356/ C
[This Document is the Property of His Britannic Majesty's Government 44
CHINA TRADE.
CONFIDENTIAL.
[43977]
No. 1.
Bre24 HFC
[December 15.]
SECTION 1.
Sir Edward Grey to the Archbishop of Canterbury.
My dear Archbishop,
Foreign Office, December 15, 1909. I HAVE now received a reply from the India Office in regard to the incident at Kucheng in the matter of opium suppression, about which you wrote to me in your letter of the 9th ultimo.
No official report has as yet been received from His Majesty's Minister at Peking on the incident in question, so that a final judgment on the case must be for the present reserved. Lord Morley is, however, inclined to think that in overruling the orders of the local officials of the Kucheng district the Chinese Board of Foochow may have had before it certain facts which were not necessarily within the cognisance of Bishop Price.
It is understood that the treaty provisions which the Bishop desires to see relaxed, though they protect foreign opium while in transit from the port to its destination in the interior and prevent differential taxation from being imposed on it, do not otherwise interfere with the retail trade.
In previous cases of a somewhat similar character His Majesty's Government have not questioned the right of the Chinese Government to regulate as it thinks fit the licensing of retail shops for the sale of foreign opium, or to restrict or prohibit the consumption of opium among the population. Thus in Nanking and Canton, where stringent regulations of this kind are in force, the action of His Majesty's Minister has been limited to seeing that they are not used to create monopolies or to discriminate unfairly against foreign opium and do not interfere with the wholesale trade in foreign opium between Chinese dealers and importing firms. The Imperial Chinese Government has recognised the equitable nature of these requirements, apart from any special obligations that may arise from treaties, and any other view would hardly be tenable, so long as the production of opium in China itself immensely exceeds the amount imported and an agreement exists between the two Governments for the puri possu reduction of the native cultivation and the foreign import. The Kucheng incident may prove on further inquiry to be capable of explanation on one or other of the above-mentioned grounds.
[2553 p-1]
I have, &c.
E. GREY.