THE AFTERMATH
One of the almost certain features of the effect of the Revolution,
however, will be China's increased foreign trade--probably 100 per
cent., says Sun Yat Sen.
The year 1913 should mark a stride in commercial progress in China
such as the world never before has seen. 1912 will probably be a
year of unrest and uncertainty. The formation of a permanent
Government and the election of a Cabinet, the dispatch of competent
officials to outlying places, and the putting down of outlawry in the
provinces will be a big programme for this year--if it is
accomplished. But 1913 and the following years will probably unfold
a remarkably rapid advance in exports and imports. China has held
back from all things foreign centuries enough, but during the past
two decades the seed has been sown for such a harvest of trade and
commercial prosperity as shall keep the factories of the West hard at
work to cope with the demands--that is, if the merchants of the West
are quick to seize their chances as they come. And in this volume
the author feels that it were well at this juncture, when an
opportunity is presented to English and American traders to come in
and take possession of the trade China is prepared to foster, to
speak of the commercial possibilities which the next decade will give.
The reader will probably understand that, despite the enormous
foreign imports which for years have come into China, there is not a
tithe of the trade done yet {22} which will be done with the opening
up of the country, now almost bound to ensue. China's market is
stupendous. The possibilities are wider than the average home
manufacturer has any conception of. From the China Sea to the
British Burma border, from the southern port of Canton up through all
the partially opened Eastern provinces, through the whole of the
wonderful Yangtze Valley to the practically untouched west, and away
into newly touched areas where the inhabitants are all anxious to buy
foreign goods, there is presented an unparalleled opportunity for the
foreign manufacturer. Any one who has taken an intelligent interest
in China's trade with foreign countries must have been impressed with
the fact that she was not importing one-hundredth part of what she
could easily handle. And if he had studied closely any particular
district where some foreign import had been taken or foreign industry
had been started and watched the phenomenal commercial growth in that
particular district, he immediately would gather some idea of the
far-reaching possibilities for the expansion of foreign trade in
China.
Even the recent changes in dress wrought by the Revolution have shown
the enormous demand there is for re-dressing the Chinese; with the
passing of the queue they decided against the little round Manchu
hat, an article made almost exclusively in China. Immediately there
came a cry for the foreign hat; at once a trade was created, into the
country there came all kinds and conditions and shapes of foreign
head-gear--felts, cloth caps, and all sorts; they sold in hundreds of
thousands and had to be supplied by some one. China, at all events,
could not make them; to her it was something quite new; they had to
come from outside. Japan was watching. She collared the trade, and
in two months she had practically re-hatted China. But this is
merely an instance; many more might be given to show the rapidity
with which commercial {23} changes come. In over seven thousand
miles of travel in China, mostly far away inland where the effect of
the treaty port is least felt, the writer some time ago made a study
of the commercial aspect of things and how far the modern spirit had
penetrated the interior, with a view specially to ascertain how the
British merchant stands in the business life of the nation. This
chapter, therefore, should have especial interest so far as it
embodies correct data, gleaned in two years and a half of travel in
many parts of the Chinese Empire where the traveller is still to the
Chinese a wonder of wonders. In China, even in far interior places,
one finds life, business, prosperity--a strange commingling of
Western ideas with Eastern. Four hundred millions of people have to
all intents and purposes become civilised. They are anxious to swing
into line and want the equipment. Their needs are making China the
greatest market in the world. They want everything--railways,
machinery, tools, guns, ships, and much else. That there is an
unprecedented large trade to be done must at once be granted. During
the last decade, without thinking for the moment of the Revolution,
China's foreign trade has doubled; in the next decade, if peace
prevails, it must be trebled, and although one cannot ignore the fact
that under ordinary conditions of progress China must ultimately
become a serious rival to Western countries as an industrial nation,
that day is not yet at hand. She must be a stupendous buyer before
she can hope to become a serious competitor.
But the point need not, I think, be pursued farther. The country has
merely to regain its normal condition, and we shall see trade
increasing by leaps and bounds. I say merely to regain its normal
condition for this reason: whilst the prevailing uncertainty
continues no permanent increase of trade can be expected, but let
there be some stable form of government and we shall see China
recuperate and begin trade again in a wonderful manner. No people
have such recuperative power. {24} No people have such power of
adaptation. And in the era of trade development upon whose threshold
we are now standing we may confidently look to probably an uneclipsed
season of foreign commercial enterprise in all parts of China. In
the increased demand for woollen goods, for engineering equipment of
all kinds, especially mining gear, for railroad supplies, for the
thousands of household requirements of daily use, motor-boats and all
the varied paraphernalia required to place an antiquated nation upon
the footing of modern civilisation there will be a demand such as
will make even Japan's era of commercial progress pale into
insignificance.
The trade will come. Let so much be granted. The next point is, Who
is to get it, and how is it to be got?
I am not a manufacturer nor a trader, and cannot go deeply into the
detail of how business should be pushed. But I have seen a good deal
of China, have closely watched the methods adopted by various
internationals in various parts of the Empire, and it may be that my
remarks on the matter may have the effect of awakening British and
American traders to the realisation of the opportunity now before
them. Some time ago, when placing manuscript for a prospective work
on China, the publisher said: "What people want to know is how to
increase their trade--they don't want to know about the physical
characteristics of the country and the people so much as how to
increase their trade. Write a book on how trade can be improved, and
your book will sell." But it is probable that those who would most
readily buy and read such a book would be the Britisher's competitor.
Now, so far as actual trading advantages are concerned, it may be
said of the British that they hold the highest advantage possible
over other nations; that advantage is in the fact that they hold the
confidence of the people. No foreigner, be he merchant, {25}
missionary, traveller, or official, is trusted in China as is the
Britisher. I speak with no intention of hurting the susceptibilities
of any one. In trade the Chinese believe in the British, they
believe in his goods; in the Revolution the soldiers would
congratulate you most heartily if they knew that you were an
Englishman, telling you that there is none better in the world. They
might be right or wrong, I am merely writing what they were saying,
and it is a fair ensample of the general opinion of the common
people. But despite this advantage, it is patent to the thoughtful
student of Chinese affairs that a great need exists among British
merchants as a whole to "wake up." I am a Britisher, am perhaps
naturally quick to notice where British merchants fail, where they
are outrun in the race for trade in this land of great promise. I
know there will be many who will at once ask me to turn to the
shipping in Shanghai, in Tientsin, in any of the ports, and notice
the predominance of British shipping. I shall be told that Great
Britain still controls the bulk of the trade of China, and that there
is no need for fear of the future. But there is another side to the
story.
Go any day to the Bund at Hankow or Shanghai; watch the progress
being made also by Japan. Go into the godowns and watch the progress
of the little brown men from the land of the Rising Sun and watch
their methods; run your eye along the offices whose men work hardest
and longest--the Germans; keep yourself informed on the doings of the
day in exports and imports, and you will find that, even if he does
hold the volume of trade he has held for years, the Britisher by no
means advances with new trade as rapidly as his competitors. In the
past no nation has done so much towards the true development of China
as the British. The British have laid the foundation, have sown the
seed, and it is only their due that they should reap the harvest now
at hand. But in the period {26} during which the trade of China has
so phenomenally advanced the cry has gone up from all quarters that
the Britisher is not only losing his grip of the increase of China's
trade in her commercial dawn, but literally giving way to the German,
and that but a few years will be necessary to prove that Great
Britain occupies a position relatively nearer the bottom of the list
of nations who have a commercial finger in the pie.
I am not the first writer who has had a wail to make over the loss of
British trade. But I do not, at the same time, see any reason why
the British merchant should not easily maintain an indefinite
supremacy of trade in China. It only needs a little more vim, a
keener outlook, a speedier business adaptation to needs, the
maintenance of commercial wakefulness where business has a tendency
to increase. Competitors of Great Britain hold no advantages; they
cannot in the long run put better goods upon the market--Japan, the
most serious rival, certainly is producing inferior goods in larger
bulk, and is everywhere overrunning the land with cheap and nasty
goods, but the British-made article will always hold its own side by
side with that of any other nation. And to the British merchant who
in China, as in most other trading commercial spheres, has almost
always absorbed the external trade, it does not matter much whether
people say he is or is not losing the trade--so long as he is not.
It has always been a case of Britain first and the rest nowhere. The
Britisher makes a good living, has an established connection, is the
life and soul of the social community, keeps up a fair average of
orders with home firms, and is content. But no right-thinking
Englishman, no matter how optimistically he may view the general
situation of Great Britain's trade in the Chinese Empire, can deny
that British trade does not expand proportionately with what is to be
done and what others are doing. This is not pessimistic. Optimism
is the keynote of the British merchant, and Great Britain's {27}
returns of exports and imports in the China trade are beyond that of
any other nation. But very powerful rivals--Germany and Japan, more
powerful than British merchants will admit to themselves--are in the
field and fighting in a way that we cannot afford to ignore.
Take Germany first. German success is undeniable. It is patent to
all beholders. German merchants are at every port. In real interior
China, far away from the beaten tracks, I do not remember ever having
met a single British commercial traveller--Germans I have met often.
They go out into the byways, beating up the trade and creating new
trade, putting themselves to inconvenience and exertion to get
orders, and undergoing in many cases greatest physical strain in
travel to get business. Once I met a man not far from the border of
British Burma; he had come right across China and had been away from
his business house in Shanghai for several months, and was then going
down to Rangoon and around to Shanghai by sea because it was the
easier and quicker way back. This is perhaps an isolated case, but
one may judge from it that the German merchants, while doing all they
can as importers of the goods the people want to buy, spread their
representatives far away from the buying centres to show the people
what they can do. In Tientsin, during the past few years, the German
has become a serious rival. German trade now at that important
northern port is probably equal to British trade. In Eastern Siberia
German is the business language, as a matter of fact, but to the
German, unlike the nonchalant Britisher, it does not matter where he
is placed in China, the first thing he does is to get a working
knowledge of the language, a factor of far greater importance in
China than appears on the surface. The German succeeds, not by
political influence, not by tariffs nor underhand methods, but by
sheer business application, and is building up an extensive scheme,
founded on sound principles, to capture {28} the lion's share of the
growing trade which will go to Europe and to wrest from the Britisher
a large proportion of that which has always been his. The average
German reads about China--its history, of the physical
characteristics of the country, of the people in the interior and the
life they live, what they have and what they want. The Englishman
does not trouble. He rarely learns the language, is careless to find
out anything about the country unless it is to get an idea of sport,
and so on.
The other dangerous rival is the Jap. If one were to go into detail
and write regarding the Japanese methods of business, it is probable
that much of it would subsequently be suppressed. The Japanese in
business in China is not the soul of honour. He has to be watched.
It is not possible here to speak at length on the unprincipled and
shady tactics employed in China--and particularly in the north and in
Manchuria--by Japanese traders. One and all seem to be alike, all
endowed with that secret and clannish spirit permeating all Eastern
nations, with a big dash of some peculiar virtue of unscrupulousness,
and they have brought themselves into a position of the most favoured
nation in the Chinese Empire. Japan has determined to get the trade
by any means. Once in a Chinese city in the interior, where doors
were closed to foreign trade, I saw the largest store on the street
was Japanese. Business is not done there, they say in self-defence,
but a show is maintained so that goods of the same kind may be
secured from Tokio! The Jap is in everything, he is everywhere--to
be first he cuts under, for he has little reputation to lose. Yet he
is as good in his own opinion as the best-bred European, and he lets
you know it. No man, however, unblinded by prejudice, can study the
progress of Japan in China, can look upon its amazing national
advance with either admiration or respect. I have met him in the
interior, in Yunnan and Szechuen, prospecting {29} quietly for
minerals, tapping goldfields and iron beds that are lying waste,
seeking out the best centres for the opening up of trade, finding out
what there is a demand for, and marking out the strategic centres
from whence his trade may be handled to the disadvantage of every
one. The Jap, as I have said, is everywhere, in everything--rarely,
however, to be trusted.
But no matter how many the rivals, I should think that no two nations
have better prospects for the securing of China's new trade than
Great Britain and the United States. It needs alertness, however.
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