Secret War in Shanghai An Untold Story of Espionage, Intrigue, and Treason in World War II Trade cloth - 1999

Details

• Title Secret War in Shanghai An Untold Story of Espionage, Intrigue, and Treason in World War II
• Author Wasserstein, Bernard
• Binding Trade Cloth
• Edition First Edition
• Pages 354 pages.
• Language EN
• Publisher Houghton Mifflin, Boston
• Date September 13, 1999
• ISBN 9780395985373

Introduction

The Second World War began in the Far East on 7 July 1937 with the Japanese onslaught on China. The battle of Shanghai in the autumn of that year marked the bloody climax of the first phase of the conflict. Britain and the United States were not drawn in formally until December 1941, the Soviet Union only in the final days in 1945. Yet in reality all the major powers found themselves embroiled from the outset in one way or another in the struggle for mastery of the Asiatic mainland. All had vital economic or strategic interests there. All maintained significant intelligence establishments there. Between 1937 and 1945 all sought to advance their interests, at times by applying brute force, more commonly by subtler, undercover means. The cockpit of this war was the intelligence capital of the Far East -- Shanghai. This book tells the story of that secret war. It is an enquiry into the interstices of espionage, subversion, deception and terror; into a murky political netherworld that produced strange, cross-cutting alliances and enmities, that evoked both heroism and treachery, and that reflected in microcosm the global war of nations.

With its lurid vice, savage criminality and conspiratorial politics, no place on earth in the 1930s and 1940s better exemplified the twilight zone of clandestine warfare than Shanghai. The wealth and sophistication of China's largest, most cosmopolitan and most dangerous city rendered it a killing-field of brutal economic competition, ideological struggle and murderous political intrigue.

Shanghai's ever-open door attracted an extraordinary agglomeration of ill-assorted foreign communities: 'White' and 'Red' Russians imported their fierce mutual animosities from their homeland and perpetuated them in their exotic exile; German businessmen dutifully celebrated Hitler's birthday at the German Garden Club but found to their dismay that they were outnumbered in Shanghai by thousands of 'non-Aryan' German-speaking refugees from Nazi persecution; upper-crust 'Shanghailander' Britons rubbed shoulders with Baghdadi Jewish property tycoons; Korean gangsters, Filipino musicians, low-life cardsharps, pickpockets and assorted con-men plied their various trades. So too did demi-mondaines of various nationalities who preyed on tourists at the Park, the Metropole and the Cathay hotels as well as on naval and military men of half a dozen countries in other, more questionable, haunts. Even in superficially respectable areas of the city meretricious glamour and horrific poverty, filth and squalor intertwined symbiotically. At Ciro's night-club, the first in the city to enjoy full air-conditioning, British taipans and Chinese mobsters tangoed with their wives or mistresses into the small hours. Outside, uniformed Russian doormen -- self-appointed ex-Tsarist 'generals' whose spurious medals could be purchased by the dozen in the Hongkew market -- held at bay importuning hordes of deformed Chinese beggars. In less salubrious dancehalls, bars and 'joints', lines of Russian 'taxi-dancers' and Chinese 'sing-song girls' sat waiting for customers. In 1935 one in every thirteen women in Shanghai was reckoned to be a prostitute.

Throughout the city violence was a constant threat whether in the form of political assassinations, gang warfare or lovers' fights. The stained cobbles of Blood Alley (rue Chu Pao-san) in Frenchtown bore witness to the frequency of brawls among foreign soldiers and sailors. God, who allowed Shanghai to endure, owed an apology to Sodom and Gomorrah -- so said the American Christian missionaries who strove to combat the devil in his own habitation. A Chinese journalist agreed: Shanghai, he wrote, was 'a city of forty-eight-storey skyscrapers built upon twenty-four layers of hell'.

The imposing European-style buildings of the banks and merchant houses on the Bund, Shanghai's famous waterfront on the Whangpoo River, gave an appearance of solidity and permanence. But the city was constructed on what were literally shaky foundations. Many of its towering structures were built on concrete rafts that floated on mud flats.

Modern Shanghai was to a large extent a foreign, not Chinese, creation. The old 'native city' of Nantao had, it is true, been an important port and market town for several centuries. But significant urban development began only after the signature of the Treaty of Nanking between Britain and China in 1842, at the conclusion of the first Opium War. With that and subsequent agreements with the USA and France, China agreed to open Shanghai and certain other ports to foreign commerce. Budding on these 'unequal treaties' and innterpreting them in a far-reaching way, the foreign powers gradually extended the privileges accorded to their merchants in the 'treaty ports'. Parts of these citiesssss were appropriated as 'concessions' ruled directly by the powers as quasi-colonies. Within these enclaves foreigners could conduct business according to their own laws, exempt from taxation by the Chinese and immune from interference by Chinese courts or officials. Within half a century Shanghai grew to be the central clearinghouse of waterborne trade between the entire Yangtse river system and the rest of the world. The port's 35 miles of wharves could accommodate over 170 ships and 500 sea-going junks at a time. Half of all China's foreign trade was cleared through Shanghai.

By the late'1930s Shanghai had sprouted into one of the urban wonders of the world. China's most dynamic city, her economic, cultural and political hub, Shanghai was the supreme prize awaiting the victor in the struggle for power among the would-be heirs of the Manchu emperors who had been overthrown in the Chinese revolution of 1911 but not replaced by any stable form of national government. With a population of more than 5 million, Shanghai was the sixth largest city in the world, the greatest commercial entrepôt in the Far East and a magnet for foreign, particularly British, investment.

Like Gaul, Shanghai was divided into three parts (see map on pp. x-xi). Each was a virtually sovereign jurisdiction with its own government, armed force and police. The largest, in both area and population, was the Chinese Municipality of Greater Shanghai which formed part of the Republic of China. This, however, constituted only the outer periphery of the city proper. Since the suppression of a communist revolt in the city in 1927, the central government at Nanking, headed by General Chiang Kai-shek, had sought to consolidate its authority over the whole of Shanghai. Chiang's Kuomintang party ran what amounted to a one-party police state. But it found that, notwithstanding its formal sovereignty, its writ did not run very far even in the Chinese municipality. Warlords and gangster-politicians competed for power with one another, with the central government and with new-style Chinese capitalists. And all of them regarded with rapacious envy the two prosperous foreign enclaves in the centre of the city.

The smaller of these, the French Concession, was a mainly residential district abutting on to part of the river foreshore. It had a population of half a million in 1936; a small fraction were foreigners, and of these only 2,342 were French civilians. They were outnumbered by 11,628 Russian residents (mainly anti-Bolshevik Whites who had fled from Siberia at the end of the Russian Civil War) and 2,468 British. The concession was ruled as an almost absolute monarchy by the French Consul-General. He was nominally assisted by a municipal council appointed by himself, but his relationship with them was akin to that between Louis XIV and the court of Versailles. For security the Consul-General could call on a force of 4,000 gendarmes, under 300 of whom were French, the remainder Chinese or Vietnamese. The French police maintained a supremely well-informed political section and supremely corrupt departments supposedly devoted to the suppression of drugs and vice -- in reality much more devoted to the illicit profits to be derived from these and other rackets.

The heart of Shanghai, its commercial and industrial core, encompassing hundreds of factories, miles of quays and godowns (warehouses), as well as parks and pleasure-grounds, fashionable clubs and hotels, and the consulates of the great powers, formed an entity unique in world politics -- the international Settlement. This area had a population of about 1.2 million in 1936 of whom only about 40,000 were foreigners. Yet this minority had been the settlement's rulers since its foundation.

Unlike most of the other foreign concessions in China, the International Settlement did not belong to any one power. The settlement's constitution, the Land Regulations, first issued by the local Chinese authority in 1845 and subsequently revised several times, took final form in 1898. This peculiar document, although recognized as binding in treaties between the major powers and China, left several issues unclear -- notably the question of sovereignty. Although the settlement was in every real political sense a foreign colonial enclave, sovereignty over it remained theoretically Chinese. The ruling body, the Shanghai Municipal Council, was limited from above by the residual authority of the 'Consular Body' and from below by the 'ratepayers'. These were a small group of property-owners, mainly British and Americans (in later years also Japanese), dominated by the taipans, heads of the great British merchant houses and banks. The ratepayers met in a public meeting once a year to decide major issues of policy and to elect the council. The council's chief civil servant, Godfrey Phillips, a former president of the Cambridge Union, was one of the most powerful men in Shanghai. A high property qualification restricted voting rights to a small minority of the European population. In 1935, only 3,852 out of the 38,940 foreign residents in the settlement had the right to vote. Until the Second World War this alien oligarchy effectively controlled the destiny of Shanghai. If the French Concession was pre-revolutionary France in exotic miniature, the International Settlement was an oriental echo of England before the Reform Act.

At the apex of Anglo-Saxon society in Shanghai stood the Keswick brothers, Tony and John, taipans of the great Jardine, Matheson trading concern. Known as the 'muckle house' on account of its Scottish origins, Jardine, Matheson employed over 100,000 workers in its mills, factories and godowns, and owned a fleet of more than 30 merchant and passenger ships. Tony Keswick exercised political as well as economic leadership of the settlement, since he also served as chairman of the Shanghai Municipal Council. His brother John's academic performance at Cambridge had been poor (a third class in the historical tripos at Trinity College) but he learned fluent Chinese in Shanghai, both Mandarin and the Shanghai dialect. A friendly, outgoing character, John had what was described as 'a remarkably pronounced back to his head which so resembled the statues of the Chinese god of happiness, Fu Shen, that in the country Chinese often touched him in the belief that some of his happiness would rub off. It usually did.' The brothers would be seen at all the major social events of the Shanghai season -- charity balls, club dinners, race meetings and the 'paper hunt' in which the rituals of English rural sportsmanship were refashioned to conform to the topography of the surrounding Chinese countryside where canals rather than hedges were the main challenges to horsemanship. The Keswicks' peacetime role was extended, in a different form, during the Second World War when they took charge of the British subversive warfare effort in China.

There were no political parties in municipal affairs but political struggle in the settlement was nevertheless intense. In the 1930s it took two main forms: resistance by the foreign communities to the Chinese government's demands for the effective recognition and exercise of Chinese sovereignty in the settlement; and growing conflict between Japan and the Anglo-Saxon powers for control of the affairs of the settlement.

Although to outward appearance 'international', the settlement's Municipal Council was really governed by British interests during most of its history. Until the early 1930s British and American councillors were always a majority on the council. The Germans had had one seat until the First World War but were excluded thereafter and replaced by Japan, whose citizens by that time formed the largest single community in foreign Shanghai. A second Japanese seat was added in 1927 but the Japanese pressed hard for greater representation. With their growing population and investment in the settlement they obviously constituted the wave of the future. As for the Chinese majority of the population, they had no say at all in the government of the settlement until 1928 when three Chinese members were added for the first time to the nine foreign members of the Council. Two more joined them in 1930. But in keeping with the council's undemocratic nature, the Chinese members were not directly elected but were nominated by the Chinese Ratepayers' Association, a body representing wealthy Chinese business interests.

The settlement's political structure reflected the economic reality of Britain's supremacy in the city -- and of her quasi-imperial dominance in China as a whole. Thirty-eight per cent of all foreign holdings in China in 1931 were British; and three-quarters of Britain's $963 million stake in the country was invested in Shanghai. The British controlled more than half of all China's shipping. The inspector-general of the Chinese customs and most of his senior staff were British citizens. In China, as elsewhere, the British, conscious of the dangers of what we would now call 'imperial over- stretch', eschewed formal annexation. Instead, they opted for an informal imperialism of which Shanghai was a pre-eminent model.

Copyright (C) 1998 by Bernard Wasserstein. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

"A richly documented and fascinating exploration of hundreds of the foreigners and secret agents who schemed and scrabbledin the turbulent city, as all pretense at law and order vanished." -- Jonathan Spence

"A Byzantine web of subterfuge, human greed, survival and death is brilliantly recounted ... Wasserstein brings to vivid life a unique period of modern history within just eighteen square miles of what was--and is--one of the most thrilling, perplexing and enigmatic cities on earth." The Times of London

"Wasserstein recounts this utterly enthralling chronicle with consummate skill, not to mention astonishingly comprehensive research. He brings to life with extraordinary clarity not only one of the most convoluted episodes of modern Chinese history, but also a cast of diverse, colorful characters and the Byzantine machinations of their lives in Shanghai, capturing with all the intensity of a blockbusting novelist the mood and intrigues of what was one of the great cities of the world." Far Eastern Economic Review