| IV |
For one thing, as has been suggested, Japan has a perfectly obvious plan to make the railways too expensive for China to purchase when the lease expires, and just here some comparisons may be in order. In Japan proper the government-owned railway stations are severe and inexpensive structures in which not one yen is wasted for display and but little for convenience. When I was in Tokyo, for example, Ex-Premier Okuma, in a public interview, called attention to the disreputable condition and appearance of the leading station (Shimbashi) in the Japanese capital, declaring that foreign tourists must inevitably have their general impressions of the country unfavorably influenced by it, so primitive and uninviting is its appearance. But when it comes to the South Manchurian Railway, also under the control of the Japanese Government (five sixths of the investment held by the government and one {86} sixth by individual Japanese), one finds an entirely different policy in force. Handsome stations, built to accommodate traffic for fifty years to come, have been erected. In Dairen, "virtually the property of the railway company," the system has built a magnificent modern city--street railways, waterworks, electric light plants, macadamized roads, and beautiful public parks. More than this, the railway company, not content with the best of equipment for every phase of legitimate railway work, including handsome stations and railway offices, such as Japan proper never sees, has also erected hotels which, for the Orient, may well be styled sumptuous, in five leading cities of Manchuria. Comparatively few travellers go to Mukden, and yet the hotel which the South Manchurian Railway has erected there, for example, is perhaps not excelled in point of furnishing and equipment anywhere in the Far East.
In buying back the railroads, therefore, China will be expected not only to pay for the railways themselves but for all the irrelevant enterprises--hotels, parks, cities--in which the railway companies have embarked; for lines "improved" beyond recognition, and for lines built not even with a view to ultimate profit, but for their strategic importance to a rival and possibly antagonist nation! As an Englishman said to me: "It's much the same as if I, a poor man, should rent you a $1000 house, agreeing to stand the expense of some improvements when taking it back, and you should spend $10,000 in improving my $1000 house--and largely to suit your own peculiar business and purposes."
More than this, Japan, as I have said, is determined to keep her absolute monopoly on South Manchurian railway facilities. In Article IV of the Portsmouth Peace Treaty Japan and Russia reciprocally engaged not to "obstruct any general measures, common to all countries, which China may take for the development of the commerce and industry of Manchuria," but in December of the same year Japan caused China to yield a secret agreement prohibiting any new line "in the {87} neighborhood of and parallel to" the South Manchurian Railway or any branch line that "might be prejudicial" to it. Japan, under threat of arms, forced China to abandon the plan for the Hsinmintun-Fakumen line after arrangements had been made with an English syndicate, and later Japan and Russia on the same pretext prevented the proposed Chinchow-Aigun line across Mongolia and Manchuria, although a hundred miles or more away from the South Manchurian line.
V
That Japan, then, holds the whip hand in Manchuria, and expects to continue to hold it, is very clear. With China as yet too weak to protect herself, Japan is virtually master of the situation. Let us ask then--since this is in an American book--whether the Open Door policy is being enforced even now; to ask it of any one in Manchuria is to be laughed at. I tried it once in a Standard Oil office and the man in front of me roared, and an unnoticed clerk at my back, overhearing so absurd a question, was also unable to contain his merriment. It is not a question of the fact of the shutting-up policy, Chinese and foreigners in Manchuria will tell you; it is only a question as to the extent of that condition.
The truth is that the ink was hardly dry on the early treaties before the discriminations began. The military railroads, which Japan was in honor bound to all the world to use only for war purposes, were used for transporting Japanese goods before the military restrictions with regard to the admission of other foreign goods were removed. The Chinese merchant and his patrons were famishing for cotton "piece goods" and other manufactured products, and the Japanese goods coming over were quickly taken up and a market for these particular "chops" or "trademarks" (the Chinaman relies largely on the chop) was established. By the time European and American goods came back their market in many cases {88} had already been taken away. In some cases, too, their trademark rights had been virtually ruined by the closeness of Japanese imitation. Even on my recent tour, among consuls of three nations, at Manchurian points, I did not find one who did not mention some recent case of trademark infringement.
Then came the period of freight discriminations and rebates, when the Japanese (principally the Mitsui Bussan Kaisha, the one great octopus of Japanese business and commerce) secured freight rates that practically stifled foreign business competitors. The railway company now asserts that rebates (formerly allowed, it alleges, because of heavy shipments) are no longer given; but in many cases the evil effects of the former rebating policy remain in that Japanese traders were thus allowed to rush in during a formative period and establish permanent trade connections.
Meanwhile, too, the relations between the Japanese Government and the Mitsui Bussan Kaisha are so close that competitors are virtually in the plight of having to ship goods over a line owned by a rival--without any higher tribunal to guarantee equality of treatment. As was recently declared:
"Two directors of the South Manchurian Railway are also directors of Mitsui Bussan Kaisha. The traffic manager of the railway is an ex-employee of Mitsui. The customs force at Dalny is not only entirely Japanese--no other foreigner in charge of a Chinese customs office employs exclusively assistants of his own nationality--but a number of the customs inspectors are ex-employees of Mitsui. The Mitsui company also maintains branches all through Manchuria in and out of treaty ports. In this way they escape the payment of Chinese likin, or toll taxes. The Chinese have agreed that these taxes--2 per cent, on the value of the goods each time they pass to a new inland town--shall not be paid so long as they remain in the hands of the foreigner. American piece goods often pay likin tax, two, three, or four times, while the Japanese--sometimes legitimately by reason of their branch houses, sometimes illegally by bluffing Chinese officials or smuggling through their military areas--manage to escape likin almost altogether."