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An otherwise untraced numerical examination of the Shanghai Licensed Pilots' Association and the financial health of its members, bringing to the surface the many tensions caused by domestic and foreign economic pressures and the uncertainty caused by the gradual interwar restoration of Chinese, rather than foreign, control over customs and shipping. The author, Y. H. J. Cloarec (b. 1889), entered the customs service in 1912 and was posted to Shanghai, Hankou, and Mukden before the First World War. In April 1931, after assignments in Shanghai and at Lungchow, he became audit secretary for the Shanghai Inspectorate of Customs, earning a promotion to the senior rank of commissioner in 1932. A French national, he is a murky figure who held a senior rank in the collaborationist customs service in Shanghai during the Second World War. In the opinion of several French colleagues, he was "rabid anti-Free French" (quoted in White, pp. 533-4). In the late 1920s, tensions arose between pilots and the General Chamber of Commerce over a proposed reorganization of the pilotage service and the decline in pilot earnings caused by currency fluctuations. Calls from the Shanghai Licensed Pilots' Association for an increase in pilotage tariffs resulted in deadlock, and Cloarec was tasked, as a well-informed neutral party, with ruling on the appropriate way forward. His recommendations equate to a 13.8 percent increase in the tariff, including the important provision that 40 percent be paid in gold units and 60 percent in Shanghai taels to protect pilots from currency depreciation. He suggests that the staff of pilots be capped at 43, to account for the reduction in international trade after the depression, and that vacancies be filled by apprentice Chinese pilots in preparation for an expected Chinese government takeover of the whole service. "It has of course been impossible for me to give any advice on the question which is causing the most anxiety to Pilots, viz. security of employment for the future and guarantee for the return of the capital invested by them in the Association" (pp. 2-3). Provenance: Captain James Edwin Inch (1870-1944), a master mariner and member of the Shanghai Licensed Pilots' Association, with his name on the front cover. Inch was a former managing director of China Motors, a motor vehicle bodywork company, and an active member of the St Patrick's Society of Shanghai, an association for Irish expatriates. He was caricatured as a burly figure by the Shanghai cartoonist Sapajou (Georgii Avksent'ievich Sapojnikoff, a White Russian ex-soldier). Benjamin Geoffrey White, "'A Question of Principle with Political Implications' Investigating Collaboration in the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, 1945 1946", Modern Asian Studies, vol. 44, no. 3, 2010. Foolscap folio (338 x 210 mm). Together, 44 sheets duplicated typescript, text one side only, hole-punched and bound into contemporary manila card spring-clip folder, front cover with manuscript title. In black archival folder. Folder soiled and worn, spring-clip mechanism corroded and partially broken, pages retained safely, contents toned, first leaf quite darkly and with rust spots, a few chips, no loss to text: very good.
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