America and the China Loan E-Book

Frederick McCormick

• Herausgeber: Full Well Ventures
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

American journalist Frederick McCormick, in this article, "America and the China Loan," originally published in the 1911 issue of Scribner's magazine, describes a financial crisis in China in about 1910, when the great powers of Europe and America worked jointly to help China rebuild its financial policies and currency in light of modern developments. 

Leseprobe

America and the China Loan

© 2020 Full Well Ventures

Originally published in the September 1911 issue of Scribner’s magazine

SCRIBNER’S

America and the China Loan

TWO CENTURIES before America was discovered Ma Tuanlin, the Chinese, wrote the whole story of China’s money. In the seventeenth century a successor modernized his work. In 1910 it was still modern and showed that the currency mediums of China were tokens for exchange, and not fixed weights or measures. No progress was made until the great powers intervened, and America, by her aid, placed China, in 1911, among the currency reform nations of the world.

April 15, 1911, at America’s solicitation, China signed terms for a currency loan from Great Britain, France, Germany, and the United States, and undertook, with the aid of these four capitalistic great contemporaries, broad measures in the form of a uniform standard currency scheme looking to the material reconstruction of the Celestial Empire, and June 13, in London, England, a financial council of these Western powers met to approve it. [Note: Of the total amount of the loan, $50,000,000, five-ninths are apportioned to China proper and four-ninths to Manchuria. Of the Manchurian section about $10,000,000 is set aside for industrial and administrative purposes.]

As there are but these four capitalistic great powers among nations, it may be said that the outer world, in fact, June 13, 1911, as so often pronounced in theory, established itself in council to sit upon the future of China, and that these things, directed to trade and industrial regeneration in China, are a realization of the desires of western nations from the beginning of trade relations with China in the sixteenth century, and of the active aims of England, France, and America for about seventy-five years. This is something of what reform in China, under the principles of the open door and the new diplomacy, means.

It has been regarded as only a question of time when China would be bankrupt. In such a case, on account of her debt to Europe, ever increasing, she would have to surrender her finances to the management of a European board of control, consisting of representatives of Great Britain, France, and Germany. Special policies for China’s protection and safety, such as are embraced in the open door doctrine, would be endangered by this and if America remained traditionally disinterested the forces that have threatened to break up the Chinese Empire would operate in spite of the open door doctrine.

America’s only chance of averting this lay in anticipating the capitalistic powers of Europe and reuniting all foreign financial and commercial interests on the lines of mutual advantage. It was not strange, therefore, that the government at Washington sought the opportunity to bring about the reform of China’s currency, the organization of industrial development, and the creation of financial order.