}
}
C.0.
15123
This Document is the Property of His Britannic Majesty's Government.]
!
AFFAIRS OF CHINA.
CONFIDENTIAL.
[6154]
(No. 41.) Sir,
No. 1.
REGE 5 MAY 09
[February 15.]
SECTION 1.
186
Sir J. Jordan to Sir Edward Grey-(Received February 15.)
Peking, January 25, 1909. I HAVE the honour to acknowledge the receipt of your despatch No. 564 of the 30th December, 1908, respecting the proposed modification of jurisdiction in the British and German Concessions in China.
I am forwarding a copy of your despatch to Mr. Bourne, the Acting Judge of His Majesty's Supreme Court at Shanghae, and the Consuls-General at Hankow, Tien-tsin, and Canton, and asking them for an expression of their views on the points raised by Dr. Krieger, and in the meantime I have the honour to record briefly my own opinion on the question.
Dr. Krieger invites us to modify a system which has worked well for nearly forty years, and which has, I believe, boen adopted by several of the other Powers holding Concessions in China, more especially Russia and France. Germany baving declined to follow the example of Great Britain and the other Treaty Powers, now wishes to institute an arrangement of her own which we and all the others are expected to follow. Before we reverse our policy we should, I think, be furnished with stronger reasons than those which Dr. Krieger has given for making the change.
The Consuls will be able to speak with more authority than I can regarding the alleged difficulties in connection with the enforcement of mortgages and the execution of judgments, but I can scarcely conceive that they are seriously felt in practice, or greater stress would probably have been laid upon them in the Reports forwarded in my despatch No. 433 of the 30th September, 1908. Mortgages are registered in the offices of the British Consulates, and aliens holding land on British Concessions are, in virtue of the guarantee given by their Consuls, obliged to submit, in this respect to British jurisdiction, but between aliens, their own legal forms, procedure and decision are, as Mr. Fraser has pointed out to me, accepted by us as binding and valid. It is doubtless true that in the last resort we should, as Dr. Krieger states, claim the right to evict a foreigner who failed to carry out his covenant to observe our Municipal Regulations, but the right has never, to my knowledge, been exercised, and thero seems to be no reason why the question should in practice arise.
If Dr. Krieger's contention that the system he advocates is far the most convenient to the landholders themselves is correct, it is strange that his views are not apparently held by lot-holders of his own nationality. At Tien-tsin, as Mr. Ker pointed out in his despatch of the 1st September, 1908, the instructions from Berlin have in some cases been disregarded, and both the German Consul and the German community have protested to Berlin against a policy which declined to recognize the extension of our system to the German Concession.
The German Logation here knows nothing of the difficulties mentioned by Dr. Krieger. On the receipt of your despatch, I asked my German colleague, with whom I had often before discussed the question, if he could tell me what were the real reasons for the suggestion now put forward by his Government. Count Rex confessed that he knew of none, but asked for a day or two to see if he could discover anything in his archives. To-day he told me that he had found nothing to show that our system had been attended with any difficulties in practice, but that the modification suggested by Dr. Krieger had been recommended to him by his Government when the question of aliens in the German Concession at Hankow arose last summer. The German Colony at Hankow had, however, he said, since made representations in favour of adopting our system, which he had communicated to Berlin."
While admitting, therefore, that the German proposal, juridically viewed, may appear to be the more logical of the two, I would strongly deprecate its being entertained until the opinions of Mr. Bourne, who is an authority upon land questions, and of the Consuls-General, who are actually working the present system, are received and considered.
I have, &c. (Signed) J. N. JORDAN.
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