After 3 January, however, Lampson had done a complete about-face. ‘The Hankow capitulation,’ he raged, ‘is the worst blow to British prestige that has occurred in the last 35 years.’ He sent the British chargé d’affaires Owen O’Malley to Hankow to try to retrieve something from the wreckage.
Despite an attack of malarial fever that rattled his teeth like dice,23 Borodin hailed the takeover of the British Concession as a major political victory. He had previously ridden around town on a humble Chinese pony but switched to a more grandiose conveyance: General Wu Pei-fu’s French-made, bullet-proof limousine. His children, aged nine and 11, were said to be receiving a bourgeois education at the American School in Shanghai under the name Ginzburg.24
The turn of events at Hankow surprised the Nationalist leaders. They had expected the British soldiers to inflict casualties on the demonstrators, thus presenting a further opportunity for anti-British agitation. Now, they waited in trepidation for Britain’s time-honoured response: a bombardment by a fleet of British gunboats. The Nationalist cabinet was debating what to do when Borodin entered the room. ‘Do nothing,’ he advised, ‘and the British will do nothing either.’ He was right. A few weeks later, in the first major victory over the unequal treaties, Lampson signed an agreement surrendering the British Concession to Chinese control.25
Despite the apparent camaraderie among the members of the Nationalist Government in Hankow, the united front was in danger of disintegrating, seemingly placing them at odds with Chiang Kai-shek and his right-wing supporters. Curiously, only Chingling Soong and Eugene Chen could be described as genuine left-wingers, whereas Ayling Soong and her husband H. H. Kung – who claimed to be a direct descendant of Confucius – were conservatives, and Wang Ching-wei and T. V. Soong were becoming increasingly right-wing.26
The distinction between the two factions was lost on diehard Shanghailanders, who had been shocked by Britain’s capitulation in Hankow. They saw all Nationalist forces as a ‘Red army’ and feared being slaughtered in a full-scale Communist insurrection. ‘There is an increasing menace to Shanghai, where emissaries from Canton are now doing their utmost to foment strikes and disorders in preparation for the advance of the Kuomintang troops,’ The Times reported. ‘The Peking Government has finally thrown up the pretence of being the Government of China, and has resigned for lack of funds.’27
O. M. Green in the North-China Daily News described Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang as ‘the new Boxer movement’ and demanded that Britain suppress it.28 The thundering presses in the basement of the paper’s new seven-storey, twin-towered building at 17 The Bund spewed out a stream of news and features on the crisis. Among a pot pourri of scare-mongering articles in a supplement devoted to the Red menace was one that became a classic of its kind. It was headlined, ‘How to Spot Communists at Moving Picture Shows and Other Public Gatherings’.
The ‘Boxerism/Red menace’ view was most strongly expressed among members of the Shanghai Club. The Manchester Guardian writer Arthur Ransome coined the phrase ‘Shanghai Mind’ to describe the outdated, imperialist and bellicose mindset he encountered there. ‘They look on their magnificent buildings,’ he wrote, ‘and are surprised that China is not grateful to them for these gifts, forgetting that the money to build them came out of China.’29
Otto Rasmussen, who mixed with Chinese patients and their families every day, understood that the basic problem in Shanghai wasn’t Communism but the soaring prices of rice and other staple foods. ‘The local English press saw “the hand of Moscow” in every abnormality from robberies to the laundry bill,’ he wrote. ‘In this way, they arrived at a state of high nervous tension, from which their only release was golf and race-meetings.’30
On 17 February the Nationalists’ Eastern Route Army, commanded by Chiang’s chief of staff Pai Chung-hsi, defeated General Sun Chuan-fang’s forces at Hangchow, 150 kilometres south of Shanghai, creating panic in the International Settlement. Coolies were employed day and night in freezing winter weather digging trenches, putting up barbed-wire entanglements and building concrete blockhouses. Within a matter of weeks 25,000 soldiers from Britain, the United States, France, Italy and Japan had rushed to Shanghai.
‘The demand for barracks, food, hotel accommodation, entertainment, was unprecedented,’ Otto Rasmussen wrote. ‘Reluctant landlords, hotel managers, cabaret owners were obliged to charge their saviour defenders double the previous price.’31 Most commanders had orders to avoid conflict with Nationalist forces but to protect the city’s 75,000 foreign citizens from mob violence.32 Wildly impractical plans from an earlier crisis for the establishment of a cordon sanitaire 80 kilometres wide along the Yangtze from Shanghai to Hankow were dusted down.
On 19 February the Communist-dominated General Labour Union paralysed the city with a general strike with the intention of setting up a fully fledged Soviet commune. The union leaders issued a statement calling for the withdrawal of all foreign forces from the city, the return of the concessions to Chinese rule and the establishment of a popular municipal government under their leaders in Red Hankow ‘to build a new Shanghai, free and independent, and wash away 80 years of shame and insult’.33
Factory production lines ground to a standstill, the docks fell silent and thousands of power workers, tram drivers and even rickshaw pullers refused to work. The defiant mood rapidly changed when murder squads, led by black-clad executioners, moved through the Chinese districts. General Sun Chuan-fang, who had returned to Shanghai from Nanking, ordered his soldiers to accompany the executioners. Dozens of strikers and protesters – often students just handing out leaflets – were beheaded with broadswords and their heads placed in bamboo cages which were hung from telephone poles.34
On 20 February the Chinese Communist Party escalated the strike into an armed insurrection with the intention of toppling Sun Chuan-fang. The future Chinese premier Chou En-lai ordered his militia, a forerunner of the Red Guards, to raid police stations for arms and occupy buildings at Chapei, Hongkew, Nantao and Pootung. But all these efforts ended in fiasco. That night Communist sailors aboard two Chinese gunboats fired several shells to signal the start of the uprising. Unfortunately, the missiles rained down on the French Concession, one shell passing through the French Club in Rue Cardinal Mercier while a female member was delivering a lecture on Chinese culture. One of the guests, Bishop Graves, thought the intrusion ‘rather a rude commentary’ on the learned treatise.35
It quickly transpired that right-wing unionists had no stomach for a fight and failed to order their units into battle, leaving scattered bands of left-wingers to take on Sun’s troops and the Chinese police through the wet winter’s night. Two days later the General Labour Union admitted defeat and called off all industrial action. It was a bitter setback for the Communist Party but one that provided a blueprint for future action.
Meanwhile, the Nationalists had advanced up the Hangchow–Shanghai railway line to within 60 kilometres of Shanghai. General Sun abandoned the defence of the city and was seen crossing the Yangtze to the safety of the north bank. The departure of his commanders created a vacuum which the dreaded ‘Dogmeat General’, Chang Tsung-chang, who had ended up in Shantung again, was only too happy to fill. On 25 February he and his troops headed south into Kiangsu in an armoured train known as ‘the Great Wall’, manned by a squadron of White Russian mercenaries.
The following day Major-General Sir John Duncan and his chief of staff, Viscount Gort, sailed up the Whangpoo in the troopship Megantic, with two more British battalions on board. While the troops marched out to their camp at Jessfield Park, near St John’s University on the western outskirts of the International Settlement, the two senior officers found agreeable quarters at the Astor House Hotel and sat back to await developments.
By now, the Nationalists had broken through the last defensive line south of Shanghai. Hundreds of General Sun’s troops tried to join refugees streaming into the forei
gn concessions but were kept at bay by British infantrymen manning all points of entry. Deserters were reduced to offering their rifles and pistols for sale at 10 cents apiece in order to eat.
On 21 March the Nationalist vanguard, clutching Soviet weapons and with large straw sunhats strapped to their backs, reached Lunghwa on the southern outskirts of Shanghai. In the intervening weeks, Chou En-lai had secretly drilled 5000 union pickets, many of them armed with stolen police weapons, and placed them in makeshift redoubts at strategic points in the Chinese districts. When Dogmeat Chang’s train pulled into North Station, he found himself surrounded by a force of hostile, well-entrenched workers.
At midday on the 21st the Nationalist flag was broken out from a mast on the cupola of the Chinese Post Office in Soochow Road and the General Labour Union called another strike of all Chinese workers. Once again, the mills and factories fell silent, the trams stopped running and there was a riot among the staff of the big department stores in Nanking Road. Ostensibly, the purpose of the strike was to welcome the Nationalist liberation of Shanghai, but while wall posters and banners hailed the triumph of the Kuomintang, the Chinese Communist Party secretly planned to pull off its greatest coup by creating a ‘Red Shanghai’ during the change-over in power.
Chou En-lai’s pickets moved through the Chinese districts disarming police and remnants of General Sun’s army; the Municipal Council declared a state of emergency and mobilised the Volunteer Corps; White Russians were brought in as scab labour to run water and power plants.36
Dogmeat Chang’s usual method of dealing with industrial trouble in Shantung was to execute the strikers’ leaders. When a burst of gunfire heralded the start of a full-scale workers’ uprising, Chang responded with characteristic violence. Houses bordering the station were set ablaze and the workers’ positions shelled with a three-inch artillery piece mounted on his armoured train.
Hongkew and Nantao fell to the revolutionaries without much of a struggle and Pootung and west Shanghai soon followed. But in Chapei, Chang’s troops in the vast Commercial Press building fought back doggedly with machine-guns and the White Russian mercenaries kept up a barrage from ‘the Great Wall’ as it chugged up and down the railway line crossing Honan Road. The uprising’s leaders took over a police station in Baoshan Road to direct their ragged battalions.
By now, fires were burning out of control around North Station. Whole blocks of houses, godowns and factories were destroyed in the conflagration and thousands of inhabitants joined the long line of refugees flocking into the International Settlement. The battle continued all through the night but in the morning, with ammunition running low and no sign of Dogmeat Chang to be found, the forces holding the Commercial Press building surrendered.
At North Station, Chang’s troops began to vacate the battlefield and late that afternoon made a fighting retreat to the British barricades at Elgin Road. Only ‘the Great Wall’, a monstrous war machine painted yellow, black and brown, kept up its bombardment until it too ran out of ammunition and hoisted a white flag.37
Lord Gort sallied forth from the Astor House Hotel to assist a group of French nuns who had been cut off in Hongkew. He was taken prisoner by Nationalist troops and it took the intervention of the British consul Sir Sidney Barton to set him free.38
Chou En-lai congratulated his men on their victory. They had, he said, ‘taken the leadership of the expedition against the warlords’. A provisional citizens’ government was set up, while armed pickets policed the streets to await the arrival of the Kuomintang’s main force.39
Chiang Kai-shek’s original plan was to isolate Nanking to prevent reinforcements being sent up the Yangtze, but the collapse of the warlord armies in Shanghai had left Nanking in desperate straits. At the first sign of trouble, General Sun’s garrison there began to retreat, burning and looting buildings in the Chinese city on the way to the North Gate. Although foreign property was left untouched, the American consul, John K. Davis, advised American women and children to evacuate the city. Every train from Pukow, the southern terminus of the Pukow–Tientsin line on the north bank of the Yangtze opposite Nanking, was loaded with soldiers, many clinging to the sides of carriages or riding on the roof, while south-bound steamers were packed with refugees.
At seven o’clock on the morning of the 24th, the Nationalists’ Sixth Army, commanded by General Chang Chien, stormed into the undefended Foreign Quarter. The soldiers’ first target was the Japanese Consulate, which was looted and burned, and the staff savagely beaten. Next in order came the United States Consulate, which was invaded at 8 am. John Davis was expecting trouble and had set off with his family and consular staff across country for Socony House, a secure building on Standard Oil Hill,[1] one of a series of low mounds inside the city walls overlooking the Yangtze. This small group was escorted by 12 United States Marines who were under orders not to shoot, even though Nationalist soldiers repeatedly fired at them, wounding one of the Marines.40
At 9.30 am the 53-year-old British consul, Bertram Giles, was shot and wounded on the lawn of the British Consulate after challenging a couple of Nationalist soldiers who were looking for loot. The port medical officer, Dr Satchwell Smith, went to Giles’s assistance and was shot dead because he resisted a soldier who attempted to cut off his finger in order to steal his wedding ring. The consulate’s intelligence officer, Captain Spear of the Indian Army, was shot twice when he tried to intervene but managed to carry the stricken Giles to the consulate office, where the consul’s wife Violet and other consular staff were sheltering in the strong-room.
The soldiers forced them to come out by threatening to shoot through the wooden door. Violet Giles, who had been married for 24 years, described what happened next. ‘Three soldiers at once seized me, tore rings off my fingers, inflicting considerable pain, and snatched the broach in my dress and the chain from my neck and also my watch and a bracelet from my wrist,’ she said. ‘They took the shoes from my feet and felt to see if there was anything in my stocking. They treated me with great brutality.’41
After the consul’s house had been comprehensively looted, an auction was held on the blood-flecked lawn. Violet Giles’s sable coat fetched $3. Dr Smith’s Australian wife, the former May Williams, daughter of a Thursday Island ship’s captain, escaped in one of the steamers heading for Shanghai.42
Elsewhere, the soldiers murdered Dr Jack Williams, the American president emeritus of Nanking University and a warm friend of the Nationalist movement, the British harbour-master of Nanking and two Catholic priests, while missionaries were chased through the streets, beaten, robbed and in some cases stripped down to their underwear.43
There were surprisingly few deaths, thanks to the besieged American Marines who signalled for assistance with flags from the roof of Socony House. Their messages were received on board warships on the Yangtze and 100 Royal Marines from HMS Emerald and 100 bluejackets from the United States destroyers Peston and Noa came ashore and advanced towards the city walls under the cover of a thundering naval bombardment.44
The barrage had a salutary effect on the marauding Southern troops who suddenly came to their senses. The killing and looting ceased and Nationalist officers were able to regain control of their men. The Americans escaped down Standard Oil Hill and lowered themselves over the city wall to safety.
Potentially, the ‘Nanking Incident’ was a public relations disaster for Chiang Kai-shek just as he was attempting to sell himself to the world as the strongman who could save China from Communism. His minions claimed the crimes had been committed by ‘bad characters from the North dressed in Southern uniforms, and what might be called an anti-missionary movement’. As proof, several dozen soldiers were held culpable for the disorder and executed.
Blinking through thick lenses and with his bushy white hair awry, Sterling Fessenden made a fighting speech at a British dinner party. ‘According to the legend, St George achieved fame slaying a dragon,’
he said. ‘If necessary, another dragon will be slain here, the head of which is in Hankow, the tail at Canton. There is an army and navy here, which means that the white race will not be ousted from China. These forces are not here for war, but to maintain the prestige of their own races.’45
Alarmed at the power of the unions, the Chinese business community sent emissaries from Shanghai to see Chiang at his winter headquarters after Fessenden invited the Chinese Chamber of Commerce to discuss ways of curbing the labour movement. The Chinese capitalists were as anxious as their Western counterparts about the threat to public order and trade. ‘It is no exaggeration to say that spontaneous combustion is apt to take place at the slightest provocation which may lead to a worse conflagration than that of last year,’ the Chinese leader Yu Hsia-ching told the municipal councillors. ‘For our respective and common interests we must by all means prevent it.’46
Chiang knew better than anyone that he needed the recognition of the foreign powers and the loans available from Shanghai’s banks and corporations to fund his campaign; he no longer needed fanatical supporters bent on ousting the imperialists and smashing the power of the corporate bourgeoisie.
Chiang’s strategy was to build support among the rural gentry and urban financiers in his quest to become undisputed ruler of the Kuomintang. He understood that the faction which controlled Shanghai’s revenues would have the resources to master the whole country. It would be the utmost folly, the former commodities broker reasoned, to strangle the geese that laid these golden eggs.47 The emissaries returned to Shanghai confident he was willing to contend with the Red menace.
Chiang’s commander in Shanghai, General Pai Chung-hsi, was a fiercely anti-Communist Muslim from Kwangsi. He ordered the workers to put down their weapons and instructed his troops to take severe measures against anyone who dissented. The workers, however, refused to surrender. They executed ‘running dog’ employees of foreigners, attacked strike-breakers and turned 25 union buildings into armed fortresses.48
Shanghai Fury Page 26