Coincidentally, Rewi Alley had been thinking for some time about how his practical experience as a factory inspector might be used to advantage in the resistance movement. ‘Now look here, Rewi,’ Nym Wales told him a day or so after Alexander’s dinner party, ‘what China wants today is industry everywhere. Drop this job of making Shanghai a better place for the Japanese and get out and do something.’17
Alley wrote down his ideas for creating a chain of industrial co-operatives stretching thousands of kilometres inland and giving workers a stake in each enterprise. He gave the document to John Powell of the China Weekly Review to print as a pamphlet.
Meanwhile, the English novelist Christopher Isherwood arrived in China with his chum, the poet W. H. Auden, to write a travel book entitled Journey to a War. They spoke no Chinese, had little knowledge of Chinese affairs and described themselves as ‘not real journalists but mere trippers’. Nevertheless, Isherwood would write a darkly humorous account of his observations and Auden would pen 27 insightful poems.18
On 9 March they called on Bill Donald in his flat on the Hankow Bund. Donald had a cold and was treating himself with a variety of medicinal remedies. Isherwood noted, ‘Donald is a red-faced, serious man, with an Australian accent and a large, sensible nose – a pleasant surprise; for most of our informants had led us to expect an oily, iron-grey, evangelical figure, with a highly developed manner.’19
A few days later Donald wrapped himself in a voluminous fur coat with an astrakhan collar and took the visitors to meet Mayling Soong Chiang at Wuchang, the all-Chinese city on the south bank of the Yangtze where the Generalissimo’s standard flew in bold defiance of the Japanese and their Chinese collaborators. Isherwood noted that she was ‘vivacious rather than pretty and possessed an almost terrifying charm and poise’. He was impressed with the fact that she sometimes signed death warrants in her own hand, but he was even more taken with her perfume, which he described as ‘the most delicious either of us has ever smelt’.20
Unknown to Donald, the knives were out for him in Hong Kong. In April, Jimmy McHugh flew back to the colony to see the banker Cyril Rogers again. At this meeting Rogers revealed he had sent a memorandum to the Bank of England in which he described Donald as a megalomaniac and accused him of wrongly taking credit for the success of the Leith–Ross mission to put China’s finances on a more stable footing. Rogers added he had also got in touch with Clark Kerr soon after his arrival ‘to debunk Donald and make sure that the new ambassador did not fall under his influence’. Donald would have been outraged to hear of Rogers’s perfidy but despite his apparent friendship with McHugh, the American told him nothing on his return to Hankow on 22 April.21
Back in Shanghai, the Committee for the Promotion of Industrial Co-operatives held its first meeting. As an emblem, Alley had a workshop in Shantung Road stamp out some enamel badges with the words ‘Gung Ho’, translated as ‘work together’, on them. The committee liked the sound of Gung Ho and adopted it as the name of the co-operative movement.
John Alexander gave a copy of Rewi Alley’s pamphlet to Archie Clark Kerr and arranged a meeting with Ed Snow and Nym Wales. Snow pitched the Gung Ho idea to him and suggested Rewi Alley as the leader of the movement. Clark Kerr saw the scheme as a basic form of socialism and thus a possible antidote to the more extreme menace of Communism. He was due to see Chiang Kai-shek at Hankow in June and on 27 May invited Snow and Alley to the embassy to answer questions about Gung Ho prior to that meeting.
Although Clark Kerr could rightly describe himself as liberal and anti-Fascist, he knew the Chinese were bound to see him as an imperialist like his predecessors. At Ed Snow’s suggestion, he saw Chingling Soong in Hong Kong on his way to Hankow and outlined the Gung Ho scheme to her. She gave it her blessing.
At Hankow, Clark Kerr invited the Snows’ friend and kindred spirit Agnes Smedley to dinner. Agnes was raising funds to provide medical supplies for the 8th Route Army, the Communist element in the Nationalist forces which had caught the public imagination with their daring resistance to the Japanese in Shansi province. Clark Kerr wanted to hear all about this and later made several contributions to Agnes’s medical fund, as well as providing her with such personal essentials as a Christmas pudding and a bottle of Scotch.
Agnes turned up at the dinner in a borrowed dress, expecting to meet ‘some devil of a British imperialist’ but was pleasantly surprised. ‘He didn’t much resemble a devil, but he certainly had the charm of one,’ she wrote in her memoir. ‘He was a lean, brown, Scotchman with a keen, tough mind and a scintillating sense of humour.’ She wondered whether he was really the militant democrat he appeared to be or merely a clever diplomat.22
Over dinner Clark Kerr raised the question of Rewi Alley’s plan for industrial co-operatives. When one of the other guests, a diplomat, replied that Alley seemed ‘something of an illusionist chasing a will-o’-the-wisp’, he replied that might not be a bad thing. At the end of the evening, Agnes concluded Clark Kerr was ‘a good Scotchman fallen among diplomats’.
Shortly afterwards the ambassador laid the Gung Ho plan in front of Chiang Kai-shek, Mayling and, despite Cyril Rogers’s warning, Bill Donald. He admitted that while the plan was a form of socialism, he believed it would prevent the spread of Communism rather than assist it. And he pledged British financial aid to get Gung Ho off the ground. Chiang accepted the offer and, on his return to Shanghai, Clark Kerr persuaded the Municipal Council to release Rewi Alley from the factory inspectorate to take up his new duties.
H. H. Kung, however, was violently opposed to the scheme, which he believed would place power in the hands of ordinary Chinese who were more likely to support the Communists than the Nationalists. He called a meeting of conservative Chinese industrialists in Hankow with the intention of sabotaging it. Donald heard about the meeting and tipped off Mayling, who stormed into the room. ‘You have spoiled every project that I tried to carry out,’ she shouted at Kung, ‘but you will not spoil this one.’23
Then she swept out into the hot afternoon, with Dr Kung in a blue silk dressing gown waddling along after her trying to say something. The following morning Rewi Alley was given the green light to make Gung Ho a reality. Soon, the forges and factories of every town in the Yangtze Delta not under Japanese control were being dismantled and carried or shipped west to Szechuen.24
On 25 May the two trippers Christopher Isherwood and Wystan Auden reached Shanghai. As their car crossed Soochow Creek, they saw the stark contrast between the cratered and barren moonscape of Hongkew on one side and the jostling crowds in neat, well-swept streets on the other. They had been invited to stay with Sir Archibald and Lady Clark Kerr at ‘Number One House’ in Frenchtown and were relieved to see police guards on the front gate and smiling Chinese servants waiting to greet them.
Isherwood, who had chronicled the cosmopolitan lowlife of the Weimar Republic in Goodbye to Berlin, a.k.a. Cabaret, was impressed with Shanghai’s ‘Sin City’ reputation. ‘The tired or lustful business man will find here everything to gratify his desires,’ he wrote.
If you want girls or boys, you can have them, at all prices, in the bath-houses and the brothels. If you want opium you can smoke it in the best company, served on a tray, like afternoon tea. Good wine is difficult in this climate, but there is whisky and gin to float a fleet of battleships.25
Archie Clark Kerr threw a garden party at the ambassadorial residence at which the guests included several hissing Japanese generals, as well as Chinese dignitaries and foreign diplomats. Scottish pipers played on the lawn and Chinese waiters dressed in lemon silk dispensed cocktails; the clink of ice cubes provided a neat counterpoint to the rattle of machine-guns next door in Nantao, where Chinese guerrillas were holding out.
Isherwood noted that the Japanese never ceased trying to find collaborators to prop up their puppet government. ‘Blackmail and bribes coerce or tempt a few prominent Chinese to negotiate with the enem
y,’ he wrote, ‘but would-be traitors seldom live long enough to be of much use to their new masters . . .’26
Despite the self-deprecating description of themselves as ‘mere trippers’, Isherwood’s words and Auden’s poems provide a riveting portrait of the dying world of Shanghai. ‘In this city, the gulf between society’s two halves is too grossly wide for any bridge,’ Isherwood wrote. ‘There can be no compromise here. And we ourselves, though we wear out our shoes walking the slums, though we take notes, though we are genuinely shocked and indignant, belong, inescapably, to the other world. We return, always, to Number One House for lunch.’
The foreigners’ world was one of garden parties, nightclubs, hot baths and cocktails, a fool’s paradise in which one European businessman could write to the North-China Daily News that Chinese refugees should be turned out of the settlement because they smelled, while another seriously suggested that the Japanese should be asked to drive Chinese farmers from a plot of land enclosing a grave-mound which spoiled the appear- ance of his garden.27
Before departing Shanghai, Isherwood and Auden visited the Shanghai Club, where the longest bar in the world ‘proved to be far shorter than we had expected’. It was left to the Australian author Frank Clune, who followed in their footsteps a few weeks later, to disprove the myth entirely. He measured the bar at 35 paces and declared, ‘The Australia Hotel bar in Sydney is half as long again but nobody skites about it.’28
Meanwhile, Buzz Farmer booked his ticket to return to Australia and resigned from the North-China Daily News. ‘The war had rolled northward,’ he explained. ‘There seemed no point in remaining in the Far East.’ On the eve of his departure a Nationalist official offered him the chance to become involved in the Chinese war effort with Hollington Tong’s Ministry of Information. Farmer told the official he knew nothing about propaganda; he replied that didn’t matter. Farmer accepted the well-paid job of editor in the ministry’s international department and reached Hankow via Hong Kong.
Chiang Kai-shek had kept the Foreign Ministry, the Ministry of Information and his military headquarters in the Wuhan triangle but moved his government beyond the Three Gorges to Chungking, a city atop the precipitous cliffs of the Yangtze in Szechuen. After being driven out of Shanghai, Chiang’s strategy had been to ‘trade space for time’ in Central China in order to protect his forces from total destruction at the hands of the Japanese. His enemies, however, accused him of selling out the country to Japan little by little to amass arms to fight Mao’s Communists.
Indeed, Nationalist forces were still attacking the Communists in Shensi but it was also true that the grim realities of war had dictated a new course. Hitler had recalled his German advisers to the Fatherland and although they had trained a force of some 80,000 troops, it was nowhere near big enough to tackle the Japanese Army.
Also, China now had just a few squadrons of serviceable aircraft and many of her best pilots were dead or badly wounded. Garnet Malley’s optimistic reports to his friend Air Marshal Richard ‘Dick’ Williams, head of the RAAF, on China’s Air Force managed to convey completely the wrong impression about the true state of affairs. ‘I might add that the [Chinese] Air Force is a Service to be reckoned with these days,’ he wrote in May 1938.
It has developed enormously and the Japanese have by no means wiped it out the many times they would have the world believe. As a matter of fact, they had a very bitter lesson right over our heads last week, when they lost over 30 machines in one of the most spectacular battles I have ever seen. There were over 130 machines involved, and I quite felt I was back again in 1918, but as a spectator this time!29
In another letter to Dick Williams, Malley recalled a tour of inspection he had made of China’s airfields some time earlier, ‘landing on aerodromes that were all polished up for inspection, being met by provincial dignitaries and lavishly entertained . . .’
When landing on most large Airports, it was most impressive seeing hundreds of Officers and personnel lined up in parade formation, and smartly turned out in white. Bands were playing, and then one was whisked away by motor-car to some sumptious [sic] banquet.30
At the time he was writing, China’s planes were being shot out of the sky and dozens of Chinese civilians were being killed in air raids. Chiang appealed for international help and Russia – the only responder – sent four fighter and two bomber squadrons, complete with pilots, ground crews and supplies. The Kremlin figured that while the Japanese were fighting the Chinese they would be too tied up to attack the Soviet Union across the Manchurian border with Siberia.
The Japanese had battered their way to within 100 kilometres of Hankow and Chiang Kai-shek was anxious that the Russian pilots should stop them. ‘At present, the Japanese are exerting every piece of military and naval strength that they possess to take Hankow,’ Donald wrote to Kenneth Cantlie on 2 July 1938. ‘When they do get here, it will be an empty shell, while the Chinese will have started for fresh fields and pastures new . . .’
At 5 am on 7 July – the first anniversary of the start of the ‘China Incident’ on the Marco Polo Bridge – Chinese freedom fighters threw 18 bombs at targets in the International Settlement and shot dead two Japanese millworkers in the street. British troops, Shanghai Volunteers and American Marines swooped on Chinese premises and arrested more than 1000 Chinese, two of whom were found with bombs. The Chinese otherwise observed the anniversary by a three-minute silence.31
Buzz Farmer met Donald for the first time that month when Donald, ‘big as a buccaneer’, strode into the Ministry of Information office in the former Japanese Club. ‘What the hell, Holly?’ he addressed Hollington Tong. ‘If the Ruskies start hammering the Japs, your fat generals along the Yangtze will just lie back, open their tunics, fan their fat bellies and let the Russians do all the fighting. Better beat them yourselves, without the Russians.’
The young Australian fell under the Donald spell. He got the first-ever interview with the mysterious W. H. Donald who described his childhood in Australia and told how he came to Hong Kong. ‘I could smell the place 40 miles away: it was terrible, but I liked it!’ he said. ‘Ashore, everyone was in duck suits and topees. My heavy blue suit and bowler hat started a procession. I don’t believe I even noticed the crowd of grinning Chinese. China gripped me that day and has never let go. I thrill every time I see a junk.’32
The Russian pilots were short and squat and seemed surly to other Europeans. They lived in quarters near the airfield and shared their mess with their Russian ground crews. ‘They had the necessary patience to understand the Chinese and struck up instant friendship with the Chinese fliers and mechanics,’ Buzz Farmer wrote. ‘It was said of the Russian airmen that they would be speaking Chinese within a month and living with a Chinese girl within five weeks.’33
Stalin was keen to give as many Soviet pilots as possible combat experience, so the tour of duty was just four months. But despite their undoubted bravery there was little the Russians could do to halt the Japanese advance. The supporters of Wang Ching-wei bided their time, ‘banqueting and whoring’, in the words of Agnes Smedley, until they could form a puppet government for the enemy.
‘Their sons and daughters dance in the night clubs, neither knowing nor caring about the fate of their country,’ she wrote in the Guardian. ‘Outside, on the streets streams of refugees pour through the city, while the roads from the north, east and south are endless lines of wounded soldiers . . .’34
In August Donald was stricken with fever while on a trip to Yunnan and was flown to hospital in French Indochina for treatment. Jimmy McHugh informed Washington he was certain Donald had come to realise that reports of Dr Kung’s ineptitude in managing China’s finances were in fact true. ‘His present trip to Yunnan, while genuinely necessary for purposes of health, embodies the two-fold object of getting away from the Kung regime for a time if possible,’ he wrote. ‘Opposed to this is his loyalty to Madame Chiang which
I believe in the end will dominate and force him to return.’
Donald was incapacitated for almost three months but on 22 October returned to Hankow from Hanoi. ‘Japanese pursuit planes were apparently waiting for me at sunset at Hankow, but I landed up-river,’ he wrote to Kenneth Cantlie. ‘I arrived next morning at Hankow on top of a bombing raid.’35
The war news was grim. The Japanese had made a surprise landing at Bias Bay, only 56 kilometres north-east of Hong Kong, and marched to the outskirts of Canton.36 Fearing a repeat of the Rape of Nanking, many Cantonese fled up the Pearl River in sampans or took to the hills; the remainder abandoned the city within hours of the Japanese occupation. The Japanese then edged their way down the Chinese coast and sealed off Hong Kong. Chiang Kai-shek warned Archie Clark Kerr that he was witnessing the ‘life and death turning-point in British Far Eastern policy’.37
Donald’s illness had added to a growing sense of disillusionment. He could see the republicans’ democratic achievements being swept away on the in-rushing Japanese tide. Moreover, he was powerless to curb the corruption that was bleeding China white. His bad temper and irritability were aggravated by the relentless flow of bad news. ‘The strategic policy for the first phase of the war was to hold positions as long as possible, and then withdraw to new lines,’ he wrote in one newspaper article at this time.
This policy ended after the withdrawal from Hankow and the capitulation of Canton. The first phase lasted from the outbreak of the war in July 1937 to the end of October 1938. The second phase is now developing. The strategy now being followed is that of nationwide mobile fronts, with intensification of guerrilla warfare and reinforcement of Chinese military and political strength behind the Japanese lines. Henceforth there is to be more intensive training of the fighting forces before they go into action.38
Shortly afterwards he saw an ambulance bought by American funds pull up outside a Hankow bank in which one of the senior Nationalist officials had a big stake. He stood in the crowd, watching, as armed guards loaded the official’s fortune into the back of the ambulance. That afternoon, the president of an American university rang him to complain about the blatant profiteering of Dr Kung and members of the Soong family, adding, ‘Lord, haven’t they any sense of decency?’39
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