On the afternoon of 26 March, Chiang Kai-shek arrived in Shanghai in a Chinese gunboat and moored at The Bund. As news of the events at Nanking flooded into the foreign concessions, Patrick Givens, the Irish head of the Special Branch and a staunch anti-Communist, stepped on board to present Chiang with a pass entitling him to go ashore in the International Settlement with his bodyguard. Only a few weeks earlier, Givens had launched a propaganda campaign to portray Chiang as ‘an unscrupulous, avaricious and blood-thirsty traitor’; now he was welcomed as the city’s saviour.49
Wang Ching-wei, who reached Shanghai on 5 April, pleaded with Chiang for time to bring the unions into line. Chiang, however, had conceived a plan to deal a mortal blow to the Communists and all other left-wingers in Shanghai through the city’s notorious Green Gang, of which he had been a member since his days as a commodities broker.50
The Green Gang’s boss, ‘Big-Eared’ Tu Yueh-sheng, not only controlled Shanghai’s gambling, narcotics and prostitution rackets but also hired out thugs to intimidate strikers. He had no love of Communists, who would dearly liked to have put him out of business. Chiang summoned Tu’s chief lieutenant, Huang Jinrong, known as ‘Pockmarked Huang’, to his gunboat and explained that he wanted his boss to act as executioner-in-chief in a massive purge of their Communist enemies. Tu responded favourably to the suggestion. His first move was to order the French police chief, Captain Etienne Fiori, to invite Sterling Fessenden to a meeting at his home in Frenchtown.51
At the meeting Fiori told Fessenden that all foreigners faced a grave threat from Communist extremists, whereupon Tu volunteered to take care of the problem. He would need 5000 rifles and ammunition from the French, he said, and permission from Fessenden for his men to drive through the International Settlement to reach the Chinese areas. When Chiang heard that Tu had been given assurances on both counts, he moved all but his most reliable troops out of the city and then sailed for Nanking to set up his new capital.52
Just before dawn on 12 April 1927, 2000 armed gangsters posing as members of the ‘China Mutual Progress Association’ moved through the deserted streets of the International Settlement. They wore blue denim overalls and white armbands bearing the Chinese character for ‘worker’ – in fact, Owen Green described them as ‘Kuomintang labourers’ in his dispatch to The Times. During the night, General Pai Chung-hsi had posted Nationalist soldiers in key positions in Nantao, Chapei and Hongkew, the western suburb of Jessfield and across the river in Pootung. He also warned the foreign authorities to close all barriers.
As early morning light crept over the Whangpoo, a gunboat siren signalled the attack. Tu’s thugs then launched vicious raids on dozens of union branches and Chiang’s troops shot anyone who tried to escape. ‘Members of the General Labour Union barricaded themselves in the Huchow Guild house,’ Green reported, ‘while 300 Communists with machine-guns stood at bay in the Commercial Press building.’ The workers resisted heroically but were overwhelmed when Nationalist artillery pieces were brought into play. Those who surrendered were mostly shot or beheaded.53 ‘It is too much perhaps to say that the Communist power is broken,’ Green concluded, ‘but certainly the Communists have had a heavy setback.’
The following day a huge procession of Chinese citizens marched down Paoshan Road with the intention of presenting a petition protesting about the slaughter of their husbands, fathers, sons and brothers to the Nationalist military commander, General Pai Chung-hsi. Sentries and nests of hidden machine-gunners opened fire, killing 66 people and wounding 316. While soldiers with fixed bayonets murdered civilians who had been chased into alleys and back streets, the bodies of the dead and wounded were thrown into trucks and driven away.54
Over the next few weeks the Nationalists’ military camp at Lunghwa on the outskirts of the city became a death camp where hundreds were executed. Among those who escaped the carnage was Chou En-lai, who moved into room 311 at the Astor House Hotel with his wife. To avoid detection, he reverted to his thoroughly middle-class upbringing, donned a three-piece suit and passed himself off as a successful businessman.
The hostility among the surviving workers towards Europeans was palpable. One Chinese docker spat in the face of Rewi Alley, a young New Zealand ex-serviceman who had just stepped ashore ‘to have a look’ at the city. ‘That’s a strange thing to do,’ he thought. ‘What an extraordinary country!’55 Alley found lodgings in a White Russian boarding house and went looking for work. ‘I saw five lads being carried naked and hanging from poles,’ he said. ‘Right in front of me they were dumped on the ground and an officer got down from a horse and pumped a bullet into the head of each of them. Next day I read in the papers that they were young “agitators”, trying to organise a trade union among the silk filature workers.’56
British engineer Albert Howkins had hoped to create a new life for his wife Winifred and six-year-old daughter Freda. ‘We lived in Birkenhead and my father worked in Liverpool but he hated going to work in the dark and getting home in the dark,’ Freda says.
When a job with the Shanghai Power Company was advertised, he applied and got it. We arrived in the middle of the emergency. We were supposed to stay at the Palace Hotel but the British Army had taken it over, so we were put in a hotel in a back road. My mother didn’t like it at all – there was a lot of shooting going on during the night. We got to know the wife of a pilot who had a spare bedroom in a safe district and we stayed there.57
The exact number of deaths in what became known as the ‘White Terror’ is unknown but it ran into many thousands when similar acts of repression followed in the provinces. The Chinese Communist Party’s hopes of a Marxist revolution had been brutally dashed. ‘It was not Communists that Chiang was suppressing,’ Wang Ching-wei charged after returning to the safety of Hankow, ‘but all the members of the Kuomintang who oppose the dictatorship of Chiang Kai-shek.’58
On 17 April, five days after the slaughter had commenced, Wang’s faction in Hankow accused Chiang of ‘the massacre of the people’ and expelled him from the Kuomintang. Chiang, however, was also tough on the Chinese bourgeoisie. He demanded that the chairman of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce provide the bulk of a $10 million loan to help finance the Northern Expedition. When the man refused, his property was confiscated and he was driven into exile. Millions were extorted from Chinese industrialists with similar threats, or their children were kidnapped and accused of Communist sympathies to force them to pay up.59
‘Red Hankow’ acted like a magnet to Milly Bennett, who took a steamer up the Yangtze to work with her American friends Rhayna and Bill Prohme on the People’s Tribune, the Hankow clique’s revolutionary newspaper. A week after arriving, she was interviewing Tom Mann, the roly-poly 70-year-old English firebrand who had played a key role in the 1909 miners strike at Broken Hill. He turned up in the newspaper office with Earl Browder, the timid, shabby-looking American Communist leader, and M. N. Roy, a tall, slender Comintern agent from a Hindu Brahmin family.
‘Setbacks? Maybe,’ Tom Mann thundered. ‘But the real revolution, deep in the Chinese people, will not be stopped again. Revolution has become the material of their lives. It is doing its work thoroughly.’ The white-haired old rabble-rouser then invited Milly out for a drink in an unashamedly bourgeois German beer garden.
[1] Standard Oil Company of New York
Having lost his close friend Roy Anderson, Bill Donald peopled his Peking house with an ever more eclectic bunch of visitors. According to Lieutenant Jimmy McHugh, a frequent visitor, Donald’s little amah ‘bossed him around in a fierce manner and he always obeyed orders’. For exercise, Donald drove his Locomobile roadster to the Western Hills Golf and Country Club when he played golf. According to McHugh, Donald’s agricultural swing suggested passion rather than finesse.1
One of Donald’s closest female friends was a beautiful young Russian woman named Irina, whom he met in 1925. The Bolsheviks had shot her fat
her and brother and confiscated the family estate on the banks of the Volga. With thousands of other White Russian refugees, she and her mother travelled to Manchuria on the Trans-Siberian Railway and then made their way to Shanghai.
‘We drifted finally to Peking, where I learned French in a convent,’ Irina says. ‘We were very poor and lived on the sale of some of our family jewellery.’2 Donald and Irina grew close in Peking and she would later accompany him on a well-publicised trip to Europe.
Although he enjoyed female company, Donald resisted all efforts to recruit him on to the diplomatic social circuit. When Lady Lampson, wife of the British ambassador, invited him to dinner, he replied, ‘Dear Lady, I will not go to an ordinary social dinner because it is a waste of time. I have no time to waste. But if you want me to come to dinner and there is somebody who wants to talk about China, then you tell me and I’ll come. Otherwise, please don’t ask because I won’t.’3
Henry Gullett, Billy Hughes’s former press officer and future Australian cabinet minister, arrived in Peking in 1925 at the height of the warlords’ struggle for control of the capital. Donald was on good terms with the victor, the Old Marshal Chang Tso-lin, whom he described as ‘almost feminine in physique and a moderate opium smoker’. He took Gullett with him on a trip to Manchuria and West China.4
The purpose of the trip is unknown but Donald was involved in a number of business ventures at that time, usually with men who wanted him to use his influence with the powers-that-be to secure contracts for them, although there is no suggestion that Gullett fell into that category. According to his son, the Australian war hero and parliamentarian Jo Gullett, they became firm friends and conducted a ‘fairly continuous’ correspondence thereafter.5
Donald also befriended President Theodore Roosevelt’s son Kermit Roosevelt and his brother Theodore Roosevelt Jr, who arrived in Peking via the Silk Road after undertaking a hunting expedition across the Himalayas. During the trip, they shot the legendary big horn wild sheep called Ovis Poli, mentioned in the writings of Marco Polo and one of the most coveted of all game trophies.
Mrs Theodore Roosevelt Jr, who had been shooting tigers in India, met up with her husband on his travels. She enjoyed Donald’s stories of revolutionary China ‘told with a delightfully humorous slant’.
On a later trip the Roosevelt brothers bagged a giant panda. ‘It took three hours to track the panda to its lair in a hollow tree,’ the New York Times breathlessly reported. ‘The big bear-like animal came out of its hiding place, and when he was fully in view the Roosevelts fired simultaneously. The animal came rolling down.’6
Donald was also happy to take in the Baroness von Ungern-Sternberg, described as ‘a charming woman and talented pianist’ from an old German family of Baltic Russia. She was related to Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, a White Russian military leader who was executed after fighting the Bolsheviks in Siberia in 1919–21.7
Jimmy McHugh returned to the United States in May 1926 but was back in Peking six months later as one of the United States Navy’s Chinese language students. He reported to the American naval attaché, a former destroyer captain named George Pettengill. ‘Donald was in his office at the time selling some information on Chinese politics for a few dollars,’ McHugh recalls.
Money was tight. For running the Economic Bureau, he was supposed to receive $2000 Mexican a month plus expenses, half from Maritime Customs and half from the Ministry of Finance. ‘The latter never paid him and was $36,000 in arrears,’ McHugh says. ‘He had to pay all expenses including salaries of the editor and Chinese staff. He was hard up except when he sold a news column or two.’
One guest, identified only as ‘AM’, claimed that Donald some- times suffered fits of depression. At such times, he took a few grains of calomel, a tasteless powder consisting chiefly of mercurous chloride and used medicinally as a cathartic. ‘He said it was the surest of all remedies against the blues,’ AM wrote in Smiths Weekly.
Despite his role as the champion of China’s economic development, Donald abhorred the greed of Western speculators. He wrote to Harold Hochschild in New York in July 1927 that ‘a few silly fools want to try and do business in this part of the world and a group is trying to make some deal for the operation of gold mines in north Manchuria’. This was probably a reference to Manchuria Goldfields Limited with which Donald’s name was associated in the 1927 British Foreign Office Index.
According to Professor Lewis, Donald found himself ‘in something of a bind’ at this time. Financially, it was clear things could not go on as they were. Donald’s dilemma was: what did he do now? He could have charged large fees as a business consultant but refused to do so. He had nothing but loathing for, as he described them in a letter to his friend Colonel Kenneth Cantlie, ‘big men with bigger ideas and still bigger brass bands who were going to make millions out of the natural resources of this country; how they festooned the lobbies of the old Wagons-Lits Hotel, and later the Hotel de Pekin at Peking; how they overflowed the reception rooms of Legations, Embassies and Chinese Yamens, and how they swelled with hopes one day and flattened with disappointment the next, till, at last, they collapsed like busted bladders, and crept off as quietly as possible to the railway station . . .’
As an economy measure, Donald rented his ‘sumptuous’ house to Chang Tso-lin’s younger son. The young man proved to be a tearaway who threw wild parties that caused considerable damage on the property. When Donald complained, the Old Marshal sent his eldest son Chang Hsueh-liang, no mean party animal himself, down to Peking to sort things out. The matter must have been resolved to Donald’s satisfaction because he and ‘the Young Marshal’, as Hsueh-liang was called, became friends.
In Sydney, the memories of women and children labouring in Dickensian conditions in Shanghai factories lingered in the mind of the Australian feminist Eleanor Hinder. After she returned to her duties at Farmer’s department store, she kept in touch with a group of YWCA activists, including Gertrude Owen and Constance Duncan from Australia and Ella MacNeil from New Zealand. Everything in her background spurred her into going back to China and doing something about it.
Eleanor Mary Hinder was born at East Maitland, NSW, on 19 January 1893, third daughter of headmaster John Hinder and his wife Sarah, née Mills. She was educated at Maitland West Girls’ High School, Teachers’ College and the University of Sydney. Having graduated in science, she taught biology at North Sydney Girls’ High School and was active in schemes to improve workers’ education.
In 1919 she joined Farmer & Company as superintendent of women’s welfare in an age when an enlightened and benevolent employer clearly cared for its staff. With Jean Stevenson of the YWCA, she founded the City Girls Amateur Sports Association for competition in seven sports. For Farmer’s girls, many of these activities were conducted from a company cottage in the seaside suburb of Dee Why. Eleanor also campaigned with the National Council for Women to oppose an employers’ move to reduce the basic wage for female workers below the present two pounds one shilling, successfully arguing that any reduction would raise ‘moral and spiritual issues in the lives of women’.
Then in 1926 she took two years’ leave of absence from Farmer’s and returned to Shanghai on a Rockefeller fellowship to work with Lily K. Haas, the YWCA’s industrial secretary. She persuaded the organisation to set up a small house in an alleyway in the silk district of Chapei where she lived with Lily Haas and two Chinese colleagues. ‘She absolutely insisted that they should get near to the factory women and children whose conditions they hoped to better,’ her biographer, Frances Wheelhouse, writes.8
Eleanor took Professor Griffith Taylor, a visiting geographer from the University of Sydney, on a tour of the factories. ‘The first was a large cotton mill, which was probably as well run as any in China,’ he related.
The manager was careful to tell us that no children under 12 years of age were employed. The mill worked in 12-hour s
hifts day and night, and one wondered how long it would be before modern industrial hours would be enforced in China. There were apparently no safeguards against accidents and no fans to clear the air of the fluff, which soon covered our clothes and is so dangerous to breathe.9
Later the same day Eleanor escorted the professor into a typical silk filature. ‘We ascended a narrow stairway and entered a room so filled with steam that at first nothing was visible,’ he wrote.
As we stumbled along a narrow gangway, babies crawled from beneath our feet towards their mothers. In the centre of the room, the air was clearer and we saw two rows of children, many of them only five or six years old, standing in front of bowls of boiling water in which they were stirring masses of cocoons. From six to six in that atmosphere of steam these youngsters toiled to produce the silk of the world.10
Professor Taylor left Shanghai shocked at what he had seen and full of praise for Eleanor Hinder.
In March of that year Lily Haas took Eleanor to the Yellow Jacket Tearoom and introduced her to a fellow American, Viola Smith, a 33-year-old Californian who was an assistant trade commissioner in Shanghai, the first woman to be given such a post in the United States Foreign Service. Addie Viola Smith, known as ‘Vee’, had graduated from the Washington College of Law in 1920 and had come to China that year and worked her way up from humble clerk in the US Department of Commerce.
Viola Smith was a member of the Shanghai Women’s Organisation comprising representatives from a whole range of European and Asian bodies: the American Women’s Club, the British Women’s Association, the Japanese Women’s Society, the Shanghai Women’s Club and the Shanghai Chinese YWCA. Over the teacups, the two women realised that these groups would have considerable political power within the foreign concessions if they could be marshalled into a pressure group. Viola Smith speculated that it might even be possible for one of them to storm the all-male bastion of the Shanghai Municipal Council.
Shanghai Fury Page 27