Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
the city as the Nationalists and Communists fought Shanghai's own warlords.
Having won that battle, Chiang promptly turned on his allies and launched
a surprise attack against the Communists, with the help of the city's ruthless
criminal mastermind,
Du Yuesheng
. I n w hat came to be known as the White
Terror, Du's hoods, dressed in Nationalist uniforms, rampaged across the city,
killing anyone with any association with communism; at least twelve thousand
died, most of them executed in cold blood.
But even during the chaos, the party continued, a nd the foreign concessions
remained an enclave of privilege. Foreign Shanghai was at its decadent height
in the 1920s and 1930s, and it was during this age of inequality and decadence
that Shanghai got its reputation as the “
Paris of the East
” or, less politely,
“whore of the Orient”. A visiting missionary sniffed, “if God allows Shanghai
to endure, he owes Sodom and Gomorrah an apology.” For foreigners, no visa
or passport was needed and every new arrival, it was said, had something to
hide. White Russian émigres (see p.76) filled the chorus lines at the Paramount
and the Majestic, and their unluckier sisters joined the Chinese girls at the only
institutions more popular than the cabaret, the brothels. In certain areas of the
city the visitor was grabbed by girls in
qipaos
with, an American visitor observed,
“the Chinese equivalent of the rugby tackle”. The traps that a destitute woman
could fall in to were many, yet only in Shanghai could a Chinese girl receive an
education, reject an arranged marriage, or carve out a career. Film stars such as
Ruan Lingyu, China's Garbo, personified the new independent spirit, in both
her roles and her life - though the latter ended in tragedy, with her suicide.
Inevitably, t he show could not last. By 1928 Chiang Kaishek had defeated
enough warlords to form a tentative
National Government
, with its capital in
Nanjing. Now he courted the Western powers and, partly to prove that he was a
modernizer, converted to Christianity and married Song Meiling, whose father
had been a close ally of Sun Yatsen. Though he was explicit about his desire to
rid China of the foreigners, the powers in Shanghai backed him as the man to
control the country. They were forced to renege some of the more outrageous
racist policies, such as the ruling that kept the Chinese out of Shanghai's parks;
more importantly, Chinese were allowed to vote in municipal elections.
But Chiang had not rooted out all of Shanghai's Communists; by 1931 they
had regrouped, and a messy civil war began. To compound the nation's woes,
the same year the
Japanese snatched Manchuria
(China's northeastern prov-
ince, present-day Dongbei) and Chiang found himself fighting two conflicts.
Believing the Communists to be the more serious threat, he fled west with
his government to avoid a showdown that he feared losing. The Japanese now
struck against the interior, and in 1937 succeeded in occupying the valley of the
Yangzi River, thus cutting of river trade, and depriving Shanghai of its source
of wealth. Hobbled by the depression at home, weary of fighting losing battles
against China's resurgent nationalism, the Western powers lost their appetite for
interference in the country's chaotic affairs, and Shanghai was left to decline.
By the time the Japanese marched in 1941, the life had already drained from
the metropolis.
Shanghai under the Communists
It took nearly a decade for China to become once more united, this time under
the Communist Party, led by
Mao Zedong
. Communism might have come
from abroad, but the manner of its triumph and rule - shrewd charismatic leader
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