at Chefoo, quoted by H.M. Consul at Chefoo in the recently published Parliamentary Paper, China No. 1 (1925).
Nominees of one or other of the Big Groups in China follow each other in quick succession in writing to The Times to state that factories owned by foreigners in Shanghai and other Treaty Ports in China are, in general, immeasurably superior to the Chinese factories, as to construction, sanitation and conditions of employment.
There is not a word of evidence, of any kind, to support this claim of general superiority.
The Report of the Shanghai Child Labour Commission (1924) —a report that is a damning indictment of capitalism in China- -tells us that over the whole field of factory employment in Shanghai the British, Americans, French and Italians employ a higher proportion of children under twelve in their factories than do the Chinese, The figures are as follows:-
Factories
French ..
Italian
British
American
Chinese
Percentage of Employees under Twelve, Girls and Boys
per cent.
47
46
17 15.9 13
So are the foreigners immeasurably superior to the Chinese if a callousness towards child life, and indeed towards everything save dividend-producing methods, be the standard.
The largest number of children employed in any one cotton- mill in Shanghai (where work is generally on two twelve-hour day and night shifts) is employed in the British Yangtszepoo Cotton Mill, where, out of a total of 3,800 employees, 700 are boys and girls under twelve.
The largest Chinese cotton-mill, the San Sing Cotton Mill, out of a far larger total of 5,339 employees, employs far fewer children, namely 430.
The foreigners in Shanghai also employ a greater proportion of women workers than do the Chinese. Miss Harrison, formerly of the London School of Economics, and now industrial expert of the Y.W.C.A. in China, reported that :—
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Women and children, because they will accept lower wages, are rapidly being drawn into the factories. Employers are doing in China what they scarcely dared to do in Lancashire a hundred years ago.
In contrast with these terrible industrial conditions the cruelly distorted mentality of the British stands out in the following extract from the Hongkong Daily Press of June 4, 1925, the organ of British rule in Hongkong :—
The riots in Shanghai will, we hope, at last convince the Powers that firm measures must be taken to save China from herself. There is abundant evidence to show that when Lloyd George (speaking in the House of Commons on June 18, 1925) likened the movements in China to Sinn Fein he erred badly.
The struggle in China is not a mere phase of subdued nationalism, struggling through petty bourgeois organisations for nationalist expression.
The struggle in China is, in its essence, a struggle of the mass of the people, fighting against intolerable conditions. The roots of the conflict are embedded deeply in the lives of the Chinese workers and peasants.
That is why there is unity and solidarity from Peking to Canton, from Shanghai to Chungking; yes, and reaching to Mukden too, the heart of Chang Tso Lin's territory, and even to Hongkong, the British Crown Colony, the key, in a military sense, to the whole British position in China. For what Hongkong says, especially when dictated by the chief of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, sooner or later becomes the corner-stone of British policy in China.
Nearly 436,000,000 souls are seething in what they pray will be their last struggle. Who knows what may happen? A distinguished official who knows China well recently foretold that within three months every Englishman would have left China.
But the grinding exploitation of the Chinese girls and boys. in the factories, the sale of foreign opium (largely conducted from behind the sheltered walls of the concessions and settlements), the financial stranglehold on Chinese railways, customs and finance itself, the market for Shell or Standard Oil (now boycotted and replaced by Russian oil from the Caucasus) enormous as these interests
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524