Page:Statesman's Year-Book 1921.djvu/810

 758 » CHINA

Canton-Hankow Railway, from Hankow to Canton, 700 miles ; and (10) the Chinese Eastern Railway, also known as the Siberian Railway, and running westward from Vladivostok through^Eastern Manchuria, Siberia and Russia proper. This line was built and is operated by the Russians, and runs for 1,100 miles in nominal Chinese territory. The gauge is the Russian standard of 5 feet. The gauges of all the other railways is 4 feet 8^ inches.

China has a fairly well developed telegraph service. Telegraphs connect all the principal cities of the Empire, and there are lines to all the neigh- bouring countries. The telegraph lines have a length of nearly 40,000 miles. The administration is now completely under government control. Five foreigners (Danes) are employed in the Telegraphs. There is also a Danish Telegraph Adviser in the Ministry of Communications and a Danish Expert in Wireless Telegraphy. Wireless Telegraph Stations have been installed at Kalgan, Peking, Hankow, Nanking, and Shanghai and Canton. In August, 1918, the Chinese Government contracted with the Marconi Wireless Co. for the purchase of 200 wireless telephones for the use of the Chinese army, each to have a radius of 40 miles. In October the Govern- ment again contracted with the Marconi Co. for the erection of three powerful wireless stations at Kashgar, Urumchi, and Lanchowfu to connect with a smaller station at Sianfu which will act as auxiliary to the land lines. Since 1912 uniform telegraph charges have been introduced.

The postal work of China, formerly carried on by the Government Courier service and the native posting agencies, was gradually taken in hand by the Chinese Imperial Post Office, begun in 1897 under the management of the Maritime Customs. By Edict of November 6, 1906, the control of the Postal Service was transferred to the Ministry of Communications, and the transfer was actually effected in July, 1911. The work of the Post Office extends over the 18 Provinces of China proper, the New Dominion and Manchuria, which have been divided into postal districts, or sub-districts. The Postal Service with Tibet has been suspended. In 1919 there were 9,762 post offices open, and the number of letters posted was 229,410,722 ; of postcards 34,987,900 ; of newspapers and printed matter, 67,896,680 ; of commercial papers, 499,450 ; of samples of merchandise, 353,380 ; and of official correspondence, 6,774,860 ; grand total of 339,922,992. The number of parcels posted in 1919 was 3,551,105. The revenue of the post office in 1919 was approximately 11,230,000 dollars, and the expenditure 8,290,000 dollars, having a surplus of 2,940,000 dollars. On December 31, 1919, the postal staff numbered about 111 foreigners and 28,298 Chinese. China in 1914 joined the postal union.

Money and Credit.

There are four varieties of banking institutions in China. The first are the large foreign banks in the open ports, some of which are among the most powerful banking institutions in the world. The second are the national banks established directly or indirectly by the Chinese Government for its own fiscal purposes and serving as an adjunct in some ways to the Chinese treasury on the one hand and foreign banking and financial interests on the other, the chief of such institutions now being the Bank of China, which was established by presidential mandate in 1913. Besides these there are two further classes of banks, one embracing the larger institutions, which do a proper banking business, i.e., deal in loans and discounts and handle exchange as a more or less secondary matter ; and the smaller native banks doing some business in loans, and dealing in dollars, silver and subsidiary coins, and buying and selling exchange in small amounts on interior points.