"If God lets Shanghai endure," wrote a disgusted missionary, "he owes an apology to Sodom and Gomorrah." Shanghai seems very much in vogue at the moment -- this new book is only one of several featuring the city currently on display in Taipei bookstores. But any modern eminence it may claim is nothing to the extraordinary life the place hosted in the period prior to World War II.
It had risen to prominence following the British success, in 1842, of wresting Hong Kong from China for the purpose of the more profitably pursuing its opium trade. Demands to establish "treaty ports" at a variety of other locations on the Chinese coast followed.
Very extensive powers were quickly acquired, including the control all customs operations, and the right of foreign residents to be tried only by courts established by their compatriots. Virtual colonies were thus established in the heart of Chinese ports, and Shanghai, only 22.5km from the mouth of the Yangtze River, leading deep into the Chinese interior, was the most important of them.
The city soon established itself as one of the most extraordinary places on earth, and the world's largest city in the middle of the twentieth century. Some of the worst living and working conditions on the planet jostled side by side with fabulous wealth and social display, both expatriate and Chinese. Everybody was welcome, from starving peasants to international adventurers, and nearly everybody came.
By 1932, some 48,000 foreigners from 50 different countries lived in the city's International Settlement, and that was without counting the 25,000 to 50,000 White Russians. This was an expatriate group particularly resented by the others who considered them, the men and the women, to be sexual predators. The appearance of Russian prostitutes, serving all races indiscriminately, was, says Dong, a shattering blow to white prestige in China in the 1930s.
Shanghai's night life was as lavish and bizarre as anything on screen in Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge. Extravagant and ostentatious parties, dance halls specializing in jazz with locally recruited dancing partners known as "taxi-girls," and (most reminiscent of the Paris of the 1890s evoked so inventively by Luhrmann) the fantastic Great World, an emporium of theaters, distorting mirrors, shooting galleries, magicians and more, patronized by "the Chinese masses and thrill-seeking Europeans alike." Many newcomers to Shanghai were appalled. The English aesthete Harold Acton, normally a lover of all things Chinese, considered the Bund a "ponderous parody", its ostentatious buildings "poisonous toadstools ... imposing from the river, but essentially soulless" and having "little connection with the people of China."
Another writer who visited was Arthur Ransome, the British journalist who witnessed the Russian Revolution, and was later to write the children's classic Swallows and Amazons and its many successors. His article in the UK's Manchester Guardian newspaper in 1926 became notorious in the International Settlement.
"They seem to live in a comfortable but hermetically sealed glass case," he wrote of its inhabitants. "They look round on their magnificent buildings and are surprised that China is not grateful to them for these gifts, forgetting that the money to build them came out of China ... Europe is very far away from them, and China, at their doors, seems almost as far."
Some of the most interesting pages of this book describe expatriate rebels, often journalists and frequently Americans. These people enjoyed being in China, but loathed the arrogance and privilege of many of the other foreign residents, particularly the British.
One such was Agnes Smedley who arrived in 1930 as China correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung. With her vocal espousal of "free love" (she had already entered into one "revolutionary marriage" with a Bengali nationalist in Berlin), she arrived in the world of Shanghai like a comet from a particularly remote corner of the heavens.
A communist sympathizer, she was soon causing havoc with her doctrines among the wives of Long March veterans in Mao Tse-tung's stronghold of Yenan. Later she had an affair with the Russian-born German, Richard Sorge, who was to organize the Sorge spy ring, for the benefit of the Soviet Union, in Tokyo during World War II.
Needless to say, the future Madame Mao, Chiang Ching, makes her appearance in what Dong calls this "most cruel and mercenary of cities." But Shanghai wins many and varied accolades in this book, veering from "the most pleasure-mad, rapacious, corrupt, strife-ridden, licentious, squalid and decadent city in the world" to being "Asia's greatest metropolis, a brash sprawling juggernaut of a city that dominated the rest of the country with its power, sophistication, and, most of all, money." Elsewhere the author describes truly atrocious factory conditions in Shanghai. Match factories employing children, for example, used a kind of phosphorus that caused painful skin inflammation when handled. It had been banned in Europe, but was still used in Shanghai because it was cheap.
Politics are covered too, from the terrible "Shanghai massacre" of striking labor unionists in 1927, via the Japanese invasion 10 years later, to the eventual emergence of "Red Shanghai" in 1949.
This is likely to be a successful book. It's fluent and very readable. There's probably no new information in it, but swathes of the extraordinary tale of Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s are covered, and the author dutifully lists her sources -- all the books of note on the period, presumably, plus a few more -- in a chapter by chapter Bibliography. The lack of notes relating specific material to specific sources is a weakness, but this is a work aimed at an intelligent popular readership rather than at scholars, and in such a book it is an omission that doesn't really matter.
A more serious omission is a good range of pictures. There are some, but they're all black and white; the famous color posters of the inter-war years, for instance, are not represented. Disaster and death are on show, but the opulence of old Shanghai, so well described, isn't anywhere effectively illustrated.
Publication Notes:
The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City
By Stella Dong
318 pages
Available at FNAC
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