SHANGHAI

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 19818, 18 April 1927, Page 3

SHANGHAI

THE CITY TO-DAY MONUMENT TO BRITISH ENTERPRISE Not everyone who has followed the course of the Chinese crisis will understand why we attach so much importance to Shanghai, and why it should be a centre of dispute, writes J. Conway Davis in a London paper. Few Britishers are acquainted with the history of the port, and the easy way in which the terms Concession and Settlement are used in speeches and articles must leave them not a little bewildered. Shanghai is a standing monument to British enterprise in the Far East. Originally a mere sand-bank or snipe-bog, an unreclaimed waste on the banks of the river, it is now the largest town and the commercial capital of China. It has been built up solely by British administrative and commercial capacity, and by eighty odd years of industrious effort. Shanghai to-day is one of the eight largest ports in the world, and through it passes nearly one-half of the total trade of China. It h*s been called the Paris of the East, and compared with other Chinese towns it is indeed like some great European city. With its macadamised roads up-to-date drainage system, its trams and motor buses, its enormous office buildings, its miles of wharves, docks, godowns and stores, its smoking factory chimneys, and its fine residential quarter, its wealth and prosperity, it is indeed a credit to the British pioneers who built it up. With Hong Kong it is the pivot upon which the British position in China turns. Shanghai consists of an international settlement and a French concession, two areas which were set aside for the use of foreign traders by treaty with the Chinese government in the middle of last century. It differs from the British concessions in other Chinese ports not only in being international, but in size and prosperity. The prepondering foreign interests in the settlement, however, are British, the amount of British capital vested in land, buildings, plant and municipal debentures, etc., being not less than £63,250,000. The personnel of the municipal administrators is largely British, and British trade and enterprise have been, and still are, the backbone of the city, which, as has been said, was eighty years ago as unpromising a piece of land as Britons overseas have ever helped to develop. Everything that happens in China has its repercussion in other Eastern countries and it is no exaggeration to say that affairs in Shanghai are of vital importance to the whole British Empire.