The Yankee dollar

"As part of the bolstering process the Chinese national dollar (CN$) has recently been anchored to the Yank dollar at rate 2,055 CN$ to one US$. What an opportunity! The inert clique take US$ at 2,055 through the loan funds, keep printing billions of CN$, and lift all controls in a terrific inflation splurge which has shot the real rate to 2.600:1. As US$ cannot be exported the boys do quite well. One result is that the US$ has also become considerably inflated in China.

"To give you some idea of the speed at which the toboggan is now moving—the cost of living index in Shanghai was 52% higher in May than in April, and in ten years it has risen [unclear: 000.] times. It now costs more to unload a ship at Shanghai than to load and ship the goods from America. Even with these prohibitive additional costs in Shanghai, traditional home of the world's cheapest labour, half the cotton factories, and in Canton most of the tobacco factories, have closed because they cannot compete with articles made in the country with the highest labour costs. You can imagine what has happened to China's export trade. For the first six months of 1946 exports through Shanghai totalled 16% of imports, and if UNRRA is considered, about 9% of imports.