Most noticeable U. S. enterprises in China:

1. The missionary, and especially several of China's best uni-versities and hospitals.
2. The Standard Oil Co.
3. Pan American Airways.
4. The Shanghai Power Co.
5. The Shanghai Telephone Co.
6. The National City Bank.
7. Messrs. Starr and Raven.
8. Mr. Henry Ford, who is a legend, not a fact.

The U. S. has at last reached a dominant position in Shanghai trade, but the American Shanghailander owes few thanks to Congress or to the foreign policy of the White House. Once upon a time, after America had first secured the advantages of extraterritoriality in 1844, the clipper ships crowded the Shanghai readstead and American shipping won first place in that international port. But the clippers became obsolete. American shopping all but vanished from the China Sea. The American foreign policy, cever distinguished for its firm-ness in any direction, set no new forces to work. While successive Secretaries of State continued to hold apologetically to the principle of extraterritoriality, American business was forced to seek, with no little shame, the protection of British guns. American traders left Shanghai, and left behind them no American bank, and only menories of those two great American trading and shipping houses, Russell & Co. and Olyphant & Co.

However, the U. S. never quite lost her place in China. The thousands of U. S. missionaries did not go out to trade, but they did carry on a spiritual warfare that had material repercussions in America as well as in China. Religious, philanthropic, and educational societies invested from $40,000,000 to $ 50,000,000 (gold), which is equal to the investment of all other nations put together; and the annual U. S. remittances to Chinese missions, etc., traditionally in the millions of dollars and totaling $ 8,000,000 (gold) in 1928, have always played a certain part in balancing China's international trade. Much of this money went to the endowment and support of schools, two dozen colleges, and half a dozen big universities, where ambitious Chinese students become acquainted with the wonders of the big democracy across the Pacific. In missions and especially in missionary higher education, America has been consistently to the fore. The butt of sneer and jest from the businessman, the missionary has usually been "on the side of the natives" and has rarely asked for gun protection.

The American commercial advance in China was resumed toward the end of the nineteenth century when the Standard Oil Co. out-grew its American market for kerosene. Learning that 400,000,000 Chinese were burning sesame oil in their lamps, Mr. Rockefeller set forth to tap that enormous market in the nineties. With its head-quarters in Shanghai, his company expanded until its hong name, Mei foo, became a passport to the most distant villages of the interior. Other American corporations got the idea. Singer Sewing Machine went out in the wake of Standard Oil, and the Sun Maid RaisinGrowers Association distributed its surplus far and wide by suggesting to the Chinese mother that raisins would boess her with a boy. Andersen Meyer & Co. experimented successfully with a general export and import business; the U. S. flag appeared more frequently in Shanghai waters when the Pacific Mail established a semimonthly service. And in 1904 Frank Jay Raven (see page 115), the first of the modern American taipans, came to Shanghai to set up a group of banks and land companies.

Thereafter the pace accelerated. The National City is now the biggest U. S. financial agent on the Whangpoo, making no important investments, but financing millions of dollars' worth of U. S. trade. In 1919 Mr. Raven was joined by Cornelius Vander Starr (see page 115), who proceeded to make Shanghai the insurance center of the Orient. After the World War one began to hear that Henry Ford was about to revolutionize China with hundreds of millions to be spent in plants and roads. But nothing ever came of this, and Mr. Ford has no plant in China. Meanwhile, and during the booming twenties, there came a flock of U. S. companies whose stocks were soaring in New York-General Motors Corp,. E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., Eastman Kodak Co., the National Aniline & Chemical Co., and Colgate-Palmolive-Peet. American brokers, led by Swan, Culbertson & Fritz, installed batteries of telephones on the Bund, which put into the discard the oldtime exchange operator who called on his customers with pony and trap. In 1922 the China Trade Act was passed by Congress; by 1925 U. S. firms were given roughly the same tax privileges as the British had enjoyed all along; and in 1926 an income-tax ruling protected the incomes of the taipans from the clutches of Washington. In 1929 Sidney Zollicoffer Mitchell's Electric Bond & Share bought Shanghai's municipal power plant for $32,000,000 (gold) and proceeded under Taipan Hopkins (see page 116) to make the Shanghai Power Co. the biggest in the Far East; while the Behn brothers' I. T. & T. bought the Shanghai Telephone Co., most polyglot in the world, for $4,000,000 (gold).

All this has swelled the American volume of business with China, concentrated at Shanghai, with the result that the U. S. now supasses all competitors in volume of trade. But in one branch of industry there are scarcely any competitors: the U. S. has a virtual monopoly among foreigners in the air. This came about in 1928 when Washington got rumors that the entire civil aviation program of the Nanking Government was about to be turned over to the German Luft Hansa. The State Department got in touch with Aviation Exploration, Inc., a small syndicate headed by Clement Melville Keys for the purpose of surveying new air routes and turning the information over to some line for development. In March, 1929. a group headed by William B. Robertson, one of Lindbergh's backers, arrived in Shanghai with a Curtiss Falcon mail plane, a Curtiss Robin training ship, a Loening, and a small flying boat. After various vicissitudes, the China Ntional Aviation Corp. was set up and now has a non-monopoly contract with the Chinese Gocvernment, good until 1940. Forty-five per cent of its stock, originally controlled by Intercontinent Aviation Inc., was eventually bought by young Juan Terry Trippe's Pan American, and the real development was on. Passenger lines carrying mail on a per-pound basis now link Shanghai with Peiping, Nanking, Canton, Hankow, Chungking, Chengtum, and way stations. The vital inland route up the Yangtze is flown by American planes with American pilots backed by American capital. Chinese are trained as second pilots, whereupon many of them join the Chinese Army. The Chinese are reputedly better aviators than the Japanese and are building a big air fleet. Through the contacts gained by establishing air routes, American aviation companies are selling planes to the Chinese Government by the dozen. Their planes dominate the Chinese market.

Thus it appears that the Yankee has come to the Yangtze for good. But strangely enough, even though the American trade is the biggest, the American position is not the strongest. The casual visitor mentally notes that the Yankee puts on a bad show in the Orient. What with the sturdy British tradition, what with the aggressive Japanese, what with an obscure foreign policy, the U. S. does not seem able to perform as a big international power. Her prestige has not been helped by the recent manipulation of silver prices by Congress. Yet the new government at Nanking has for its heroes the fathers of the American Revolution. Hundreds of influential Chinese have been educated in America and welcome our trade, our capital, and, at least until recently, our institutions.