Term paper of Asia: Chiang kai-shek in the Shanghai massacre

A Revolution Is Not a Tea Party: The "Shanghai Mind(s)" Reconsidered

Author(s): Nicholas R. Clifford

Source: Pacific Historical Review , Nov., 1990, Vol. 59, No. 4 (Nov., 1990), pp. 501-526

Published by: University of California Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3640237

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A Revolution Is Not a Tea Party: The "Shanghai Mind(s)" Reconsidered

NICHOLAS R. CLIFFORD

The author is a member of the history department at Middlebury College, Vermont.

The events of May 30 [1925] in Shanghai have been called "China's 'Boston Tea Party.'" A Revolution is not a dinner party. May 30th will be... like the fall of the Bastille in Europe.'

Ever since the opening of the Chinese treaty ports after the Opium War, the foreigners who lived and worked in those cities had constituted a very particular kind of colonial society. Unlike the British in Bombay or Nairobi, or the Americans in Manila, they found themselves in a country that was not part of formal empire, but rather an independent nation. Yet the institutions of extraterritoriality diminished China's sovereignty, and hence the treaty port communities enjoyed a degree of independence from both China and their mother countries that was unique, subject neither to the political controls nor the financial demands that would have been imposed on them elsewhere. It was a seeming moral independence as well; precisely because China was technically sovereign, her foreign residents lacked

1. Frank Rawlinson, in the China Christian Yearbook, 1926 (Shanghai, 1926), xvi; Mao Zedong, "Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan" (March, 1927), in Selected Readings from the Works of Mao Tse-tung (Peking, 1967), 22; minute by Frank Ashton-Gwatkin, Jan. 26, 1926, Public Record Office (PRO), Great Britain, Foreign Office, General Political Corre- spondence (FO 371) F248/13/10.

Pacific Historical Review ? 1990 by the Pacific Coast Branch American Historical Association 501

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502 Pacific Historical Review

both the sense of responsibility for her ills, and the sense of mission civilisatrice that often found its way into the rhetoric of formal imperialism.

Despite the mass of reminiscences and the volume of correspondence to be found in diplomatic, missionary, and other archives, historians have paid relatively little attention to the expatriate communities that lived in the cities of the colonial world. James L. Huskey's recent examination of Americans in Shanghai after the First World War is a signifi- cant exception to this generalization, and a splendid example of how to study informal diplomacy.2 The present article is an attempt to define one facet of the Western presence in China, a facet which, as Huskey shows, while not defined by Americans, was one in which they fully shared.

Visitors to China were struck by the outlook of foreign treaty port society, which they characterized as a "treaty port mentality," or a "Shanghai mind." The term denoted a form of local culture that set expatriates off from people of similar backgrounds, education, and social class at home. Though the outlook was as old as the treaty ports themselves, the classic description came from Arthur Ransome, who arrived in China as a reporter for the Manchester Guardian in early 1927 when the National Revolutionary Army was closing in on Shanghai, and a foreign force of some 16,000 men was landing to protect the foreign settlements. His essay on "The Shanghai Mind," which first appeared in the Guardian on May 2, 1927, and was reprinted in The Chinese Puzzle, was the most famous (and the most damning) attempt to explain the beliefs and attitudes of foreign Shanghai, and primarily of British Shanghai. When Ransome was through, he had made the term synonymous with a particularly unpleasant combi- nation of ethnocentrism, arrogance, and racism. Ransome condemned his fellow countrymen in Shanghai, condemned their unthinking loyalty to their narrow world even when it contradicted the broader interests of Great Britain, and con- demned their treatment of the Chinese.

2. James Layton Huskey, "Americans in Shanghai: Community Forma- tion and Response to Revolution, 1919-1928" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina, 1985).

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Shanghai Mind(s) 503

Nothing could be further from the truth than to imagine that the Englishmen in Shanghai represent an English outpost or share the English point of view. The Shanghailanders hold that loyalty begins at home and that their primary allegiance is to Shanghai. They proclaim that British property is in danger when they need British troops to defend them, but... the accep- tance of this assistance does not in anyway prevent them from doing what they can to make impossible the realisation of a British policy which they do not like.... Controlling the bottle- neck through which the bulk of the China trade must pass, they prosper upon it coming and going and forget that it is the trade that is valuable to England and not the magnificent buildings which profits and small taxes allowed them to erect. English prestige is at stake when their interests are threatened, but unless English policy coincides with their own they are prepared at any moment to be the Ulster of the East.3

"The article does not overstate the case," observed Sir John Pratt at the Foreign Office, who had recently served at the Shanghai consulate-general, and was well aware of the ways in which British Shanghai and its London lobbyists could embarrass Whitehall's attempts to devise a rational China policy.4 Some Americans agreed. "The British people at home have been fed on a certain type of colonial imperial- istic propaganda for many years," claimed John B. Powell, the American editor of the China Weekly Review, "and it required something like this book to let them know about Britain's real destiny in the Orient."5 "I was finding out that practically all of the British in Shanghai were die-hard reac- tionaries," observed the radical American journalist Milly Bennett in an unpublished memoir, "and that the only way to gain access to the business and social circles that they con- trolled, was to echo their hidebound dogma which came to something like that the Chinese were a dirty, low, mongrel race, that they should be everlastingly grateful for being booted around by the extremely superior British, and how

3. Arthur Ransome, The Chinese Puzzle (London, 1927), 28-29. 4. Pratt minute of May 5, 1927, FO, F4313/4313/10, PRO. 5. J. B. Powell, "Best Books in English on China," in China Christian

Yearbook, 1928 (Shanghai, 1928), 379.

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504 Pacific Historical Review

what the Chinese really needed was the firm British govern- ment to guide them."6

Though the British might define this kind of Shanghai mind, others were not exempt. Both Bennett and Powell were appalled at what happened when their fellow Americans fell for British ways, and at least one American observer believed that his countrymen's tradition of racism made them even worse offenders than the British.7 Yet the picture of the Shang- hai mind given by observers such as Ransome or Bennett remains something of a caricature. For they looked only at the extreme manifestation of this mentality, seeing it against the background of the great crisis of early 1927, when Shang- hai captured the world's headlines, and not only foreign prop- erty and foreign privilege, but also foreign life seemed in danger. Extremism, of course, makes good copy for journal- ists, for it speaks with a clarity that may neither be audible in day-to-day discourse nor visible in day-to-day behavior. Yet there was a Shanghai mind -or rather there were at least two Shanghai minds--and they are significant not only as types of Western perception of the China problem during a time of revolution, but also for the ways in which they illuminate a very specific kind of colonial world.

By the 1920s, Shanghai had a population of about 37,600 foreigners, of whom all but a handful lived in the Settlement or the French Concession. While the 14,000 Japanese made up the largest single group, it was the 9,000 British who dom- inated the city's foreign community, who had by far the larg- est foreign investment in the city, and who controlled the administration of the International Settlement. Yet as Huskey points out, the decade after the First World War saw the growth of a new and increasingly self confident American community.8 It was manifest in the new American Club on

6. Milly Bennett (Mildred Jacqueline Bremler) Papers, box 11-2, Hoover Institution, Stanford, California.

7. China Weekly Review (hereafter cited as CWR) (Shanghai), XLI, no. 1 (June 4, 1927), 3-4; no. 6 (July 9, 1927), 137-138; Lloyd Balderston Swift, ed., Lloyd Balderston's Visit to China, 1925-1926: His Reports and Letters Home While on an Exploratory Trip for the American Friends Service Committee (Bethesda, Md., 1988), 280; Huskey, "Americans in Shanghai," chap. 2.

8. Huskey, chap. I.

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Shanghai Mind(s) 505

Foochow Road, the new Shanghai American School and the American Community Church on the Avenue P6tain in the French Concession. It was evident in Powell's China Weekly Review, bragging about rising American trade figures, and in the American-style China Press, a newspaper that challenged the preeminence of the British North China Daily News. It was evident in new styles of architecture, of advertising, of mar- keting, of entertainment as Shanghai enthusiastically entered the jazz age. From 1923 to 1928, the chairman of the Shanghai Municipal Council was Sterling Fessenden, a native of Maine and a Bowdoin graduate, one of a handful of Americans who had made it to the top in what was otherwise a very British society. To British residents he was "the Lord Mayor of Shang- hai"; to American critics, like acting consul-general Clarence E. Gauss in 1927, he was more British than the British, a man whose "faithful obedience to the will of the reactionary major- ity of the Council and their supporters" simply provided an international facade behind which the Settlement's British

administration could go about its business.9 For all that Shanghai was a meeting ground of East and

West (a thousand books, pamphlets, articles, and speeches repeated this commonplace) it was a very particular East that met a very particular West. In both its Chinese and its for- eign populations, Shanghai was an immigrant city. As Arthur Ransome suggested, the society of foreign Shanghai differed from the society of its mother countries. What changed its expatriates, however, was less contact with China and its cul- ture than the distance separating them from their own home- lands, a distance that insulated them from the social and political changes taking place in their native societies and cultures.10 Above all they were set apart by the daily experi- ence of a position of superiority to which most of them could never have aspired at home. In Shanghai, in their well-staffed

9. Gauss, Clarence E. to Dept. of State, May 5, 1927, file 893.102S/117, U.S. Dept. of State Papers, Record Group 59, National Archives. Gauss was infuriated by Fessenden's criticisms of American policy during the crisis of 1927, calling him "not only distinctly a liability to the American Government in its position in China, but an open offense to that Government."

10. See, for instance, Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (London, 1974), 60-61.

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506 Pacific Historical Review

houses on Bubbling Well Road, or in the villas and apart- ments that still line the tree-shaded streets of the old French

concession, in their own schools, churches, business associa- tions, and social clubs, expatriate Westerners could still enjoy the sort of society of deference that was vanishing from their own countries after the First World War.

Though many had come to get rich, or simply for adven- ture, by the 1920s more and more Westerners considered Shanghai home. Some had been born there; others had set- tled down, built houses, investing in local real estate or in debentures issued by the Shanghai Municipal Council or the French Municipal Council. Men and women like these had a stake in the city, and seeing their own economic and social well-being intimately tied to the question of Shanghai's future, they resisted any radical change that might jeopar- dize that future.

The overthrow of the Manchu dynasty in 1912 and the repercussions of the Great War and the Russian revolution had all changed the world of treaty-port society. Though they still enjoyed the privileges won by the forceful diplo- macy of the nineteenth century, Westerners in the 1920s found their physical superiority threatened by the declining power of the British empire, and their moral authority challenged by the growth of a radical nationalism in China and by anti- imperial sentiment at home. Convinced that their presence benefited both their host country and their home countries, they fought back, trying to persuade their governments of the need to maintain their preferential position while China descended into the violent anarchy of warlordism after 1916. The new nationalism of the twenties, however, identified the foreigners as a chief cause of China's misfortunes, and after 1923 the Communist-Guomindang alliance prepared an assault -economic, military, moral, and psychological--on the for- eign position. The storm broke in Shanghai on May 30, 1925, when Chinese and Sikh police, commanded by a British offi- cer, fired into a crowd of demonstrators, killing eleven and wounding many more, thus provoking the greatest anti- imperialist movement the country had yet seen. By 1927, when Ransome wrote, Shanghai found itself the target both

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Shanghai Mind(s) 507

of an external military campaign from Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist armies, and an internal armed rising led by his communist allies.

Faced by revolution in China and uncertain of backing at home, Shanghai's Westerners needed to interpret their world in terms both comprehensible and useful to themselves and their supporters at home. There were three parts to this world. First were their own communities in Shanghai itself. Second, there were their homelands and home societies, whose rela- tionship to their own expatriate community they must define. Third, there was the vast world of China, a country on whose periphery they lived, yet whose language they seldom spoke and whose traditions and history they seldom sought to under- stand. As Edward Said has argued of the European view of the Middle East, Westerners were the heirs of over half a century of "Orientalism," a name he uses to embrace a kind of cultural discourse whose categories not only made possible a Western knowledge of the East, but also formed part of the Western apparatus of control.' To this orientalist tradition was added, after the Russian revolution and after the Soviet intervention in China, the new vocabulary of anti-Bolshevism. From these languages Westerners could choose certain terms to define their position, while disallowing others, and could construe those terms in ways that excluded other possibili- ties. Hence there arose an ideological construct that helped Westerners to maintain not only a physical but also a moral superiority in a country where not even the excuse of formal colonialism could justify their privileges.

Of course, not all foreigners in Shanghai thought alike. There were obvious differences among nationalities. Ameri- cans were confident that because they alone had never had predatory designs on the Middle Kingdom, their country had a special relationship to China and enjoyed a special place in Chinese affections. "It seems to me to be a wonder- fully touching thing," said Charles Crane, a former minister to Peking and stockholder in a Shanghai daily paper, "that this oldest nation, the greatest nation in size, and the wisest

11. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978), esp. 1-29.

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508 Pacific Historical Review

nation of the world, should put her trust so entirely in our hands. It is a wonderful responsibility."12 The French knew that because they were untainted by the racism of British and Americans--what Jacques Meyrier, the French consul-general, called "Anglo-Saxon superciliousness and its contempt for the Chinese"-they occupied a special place in the hearts and minds of Chinese (although L'tcho de Chine, the French daily newspaper, could be just as contemptuous of things Chinese as the North China).13 The British knew that because they had been in China the longest, had done the most for China, had (unlike the flighty Americans) made their actions conform to their words, they received a special and deserved respect from responsible Chinese.14 (One might add that the Japan- ese knew that because they shared with China a common cultural heritage, they occupied a special place in the senti- ments of the Chinese.)

There were also differences among and within profes- sions. Businessmen whose interests embraced all China saw

the country differently from those whose interests were restricted to Shanghai. Upcountry missionaries differed from those at mission headquarters in Shanghai or at home in London, New York, Rome, or Paris; young differed from old, and Protestant fundamentalists different from Protes- tant modernists. It is much harder to know if there were

differences among levels of society within foreign Shanghai, for they were well hidden. To take one very obvious point, there was almost no public protest against the decidedly

12. American Relations with China: A Report of the Conference Held at Johns Hopkins University, September 17-20, 1925, with Supplementary Materials, and Arranged to Be of Use to Discussion Groups, Current Events Clubs, and University Classes (Baltimore, Md., 1925), 133. The genesis of the idea is treated at length in Michael Hunt, The Making of a Special Relationship: The United States and China to 1914 (New York, 1983).

13. The phrase is found in Meyrier to Martel, Sept. 20, 1925, vol 336, Archives de la Ministbre des Affaires Etrangbres (AMAE), Paris: Asie 1918-29: Chine, deuxibme partie. Wilden to Ministibre des Affaires Etrangeres (MAE), Feb. 13, 1924, contrasts French benevolence to the Chinese inhabitants of the Concession with the Anglo-American lack of any sense of obligation to those in the Settlement; it was a favorite theme of French consular correspondence in these years.

14. An example is in Eric Teichman, "Analysis of the Chinese Nationalist Complex... February 1927," FO, F4178/2/10, PRO.

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Shanghai Mind(s) 509

undemocratic machinery of government that ensured that control of the International Settlement and the French Con-

cession would stay in the hands of a small group of men representing the important business and real estate interests. Though the British journal Finance and Commerce did occa- sionally call for a broader representation of interests in the International Settlement, and the American China Weekly Review complained of the Council's narrow British cast, such instances were rare. Any real call for democratization would have opened a Pandora's box, out of which would rise the awkward specter of Chinese political power.15

Such lives, such privileges, such relationships to the coun- try in which they lived, and the countries from which they had come, helped to shape the mind of Shanghai's West- erners, to set the terms in which they viewed the world, and to define the sort of behavior that they thought rational and logical. Without trying to get into the problems of mentalitd, we can isolate a set of beliefs which were common in the 1920s

among the sorts of Shanghailanders whom Ransome and oth- ers described.

I. Besides the assumptions of cultural and class superior- ity, there remained an implicit assumption of racial superior- ity as well. Whatever might be the triumphs at home of the new cultural anthropology, Shanghai still echoed the argu- ments of an earlier scientific racism. "It has been calculated

that the nervous energy of the educated Chinese is 0.24 of the white man; and that of the laborer 0.18," wrote Putnam Weale (Bertram Lenox Simpson), explaining why it would never do to employ Chinese in the place of individual foreigners. "In an office it thus takes four Chinese to do the work of one

foreigner, and in manual work five men."16 II. The West had opened the road into the modern world

and China must follow, gratefully learning from its tutors international trade, modern industry, modern marketing, and modern business practices. Nor were businessmen China's only teachers. Missionaries, particularly Anglo-American

15. Finance and Commerce (Shanghai), XI, no. 13 (April 1, 1925), 174; XII, no. 1 (July 1, 1925), 1.

16. Putnam Weale (B. Lenox Simpson), Why China Sees Red (New York, 1925), 282.

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510 Pacific Historical Review

Protestant missionaries, sought to save not only Chinese souls, but also Chinese bodies, and preached not only the Gospel but the good news of modern secular civilization as well (by which they meant Anglo-Saxon civilization).17 So, too, French Catholic missionaries (in the eyes of the French government, if not of the Vatican) brought to China the blessings of French culture.18

III. One of the most important lessons for Chinese to learn was that of modern municipal administration. For- eigners commonly (but wrongly) believed that Shanghai had been no more than a tiny fishing village on a mudflat before its opening to the West in 1843. Since then the foreign settle- ments, with their good order, modern infrastructure, and rule of law, had become models which the Chinese should study and imitate, rather than simply denouncing them as imperialist institutions which must be reclaimed. "The shock- ingly administered Chinese municipalities lie round the Inter- national Settlement and the French Concession," wrote a local British trade journal, "and stand as an object lesson of the failure of the Chinese to grasp even dimly what municipal government means."19 The overthrow of the Manchus in 1912 had made matters even worse. "Republicanism," as the North China Daily News put it, "in China means nothing but the breakdown of all authority, disruption, violation of treaties, insecurity of life and property, impossibility of trade."20 Never in history, wrote the tcho de Chine, had a nation seen such chaos as republican China, a country in which "everyone

17. See Louis E. Nantz, "American Missionaries and British Merchants," China Press (Shanghai), March 4, 1926, p. 12. Nantz's view is an admiring one; not all agreed: "les Universiteis et IEcoles ambricains faisaient, non de la propagande religieuse, mais de la propagande anglo-saxonne, propagande de langue, propagande sociale, propagande politique...," complained the French minister in Peking. "Les americains, avec leurs Universit6s, leurs Ecoles, leurs oeuvres protestantes du Y.M.C.A., tendaient ia jouer un rile politique en Chine." Fleuriau to MAE, April 28, 1924, vol. 257, AMAE.

18. There is a good deal of correspondence on this subject at the Quai d'Orsay; for an example, see Martel to MAE, May 5, 1926, vol. 258, AMAE. Though times change, sentiments, mutatis mutandis, remain the same. See the letter of Michele Hoffman in the New York Times of August 17, 1988, uphold- ing China's mission civilisatrice in contemporary Tibet.

19. Finance and Commerce, XV, no. 9 (March 2, 1927), 92. 20. North China Herald (NCH) (Shanghai), April 5, 1924, p. 5.

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Shanghai Mind(s) 511

rules and no one obeys."21 The Chinese, wrote Weale, must be denied any real political power. Their presence on a body like the Shanghai Municipal Council would only "lead to a lowering of the standard since they could not rise superior to conditions which are natural in the country unless the machinery which is raising the level is kept out of their hands."22 In 1922 the Washington Conference had foolishly promised certain concessions, thus exciting Chinese hopes without demanding the assumption of any corresponding Chi- nese responsibilities. The country's chaotic state and the cor- ruption and greed of warlords and politicians showed how necessary it was, both for foreigners and Chinese, that the special privileges of foreigners continue until China put her house in order.23

IV. Ordinary Chinese, real Chinese, are admirable--"the frugal, industrious and naturally good-hearted people who form perhaps 98% of the population."24 Responsible Chinese, from the peasant patiently tilling the fields to the modern Shanghai businessman, welcomed the foreign presence and foreign efforts to keep order and to improve China. Yet some Chinese had been spoiled by self-seeking politicians and gen- erals, by students who shouted democratic slogans without understanding democratic institutions or democratic culture. (The guardians of modern Shanghai used similar language when they railed against the "small handful of troublemak- ers" in Tiananmen Square who had to be dispersed by the People's Liberation Army on June 4, 1989).25 Missionary schools, particularly those run by Americans, pandered to the self-delusions of the Chinese students (an Anglican bishop worried that American educators in China were paying too much attention to 1776 and all that).26 Above all they had been spoiled by Bolsheviks, who through a combination of

21. Echo de Chine (Shanghai), Jan. 8, 1926, p. 7. 22. Weale, Why China Sees Red, 256. 23. See, for instance, NCH, July 5, 1924, pp. 3-4; Sept. 27, 1924, pp. 495-496. 24. Finance and Commerce, XIV, no. 12 (Sept. 22, 1926), 122. 25. Xinmin Wanbao [New People's Evening News] (Shanghai), June 4,

1989.

26. Edwin S. Cunningham to Dept. of State, May 15, 1925, Consulate General, Shanghai, 1925, part 54, U.S. Dept. of State Papers, Record Group 84, National Archives (hereafter cited as CGS).

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512 Pacific Historical Review

gold and appeals to mob xenophobia, excited them to believe that expelling all foreigners (save Soviet Russians) would solve China's problems.

V. Since the war, and particularly since the Washington Conference, the powers, led by Britain and America, had followed a weak and vacillating policy. Their ministers and their legations were in Peking, a city that lived on its past, out of touch with changing China, while Shanghai looked to the future. Meanwhile, influential voices at home distorted the facts. In America, they came from the powerful Protes- tant missionary lobby, whose optimistic view of Chinese nationalism misrepresented the true state of the country. (Paris had the same misgivings about the Vatican: "in Rome, as in other capitals, there has been pictured a new and reborn China which never existed.")27 In England missionaries shared the blame with liberals and socialists, particularly those who sat as Labour members of Parliament.

VI. The powers could save themselves a good deal of trouble if they would take common action to force China to respect the treaties she herself had signed. "Every Concession to Chinese Officials means Fresh Attacks on Foreigners: Treaty Violations come from Weakness and Vacillation," ran the headline for an article by the American Rodney Gilbert, sometime acting editor of the North China.28 An insistence on obligations would benefit not only foreigners but also Chi- nese, and responsible ones knew it.

Ideas like these define the sort of Shanghai mind about which Ransome and others wrote. In private, it found expres- sion in the deliberations of the Shanghai Municipal Council, of foreign chambers of commerce and business interests, and in the correspondence of foreign consuls, like Sidney Barton of Great Britain and Edwin Cunningham of the United States. Its public voice was most audible in the columns of the North China Daily News, largest and most influential of the treaty port papers, whose outspoken editor, O. M. Green, was a perpetual thorn in the sides both of liberals and of the British Foreign Office. Sir John Pratt put it most bluntly: "Green's

27. Fleuriau to MAE, Feb. 22, 1924, vol. 257, AMAE. 28. NCH, July 26, 1924, p. 122.

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Shanghai Mind(s) 513

greatest fault is his colossal ignorance and the narrow out- look which is the result of ignorance."29

If such views were to carry conviction, the Shanghai mind had to deny the legitimacy of any Chinese protest. Take, for example, the use made of two terms that appear frequently in Western writing about China: "anti-foreign" and "interven- tion." If the foreign presence were essentially benevolent, then opposition to it could only prove China's backwardness and cultural isolation. The term "anti-foreign" was used indis- criminately to refer to virtually any utterance or action that opposed or just wanted to modify the privileges of outsiders. Xenophobic mobs who shouted "Sha yangguizi!" (kill the for- eign devils) were anti-foreign; but so were students who cried "Abolish the Unequal Treaties!" or "Down with Imperial- ism!" So even were those who, like the moderate leaders of the Chinese General Chamber of Commerce, simply wanted to negotiate changes in the governance of the International Settlement. "Anti-foreign" had a particular resonance among Westerners, associated as it was in the popular mind with the Boxers of 1900 who had slaughtered tens of thousands of Chinese Christians and their foreign missionaries. Though sometimes even the North China Daily News might admit that modern anti-foreignism was not Boxerism, in that it was "impelled by an intelligent and greatly awakened national consciousness,"30 it was not usually so discerning. When Shanghai was gripped by a general strike in the aftermath of the May 30th incident, even J. B. Powell, a man usually immune to foreign hysteria, raised the Boxer ghost by a head- line reminding his readers of "What happened Twenty-Five Years Ago This Month!"31

"I have been all through the various phases of Foreign- Chinese relations for nearly forty years," wrote a correspon- dent in a local paper in 1924, "and my feeling is that there is a more bitter and wide-spread feeling of antiforeignism preva- lent today than at any previous time.... Psychologically it is inexplicable. Foreigners are doing nothing but good works

29. Pratt minute of Nov. 17, 1926, FO, F5398/5298,10, PRO. 30. NCH, April 23, 1925, p. 315; Weale, Why China Sees Red, 29. 31. CWR, XXXIII, no. 3 (June 20, 1925), 52-54.

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514 Pacific Historical Review

for China and the Chinese.... One can only conclude the Chinese are in some respect like children who have not yet grown up and are only partially civilized. They understand force and are most humbly amenable to it, but kindly and generous treatment is interpreted as a sign of weakness on the part of foreigners."32 Here are drawn together several of the major themes of the Shanghai mind: the Chinese are backwards and childlike; they must be handled firmly; for- eigners are blameless in China's troubles; and that there is no need to distinguish between the xenophobia of earlier decades and the patriotic movement of the present.

The last point is crucial, of course. For all of the ink spilled on the question of anti-foreignism in the treaty port papers, in consular reports, in private correspondence, nowhere was there a foreign attempt to define it, to say what anti-foreignism was and was not. Yet Chinese activists drew distinctions between the old and the new. Though some com- munists might praise the Boxers,33 radicals rejected the appli- cation of the term "anti-foreign" (paiwai) to themselves. Rather they called themselves patriots, whose opposition to foreign privilege grew from an aspiration to China's equality. "The Student movement is NOT Bolshevik, NOT Anti-Christian, NOT Anti-Foreign, BUT CRY FOR HUMANITY," read posters in English put up in the wake of the 30th shooting. (Other posters depicting fat British capitalists, morning-coated and top-hatted, ordering policemen to fire on defenseless workers, or--more insultingly--as turtles and dogs, were not translated.)34 It was the foreigners, not Chinese, they said, who were guilty of Boxer-like barbarism. A Guomindang statement of 1925 denounced the British actions as reprehen- sible by any modern enlightened (wenming) standards; they "ought to make all Christians and Anglo-Saxon lovers of free- dom and independence ashamed."35 Chinese nationalism was

32. Quoted in CWR, XXX, no. 9 (Nov. 1, 1924), 265-267. 33. Jeffrey Wasserstrom, "'Civilzation' and Its Discontents: the Boxers

and Luddites as Heroes and Villains," Theory and Society, XVI (1987), 657-707, esp. 687-688.

34. See photograph in Weale, Why China Sees Red, facing p. 131; and photographs in Cunningham to Dept. of State, June 12, 1925, CGS 1925, part 48.

35. Lo Jialun, ed., Geming wenxian [Documents of the Revolution], XVIII (Taipei, n.d.), 3279-80; Wasserstrom, "Civilization," 686.

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Shanghai Mind(s) 515

progressive, patriotic, forward looking; paiwai implied a reactionary cultural blindness that was a thing of the past. Communists at Shanghai University even used the term to denounce their rivals who wanted to oust all foreigners, and thus failed to understand the need for Soviet help in China's struggle for liberation. That kind of paiwaizhuyi (anti- foreignism), of course, merely sought to stem the tides of history.36

For foreigners to allow such distinctions would make legit- imate a vocabulary of Chinese protest and thus undercut the moral basis of their position. Hence the need to reduce all such opposition, whether coming from Chinese liberals edu- cated in America, from Chinese Christian or anti-Christian leaders, from Marxist intellectuals, striking mill workers, right-wing and left-wing military leaders, to the simple frame of anti-foreignism. It would not do to admit a Chinese claim to a Western political language that could be turned against Westerners.

So, too, the term "intervention" was very much in the air in those days, though again it was rarely defined. To many, intervention would be simply another kind of tutelage. Its purpose, wrote the Echo de Chine, was not the absorption of China, for no one wanted that, but "to give the country a course by forcing her to undertake a reform program under the enlightened direction of competent leaders.""37 "Innocent though their responsibility is for her troubles," observed the North China, "they cannot evade the consequent duty of help- ing her pick up the pieces."38 "The doctrine that China must work out her own salvation has been tried and found want-

ing," declared A. O. Lang, chairman of the Court of Direc- tors of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank at the ceremonies in June 1923 opening its new Shanghai offices (at the time the second largest bank building in the world). "It is not only

36. Guang Liang, "Xingshipai 'Paiwaizhuyi'--'guojiazhuyi' de fandong- xing" [The Anti-Foreignism of the Awakened Lion clique-the counter- revolutionary aspects of 'nationalism'] reprinted from the Shang Da wusa tekan [Shanghai University Special Bulletin on May 30th] in Huang Meizhen, Shi Yuanhua, Zhang Yun, eds., Shanghai Daxue shiliao [Historical materials on Shanghai University] (Shanghai, 1984), 229-232.

37. tcho de Chine, April 20, 1926, p. 1. 38. NCH, Feb. 23, 1924, p. 275.

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516 Pacific Historical Review

derided by most intelligent Chinese, but has been abandoned by all thinking foreigners.

"We have reluctantly come to the conclusion that the time has come to give foreign interference a trial, not in any aggressive spirit, but with the firm and friendly determina- tion to save the country from the chaotic conditions to which military mis-government and political demoralization have brought it.... I am persuaded that firm insistence... on essen- tial reforms, backed, if necessary, by an unequivocal demon- stration of force, will not only speedily result in the restoration of order and security, but will be welcomed by the masses of China, who are suffering, no less than ourselves, from the long continued misgovernment and lawlessness of their country."39 The North China, pointing to the parallels between 1925 and 1900, reminded its readers that "the allied armies saved China in 1900. They crushed the Boxers and gave her a new lease of life. Will the Powers be good enough to under- take the same task again? We see no reason to suppose that they will, for the simple reason that they do not understand the situation and are not likely to understand it unless it is lit for them by the light of a national conflagration."4 Even liberals, like Thomas Millard, founder of the China Weekly Review and later correspondent for the New York Times, warned after May 30 that "a serious anti-foreign uprising" could be checked only if the Powers were to "consider the adoption of a policy designed to arrest the forces of disintegration in China...." The Manchester Guardian's correspondent took a similar line.41 China's crisis was the world's danger, warned a writer in the Echo de Chine, and the day might soon come when "we will again see the waves of great Asiatic invasions unleashed against Europe."42 In the crisis of early 1927, as thousands of British troops, American marines, and others landed on the rain-swept wharves of Shanghai, the American and French chambers of commerce demanded strong mea-

39. Ibid., June 30, 1923, pp. 883-884. 40. Ibid., August 29, 1925, p. 239. 41. New York Times, June 5, 1925, p. 1; Manchester Guardian, June 2, 1925,

p. 9. It is only fair to note that Millard and the Guardian were usually determined opponents of forceful intervention.

42. Echo de Chine, Jan. 8, 1926, p. 7.

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Shanghai Mind(s) 517

sures against "militarism, brigandage, and Bolshevism" and the hordes barbares that threatened to engulf the city.43

Few wanted outright military intervention, though the American General William Crozier thought a mere eight to ten divisions would do the trick, since the Chinese lacked the patriotism necessary for guerrilla war.44 Usually the term "intervention" simply hovered in the background, appearing in editorials in the North China Daily News, in speeches by leaders of foreign Shanghai, and in communications sent home by foreign chambers of commerce. It was, in short, a vague threat, a specter of military force that could be used to keep China in her place. "The Chinese have special charac- teristics, and are unlike Mexicans, Indians, Arabs and Egyp- tians," noted a British businessman. "They are easily dealt with if force is merely displayed.... In many respects, China is a comic opera country and can easily be controlled by a strong hand."45

This was the sort of Shanghai mind that Ransome and other observers depicted. There was, however, another sort as well. James Huskey distinguishes between what he calls the parochial and cosmopolitan elements of the city's Ameri- can community, the former holding attitudes typical of the conventional Shanghai mind, and the latter representing views that were more equalitarian and more sympathetic to an emerging Chinese nationalism.46 Similar distinctions can be made for the British community as well, though the cos- mopolitan element there never had the same sort of public voice that Powell's China Weekly Review gave the Americans.

Yet the views of the cosmopolitans (whom I will simply call liberals) themselves constituted simply another kind of

43. The statement of the American Chamber of Commerce is in NCH, April 5, 1927, p. 54; the French Chamber of Commerce's statement is in Chambre de Commerce Franco-asiatique (Paris) to Briand, March 31, 1927, vol. 341, AMAE.

44. NCH, Sept. 3, 1927, pp. 428-429. 45. Letter excerpted in FO, F2642/194/10 of 1925. In a memorandum of

Jan. 31, 1927, Pratt used similar arguments, but in a way to try to prevent, rather than encourage, the sending of a large military force to Shanghai. See FO F979/156/10, ibid.

46. Huskey, "Americans in Shanghai," esp. pp. 35-71; see also Huskey's "The Cosmopolitan Connection," Diplomatic History, XI (1987), 227-242.

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518 Pacific Historical Review

Shanghai mind. No less than that of the conservatives, the liberal representation of China built on a rhetoric, on images, terms, and a discourse that was made in the West and hence "truthful" in Western terms. If the conservatives clung to the "Orientalist" tradition, using images that stressed the "other- ness" (and, therefore, the abnormality) of the Chinese, liber- als also had their ways of appropriating China to the West. Thus they, too, risked denying to China and Chinese history their own autonomy. Missionaries were particularly apt to speak in these terms. Such men denied that movements like May 30th were anti-foreign, and thought such outbursts thor- oughly justified by the arrogance and brutality of so many foreign Shanghailanders. "We have nothing to fear from nationalism.... [T]rue religion is opposed neither to patrio- tism nor to the legitimate aspirations of the Chinese people," wrote Celso Constantini, the Vatican's representative in 1927.47 Some even praised the anti-Christian movements for helping Westerners better understand the essence of their faith: "a

blessing in disguise, according to an American Methodist newly arrived in the hectic winter of 1927. "It is clarifying the issue, separating from Christianity much excess baggage that has been clouding its clear message, teaching us all what Christianity is not, and leading us to seek desperately for what it is."48 With a cultural arrogance remarkable even in those days, the Shanghai Y.M.C.A. leader Fletcher Brockman unfurled the Stars and Stripes over the Chinese revolution and claimed it firmly for the United States. "It was no Chi- nese who overthrew the Manchu dynasty," he told an audi- ence in St. Louis, "but three Americans -George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln!"49

While conservatives argued that "responsible" Chinese favored the Western presence, but were afraid to say so in

47. Cardinal Celso Constantini, Rdforme des Missions au XXe siacle (Tournai, 1960), 99.

48. Paul Johnson, "Learning China," China Christian Advocate (Shanghai), XIV, no. 2 (March 2, 1927), 13-15. For a similar view from a German Catholic missionary (J. M. Bretscheid), see Constantini, Rdforme, 102-103.

49. A "diabolically clever speech," commented the North China Herald, not because of Brockman's appropriation of China's past and present, but because Brockman's own institution on Szechuen Road owed its safety to the foreign troops. NCH May 7, 1927, pp. 243, 233.

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Shanghai Mind(s) 519

public, liberals let the Chinese speak for themselves. But they chose those who did the speaking, looking to men and women who talked the language of Western liberalism, which brought forth both Western comprehension and Western sympathy." Such men, often educated in America or at mis- sionary universities like St. John's, can be thought of perhaps as "compradors of rhetoric," men who mediated between the aspirations of a violent and radical Chinese revolution and the liberal world of the 1920s whose new shape the Washing- ton Conference had attempted to define.51 They did this by appealing to foreign -particularly American - sympathies with national independence, implying that Chinese national- ism was no more than a laudable sentiment learned from the

West, and that the foreign presence, far from helping China, blocked her progress towards democracy. So, while Guomin- dang and Communist labor organizers were busy in the terri- ble sweatshops of China's mills and factories, P. W. Kuo blandly told a gathering at Johns Hopkins in the summer of 1925 that modern labor and humanitarian laws were in effect

throughout China "with the exception of the treaty ports."52 Jesus was a nationalist who favored self-determination, argued T. Z. Koo (Gu Ziren) of the Y.M.C.A. (B.A. St. John's, 1907), though he admitted that His conception of nationalism far transcended that of this sinful world.53

David Yui (Yu Rizhang, B.A. St. John's, 1902, M.A. Har- vard, 1910) of the National Christian Council was one of the

50. See for instance, Milton Stauffer, ed., China Her Own Interpreter: Chapters by a Group of Nationals Interpreting the Christian Movement (New York, 1927). Stauffer was educational secretary of the Student Volunteer Movement, an American Protestant group.

51. The term "comprador" was used to describe those Chinese who, because of their familiarity with Chinese business practice, markets, exchanges, and above all, Chinese language, worked as the agents of western firms in China. I have also adapted a phrase used by Brian Martin in his work on the Shanghai underground; he calls "compradors of violence" the Chinese gang leaders who worked with the foreign police forces, "'The Pact with the Devil': The Relationship between the Green Gang and the French Concession Author- ities, 1925-1935" (paper prepared for the Conference on Shanghai History, Shanghai, September 14-17, 1988), 6.

52. American Relations with China, 131. 53. T. Z. Koo, "The Nationalism of Jesus," Chinese Recorder (Shanghai),

LVIII, no. 3 (March, 1927), 163-169.

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520 Pacific Historical Review

most effective of these spokesmen who played on Western sympathies to gain the ends of moderate nationalism. "The growth of nationalism among the Chinese people is indeed remarkable," he wrote in early 1926. "The national spirit is penetrating every institution and movement. In general it is safe to say that each institution and movement will rise or fall in accordance with whether it has the approval or disap- proval of the national spirit."54 (A year later, Mao Zedong would impose a similar test on would-be Chinese leaders, but for him the test was not one of bourgeois nationalism, West- ern style, but rather of violent peasant revolution.)55 Yet Yui's review of China's foreign policy at the Honolulu Conference of the Institute for Pacific Relations in 1927 was very much that of an American liberal, and included the common denun- ciation of the Communists for having caused the Nanking incident of March 1927 in which six foreigners were killed.56 David Yui is "one of the ablest and most reliable Christian

leaders whom I know anywhere," wrote John R. Mott of the Y.M.C.A. to President Calvin Coolidge, while Lloyd Balderston of the American Friends Service Committee called him "a

man who must impress anyone, I think, as a great man from any point of view. His spirit is so beautiful; no other word is good enough and that is too weak.""57

Precisely because these compradors of rhetoric spoke a language that resonated so effectively in Western minds, their antagonists considered them particularly dangerous. After the National Christian Council called for an impartial inves- tigation of the May 30th affair, the North China Daily News began a series of attacks on the organization in general and David Yui in particular that would last for the next several years. Edwin Cunningham, the American consul-general thought Yui had forfeited all the trust foreigners had earlier

54. National Christian Council Bulletin (Shanghai), no. 21 (Nov., 1926), 8-10. 55. Mao, "Hunan Report," 20-31. 56. David Z. T. Yui, "China and Pacific Relations During 1925-1927, J.

B. Condliffe, ed., Problems of the Pacific: Proceedings of the Second Conference of the Institute of Pacific Relations, Honolulu, Hawaii, July 15 to 29, 1927 (Chicago, 1928), 17-22.

57. Mott to Coolidge, June 22, 1925, file 893.00/6032, NA; Balderston, Lloyd Balderston's Visit, 32.

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Shanghai Mind(s) 521

accorded him. Bishop F. R. Graves of the American Church Mission (Protestant Episcopal), a man who was deeply dis- turbed by the rise of Chinese nationalism, suspected him of aiding the students and professors who broke away from St. John's in the summer of 1925 to found a new university. "Mr. Yui is an able and exceedingly smooth person. I have known him from the time when he was a little child and have never

trusted him, but he has had a quite a remarkable reputation amongst many foreigners."58

Behind the liberal circumscription of the Chinese revo- lution lay more than simply a desire to understand what was happening in China. "A revolution is not a dinner party,..." cried Mao in 1927. "It is an act of violence by which one class overthrows another."59 But well-meaning foreigners saw May 30th as China's Boston Tea Party, while in the Foreign Office's Far Eastern Department, Frank Ashton-Gwatkin likened it to China's quatorze juillet. The similes are revealing: on the one hand, the Chinese revolution was a laudable rising against oppression, which implied no attack on property or the estab- lished order; on the other, it was the start of an outburst that would culminate in a new reign of Terror and Virtue, under a blood red (rather than sea-green) Incorruptible. For liber- als, the translation of the Chinese revolution into Western terms came not simply from a need to make it comprehensi- ble. It was also the expression of an attempt to tame, to domes- ticate, what was a violent, destructive, and bloody upheaval, and to assure themselves that in the revolutionary China of the future, foreign business, foreign missions, even perhaps some foreign privilege would still have a place.

These two Shanghai minds were reflected in the internal politics of the foreign community during the great revolu- tion of the mid 1920s, and it was the crisis that brought them out most clearly. Huskey describes well how some Shanghai Americans broke away from the mainstream of Shanghai-

58. Graves to the Rev. John Wood, June 19, 1925, file 113, F. R. Graves Papers, Record Group 64, Archives of the Episcopal Church, Austin, Texas. See Graves to Wood, July 2 and July 7, 1925; and Oct. 15, 1926, file 115, ibid. The new institution became Guang Hua University.

59. Mao, "Hunan Report," 25.

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522 Pacific Historical Review

landers mentality in the years after May 30th. As the Nation- alist armies drew near the city in the late 1926 and early 1927, J. B. Powell used the pages of the China Weekly Review to attack the Shanghai Municipal Council, Britain's China pol- icy, and those of his countrymen with whom he disagreed. An exasperated American Chamber of Commerce, crying that Powell had betrayed foreign Shanghai in its hour of need, sought to oust him from membership in April 1927, and Powell only made matters worse when he argued-for the most part correctly-that his Review, in opposing inter- vention, or sanctions for Nanking, was simply upholding Washington's policy.60

British Shanghai had no such public voice as Powell's. The Foreign Office was appalled at the reactionary nature of Shanghai's Britons, and more particularly of the North China Herald. So were some individuals, though their complaints were usually made in private. An exception was L. A. Lyall, the British Commissioner of Customs, who called Shanghai- landers "the spoilt children of empire," and had a brilliant idea about how to deal with the Old Lady of the Bund: trans- late the North China's editorials into Russian, and let the Soviets take the blame for 0. M. Green's obnoxious effusions.61

Nonetheless, some of the leaders of the British community realized that change could not be postponed indefinitely. In August 1925, after almost three months of general strike and anti-British boycott, broadly based trade organizations like the British Chamber of Commerce and the China Association

were far more ready to make concessions to moderate Chi- nese nationalism than were the North China or the Shanghai Municipal Council. They did this by stating their readiness to seat Chinese on the Council, and to find a solution to the complicated jurisdictional dispute of the Settlement's Shang- hai Mixed Court.62

60. Huskey, "Americans in Shanghai," chaps. 4-5. 61. L. A. Lyall, China (New York, 1934), 317; CWR, XXXVIII (Nov. 27,

1926), 348; NCH Nov. 18, 1926, pp. 343-344, 352. 62. China Association and British Chamber of Commerce Shanghai to

China Association, London, August 5, 1925, FO, F3833/2/10, PRO; Barton to Palairet, Sept. 7, 1925, FO, F5390/348/10, ibid.,; British Chamber of Commerce Journal, VII, no. 75 (Sept., 1925), 232-224. For the council's unwillingness to

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Shanghai Mind(s) 523

Nonetheless, when the great crisis of 1927 came, and Shanghai was about to fall to the revolutionary armies, most foreigners joined in a cry for protection against the red hordes. Britain responded by sending the Shanghai Defence Force in the winter and spring of that year, while Americans and Frenchmen complained volubly that their governments were not doing enough. Even the missionaries, many of whom had been ready since the May 30th movement to renegotiate the unequal treaties and to cast off the protections of extraterrito- riality, began to waver. As more and more Western refugees fled from up-country treaty ports and mission stations to safe Shanghai, a group of thirty-two prominent Protestant mis- sionaries published a statement criticizing the National Chris- tian Council for its willingness to overlook the violence of the Nationalist armies.63 "Have the missionaries been con-

verted?" wondered Powell. It was to answer such critics that

Fletcher Brockman purported to discover the American ori- gins of the Chinese revolution. Yet Washington, with an assist from Tokyo, blocked any forcible punishment for Nanking, and the French consul-general discovered to his disgust that the Vatican had no interest in demanding reparations for its murdered priests.64

Despite Britain's sending of the Shanghai Defence Force, home governments by 1927 were skeptical of Shanghai's pan- icked cries, and by 1928, the sense of crisis was less. Huskey describes how the American community pulled itself back together, its members gradually convincing themselves that they could work with the new Nationalist China that was emerging. The Municipal Council and the North China were less certain. To them, the new Provisional Court that on Jan- uary 1, 1927, had taken the place of the Mixed Court, seemed to have become merely the judicial arm of the Guomindang. Three Chinese councillors finally joined the Municipal

budge, see the council for the Foreign Settlement of Shanghai, meetings of July 31 and Aug. 4, 1925, "Minute Book, 1925," Shanghai Municipal Archives.

63. NCDN, April 12, 1927, p. 12. 64. CWR, XL, April 9, 1927, pp. 142-143; April 2, p. 118; unsigned memo

dated Dec. 21, 1928, "Rbglement de l'affaire de NANKIN: 24 Mars 1927," papers of Mgr. Prosper Paris, III, 1926-28, carton 31, Archives des Jesuites ' Paris: Fonds Chine, Chantilley.

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524 Pacific Historical Review

Council in 1928, and--according to some--their presence made it impossible to hold confidential discussions, since their substance would be leaked to Chinese authorities.65

Thus foreign Shanghai grumped about the concessions it had made, and in January 1932, when fighting broke out between Chinese and Japanese in the city itself, many Shanghai- landers still hoped that the Japanese army would teach the Nationalists a lesson that would keep them in line. Pearl Harbor was only nine years away. These aspects of Shanghai politics deserve a separate treatment, and get us into political and diplomatic issues that are not properly the concern of this article. While the kind of Shanghailanders mentality that Ransome described remained dominant in the city, perhaps we can see in the other idiom of the liberals and their rhetori-

cal compradors the emergence of a language defining what later years would call neocolonialism.

For a while the new world of the 1920s seemed to promise an end to the age of classical imperialism in China, with its spheres of influence, its military and political expansion. Instead, out of the Washington Conference would emerge a new era marked by China's growing independence, and an international cooperation in the country's development, a cooperation that would, however, enhance the prospects for foreign trade and investment.66 While conservatives main- tained that the violence of the Chinese revolution after May 30th showed the bankruptcy of the Washington system, oth- ers, both in Britain and America, argued the need of even more rapid concessions to win China's friendship. Liberal Americans in particular were quick to believe in this course; it informs virtually all J. B. Powell's editorials in the China Weekly Review during the crisis of 1927 and later, while John Leighton Stuart of Yenching University urged his countrymen in 1925 to take advantage of the "superlative opportunity" presented by Britain's loss of moral leadership after May

65. Lampson to F.O. Feb. 6, 1929, FO, F658/250/10, PRO; Lampson to F.O. June 7, 1929, FO, F3797/250/10, ibid.

66. Marie-Claire Bergere, L'age d'or de la bourgeoisie Chinoise (Paris, 1986), 263-264, discusses this aspect of the Washington Conference.

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Shanghai Mind(s) 525

30th.67 When in December 1927, Chiang Kai-shek married his Wellesley-educated bride in the splendid ballroom of Shang- hai's Majestic Hotel, and shortly thereafter announced his conversion to her Protestant faith, the image-making had begun. Though it would be years before American and Brit- ish diplomats reluctantly became convinced they could work with Chiang, the future would bring his apotheosis as the brave leader of a democratic China against the dark forces of Japanese imperialism that were to sweep over the country in the 1930s.

The kinds of conceptualization that come from these two Shanghai minds are hardly unique to this particular time and this particular case. It would not be difficult to find parallels in Western treatments of the Soviet Union in the 1930s, Cuba in the 1960s, or of Maoism itself after 1949-the image of the Red Menace and the Yellow Peril combined with the Empire of the Blue Ants on the one hand, the vision of the Cultural Revolution as the last best hope of the world on the other. Even the attempt after the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 to see Li Peng as a "fascist" reflects a desperate desire to impose an external order on events that do not fit one's common definitions.

Let us close with a vision of the Shanghai mind as it appeared not to other foreigners, but to at least one Chinese of the time. Take the following scene from Ba Jin's brief novel about May 30th, Siqu de taiyang (Dying Sun). Here, exhausted and overwrought, the young protagonist Wu Yangqing, who had witnessed the bloody events in Nanking Road, sees in a hallucinatory vision a shadowy English "gentleman" (the word is in English) who ridicules the Chinese and boasts of his own brutality. Through the gray dimness Wu makes out a face: teeth bared in a hideous grin, a neat little mustache, deep green eyes staring contemptuously at him. The shadow talks:

You have the nerve to be anti-foreign (paiwai)? Just watch us kill a few people, and then you'll really know what fear is.... Didn't you see the gore splashed eight feet high on the gates of Louza

67. American Relations with China, 39. See also Thomas Millard in the New York Times Oct. 17, 1926, for another expression of this view.

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526 Pacific Historical Review

Prison that day? the street slimy with blood? Whose blood was it? the blood of you yellow dogs, wasn't it? I myself held a Colt .45, and we shot that front rank to pieces!... You Chinese scum (liumang) think you can grab our foreign interests, and there's nothing for it but to kill a few dozen of you. Only guns and whips work with trash like you; it's pointless to try to talk reason.

That afternoon my friends and I shot and killed several dozen Chinese; in the evening we sat around carousing in the Astor Hotel, and that night I took a pretty Chinese girl to bed with me. Another time about eighteen or nineteen of us went out with baseball bats to amuse ourselves with you trash.... We broke a lot of Chinese bones, crushed twenty-two or three Chi- nese heads, broke a Chinese back, smashed a lot of Chinese faces, noses, arms and legs. I don't think I've ever had as much fun!... Then once we were driving in an armored car, steel plates an inch thick, a gun mount on top, machine guns, built strong as a tank. Full speed ahead, right into the crowd, and sure enough, we crushed a couple of Chinese to death. Their guts spilled out into the street, arms, legs, limbs smashed, and most of those who tried to get out of the way broke their bones.... Here's another good story. One morning we were surrounded by a crowd of filthy heathens who climbed out of their mean little kennels. First we used a firehose to douse them with water, but it did no good at all. That's typical of your Chinese tempera- ment. The minute there's a little rain, you don't see any Chinese on the street. But when we'd drenched them right through, those bastards would still pick up bricks to throw at us. So then our machine gun opened up. What a pretty sight! Right away we killed seven people, screams tore the air, and the streets ran red with blood.68

Ba Jin was no rhetorical comprador, and his writing reminds us that the images of Western culture transmitted through the ways in which foreign Shanghai lived were very different from those transmitted by reading translations of John Stuart Mill or studying at the feet of John Dewey at Columbia. Foreigners were, indeed, as the Shanghai mind maintained, the teachers of China. But they might have been surprised at what some of the Chinese were learning.

68. Ba Jin, Siqu de taiyang (Hongkong, n.d.), 29-32.

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