CO129-542-12 Smuggling from Hong Kong into China 21-1-1933 - 21-8-1933 — Page 66

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case of a shipping company, it runs the risk of losing the

privileges granted in return for the annual guarantee.

is particularly the use of this threat to withdraw the an-

nual guarantee privileges as a bludgeon to compel companies

to accept liabilities not contemplated in the Annual Guarantee

to which exception is taken in this and similar cases.

The second case occured at Amoy.

A firm named

"Ching Seng" of which a British Subject, Mr. Koh Boon Chye,

was the principal, was suspected by the Commissioner of being

concerned in frauds on the Customs. A watch was kept and it

was found that in one shipment of incense paper consigned by

this firm there were 220 packages of paper, although the

number shown in the export application was 20 only. The

Commissioner thereupon ordered the whole of the firm's ship-

ment, consisting, besides the incense paper, of a few cases

of vermicelli and mosquito cones, which had been properly de-

clared, to be confiscated. When the Commissioner was asked on

what authority he thus seized British owned goods in respect

of which no offence had been committed, he replied that tariff

autonomy gave the Customs unrestricted rights to impose and

exact penalties without reference to any other authority and

that it was not necessary for him to proceed in the Consular

Courts in order to recover penalties where persons having extra-

territorial rights were concerned. In other words, the claim

put forward by the Customs is that they can inflict penalties

on foreign merchants or ships without any legal process, the

Customs being both prosecutors and judges, and there being

in the present circumstances of China no court to which ap-

peal can be taken from their decisions.

I cannot possibly go into all the arguments in the

course of a semi-official letter like this, but the point I

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