693.002/916: Telegram
The Consul General at Shanghai (Gauss) to the Secretary of State
[Received September 1—4:20 p.m.]
789. First reference my 785, August 31, 8 p.m. The Central Bank of China Collecting Agency for the Shanghai Customs House withdrew from its premises last night and a collecting unit from the Yokohama Specie Bank took over this morning upon the invitation of the Chinese Superintendent of the Shanghai Customs, an appointee of the Nanking regime. The collection rate set by the Superintendent today is 1 customs gold unit equals Chinese dollars 3.925 and the rate notified today by the Central Bank to the Inspectorate General (which would have been the collection rate enforced had the Central Bank Collecting Agency remained) is Chinese dollars 2.565. Duties assessed today are therefore 53.18 percent higher than those that would have been assessed had the new arrangement not been enforced. However, due to the use by the Chinese Customs of the official rate instead of the open market rate for the Chinese dollar in calculating the duty paying value of imports (as explained by the Acting Commercial Attaché in my telegram No. 1275 of September 29, 1 p.m., 193810) the duty payments in terms of foreign currencies actually collected from importers have recently been only some 27 percent of the statutory duties on values converted at open market exchange rates rather than official rates and today are still but little over 41 percent of those statutory duties.
Repeated to Peiping and Chungking, by air mail to Tokyo.
- Not printed.↩