Secret War in Shanghai - Hardcover

Wasserstein, Bernard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395985374 ISBN 13: 9780395985373

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999

Synopsis

The story of wartime Shanghai unveils the savage political intrigue, diplomatic maneuvering, and sometimes deadly espionage that defined this city at the height of World War II, as foreign representatives converged on the city with its promise of cheap living and excitement. Tour.

About this title

About the Author

Bernard Wasserstein's books include Vanishing Diaspora and The Secret Lives of Trebitsch Lincoln, which won the Golden Dagger Award for nonfiction. His is president of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and has been chairman of the History Department and dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Brandeis University. The author resides in Oxford, England.

From the Inside Flap

Shanghai during World War II was a killing field of brutal competition, ideological struggle, and murderous political intrigue. China's largest and most cosmopolitan city, the intelligence capital of the Far East, was a magnet for a corrupt and bizarrely colorful group of men and women drawn to the "Paris of the East" for its seductive promise of high living and easy money. Political and sexual loyalties were for sale to the highest bidder. Allied and Axis agents, criminal gangs, and paramilitary units under various flags waged secret, savage warfare. Espionage, lurid vice, subversion, and crime come together in a lethal concoction. Nowhere on earth was the twilight zone between politics and criminality better exemplified than in this glittering and dangerous place.

Secret War in Shanghai is the first book-length account of the little-known story of Shanghai's underground war. The widely respected historian Bernard Wasserstein has researched it entirely from original sources and uncovered startling new evidence of collaboration and treason by American, British, and Australian citizens. This remarkable depiction of complicity and betrayal is history at its most exciting and surprising.

Reviews

On the eve of WWII, Shanghai contained two foreign enclaves, a French Concession and an International Settlement, each ruled by a small minority of foreigners for their own economic advantage. These enclaves, which sheltered a melange of entrepreneurs and rogues, adventurers and self-promoters, are the setting for Wasserstein's account of the war years in Shanghai, a city rife with violence, vice, colonial hauteur and espionage. Wasserstein's ability to ferret out long-forgotten information from obscure archives shows on every page of this close examination of the behavior of Shanghai's foreign community under the pressure of the Japanese occupation. There are no persons or events of high importance, no battles of consequence, no intelligence breakthroughs. Paradoxically, it is exactly this absence of momentous historical drama that gives the book its charm. This is a study in microcosm of local conditions in Shanghai, where a rag-tag collection of professional survivors adapted to shifting circumstances as the war progressed, and where the intelligence services of many nations labored with equal energy and futility. Wasserstein recounts the careers of many of the more colorful and, in some instances, sinister of Shanghai's spies and opportunists. If the canvas is a bit too crowded, it should still appeal to those who find irresistible the lifestyles of the eccentric, the raffish and the villainous. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Well-written, well-researched, but ultimately flat look at the covert (and not so covert) activities of the various Axis and Allied powers in Shanghai during WWII, by a dean and chairman of the history department at Brandeis (Vanishing Diaspora: The Jews in Europe Since 1945, 1996). Wasserstein begins his study with a compelling look at Shanghai in the years before the war, a city in which White Russians intermingled with refugee German Jews, Japanese nationalists spied on Chinese Communists, Americans worked with Chinese nationalists, the British (seemingly) worked with and spied on everyone, and countless other nationalities, with their respective agendas, plied the streets. He then continues the tale as war becomes imminent, with the Japanese quickly changing their role from that of a lesser colonial power in Shanghai to controllers of what was then China's largest city. Wasserstein looks at the seamy underside of WWII in Shanghai, a tale full of thieves, thugs, and prostitutes, all for sale to whomever needed their services. Although the characters Wasserstein depicts are fascinating, the portraits are drawn too briefly, and his descriptions of the actions that took place, mostly of sabotage, killings, and beatings, are so dry as to take all the drama out of them. Though Wasserstein offers tremendous documentation and seems to have covered every source, ranging from American and British archives to war crimes testimony and Chinese and Japanese primary sources, narrative drive is lacking, as if the author were afraid to draw the reader as far into the historical events as he himself is drawn. Colorful material richly researched, but weak in narrative flow. (photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The louche cynicism of wartime Shanghai emerges from Wasserstein's account of the criminals, spies, and hedonists who lurked in the city's shadows from 1937 to 1945. The metropolis became a stew of intrigue because, due to its internationalized status, sizable numbers of belligerent nationals lived there, excellent cover for the intelligence services of Britain, France, Japan, Germany, the Soviet Union, Nationalist China, and America. Throw in White Russian exiles, a Jewish community, and various adventurers, and Wasserstein has a dauntingly complicated cast of characters with which to work. He straightens what could have been a tortuous narrative by following the known, but still murky, activities of the spies. Suspiciousness reigned, not least between nominal allies, as it seems the German expended as much effort keeping tabs on the Japanese, and likewise the American OSS on the British SIS. Declining to appraise the worth of the frantic espionage, Wasserstein yet turns it into an unusual story of spies, overlayed with the brutalities customary to Japanese occupations in World War II. Gilbert Taylor

Wasserstein, president of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, is the author of five previous books. His new title is concerned with the espionage activities of the major powers in Shanghai during the late 1930s through the 1940s, when Shanghai was known as the intelligence capital of the Far East. Every one of the major powers operated intelligence offices there, often employing convicts or criminals as operatives in the most dubious of circumstances. It wasn't unusual for an operative to be working both sides of the fence while at the same running his own criminal enterprise to boost his profit margin. Wasserstein tells a fascinating story of wartime espionage that has had surprisingly little coverage until now. Relying on foreign intelligence documents and communications among the various agents, he weaves a tale of intrigue and suspicion that will surely interest readers. Recommended for public and academic libraries.AMark E. Ellis, Albany State Univ., GA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Introduction

The Second World War began in the Far East on 7 July 1937 with
the Japanese onslaught on China. The battle of Shanghai in the
autumn of that year marked the bloody climax of the first phase
of the conflict. Britain and the United States were not drawn in
formally until December 1941, the Soviet Union only in the final
days in 1945. Yet in reality all the major powers found
themselves embroiled from the outset in one way or another in
the struggle for mastery of the Asiatic mainland. All had vital
economic or strategic interests there. All maintained
significant intelligence establishments there. Between 1937 and
1945 all sought to advance their interests, at times by applying
brute force, more commonly by subtler, undercover means. The
cockpit of this war was the intelligence capital of the Far East
-- Shanghai. This book tells the story of that secret war. It is
an enquiry into the interstices of espionage, subversion,
deception and terror; into a murky political netherworld that
produced strange, cross-cutting alliances and enmities, that
evoked both heroism and treachery, and that reflected in
microcosm the global war of nations.

With its lurid vice, savage criminality and conspiratorial
politics, no place on earth in the 1930s and 1940s better
exemplified the twilight zone of clandestine warfare than
Shanghai. The wealth and sophistication of China's largest, most
cosmopolitan and most dangerous city rendered it a killing-field
of brutal economic competition, ideological struggle and
murderous political intrigue.

Shanghai's ever-open door attracted an extraordinary
agglomeration of ill-assorted foreign communities: 'White' and
'Red' Russians imported their fierce mutual animosities from
their homeland and perpetuated them in their exotic exile;
German businessmen dutifully celebrated Hitler's birthday at the
German Garden Club but found to their dismay that they were
outnumbered in Shanghai by thousands of 'non-Aryan'
German-speaking refugees from Nazi persecution; upper-crust
'Shanghailander' Britons rubbed shoulders with Baghdadi Jewish
property tycoons; Korean gangsters, Filipino musicians, low-life
cardsharps, pickpockets and assorted con-men plied their various
trades. So too did demi-mondaines of various nationalities who
preyed on tourists at the Park, the Metropole and the Cathay
hotels as well as on naval and military men of half a dozen
countries in other, more questionable, haunts. Even in
superficially respectable areas of the city meretricious glamour
and horrific poverty, filth and squalor intertwined
symbiotically. At Ciro's night-club, the first in the city to
enjoy full air-conditioning, British taipans and Chinese
mobsters tangoed with their wives or mistresses into the small
hours. Outside, uniformed Russian doormen -- self-appointed
ex-Tsarist 'generals' whose spurious medals could be purchased
by the dozen in the Hongkew market -- held at bay importuning
hordes of deformed Chinese beggars. In less salubrious
dancehalls, bars and 'joints', lines of Russian 'taxi-dancers'
and Chinese 'sing-song girls' sat waiting for customers. In 1935
one in every thirteen women in Shanghai was reckoned to be a
prostitute.

Throughout the city violence was a constant threat whether in
the form of political assassinations, gang warfare or lovers'
fights. The stained cobbles of Blood Alley (rue Chu Pao-san) in
Frenchtown bore witness to the frequency of brawls among foreign
soldiers and sailors. God, who allowed Shanghai to endure, owed
an apology to Sodom and Gomorrah -- so said the American
Christian missionaries who strove to combat the devil in his own
habitation. A Chinese journalist agreed: Shanghai, he wrote, was
'a city of forty-eight-storey skyscrapers built upon twenty-four
layers of hell'.

The imposing European-style buildings of the banks and merchant
houses on the Bund, Shanghai's famous waterfront on the Whangpoo
River, gave an appearance of solidity and permanence. But the
city was constructed on what were literally shaky foundations.
Many of its towering structures were built on concrete rafts
that floated on mud flats.

Modern Shanghai was to a large extent a foreign, not Chinese,
creation. The old 'native city' of Nantao had, it is true, been
an important port and market town for several centuries. But
significant urban development began only after the signature of
the Treaty of Nanking between Britain and China in 1842, at the
conclusion of the first Opium War. With that and subsequent
agreements with the USA and France, China agreed to open
Shanghai and certain other ports to foreign commerce. Budding on
these 'unequal treaties' and interpreting them in a far-reaching
way, the foreign powers gradually extended the privileges
accorded to their merchants in the 'treaty ports'. Parts of
these cities were appropriated as 'concessions' ruled directly
by the powers as quasi-colonies. Within these enclaves
foreigners could conduct business according to their own laws,
exempt from taxation by the Chinese and immune from interference
by Chinese courts or officials. Within half a century Shanghai
grew to be the central clearinghouse of waterborne trade between
the entire Yangtse river system and the rest of the world. The
port's 35 miles of wharves could accommodate over 170 ships and
500 sea-going junks at a time. Half of all China's foreign trade
was cleared through Shanghai.

By the late'1930s Shanghai had sprouted into one of the urban
wonders of the world. China's most dynamic city, her economic,
cultural and political hub, Shanghai was the supreme prize
awaiting the victor in the struggle for power among the would-be
heirs of the Manchu emperors who had been overthrown in the
Chinese revolution of 1911 but not replaced by any stable form
of national government. With a population of more than 5
million, Shanghai was the sixth largest city in the world, the
greatest commercial entrepôt in the Far East and a magnet for
foreign, particularly British, investment.

Like Gaul, Shanghai was divided into three parts (see map on pp.
x-xi). Each was a virtually sovereign jurisdiction with its own
government, armed force and police. The largest, in both area
and population, was the Chinese Municipality of Greater Shanghai
which formed part of the Republic of China. This, however,
constituted only the outer periphery of the city proper. Since
the suppression of a communist revolt in the city in 1927, the
central government at Nanking, headed by General Chiang
Kai-shek, had sought to consolidate its authority over the whole
of Shanghai. Chiang's Kuomintang party ran what amounted to a
one-party police state. But it found that, notwithstanding its
formal sovereignty, its writ did not run very far even in the
Chinese municipality. Warlords and gangster-politicians competed
for power with one another, with the central government and with
new-style Chinese capitalists. And all of them regarded with
rapacious envy the two prosperous foreign enclaves in the centre
of the city.

The smaller of these, the French Concession, was a mainly
residential district abutting on to part of the river foreshore.
It had a population of half a million in 1936; a small fraction
were foreigners, and of these only 2,342 were French civilians.
They were outnumbered by 11,628 Russian residents (mainly
anti-Bolshevik Whites who had fled from Siberia at the end of
the Russian Civil War) and 2,468 British. The concession was
ruled as an almost absolute monarchy by the French
Consul-General. He was nominally assisted by a municipal council
appointed by himself, but his relationship with them was akin to
that between Louis XIV and the court of Versailles. For security
the Consul-General could call on a force of 4,000 gendarmes,
under 300 of whom were French, the remainder Chinese or
Vietnamese. The French police maintained a supremely
well-informed political section and supremely corrupt
departments supposedly devoted to the suppression of drugs and
vice -- in reality much more devoted to the illicit profits to
be derived from these and other rackets.

The heart of Shanghai, its commercial and industrial core,
encompassing hundreds of factories, miles of quays and godowns
(warehouses), as well as parks and pleasure-grounds, fashionable
clubs and hotels, and the consulates of the great powers, formed
an entity unique in world politics -- the international
Settlement. This area had a population of about 1.2 million in
1936 of whom only about 40,000 were foreigners. Yet this
minority had been the settlement's rulers since its foundation.

Unlike most of the other foreign concessions in China, the
International Settlement did not belong to any one power. The
settlement's constitution, the Land Regulations, first issued by
the local Chinese authority in 1845 and subsequently revised
several times, took final form in 1898. This peculiar document,
although recognized as binding in treaties between the major
powers and China, left several issues unclear -- notably the
question of sovereignty. Although the settlement was in every
real political sense a foreign colonial enclave, sovereignty
over it remained theoretically Chinese. The ruling body, the
Shanghai Municipal Council, was limited from above by the
residual authority of the 'Consular Body' and from below by the
'ratepayers'. These were a small group of property-owners,
mainly British and Americans (in later years also Japanese),
dominated by the taipans, heads of the great British merchant
houses and banks. The ratepayers met in a public meeting once a
year to decide major issues of policy and to elect the council.
The council's chief civil servant, Godfrey Phillips, a former
president of the Cambridge Union, was one of the most powerful
men in Shanghai. A high property qualification restricted voting
rights to a small minority of the European population. In 1935,
only 3,852 out of the 38,940 foreign residents in the settlement
had the right to vote. Until the Second World War this alien
oligarchy effectively controlled the destiny of Shanghai. If the
French Concession was pre-revolutionary France in exotic
miniature, the International Settlement was an oriental echo of
England before the Reform Act.

At the apex of Anglo-Saxon society in Shanghai stood the Keswick
brothers, Tony and John, taipans of the great Jardine, Matheson
trading concern. Known as the 'muckle house' on account of its
Scottish origins, Jardine, Matheson employed over 100,000
workers in its mills, factories and godowns, and owned a fleet
of more than 30 merchant and passenger ships. Tony Keswick
exercised political as well as economic leadership of the
settlement, since he also served as chairman of the Shanghai
Municipal Council. His brother John's academic performance at
Cambridge had been poor (a third class in the historical tripos
at Trinity College) but he learned fluent Chinese in Shanghai,
both Mandarin and the Shanghai dialect. A friendly, outgoing
character, John had what was described as 'a remarkably
pronounced back to his head which so resembled the statues of
the Chinese god of happiness, Fu Shen, that in the country
Chinese often touched him in the belief that some of his
happiness would rub off. It usually did.' The brothers would be
seen at all the major social events of the Shanghai season --
charity balls, club dinners, race meetings and the 'paper hunt'
in which the rituals of English rural sportsmanship were
refashioned to conform to the topography of the surrounding
Chinese countryside where canals rather than hedges were the
main challenges to horsemanship. The Keswicks' peacetime role
was extended, in a different form, during the Second World War
when they took charge of the British subversive warfare effort
in China.

There were no political parties in municipal affairs but
political struggle in the settlement was nevertheless intense.
In the 1930s it took two main forms: resistance by the foreign
communities to the Chinese government's demands for the
effective recognition and exercise of Chinese sovereignty in the
settlement; and growing conflict between Japan and the
Anglo-Saxon powers for control of the affairs of the settlement.

Although to outward appearance 'international', the settlement's
Municipal Council was really governed by British interests
during most of its history. Until the early 1930s British and
American councillors were always a majority on the council. The
Germans had had one seat until the First World War but were
excluded thereafter and replaced by Japan, whose citizens by
that time formed the largest single community in foreign
Shanghai. A second Japanese seat was added in 1927 but the
Japanese pressed hard for greater representation. With their
growing population and investment in the settlement they
obviously constituted the wave of the future. As for the Chinese
majority of the population, they had no say at all in the
government of the settlement until 1928 when three Chinese
members were added for the first time to the nine foreign
members of the Council. Two more joined them in 1930. But in
keeping with the council's undemocratic nature, the Chinese
members were not directly elected but were nominated by the
Chinese Ratepayers' Association, a body representing wealthy
Chinese business interests.

The settlement's political structure reflected the economic
reality of Britain's supremacy in the city -- and of her
quasi-imperial dominance in China as a whole. Thirty-eight per
cent of all foreign holdings in China in 1931 were British; and
three-quarters of Britain's $963 million stake in the country
was invested in Shanghai. The British controlled more than half
of all China's shipping. The inspector-general of the Chinese
customs and most of his senior staff were British citizens. In
China, as elsewhere, the British, conscious of the dangers of
what we would now call 'imperial over- stretch', eschewed formal
annexation. Instead, they opted for an informal imperialism of
which Shanghai was a pre-eminent model.

Copyright (C) 1998 by Bernard Wasserstein. All rights reserved.
Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0395985374
• ISBN 13: 9780395985373
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 354