Free & Equal

For 14 months American businessmen had operated in China in a kind of legal vacuum, created by the U.S.'s renunciation of extraterritoriality in 1943. This week they were back on firmer ground, although the "Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Navigation" between the U.S. and China, signed recently at Nanking, did not restore the old license for freebooting exploitation.

Modeled in some ways on the prewar reciprocal trade pacts, the treaty provided for free & equal trade on a most-favored-nation basis. It contained some specific safeguards for American investment, but not at the expense of the Chinese nation or people. Besides furnishing a much-needed business blueprint, the conclusion of the pact was a peacetime implementation of a primary U.S. war thesis: that China is a big power now, and deserves to be treated as such. U.S. business naturally hoped that China would soon begin to behave like a grownup.

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