companies have not yet started upon any genuine development work worth speaking of, All the much advertised big development projects of these companies had to be postponed indefinitely, including the North China coal and iron mining projects, the Shanghai Lower Whangpoo Industrial Area project, and large-scale new railway construction. Both companies are suffering badly from lack of funds. Their capital of 450 million yen is paid up by about one-third, represented for the most part by the book values of seized Chinese property. They have not yet raised a single yen of the 1400 million yen which they were scheduled to raise as from the beginning of last year Japan, herself in the throes of an unprecedented economic and financial crisis, has been unable to finance development in China.
The development companies' failure to mobilise funds and to start large-scale operations has resulted in an extremely poor supply of Chinese raw material for Japan. To secure from China proper huge supplies of coal, iron ore and raw cotton was one of the chief objects of the invasion, yet occupied China under compulsion yields less coal, iron ore and raw cotton to Japan than she voluntarily sold to Dai Nippon before the war. Last year, Japan obtained from China 2,853,000 tons of coal; 102,000 tons of iron ore; and 8,800 tons of raw cotton. Chinese iron ore and} cotton acgounte@ for but insignificant percentages in Japan's imports of these raw materials China coal covered about one-third of Japan's import demand, but more than half the coal procured from China was obtained by means of regular commercial purchase from the British-owned Kaiping mines. The Japanese Empire's export share in China last year was less than 10 per cent, and imports from China accounted for only 2 per cent. of Japan's total imports. As a source of supplies, occupied China remained unimportant for Japan.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.