Bill Donald took Lieutenant James M. McHugh, a young officer of the Marine Detachment at the American Legation (where his father-in-law Jacob Gould Schurman was now the American minister), to see him at the Rockefeller Hospital in Peking. ‘He was a gaunt little man with very large, brilliant eyes,’ McHugh recalls.
When medical science could do nothing further for ‘The Father of the Republic’, he was moved to Wellington Koo’s home, where he died on 12 March 1925 without ever having achieved the national harmony he desperately desired. On his deathbed, it is said, he spoke of his love for Mikhail Borodin and his faith in his advice. He urged his wife Chingling and Chiang Kai-shek to take counsel from him at all times.
‘The Kuomintang loses its titular head and has no outstanding figure with which to replace him,’ The Times noted. ‘The Party, moreover, has lately been much divided, largely owing to Sun Yat-sen’s coquetting with the Bolsheviks. The moderate elements had already drifted away from him, and it remains to be seen whether the extremist or the moderate group will control the party in future.’54
It seemed tragic to many Westerners who had followed the vacillating fortunes of the Chinese Revolution that his long struggle should end in so pitiful a failure.
Just an hour before Sun Yat-sen breathed his last, Roy Anderson died of pneumonia in the French Hospital at the age of just 46. Donald stood beside his bed with tears running down his cheeks. ‘We failed, Don,’ the intrepid, big-hearted American had said to him. ‘We were never able to do what we tried in this country.’55
[1] The Nationalist Government dissolved Chihli in 1928 and formed the province of Hopeh (Hebei).
[2] The Dogmeat General got his nickname because of his fondness for the Chinese gambling game of Pai Gow, which Northern Chinese call ‘eating dog meat’.
Through these desperate, extravagant years, Shanghai outshone all other Chinese cities. The Bund symbolised British dominion over the Yangtze Valley, its semi-skyscrapers anchored to rafts of concrete that floated on pilings of Oregon pine like ‘a long line of poisonous toadstools sprung up from the mud’.1
To the city’s three million Chinese residents, these buildings, heavily ornamented with art deco symbols, were motian dalou – literally, the magical edifices that reach the skies. In the words of one Chinese commentator, they saw the foreign concessions as ‘an exotic world of glitter and vice dominated by Western capitalism’.2
The flashing neon lights of Nanking Road illuminated the soaring spires of the Australian-styled Sincere, Wing On, Sun Sun and Sun Company department stores, each one of the ‘Four Great Companies’ offering an astonishing array of hotels, restaurants, theatres, amusement arcades, skating rinks and roof gardens, as well as counters piled high with merchandise from Europe and the United States.3
In the middle of these retail temples, the Sweetmeat Castle, long the favourite spot for tea and cakes, had become the more modern Bakerite Chocolate Shop dispensing American-style waffles, ice cream and sodas. On Avenue Edward VII, the borderline between the British and French concessions, the Great World amusement centre presented a galaxy of attractions. Climbing the stairs from one floor to the next, Josef von Sternberg, director of the Marlene Dietrich film Shanghai Express, goggled at ‘gambling tables, singing girls, magicians, pickpockets, slot machines, fireworks, birdcages, fans, stick incense, acrobats and ginger’. And that was before he reached the ‘shooting galleries, fan-tan tables, revolving wheels, massage benches, acupuncture, hot-towel counters, dried fish and intestines, and dance platforms serviced by hordes of music makers competing with each other to see who could drown out the others . . .’4
‘Shanghai has always been different,’ says the former Australian diplomat Ivor Bowden, who was born in Frenchtown on 19 August 1925. ‘It regarded itself as a world city and saw Peking as provincial.’5
The city’s street names provided tangible evidence of its cosmopolitan nature. In the Central District, roads bearing the names of provinces – Chekiang, Honan, Shantung, Szechuen – ran north and south, while the cross streets running east and west were named after cities: Nanking, Peking, Ningpo, Foochow. Elsewhere, they were named after the outposts of empire – Penang, Rangoon and Singapore – or were reminders of ‘home’, such as Edinburgh Road for the British and Broadway for the Americans. Even Lord Elgin, ‘Chinese’ Gordon and the opium dealer Thomas Dent were commemorated in street names; you had to go to Frenchtown to find the arts honoured in Rue Moliere and Rue Wagner.6
Marshal Joffre, the World War I hero, visited the French Concession, where one of the grand boulevards had been renamed in his honour (although owing to the prevalence of White Russians it was known to the locals as ‘Little Moscow’). Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell came to Shanghai to give lectures, while Aldous Huxley thought the spectacle of Shanghai life ‘inspired something like terror’. And in the dance studio of the Russian émigré George Goncharov eight-year-old Margaret Hookham took her first steps as a ballerina. She would find fame at Sadlers Wells as Dame Margot Fonteyn.
Australians came from far and wide to add colour and dash to the Shanghai panorama as well as performing important civic duties. Indeed, they had an influence far beyond their relatively small numbers. Les Lawrance visited Shanghai and thrilled the crowds with his daring as a Queensland speedway star but stayed to run the transport section of the Shanghai Telephone System. Melburnian Dr Bill O’Hara, a member of the 7th Light Horse at Gallipoli, arrived in Shanghai in 1929 and built up a successful medical practice in the China United Building just off Nanking Road. He also earned a reputation as one of the city’s biggest gamblers.
Otto Rasmussen, the Melbourne teenager who had wit- nessed the 1905 riots, was now an eye doctor treating glaucoma and other eye diseases among the Chinese workforce. And the Reverend Robert Mathews, on his return to Shanghai from Szechuen, compiled the monumental, 1200-page Mathews’ Chinese–English Dictionary containing 7785 Chinese characters and more than 100,000 phrases including modern and technical terms.
For the vast majority of Chinese, life in Shanghai was a desperate struggle against starvation. Indeed, the bright lights and fluttering red banners masked the misery of back-lane sweatshops and oppressive Hongkew factories in which children as young as five or six stood for 12 hours a day over boiling kettles in the silk filatures. Their tiny fingers were red and swollen from brushing the cocoons into silk strands for female workers to unwind. The children’s eyes were inflamed from the heat; some were crying from a beating at the hands of the foreman who walked up and down behind their long rows swinging a piece of no. 8 gauge wire like a whip. If they passed a thread incorrectly, their arms were scalded in boiling water.7
There was no distinction between boys and girls – all were treated with the same impersonal cruelty. In the workshops, young boys laboured over open chromium vats whose fumes created ‘chrome holes’ – incurable sores – in their hands, arms and feet. Others making batteries died of lead poisoning. All of the children were denied even the most basic of human rights in order to make profits for their Chinese, Japanese and European masters.8
In 1923 the Municipal Council, at the urging of female members of the National Christian Council and the Young Women’s Christian Association of China, appointed a Commission on Child Labour to study the conditions under which children worked in Shanghai’s factories. One of the commission’s members was the Australian-born crusader Dame Adelaide Anderson and another was Charlie Soong’s youngest daughter Mayling, who had returned to Shanghai after graduating in English literature from Wellesley College in the United States.
Like a pocket battleship, Dame Adelaide steamed up the Whangpoo clutching an umbrella and a bag bulging with documents to apply her expertise as Britain’s former ‘principal lady inspector of factories’ to Shanghai’s horrendous labour problems.
In one of the silk filatures, she met ‘a little old man’ who told her h
e was five and a half years old, that his name was ‘Little Tiger’, and that he was working ‘to be able to eat rice’. ‘He earned his rice,’ she says, ‘for he worked like a little tiger and came and went daily alone to and from the filature.’ To her question of what became of these tiny workers, she was told, ‘When they go to work so early, they mostly die young.’9
Adelaide Mary Anderson was born on 8 April 1863 in Melbourne, the eldest child in the large family of an immigrant Scottish shipbroker. She was educated in London and then sent to France and Germany before going up to Girton College, Cambridge, where she obtained a second-class honours degree in the moral sciences. She was introduced to the harshness of working women’s lives in late Victorian England as a lecturer in philosophy and economics at the Women’s Co-operative Guild.10
In 1894 she was appointed one of the first female factory inspectors in Britain and three years later was made principal lady inspector, with the responsibility of enforcing legislation protecting women and children in factories and workshops. Her small stature and fragile looks belied a steely resolve, coupled with great powers of endurance.11 Her reports combined literary skill with shrewd observation and reflected her profound belief in the future of women in industry.12
In Shanghai, she had had no hesitation in plunging into the Chinese districts to gather information. Walking along a street, she was attracted by a brightly-lit building which she supposed to be a temple. She went in and was welcomed by the owner of a private house who was celebrating the approaching nuptials of his daughter. The uninvited guest was taken to see the decorations, introduced to the bride and her relatives, and pressed to remain for the festivities. Dame Adelaide came away impressed with the happy family life of many Chinese.
She found the same commitment in the hot, dusty atmosphere of the factories, where tiny children laboured and younger ones slept or played under the roaring machines. One important effect of the factory system, she said, was that it had brought Chinese women out of their isolation into an organised world. She was delighted when a group of female workers asked to speak to her. Their first priority was that their children should be well cared for, they said, and the second was a ‘mild limitation’ of working hours to give them more time with their families. When she asked whether they would like the heat reduced in the workplace, they replied they did not want anything done that would hamper production and thus reduce their earnings.
While in Shanghai, Dame Adelaide met Eleanor Hinder, an Australian feminist who was responsible for the health and welfare of female employees at Farmer’s department store in Sydney. In a remarkably enlightened move, the store had sent her on a one-year trip abroad to study work practices and trade union activities. Mary Dingman, the American international industrial secretary of the YWCA, who thought Eleanor ‘the most intelligent and ablest young woman I met in Australia’, suggested she visited the cotton mills, silk filatures and match factories that had appalled Dame Adelaide. Eleanor did so and wrote to her mother, ‘It seems as if this is a laboratory of things directly concerned with my own education – it is a wonderful thing that I should have come.’13
Dame Adelaide was still in Shanghai on May Day 1924 and appeared in front of 80,000 workers at a Shanghai Labour Federation rally on the same platform as a handsome Kuomintang apparatchik named Wang Ching-wei.14 ‘I had never spoken at a Labour meeting before,’ she said later. ‘It was an extra- ordinary experience to begin in China.’15
Born into a poor family in Kwangtung, Wang had joined Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary movement after graduating from Tokyo Law College in 1906. Four years later he threw a bomb at the Manchu regent, Prince Chun. The prince survived and Wang was thrown into prison but the attempt made him a national hero. He was released during the 1911 Revolution.
Ten resolutions were passed at the rally including demands for children under 14 to be banned from factories, for an eight-hour working day and for a national labour conference to address workers’ concerns. The final resolution read, ‘Unite with the workers of the whole country, and of the whole world, organise a great united front, and clear away obstacles to humanity.’
Dame Adelaide returned to London convinced of the solidarity of Chinese family life. ‘My belief is that Chinese women have it largely in their power to re-make the country if they get the chance,’ she said. ‘They have character, dignity and a beautiful suppleness of mind, with an affinity for things of the imagination. The responsibility that is thrust upon the mother or the grandmother at the head of the household has its effects on the whole family.’16
In July 1924 the commission released its report highlighting the scandalous conditions of Shanghai’s Chinese workforce. One member of parliament described it as ‘one of the most melancholy social documents of recent years’. The commission suggested new regulations to eliminate the major abuses, including a bye-law making it illegal for children to start work before the age of 10, rising at a later date to 12. The following year, however, the reformers failed to get a quorum at two special meetings of Shanghai ratepayers – the first step in introducing any change in the workings of the British Concession – to set a minimum working age.
Reactionary members of the Municipal Council pointed to the existing Land Regulations, which prevented them taking action against Chinese mill owners employing child labour. To alter the regulations would require a three-quarters majority of ratepayers, the unanimous decision of the consuls of every nationality in Shanghai and the concurrence of every minister in the Peking legations.17 One of the chief obstacles was Sterling Fessenden, the Municipal Council’s short, plump American chairman, who was described in a British Legation assessment as ‘a feeble creature, one of those who have gone to pieces in the East, and conspicuously unfit for his position’.18
To exacerbate the hardship among Shanghai’s Chinese citizens, the cost of living had risen sharply since the First World War. Rice was up to 135 per cent more expensive, whereas wages had risen only 80 per cent.19 Nationalists agitated among the growing labour class for higher wages and pro- tested against medieval work practices. Strikes, protests and boycotts escalated but the strikers’ demands were rarely met and the authorities cracked down on all public demonstrations.
In February 1925 Chinese workers went on strike in protest against low wages at the Naiga Wata cotton-weaving mill, one of 32 Japanese textile mills in Shanghai. The Chinese Chamber of Commerce was asked to mediate in the dispute and succeeded in reaching a preliminary settlement, which the Japanese owner then ignored.
Sun Yat-sen’s death the following month, however, gave Chinese workers a focal point in the wider issues at stake. His Three Principles swept the city and his photograph was printed on flags, posters and banners. In death, Sun’s rallying cry had become far more powerful than it had ever been during his lifetime.20
At dawn on Anzac Day 40 Australian and New Zealand members of the Anzac Society gathered on The Bund as Dr Bill O’Hara, a captain-surgeon at Gallipoli, laid a wreath at the war memorial, a bronze statue of Winged Victory on a spare stone pillar. ‘As the mixed river traffic and the queer medley of rushing vehicles passed closely alongside the monument,’ the Reuters correspondent reported, ‘they slowed down while the little band paid homage to the dead.’21
The following week the Naiga Wata mill workers started a second strike and on 15 May sent an eight-man delegation to negotiate with the Japanese management. The confrontation ended in a violent clash in which Japanese guards opened fire, mortally wounding one worker, Ku Cheng-hung, and injuring the other seven.22
The Municipal Council declined to prosecute the guards, but municipal police arrested a number of Chinese workers on charges of disturbing the peace. On 22 May students and workers held a memorial service for Ku Cheng-hung in the Inter- national Settlement. He was a popular figure at the Workers’ Club, a quiet chess player who was also interested in furthering his education. Union leaders made impassioned speec
hes attacking the Japanese factory owner. The police made more arrests.23
At 12.40 pm on Saturday 30 May Inspector Edward Everson, the officer in charge of Louza police station, received a telephone message from the chief of police, Commissioner Kenneth McEuen, that students were holding anti-Japanese protests in the Chinese districts and that steps should be taken to prevent them spreading to the International Settlement.24
Saturday was McEuen’s day off and he had several social commitments in his diary, including lunch at the Shanghai Club and a visit to the Shanghai Race Club. As a captain- superintendent at the time of the 1905 riot, he had witnessed the destructive power of the Shanghai mob and had been present when the Louza police station was burned down.25 But McEuen was a ‘notoriously incompetent loafer’, according to a report by the British Consulate, and there is some doubt he issued any orders at all. In the morning, he left the settlement for a couple of hours, returned for a leisurely lunch at the Shanghai Club and then, dressed in blazer and panama hat, drove to the racecourse at the western end of Nanking Road without contacting any of his subordinates.26
Meanwhile, large numbers of chanting, banner-carrying students had entered the settlement and started to demonstrate outside the Japanese Consulate and the Mixed Court, while another large group gathered in the Nanking Road shopping precinct. The police arrested hundreds of demonstrators, mostly students, although all were released before two o’clock. By then, the gathering in Nanking Road had turned into a mass rally, with a large crowd concentrated in the Louza district.
Shanghai Fury Page 23