[This Document is the Property of His Britannic Majesty's Government.]
360
CHINA TRADE.
CONFIDENTIAL.
(43633]
No. 1.
[December
4/444
SECTION 24 DEC 09.
Sir,
Foreign Office to Honorary Secretary, Edinburgh Committee.
Foreign Office, December 8, 1909.
I AM directed by Secretary Sir E. Grey to inform you that your letter of the 23rd October last, in regard to the Indo-Chinese opium traffic, has been carefully considered in communication with flis Majesty's Secretary of State for India, and Sir E. Grey now desires to offer the following observations :-
The committee press for the revision of the ten-years' limit on the ground that the Chinese Imperial Government and some at least of the provincial Viceroys are anxious to suppress the cultivation of the poppy in China within a shorter period, and are sanguine from the progress already made that this will be accomplished The sincerity of these aspirations is not questioned. But within the next two years.
The information laid before the Shanghae they have still to be translated into facts. Commission showed that China herself was unable to give any satisfactory statistics from which the extent of the reduction in the cultivation of Chinese opium could be inferred. In the sixth session of the commission Sir Alexander Hosie examined at length the reports and returns which the Chinese delegates had submitted, and carried the commission with him in his conclusion that the Chinese estimates of production, consumption, and reduction were altogether unreliable, while the actual progress up to date was not known with any approach to certainty. The mention made in the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs reports for 1908 of the opium crop in the province of Szechuan having "turned out most satisfactorily," of the increased export of native opium from Chung King, and of the decreased import of foreign opium, confirms these criticisms.
The Committee appear to be under the impression that the three years of trial were unnecessary, and that the ten years limit may, in some manner, impede the As regards the former, it may be observed that the progress of reform in China. trial period was accepted by the Chinese Government themselves as an essentially just and reasonable arrangement, to ensure that the object of the steps taken by the Government of India for the gradual suppression of a hitherto legal traffic should not be frustrated by a want of corresponding restrictive action on the part of the Chinese authorities. Nothing has since occurred to throw doubt on the wisdom of the arrangement agreed to. According to the figures supplied to the Shanghae Commission by the Chinese delegates the normal production of opium in China at the time of the agreement was eleven times as great as the import from India; and even in 1908 the diminished production (on the most favourable estimate of the progress of the reforms) was eight times the amount of the import. The essence of the agree- ment of 1907 was that this huge production should diminish pari passu with the import, and that satisfactory evidence of this, as regards the first three years, should be furnished for the assurance of the Indian Government at the end of 1910. Judging from the very imperfect nature of the returns and reports which the Chinese delegates were this year able to furnish, the experimental period would seem to be by no means excessive. As regards the ten years limit, it in no way prevents the Chinese Government from antedating the time by which the production of opium in But the period China is to cease.
Of this the Chinese Government is well aware. was deliberately proposed by the Chinese Government itself as being the shortest length of time within which so gigantic a reform might be expected to be effectively accomplished. It may prove to be unnecessarily long, but of this there is no satisfactory evidence at present, nor apparently can there be for some time
to come.
The committee urge that China should be given by the treaty Powers a similar right in respect of opium to that lately given her by those Powers in respect of morphia. The cases are not analogous. China produces no morphia, has never legalised its use, and has on those grounds obtained the assent of the Powers to the prohibition of import from abroad. But in the case of opium the question was one of the gradual modification of a national habit and of the reduction simultaneously and
[2553 A-1)