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[This Document is the Property of His Britannic Majesty's Government.C.O
24090
OPIUM.
CONFIDENTIAL.
[May 30.] REC
Ree 14 JUL 13
SECTION 1.
[24709]
(No. 204.) Sir,
No. 1.
Sir J. Jordan to Sir Edward Grey.-(Received May 30).)
Peking, May 14, 1913.
I HAVE the honour to enclose herewith translation of the memorandum from the Wai-chiao Pu summarised in my telegram No. 113 of the 9th instant, in which a formal request is made that His Majesty's Government should consent to the revision of the Opium Agreement of the 8th May, 1911.
In view of the declaration made by His Majesty's Under-Secretary of State for India in the House of Commons on the 7th instant, the terms of which you were good enough to communicate to me in your telegram No. 131 of the 10th instant, I assume that His Majesty's Government are prepared to consent now to the revision of the agreement without waiting for the stocks to be cleared off. If this assumption is correct, the proposed new agreement would still take the form suggested in my despatch No. 166 of the 24th ultimo, namely, that of relinquishing the right to export opium from India to China, on the condition that the provisions for investigating the diminution of cultivation of native opium are faithfully observed. It will, however, in this case be necessary to make it clearly understood that, pending the absorption of the stocks now in China, the conveyance of certificated Indian opium from port of entry to place of consumption in the interior shall continue to be regulated by the provisions of the additional article to the Chefoo Agreement and of the Agreement
of 1911.
According to an estimate just received from the Shanghai importers, the present stocks in the Treaty ports and at Hong Kong amount to 25,300 chests (including 2,680 certificated chests still to arrive from India). As regards the rate at which these stocks may be expected to pass into consumption, it has to be pointed out that the Customs returns for April show a considerable falling off compared with those of March, which amounted to over 1,800 chests, and that according to these returns the average consumption during the four months, January to April 1913, works out to an average of only about 1,400 chests a-month. The importers at Shanghai, indeed, put! the average monthly deliveries at Shanghai and Hong Kong since the 1st January last as low as 1,100 to 1,200 chests. I am making further enquiry into the reason for this discrepancy, but in the meantime it has to be remembered that the market for the opium to be disposed of will tend to diminish in area as one province after another is investigated and placed on the prohibition list. Provided such diminution is gradual, this will not prevent the eventual solution of the problem, but it seems necessary to guard against undue optimism as regards the length of time the absorption will take, and it is evidently impossible to fix a limit of time for this process. My own impression, as stated in my telegram No. 99, is that it will, in practice, prove to be less than two years.
The memorandum from the Wai-chiao Pu, it will be noticed, makes no reference to the difficulty presented by the question of the stocks, but the above considerations show that it is very necessary to take this difficulty into consideration when dealing with the request for revision. The Chinese Government have, moreover, recognised their responsibility in the matter, for it will be remembered that on the 1st February last I had the honour to submit to you, at the request of the Chinese Minister for Foreign Affairs, à proposal to the effect that if His Majesty's Government undertook to import no more opium into China, the Chinese Government should purchase the existing stocks and establish a monopoly on the pattern of the Japanese system in Formosa. It is true that this proposal will probably be abandoned, but it has never been formally withdrawn, and His Majesty's Government are still awaiting the detailed statement as to financial arrangements which the Chinese Government promised to furnish.
If the Chinese Government do not proceed with this proposal, it seems to me that they can hardly raise any objection to the only practical alternative, that of safeguarding the existing stocks in revising the Agreement of 1911. His Majesty's Government are making an important concession by undertaking to give up altogether the import of
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