by Carl Crow
At about the same time that the Germans lost their special rights in China, the Soviets made a grand gesture of abandoning theirs voluntarily. This move was inspired by three motives:
(1) The brain trusters at Moscow were enjoying the delusion that they could convert China to Communism, and this gesture was a part of a move to break down Chinese resistance.
(2) It would, they hoped, embarrass the wicked capitalist powers which insisted on clinging to their treaty rights.
(3) Finally, it was a concession which cost the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics nothing. Practically all the Russians in China to whom Moscow could have extended a protecting arm were the nonconformists who had fled from Russia by horse, foot, and carriage in order to escape domination by the Bolsheviks. To the Moscow doctrinaires it was a matter of complete unconcern what happened to these “White Russians.” If it was something of a fatal nature, it could be appraised as a purge of undesirable elements carried out without any trouble or expense to the party.
The poor Russian refugees were not only thrown to the mercy of the Chinese courts but faced general Chinese hostility. A large proportion of them were completely destitute. Many would probably have starved but for the fact that the American Red Cross opened a relief kitchen where we fed thousands of them daily until they found work to do. This work brought them into direct competition with the Chinese laborers, for they worked at anything and everything. Some of them pulled rickshas. For the first time in the history of China the white man was taking employment away from Chinese instead of performing his usual function of providing employment for them.
When Chinese laborers in a similar way interfered with the jobs of Americans in San Francisco, many were killed by mobs, discriminatory laws were passed against them and they were denied the usual protection of the courts. In Shanghai the Chinese who were thrown out of work by Russian competition grumbled and some of them went hungry. But there were no outbreaks of mobs and few individual Russians were molested.
We watched the infliction of Chinese justice on the Russians just as we had watched for its effect on the Germans. The latter were fortified by their long and friendly business relations with prominent Chinese and the fact that they were closely organized and had an aggressive diplomatic and consular service. They had money in the bank and a trade that was rapidly increasing in volume. The Russians had nothing, and the proletariat officials who occupied the old Czarist consulate didn’t give a tinker’s dam what happened to the now impoverished bourgeois who had fled from the red terror.
What happened to the Russians as well as to the Germans was nothing more than might have been expected in any large city where there is inevitable litigation over business disputes and trials for infractions of the law. A number of people were haled into court and tried by Chinese judges. Civil suits were adjudicated and fines and prison sentences imposed. But there was no outcry over injustice or cruelty, and this was remarkable in a community which is so touchy on the subject of the legal rights of the white man.
Twenty years ago any foreigner who expressed the opinion that extraterritorial rights might safely be abolished would have been looked on as one who had become temporarily deranged. At the time of the Japanese invasion there were a great many foreigners who would have seen these rights surrendered without a protest.
There is a great deal that can be said in defense of extrality which was justified by the fact that trade between China and foreign countries could have been initiated in no other way. No one who ever thought seriously or intelligently about the matter ever looked on it as more than a temporary measure which would eventually be abolished, just as it had been in Japan. There were definite promises to China that this irritating provision of the treaties would be canceled as soon as China got her house in order and established courts which administer justice along Western lines. For a number of years Chinese radicals agitated for the abolition of what they called “the unequal treaties” without doing anything to justify this action. But about ten years ago there was a general movement to improve the courts - and in many ways a very successful movement.
But this created a new rift between foreigners and Chinese. With every improvement in Chinese administration the case for the revision of the treaties became stronger and foreigners began to envisage the time when they would no longer be under the protection of their own flags. With each advance made by the Chinese government, that day drew nearer and in what was an instinctive move for self-preservation, every improvement in Chinese administration was belittled or denied. To admit that any progress was being made by China was to admit justification for abolishing the special rights and privileges of foreigners and therefore it became a kind of treachery to foreign interests to praise the Chinese government or to admit its accomplishments. It was against a sabotage of this sort that the Chiang Kai-shek regime has struggled.
Attempts to defend extrality after the reasons for it had begun to disappear, led many foreigners into a false position. While the establishment of law and order and the general improvement of the governmental machinery of China was welcomed, the welcomes were cautious whispers. To admit that conditions were getting better was to admit that sooner or later there would be no reason for continuing the special privileges which foreigners enjoyed. It became treason to his own kind for the foreigner to find anything praiseworthy about the Chinese government and he was likely to be called “pro-Chinese” in tones which would indicate that there was a good deal of odium attached to the term. As late as July, 1937 there were a number of my fellow members of the American Club who frequently expressed the hope that Japan would come in and “clean up the country.” Few of them really meant what they were saying and none of them knew what they were talking about as they discovered a few months later when Japan started her cleaning up process by wiping out most of the business these Americans had been doing.
I suppose I was one of thousands of foreigners who lived for years in China under the protection of extraterritorial rights without ever enjoying any of the benefits of that peculiar legal status. I was never arrested, so the right of trial by Judge Thayer, Lobinger, Purdy or Helmick, all of whom could have fined or jailed me, was one that I never enjoyed. All of these judges were personal friends but the way they handed out sentences to a few American malefactors made me feel that if I ever decided on a life of crime I would prepare for it by acquiring some other nationality, possibly Chinese. I was once sued in the American court and no legal defeat would have been more complete for the Italian plaintiff got all that he asked for. My lawyer had forgotten that the United States court sat on a day that other courts observed as a holiday and was not on hand to present the documentary evidence and argue the matter. It was a small amount anyway.
I do not recall that I ever asked either Consul General Wilder, Sammons or Cunningham for any help in upholding my treaty rights. In my business I had innumerable controversies with Chinese officials over the matter of taxes and permits and license fees but these were always settled to my satisfaction by the old Chinese custom of talking the thing over and arriving at a compromise. The only consular office I ever called on for help was the British and that was when a Canadian employee of mine was involved in a fatal motor-car accident in Chekiang province. The Chinese police had seized him and were holding him in what was genuine “protective custody” while the mob calmed down. About the time I was talking to the British consul about this, the mob dispersed and the Canadian was released and on his way home.
IX
Foreign flags for sale
“A wise bird selects its tree.”
It wasn’t very long after the extraterritorial rights of foreigners had been established before it developed that many Chinese were legally foreigners and had the protection of some foreign flag. The Portuguese government claimed as subjects all who had been born in the little colony of Macao, many of whom had in fact traces of Portuguese blood. When the British took possession of Hong Kong as a crown colony, all Chinese who were
born there were assumed to be British subjects and thousands who migrated there were naturalized. According to the records in Hong Kong, the well-known Chinese diplomat, Wu Ting Fang, was a British subject at the time he was serving as Chinese minister to Washington. While he was the official representative of the Chinese government, he was not subject to its authority and could have called on the British for protection if the Manchus had ever learned of his traitorous republican sentiments. In a conversation with him I once incautiously referred to this, and the rage of the old gentleman showed that I had touched a very sensitive spot.
Many Chinese indeed enjoyed a kind of dual nationality. They claimed the rights that were restricted to Chinese - such as the ownership of real property in the interior. On the other hand when threatened by the Chinese courts the production of a birth certificate would throw them into the protection of some foreign court. The number of Chinese who have this very peculiar status has constantly increased. Several hundred Chinese who were born in America have returned to China to live. One never hears of them until they get into trouble and then they lean very heavily on the stars and stripes.
When Japan took Formosa, all of the residents of that island became subjects of the Mikado and could come to China and smuggle opium and defy the Chinese authorities. If they were arrested they were tried by the Japanese courts and invariably freed because it is not contrary to Japanese law to sell poisonous narcotics to Chinese. When the rising sun flag was hoisted over Korea, many of the unfortunate residents of the Hermit Kingdom found that peddling Japanese heroin in China was the only way they could make a living, and the punishment given by the Japanese courts was never harsh enough to discourage them. Church-going Caleb Cushing had never dreamed that the privileges he had secured with such exact legal phrases and justified on high moral grounds would be used to protect the greatest dope-running racket in history.
There are so many obvious advantages to this dual nationality that it is the ardent desire of many of the treaty-port Chinese to become what an old houseboy of mine once described as a “foreign style Chinaman.” This has in thousands of instances been accomplished by consuls of a foreign power placing individual Chinese under their protection, temporarily or permanently. At times there was some justification for an action of this sort. Some other consuls went much farther than that and assumed the right actually to naturalize Chinese who had never set foot out of their own country. This was a thriving business carried on particularly by the consuls of a few small countries. No Latin-American country ever had more than a handful of nationals living in China and none of them ever had a trade which would justify the maintenance of a consulate; yet there were always Latin-American consulates with officials who had little or nothing to do. And almost invariably there was one national living in China who came under the protection of that consulate, together with an indeterminate number of Chinese rascals who kept out of their own jails by claiming the protection of a foreign but friendly flag.
There was at one time one business man and one consul who comprised the entire Cuban population of Shanghai; and the business man and his Chinese partners prospered by the simple expedient of never paying their debts. They went even farther than that, and by hook or by crook, would get possession of merchandise and refuse to return it to the owners. There was nothing to be gained by suing because they had to be sued before the Cuban consul who invariably threw out every action. The matter was not straightened out until the government of the United States made representations to the Cuban government and got the consul recalled.
American officials did less flag selling than many others but were not entirely guiltless. More than thirty years ago a young American consul was given his first post at an unimportant port in South China. On the following Christmas he found several dozen live turkeys in his compound and his kitchen full of hams and cases of liquor. The houseboy, who had worked in the consulate for years, explained that these were Christmas presents from the “American subjects” living in the consular district. The fact that any Americans besides a few missionaries were under his protection was news to the consul, and he started an investigation which disclosed some interesting and profitable activities of his predecessor.
The latter had issued “certificates of good character” to hundreds’ of Chinese, affixing the consular seal to each and collecting the consular notarial fee. The certificates were good for only one year, and their renewal provided a neat little annual revenue in fees alone. Those were the days when American consuls got very small salaries or no salaries at all, and their principal compensation came from the fees they collected. Honest consuls, who were not unknown, had a hard time saving up enough money for return fare when a change of administration would mean the appointment of a successor; but those who were adept at manipulating fees enjoyed a fair degree of prosperity. There was nothing technically illegal about issuing these certificates of good character, but the intent was to protect the holders from Chinese courts. Any Chinese official who glanced at the imposing consular seal would come to the conclusion that the holder of the document was some kind of American and would think twice before sending him to jail or ordering his head chopped off.
While some amount of chicanery was necessary for a Chinese to acquire a foreign nationality and get the personal protection of a foreign flag, it has always been a very simple matter to place his property under that protection. This has been a thriving business from the time foreigners first acquired extraterritorial rights, and still is. Chinese officials of the Manchu period looked on it as a sound policy to soak the rich, and those who fell in that category found escape by placing their property in the hands of some trusted foreigner and living with no easily discernible means of support.
The great American firm of Russell & Co. owed a part of its phenomenal prosperity to the fact that one of the wealthiest families in Canton turned over all its property to the firm and for more than a generation the clan lived on the profits made from investments managed by Russell. There are several large British, French, and American companies and a few firms of British solicitors which have millions of dollars’ worth of Chinese real estate registered in their names. Who the actual owner may be is usually a secret between him and his trustee. The latter manages the properties and collects the rents. While it is usually real estate that is given this protection of a foreign flag, there are few lines of business in Shanghai that have not been given this protection from the vagaries of Chinese law or, in times of war, the threat of seizure by a powerful enemy. There are very few old residents who have not eased the worries of a Chinese friend by assuming ownership of his property. I was at one time the ostensible owner of a coal yard I never saw. My connection with this enterprise ceased when irate customers began phoning me at all hours of the day complaining about the quality of the coal my Chinese friend had sold them.
While I was the Far Eastern representative of the Committee on Public Information during the first World War I made an investigation of the ownership of the dozen or more Chinese language newspapers published in Shanghai and found that there was not a single one of them that was not ostensibly a foreign property. In the case of one of them, the Sin Wan Pao, there was nothing fictitious about the American ownership, for the paper had been founded by an American, Dr. John C. Ferguson, who took an active interest in its management and editorial policy. Most of the others were Italian or Portuguese, and it is safe to assume that there was not a penny of Italian or Portuguese money invested in any of these papers, and certainly no foreigner had anything to do with the editorial policy or management.
Shortly after the end of the war I was elected chairman of the board of directors of a Chinese paper in Tientsin. I never attended a directors’ meeting and was never inside the newspaper office and had no more to do with the management of the paper than with that of the London Times. But the fact that I was chairman of the board did enable the real owners of the paper to wave the American flag every time a Chinese official threatened to troubl
e them. I may also add that I never collected a cent of the salary I was supposed to draw and that all I got out of the connection was a ding hao Chinese dinner given me by the owners of the paper.
The fact that Chinese journalism has had a vigorous and fairly healthy growth is due to the protection foreign flags have given it through subterfuges such as that to which I was a party. Without this protection there would have been no newspapers in the Manchu days, for to them the printing press was the potent tool of the traitor. For several years after the downfall of the Manchus the many newspapers which sprang into existence under unconcealed Chinese ownership had to keep a wary eye on the fortunes of the various war lords, as they rose and fell in power. It was only the papers that had the protection of a foreign flag that were able to maintain any semblance of an independent policy. It is a curious anomaly that the curtailment of Chinese sovereignty through the imposition of the extraterritorial rights of foreigners was the only thing that made a free press possible during the period of social and political development when it was of the greatest value and importance.
Missionaries always went to the bat for a convert who was unjustly treated by the officials, and as the missionaries never heard anything but the convert’s story, all were presumed to be oppressed. Knowing that they would be supported by their missionary patrons if they got into trouble many of the converts took full advantage of their opportunities to evade Chinese law. It was the missionaries’ insistence on interfering for the protection of their converts that aroused more official resentment than anything else that they did. The missionaries helped their converts to secure employment, fed them when they were hungry and protected them from the injustice of Chinese officials. There were many whose profession of the Christian faith was influenced by the material advantages that were sure to follow. Wu Ting Fang contemptuously called them “rice Christians.”