One of Dorothy’s closest friends was the former Laura Bullmore, wife of Frederick Maze, future inspector-general of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service at Shanghai. Laura had been raised and educated in Ipswich, Queensland, and met her husband, the Belfast-born nephew of Sir Robert Hart, in Colombo at the beginning of World War I. She was returning to Australia from England and he was on his way to China. They corresponded for a couple of years and then in 1917 Laura travelled to Shanghai for their wedding.45
Dorothy and Gordon’s second daughter, June, was born in Shanghai in 1921 and their son Ivor four years later. Ivor started his education in the kindergarten at the Cathedral Girls’ School and then moved to the Public School, an international, non-denominational school in Yu Yuen Road. ‘I learned enough Shanghai dialect to count a little, swear a little and call a rickshaw,’ he says. He was taught to swim at the Country Club by Billy Tingle, the popular Australian boxing champion and gym teacher.
‘The favourite weekend event was the paper chase when riders with saddlebags filled with red, white and green paper laid the trail for the hunt to follow,’ he says. ‘The Boxing Day paper chase was a particularly festive event. Those who had hunting pinks wore them, with holly in their hats and lots of Christmas cheer under their belts.’
For the school holidays, Gordon Bowden took his family to the former German resort of Tsingtao or the Repulse Bay Hotel in Hong Kong. Life was good. Now, with Communist-inspired strikes breaking out all over Shanghai and wall posters denouncing Britain and the unequal treaties, it seemed the Bolsheviks had come back into his life and that of his adopted city.
Public anger over the May Thirtieth killings did not subside until December 1925 when Commissioner McEuen and Inspector Everson were dismissed from the force and the Municipal Council paid compensation to the families of the deceased and wounded. McEuen, described by Maurice Tinkler, one of his officers, as ‘easygoing but otherwise of little use’, retired to Japan on a large pension, while Everson lived out his days in Gloucestershire. ‘There is no suggestion,’ he was reassured in an official letter from his superiors, ‘that you failed in or exceeded your duty as a responsible police officer in any respect whatsoever.’46
The International Settlement settled down to its normal routine of business and pleasure. Octavia Down, a young Australian who worked for a British trading house, enjoyed an active social life. It could scarcely be otherwise, Miss Down told The Argus during a holiday in Melbourne, ‘because there is nothing for the women to do except enjoy themselves’.
When the Chinese are trained by the foreigners [the paper reported], they make such perfect servants that there is no need for the women to do anything in their homes, quite apart from the fact that they would ‘lose face’ if they did so. There is plenty of sport, golf, tennis, riding and dancing, with swimming in the summer. It was interesting to learn that many of the better class Chinese take their wives to dance at cafes and hotels like the Majestic and the Carlton, though they are never seen at the American or the French Club. Both the men and women dance very well.47
Such condescension towards the Chinese infuriated Otto Rasmussen, who had got to know many Chinese families through his medical work. Born in 1888, he was the eldest child of Danish settler Christian Rasmussen and his Australian wife Mary, née Jennings, who raised him with a firm belief in human rights. He was outraged by Rodney Gilbert’s anti-Chinese tirade What’s Wrong with China, which was published as a series of articles in the North-China Daily News and then released in 1925 as a book. Gilbert concluded, ‘We have therefore to be grateful to the firebrand element in China which is driving furiously on towards the complete ruin of China as a nation, the utter collapse of foreign trade with this bad-boy people, and very possibly the martyrdom of those of us who are foolish enough to live in China.’
As Gilbert’s prophecy seemed like coming true, Rasmussen sat down to write his own book, What’s Right with China: an answer to foreign criticisms. He dedicated it to ‘the young men and women of China whose exalted idealism is leading their country from the stagnant marshes of an alien-imposed regression to the hard highway of progress’.48
Meanwhile, thousands of newcomers of all political shades continued to stream through Shanghai’s porous borders. Among them was the sinister Trebitsch Lincoln, a Hungarian-born Jewish émigré who had served as a Liberal member of parliament at Westminster after changing his name and converting to Christianity. During World War I, he worked as a German agent spying on British shipping and later served three years in prison for fraud.49
Stripped of his British citizenship, Trebitsch Lincoln came to China in the early 1920s and earned a living as an arms dealer and political adviser to several warlords, including General Wu Pei-fu, who had become the dominant militarist of the Middle Yangtze following his defeat at the hands of the Old Marshal and the Dogmeat General in North China.
In 1925, Lincoln appeared to put his dark past behind him when he converted to Buddhism, taking the Chinese name Chao Kung. After six years of religious study, he was ordained a monk with the rank of Bodhisattva. Supported by a small group of European Buddhist monks and nuns, he established the Trebitsch Lincoln Buddhist Monastery in Shanghai. As we shall see, the spiritual life had done little to reform him.
The May Thirtieth killings at Shanghai strengthened the hand of the Nationalists in their avowed aim of ending foreign imperialism and establishing Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People. Conservative elements of the Kuomintang threw their weight behind Sun’s protégé Chiang Kai-shek, who had spent three months in Moscow but had singularly failed to embrace the Communist system. It was inevitable he would clash with Mikhail Borodin and his nominee for party leader, Wang Ching-wei, the handsome demagogue who had risen to acting chairman.1
Long before Mao Tse-tung emerged as a contender, the battle between the neurotic, ambitious Chiang and his charismatic rival Wang for the hearts and minds of China would become one of the dominant features of Chinese politics. Chiang seemed a stiff, militaristic figure compared with the silky-smooth Wang, although the radical journalist Milly Bennett detected a slippery quality in the latter which she put down to ‘a shallow and treacherous nature’.2
Ho Chi Minh, a young Vietnamese who had graduated in Marxist agitation at the University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow, was dispatched to Canton as an interpreter to help Borodin tighten his grip on the party. The Communists were intent on agrarian reform and redistributing the land among the peasants, whereas Chiang had no intention of empowering the masses. Despite their conflicting aims, Chiang and Borodin joined forces in the spring of 1926 to achieve Sun Yat-sen’s cherished dream of a united China. Once power had been wrested from the Northern warlords, they could argue over the ideological spoils.
All eyes were turned to Red Canton in May when the legions of the National Revolutionary Army, trained by Communist advisers and armed with Russian weapons, marched smartly out of their barracks. The destination of the long-awaited Northern Expedition was Peking via Britain’s sphere of influence, the Yangtze Valley. But whereas the Communist-led section headed for Hankow, Hanyang and Wuchang – the three cities that constituted Wuhan – Chiang Kai-shek set off with his forces in a more north-easterly direction for the walled city of Nanchang in Kiangsi.3
Prior to each engagement with Northern forces, Borodin’s agents provocateurs were sent ahead to undermine enemy morale and create chaos in factories and schools. Large agricultural estates were broken up and the land distributed among the peasants; many landlords and governors were tortured and beheaded.4 One of the most enthusiastic party officials involved in the bloodletting was Mao Tse-tung. The former librarian seemed to get a visceral thrill from watching the humiliation of Chinese officials and their gory executions.5
At the beginning of September, Borodin’s troops besieged Wuchang.6 Burgoyne Chapman, the Australian educationist, described living in ‘an atmosphere of strike
s and demands, placards and speeches of denunciation’ after Communist provocateurs targeted his Central China Teachers’ College.
During the siege, the college formed part of the southern boundary and teachers and students were ordered to evacuate the premises. ‘When we returned, the fighting had moved to the north and we thought our troubles were over,’ he said.
However, six students from Hunan immediately started to cause a disturbance. Certain demands were made, and a student strike was organised. When our reply to their demands proved unsatisfactory, the vice-principal was imprisoned, beaten and driven away. The other students were terrorised.7
The gang of six remained in control of the school for two weeks but left after Chapman agreed to their demands. Two days later they returned, destroyed books, posted menacing notices and threatened to beat certain students. The college had to close down.
Chapman said high officials in the Nationalist Government had declared that the party was not anti-Christian or anti-foreign, but revolutionary elements had been let loose and were beyond control. An unfortunate feature of the situation was the predominance of Russian advisers and the complete acceptance of Soviet methods. ‘The only hope,’ he said, ‘is in the more moderate section of the party asserting itself and ending the terrorist methods now so widely practised.’8
Hanyang, the second of Wuhan’s three cities and site of a huge Japanese ironworks, an arsenal and an important Buddhist monastery, collapsed without a fight in early September after the disloyal Northern commander accepted a bribe. On 6 Sep- tember, Hankow’s Chinese defenders withdrew when the Nationalists warned General Wu Pei-fu that he should evacuate the city before daylight the following day. Wu took the hint and during the night evacuated his troops in 294 railway wagons after promising the foreign consuls that he would return to liberate Hankow from the Nationalists as soon as he received reinforcements. When Wuchang threw open its gates to the Nationalists on the symbolic date of 10 October, Wu realised that further resistance was futile and headed north to Honan.9
All of Hankow’s foreign enclaves lay along the riverbank of the Yangtze and could be protected from the front by destroyers and gunboats, but were vulnerable to attack from open countryside at the rear if the Nationalists chose to do so. Moreover, the British, French and Japanese concessions were separated by the former Russian and German concessions, which were now under Chinese control. ‘It is not Hankow alone that is in danger,’ The Times warned, ‘but the whole range of British interests throughout China.’10
By December, the Nationalist armies controlled five provinces in South and Central China and it was time for the Nationalist Government and its Soviet allies to move from Canton to Hankow. The group included the Harvard-educated Finance Minister T. V. Soong and two of his sisters, Ayling (Madame H. H. Kung) and Chingling (Madame Sun Yat-sen), the tubby, short-sighted Industry Minister H. H. Kung, and the Trinidad-born Foreign Minister, Eugene Chen.
Their most pressing task was to orchestrate the advance across the Yangtze for the march to the north, where the Old Marshal Chang Tso-lin, having declared he would not tolerate Feng Yu-hsiang’s efforts to ‘bolshevise’ North China, had finally succeeded in deposing the Christian General and fulfilling his dream of ruling Peking.11
Chiang Kai-shek, meanwhile, set up his winter headquarters 320 kilometres south of Hankow at Nanchang. Although protesting his loyalty to the Nationalist Government, his intention was to let the Communist-led armies fight their way to Peking while he made a two-pronged attack on the old Ming capital of Nanking and the richest prize of all: Shanghai.12
Borodin suspected that the united front was dead but, as instructed by his Comintern masters, concentrated on taking the fight to Britain, the biggest and most powerful nation on the Yangtze. His walrus moustache bristling with righteous Leninist indignation, he urged his agents to stir up anti-British feeling among the industrial proletariat of the three Wuhan cities. ‘Seemingly the impresario of insurrection, master of every move and every situation,’ the Sinologist Nicholas R. Clifford wrote, ‘Borodin was never too busy to receive the throng of foreign writers and journalists who made the pilgrimage that winter and spring to the new Jerusalem on the Yangtze.’13
By the New Year, anti-British feeling had reached fever pitch after it was learned that British police at Tientsin had arrested seven Kuomintang activists and handed them over to the Old Marshal’s Fengtien commanders, who had promptly executed them. Borodin denounced the British Concession at Hankow – a mini-Shanghai, with its own bund, custom house, consulate, police force and banks – as a nest of counter-revolutionary activity. He demanded it be seized.
For several days, farm labourers and coolies were given free passes on Hankow-bound trains until large numbers had gathered in the Chinese city on the banks of the Han River.14 As agitators inflamed passions with anti-imperialist speeches at mass rallies, a British destroyer anchored off the British Concession alongside the 645-ton gunboat HMS Bee, flagship of the Yangtze patrol.
On Monday, 3 January 1927, the British consul Herbert Goffe asked the British naval commander Rear-Admiral J. S. Cameron for a naval landing party to reinforce the small contingent of Royal Marines who were defending the concession with a group of special constables and some firemen armed with hoses. A detachment of naval ratings commanded by Lieutenant T. Ellis came ashore and joined the Marines, who were building a barricade of sandbags and barbed wire entanglements. The sight of the bluejackets enraged the Chinese who shouted insults and pelted the troops with stones. Meanwhile, Herbert Goffe called in vain on the Nationalist authorities to restore order.
Between four and five o’clock that afternoon a mob estimated at 50,000 stampeded towards the concession and succeeded in capturing the first line of barbed-wire defences. The rush was stemmed by the defenders, but not before a naval officer and two special constables had been seriously injured.15
Burgoyne Chapman, who had escaped across the river from Wuchang and was sheltering in the British Concession at Hankow, paid tribute to the Marines’ valour. For hour after hour, they stood guard with fixed bayonets and Lewis guns at the ready, while small children standing a few paces in front of the mob hurled mud and stones at them. After the slaughter in Shanghai on 30 May 1925, no amount of provocation could induce them to shoot.16 ‘Time after time I expected to hear the order given to open fire, in spite of the odds against the men,’ The Times correspondent reported. ‘Discipline prevailed.’17
The mob then turned in mindless fury on the nearest available building which happened to be a shelter for rickshaw pullers on the foreshore. The shed was torn to pieces and set ablaze. One of the Marines guarding the foreshore was set upon by rioters, who seized his rifle and bayoneted him in the leg.18
‘Everywhere was a dense human mass, with thousands of waving lanterns,’ The Times man reported. ‘The uproar caused by the shouting and yelling, the banging of drums, the crashing of cymbals, and the blowing of all kinds of noise-producing instruments was at times deafening.’19
At 5.30 pm, a large detachment of Nationalist soldiers finally forced their way through the besieging mob and were admitted to the British Concession. However, the Nationalist commander refused to take any action unless he was placed in complete charge of the area. Goffe and Cameron knew that their small force of 240 men could easily be overwhelmed and reluctantly agreed to the naval unit returning to its ship.
On Tuesday morning the mob was permitted to tear down the barricades and occupy the concession, where they plastered the war memorial with Kuomintang posters and held rowdy meetings.20 That afternoon, the demonstrators were driven out by Nationalist troops and, with Goffe’s permission, the British flag was hauled down from the municipal building and replaced with the Nationalist flag, the white-rayed sun on a navy blue field. All was in readiness for the arrival that evening of a provisional committee, including such luminaries as Eugene Chen, T. V. Soong and Sun Yat-sen’s
36-year-old son Sun Fo, who would take charge of the concession. The Communist labour organiser Liu Shaoqi took great delight in establishing the headquarters of the Hupeh General Labour Union in the British Consulate.
The following day the mob attacked the concession’s police station and occupied the Union Jack Club. British women and children were herded on to the Hankow Bund and loaded on to steamers bound for Shanghai. As dark clouds blanketed the sun and an icy rain pelted down, the mortification of British arms was complete. One of the most galling aspects of the shameful episode was that the French and Japanese concessions had been left untouched.
Eugene Chen professed to regret the mob’s unruly behaviour, apologised for the defacement of the war memorial and promised that government forces would maintain order. The Times, however, blamed Chen and his comrades for the debacle: ‘First by intimidation, then by keeping the harassed local authorities in play with negotiations and smooth promises, the Chinese Nationalists have succeeded in their immediate aim of seizing control of an important concession secured to Great Britain by treaty.’21
The events at Hankow were a crushing setback to Britain’s diplomatic efforts to achieve a detente with the Nationalists. The British minister Sir Miles Lampson, a great bear of a man six-feet five-inches tall with the girth of an oak tree, had visited the treaty port three weeks earlier. At a meeting with the diminutive Eugene Chen, he explained that His Majesty’s Government no longer believed that China needed the guiding hand of foreign powers in her development as a modern nation. He also promised to co-operate with the Nationalist Government in negotiating a revision of the unequal treaties.22
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