NEW TRADE

Evening Star, Issue 20862, 4 August 1931, Page 9

NEW TRADE

CHANGING CHINA China’s great merchant classes in her interior cities, accustomed for centuries to consider only the costs of primitive transportation and the exactions of official classes, are now feeling the impact of modernity, with the result that trade customs are changing as rapidly as' are the appearances of the shops and the classes of goods carried, writes Hallett Abend, in the Chicago ‘ Tribune. ’ Most modern and startling of all new things, however j is China’s new tariff law, which has increased import duties to such a high level that the price of nearly everything is soaring to new heights. Coupled with the fall in the price of silver, it has forced all merchants to mark up their prices from week to week—often from day to day. Because of continued civil war, banditry, high taxation, and the Communist domination over vast areas in the interior provinces, there lias been little, if any, increase in wages or salaries in China within the last two years. The result has been that its prices have gone higher and ever higher, the scale of living of all except a "handful of Chinese has had to go lower and lower. This, in turn, breeds widespread discontent, and Communists’ propagandists are not slow in faking advantage of the situation. In tho larger coastal cities or in the interior places which have long been open to trade and residence for foreigners, Chinese methods of doing business have already undergone considerable modification. In Shanghai, Canton, Tientsin, Hankow, and Mukden are to be found to-day many tall buildings housing foreign-style department stores which are owned and successfully operated by Chinese. But even in the larger cities, and certainly in tho interior, the small shop system still prevails. The small shopkeeper deals in one or two commodities or specialties, and runs tho shop himself, with tho assistance of an apprentice or two. The shoo owners are organised into guilds—tno Tea Guild, thg Silk Guild, the Fish Guild—and the workers have corresponding unions. In recent years, since- Russian propagandists have been busy in tho country, the unions have become more insistent and radical in their demands —another phase of modernisation with which the Chinese merchant must cope, _ Tho art of the silversmith is an ancient one in China, and the silver shops rro filled with many objects of.beauty and utility distinctive of tho country. But Chinese silver is too pure, and consequently tno soft, to bo put to many ■'•-os for which it is most employed broad. Chinese forks and spoons, for nstanco, bend too easily to be generally ?d.

Clio tea stores are always small “ specialty shops.” The various grades of tea arc ranged in huge air-tight cans, and prices mu from less than one dollar a pound, Chinese money, to fifty dollars a pound, and oven more. Besides tho teas, black and green, tho tea merchants have in stock canisters of dried jasmine blossoms, of rod and ycllow rose leaves, of lemon tree blossoms, and of dried pink geranium flowers. Theso are added to the tea in quantities to suit tho taste of individual customers.

The Chinese, are inveterate smokers of tobacco. Shops sell snuff, cigarettes, cigars, fine-cut tobacco for pipes with diminutive metal bowls, and longcut to smoko in the old-stylo water pipe’s which are still widely used in the interior provinces. In spite of the rather rapid spread of Western ideas of medicine, all Chinese cities have scores of old-style medicine shops, as well as the shops of the old-time herbalists. The herbalists scorn drugs obtained from animals or fish, and confine their prescriptions to leaves, flowers, and roots. They hold that it was the God of Agriculture who first transmitted to men a knowledge of how to cure disease. The chests and bamboo canisters containing their drugs are engraved with poetic names for their different concoctions. Ginseng, for instance, is usually labelled “Saint Detached from Sordid Life.” Book stores to-day toll the most surprising talo of the trend of the times. Cully half of the works sold in the larger cities arc translations from the Bussian, and most of those are books written by Communists since 1918. Karl Marx is a great favourite, ns is Henry George, and any books about Lenin and Trotsky can bo certain of wide sales. Foreign fiction is only measurably popular.

order to make room for United States scanion out of work. “ They have adopted a definite policy,” he said, “ but it is doubtful whether it will succeed in a country whose men prefer to lie cabinet makers than able seamen, and has to roly largely on Swedes to man her ships. Amcrica < is frankly jealous of Britain as a nation of sailors, and will accept any national in preference to British-born men for her ships' crews.”