Wartime Shanghai

Wen-hsin Yeh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415174411
• eBook ISBN: 9781136858086
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Wartime Shanghai is a lively account of the political and social situation between 1937 and 1946. It explores the deep political rivalries between Nationalist groups, the intrigue of international espionage and how Shanghai society, from European administrators to Chinese film makers, collaborated with, or resisted, the Japanese occupation.
Drawing on archival and published sources in English, French, Chinese and Japanese, the authors show the diversity of groups and communities that made up wartime Shanghai. This book is an engaging collection of essays written on an exciting, but often neglected episode of Chinese history.

1 Prologue

Shanghai Besieged, 1937-45

Wen-hsin Yeh

Shanghai in the 1930s was one of the most sophisticated and complex metropolises in the world.¹ When the Japanese launched their assault on the Chinese parts of the city in August 1937, Shanghai also became the first major city to come under the impact of concerted attack by armored columns and bomber armadas in the mechanized warfare of World War II. The fighting disrupted the well established patterns of relationships among the city’s various constituent components.² With the fall of the Chinese city to the Japanese, it also thrust upon the unoccupied sectors—the International Settlement and the French Concession—the new tasks of survival in a hostile environment. The financial, manufacturing, publishing, and entertainment industries continued to thrive. The political autonomy that the largely British and American concession authorities sought to maintain vis-à-vis the Japanese, however, was precarious at best. On the morning Japan bombed Pearl Harbor (December 8, 1941), Japanese troops in Shanghai simultaneously moved into the International Settlement and occupied the entire city.

Different parts of Shanghai thus fared differently during the War of Resistance (1937-45). Besides the conflicts between the Chinese and the Japanese, there were divisions that traced their origin to the wars and treaties between China and European powers in the nineteenth century. Chinese resistance against Japanese aggression took place in the context of a broader nationalism that had been developing for decades against colonial influence and imperialist expansion, formal as well as informal. This contextual complexity meant that those occupying different positions in the city experienced the war differently, from perspectives unique to themselves. What, for example, did it mean to be a European instead of a Chinese in the International Settlement during the war? How significant was it to be a nationalist instead of a socialist in the city? Did the war forge among Shanghai’s diverse population a new sense of community, or did it simply serve to underscore the differences that had fragmented Shanghai society? What sorts of new consciousness did the war foster? And what were the legacies of these eight years, when Shanghai, the center of Chinese modernity, was exposed to the most violent forms of war and occupation?

In the years since 1945, in a climate dominated by the civil conflicts between the Nationalists and the Communists, few attempts have been made to come to terms with the history of wartime Shanghai in its full complexity. General histories published in China and Taiwan offer cursory treatment, if at all, of the subject, painting quite often a picture of sharp contrasts between resistance and collaboration, heroes and traitors, patriotism and treason. Not only has the interpretive framework been constraining; much has been left utterly unexplored about the happenings as such.

The war, with the ceaseless reconfigurations of national strategies and local tactics, the demands on the front line as well as in the home base in Tokyo or Chongqing, and the ever shifting balance of power among the contestants, was a critical juncture in Shanghai’s modern transformation. It also meant different things to different people at different points in time. This is not the place to offer a detailed account of the political events that took place during the war. Several general trends none the less deserve to be noted to provide a backdrop to the specificities of war in Shanghai.

Warfare in Shanghai

The war broke out in Shanghai on August 13, 1937, and ended in August 1945. The eight years in between can be divided into two phases: a gudao (lone islet) period when all parts of the city except the International Settlement and the French Concession were taken by the Japanese, and a full occupation period ushered in by the Japanese seizure of the International Settlement in December 1941. The French Concession, by then under a council appointed by the Vichy government, was spared the occupation. It was, instead, handed over to a Japanese-backed Chinese puppet regime—the Wang Jingwei regime in Nanjing—subsequent to the conclusion of a treaty in 1943 in which the French relinquished their extraterritoriality.³

The gudao, as it happened, was formed in a period of heavy fighting in 1937, and was made possible by European treaty privileges in China. The heavy fighting had much to do with Chiang Kai-shek’s resolve, in the aftermath of the Japanese attack in August on Shanghai, to reverse his long-held policies followed up to that point, and to opt for armed resistance instead of negotiated peace. Chiang launched a full-scale campaign of resistance, and ordered, over the course of the following weeks, over seventy battalions of Chinese troops into the Shanghai area.⁴

The ensuing battle of Shanghai, which ended in late October with the retreat of Chinese troops, was one of the most fiercely contested struggles in China’s War of Resistance (1937–45) against Japan. It pitched a patchwork of Chinese troops, hastily assembled, against a smaller yet much better equipped Japanese force. The Japanese, intent upon delivering a knockout blow, eventually beefed up their military strength to 200,000 men. The Chinese, with an aroused civilian public that was mobilized to stand behind the military, put up a determined resistance. By the time Chinese troops abandoned their attempt to defend Shanghai, they had exacted a toll of 50,000 Japanese casualties. They had also left behind nearly 300,000 dead and wounded of their own.

The troops that pulled out of Shanghai withdrew westward along the highways and railroads in the direction of Nanjing. Five weeks later, Nanjing, the Nationalist capital, also fell. The fall of that city set the stage for the infamous Japanese rape and massacre of the city’s civilians. The number of dead was said to be as high as 200,000. By mid-December 1937, nearly 10,000 of the approximately 25,000 men who graduated between 1929 and 1937 from the Central Military Academy, Chiang Kai-shek’s prized officer training institution, had been killed in the fighting. Nearly one-third of the entire Chinese military force under Nationalist command had also fallen on the battlefield.⁵;

Within a matter of but three months, then, large parts of the lower Yangzi delta region, the heartland of China’s modern industry and commerce, were laid to waste, and numerous mills, shops, schools, and factories—in some cities up to 90 percent—were destroyed by incendiary bombs and artillery fire.⁶ The affluent as well as the destitute gathered their family members and took to the road. Some followed the retreating troops up the Yangzi into China’s vast interior. Others went into hiding either among the peasants in the countryside or up into the hills and provincial borderlands. Shanghai’s International Settlement and the French Concession, which had promptly declared their neutrality as soon as armed conflict broke out, were seen by all as a haven in a land of conflagration.

The thin line drawn by Suzhou Creek, which bounded the northern limits of the International Settlement, became a zone of demarcation between two worlds. North of the creek the explosions of aircraft, machine guns, rifles, and hand grenades reverberated in the air in a sky darkened by the smoke arising from crumbling structures and smoldering buildings. South of the creek, from the roofs, balconies and windows of multiple-storeyed modern buildings—the International Hotel, the China Hotel, the Nine Heavens pub—crowds of men and women looked down into the war zone with the aid of binoculars. A contingent of 500 men, assigned by the Nationalist army to guard the general warehouse of the Bank of China, the Bank of Communications, the Central Bank, and the Farmers’ Bank, thus carried out their mission on the north bank in full view of the concerned spectators in the concessions. These fighters, of course, also spared time to receive visitors who navigated across the creek to salute their determined resistance.⁷

Nationalist state-owned enterprises set the example by moving their operations and valuables into the concessions. The Bank of China directed its Nanjing personnel to report to Shanghai. The Central Bank moved its currency reserves into the vaults in the concessions. Many schools, newspapers, and even government departments moved their archives and equipment into the International Settlement both for safe keeping and for continuous operation under the protection of the British and the American flags.

Refugees, similarly, poured into the ten square miles of the conjoined foreign concessions from all parts of the lower Yangzi, swelling the population from 1.5 million to 3 million by mid-September and increasing the size of the average household to thirty-one people. Concession authorities and charitable organizations turned schools, temples, and public places into hundreds of refugee shelters. Tens of thousands of men and women none the less clogged the back alleys and laid down their bedding on the city’s sidewalks. Rental charges skyrocketed while sub-rentals multiplied. By late fall, entire shanty towns, in defiance of municipal codes and ordinances, sprang up along the edges of the concessions—home to the new arrivals who now tried to make their living as day laborers and itinerant peddlers.⁸

As the Chinese part of the city lay in ruins, the foreign concessions not only maintained an appearance of business as usual, but further entered a period of war-stimulated boom, thanks to the increased demand generated by the sudden influx of wealth and people. One major source of increased demand for a foothold in the gudao was none other than the Nationalist government, which had, by late 1938, relocated its wartime capital to Chongqing. The Nationalist authorities had always relied upon Shanghai as a source of capital and tax revenue. They had also always accorded Shanghai its due recognition as the national capital of media, public opinion, political intelligence, and propaganda, and designed their own organs accordingly. With the outbreak of the war and with the relocation of the central government into the isolation of the interior, it became all the more important that the state hold on to this window to the outside world via the International Settlement.

The pre-war International Settlement, especially the quarter-square-mile area along the Bund, had long been an established center of multinational banking, where a large number of foreign and Chinese-owned enterprises, including the Bank of China and the Bank of Communications, had maintained their head offices. The sub-district on Wangping Street, which lay a few blocks inland behind the Bund, meanwhile, was where a large number of major Chinese newspapers and publishing houses had clustered—a sort of Fleet Street to the Bund’s Wall Street. With these institutions in place, the gudao emerged, after the fall of Nanjing, as a strategically critical site for a Nationalist presence in the lower Yangzi region. The state transferred into the International Settlement a vast amount of resources and personnel under its control. With the quiet support of the British and the Americans in Shanghai, state-owned banks continued to fly the Chinese national flag atop their office buildings while successfully maintaining the circulation of the fabi, the Nationalist currency, as the legal tender in the lower Yangzi. Critical Nationalist government and party organs, including the official wire service, the Central News Agency, were allowed not only to open up liaison offices but also to build radio stations. A whole network of finance and information was set up that linked Shanghai with Chongqing.

The sudden increase of the wealthy among the city’s population provided a second source of demand that stimulated the boom in the city. Theaters, hotels, restaurants, night clubs, amusement parks, and gambling casinos were in high demand. Fiction writers made a fortune serializing old-fashioned mandarin duck and butterfly romances that had little to say on current events.⁹ With the production of historical melodramas, the film industry entered a period of growth that—as Poshek Fu suggests in Chapter 6—could almost be considered golden in its history.

After a brief interval, many textile mills, formerly situated elsewhere, relocated in the Settlement and resumed their operation under foreign registration. Chinese entrepreneurs rushed to move their plants from the interior to take advantage of the abundance of labor due to the refugee populations, the access to raw materials, the accumulation of liquid capital in the Shanghai banks, and, above all, the sense of relative safety from war. They regained their productive energy soon enough, and small enterprises proliferated in response to rising demand, creating the economic conditions for the “flourishing” of the gudao.¹⁰ The stock market and the commodity exchange traded at a level of activity and total capitalization that well exceeded their pre-war record. Trade organizations and social clubs, such as the Bankers’ Association, the Chamber of Commerce, and the YMCA, not only retained their pre-war level of activism but also went on to spawn ancillary organizations that mobilized the city’s middle class for a variety of causes. The social pages of journals and newspapers were crowded with announcements of fund-raisers such as amateur theatrical performances and sewing campaigns for soldiers on the front line.¹¹ The gudao, so actively linked by an army of smugglers with the hinterland, bounced back to such a high level of prosperity, with such minimal structural disturbance of well established patterns of social and economic lives, that the war, far from leveling off inequalities between the rich and the poor, increased the disparity and intensified the stratification.

Puppet Regime

Early in 1938, as the Japanese gave up attempts to bring Chiang Kai-shek to the negotiation table for a speedy resolution of the state of war, they adjusted their policies from invasion to occupation, and sought to work out efficient ways that might permit them to hold Chinese territories securely with a minimal drain on their energy. Instead of creating one puppet regime for all occupied territories in China, however, political prudence combined with conflictual factional interests within the Japanese camp led to the creation of multiple collaborationist governments: in Manchuria, as was done in 1931, in north China, as was accomplished in late 1937, and in central China. The occupied sectors of Shanghai, to be sure, had been placed under a puppet municipal government headed by a local collaborator named Su Xiwen as soon as the city fell. For the right candidate to head a puppet regime in Nanjing with nominal responsibilities over all of central China, the Japanese none the less regarded it necessary to seek out political figures of national stature, and such prospective collaborators turned out to be concentrated in Shanghai’s foreign concessions. Japanese recruiters, representing the military, the military intelligence, and the Foreign Ministry, thus busied themselves proffering deals in Shanghai—in rivalry as well as in cooperation among themselves.

Several notable Chinese—Zhou F...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Prologue: Shanghai besieged, 1937–45
• 2. Introduction: the struggle to survive
• 3. Ambiguities of occupation: foreign resisters and collaborators in wartime Shanghai
• 4. The other Japanese community: leftwing Japanese activities in wartime Shanghai
• 5. Chinese capitalists and the Japanese: collaboration and resistance in the Shanghai area, 1937–45
• 6. Projecting ambivalence: Chinese cinema in semi-occupied Shanghai, 1937–41
• 7. Urban warfare and underground resistance: heroism in the Chinese secret service during the War of Resistance
• 8. Urban controls in wartime Shanghai
• 9. The purge in Shanghai, 1945–46: the Sarly affair and the end of the French Concession
• Bibliography
• Index