WEST AND EAST

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 75, 31 March 1937, Page 13

WEST AND EAST

CHINESE METROPOLIS

SHANGHAI CROSSROAD

FASCINATING CITY

One can never . enter or leave Shanghai, that extraordinary commercial metropolis on the banks of the slimy Whangpoo River, without feeling ■a curious sense of attraction and fascination. I have been, a visitor in Shanghai three times, in 1927, in 1935, and,.in 1936. ■ Each time, as it happened, the city was faced with an interesting and dramatic situation, says a writer in the "Christian ■ Science Monitor." In 1927, the tide of nationalist revolution had just begun to ebb after reaching a point so high that the more nervous and excitable foreigners were seeing visions of a new Boxer outburst. In 1935, the financial marts of the. city were buzzing with excitement over the momentous abandonment of „ China's age-old measure of currency value, silver, and the substitution of a managed paper currency. On this,- my last visit, the tense strain in SHiu-Japanese relations lent dynamic possibilities to incidents that were small in themselves — a parade of Japanese tanks on the Bund, a strike of Chinese labourers in Japanese cotton mills, vague hints that the Japanese desired to take over entire police control of the large Hongkew districts where most of Shanghai's 30,000 Japanese dwell. But the fascination of Shanghai does not lie in the headline.news which it provides from time to time. Neither does it lie in the architectural beauty or the feeling of communion with a remote past that lend beauty and distinction to Peking "and Kyoto and Delhi and Damascus. Shanghai is an upstart, a parvenu among the world's great cities, built up by ''western barbarians," hungry for trade, on a mud flat which the Chinese had renounced as useless to themselves. And there is certainly no inspiration in Shanghai's flat.; surroundings, • or in the. city's climate. CITY'S FASCINATION. No, the fascination of Shanghai, as 1 feel it, lies in two things: sharply vivid contrasts and- am^ing cosmopolitan diversity. Nowhere,' I should think, is the juxtaposition of the modern West and the ancient East so striking. Along the Bund, where huge banks" and office buildings "look out on modern warships and great ocean liners, one can see a gang of sweating coolies, carrying a huge log or some other 'burden th|it machinery would take care of in most other countries, singing their chants of toil. ■.."■• ' Great wealth and abject poverty, luxury and squalor, are crowded very close together within the confines of Shanghai, t At one extreme one has the senior "taipan," or manager of some opulent, well established British bank or business, the successful . investor or speculator, with his sleek limousine, his large comfortable home in the French Concession. At the other end of the scale is the Chinese apprentice, somehow keeping alive on a wage that would literally .mean starvation, to a Westerner; the. Russian refugee who is never quite sure where his next meal or-the roof to cover his head will come from. As might be expected, one finds in Shanghai an unusual number of keen political and"; economic':observers, both Chinese and foreign; ; Here the element of contrast is furnished by the city's plentiful crop of cranks and bores, who fill the columns of the tolerant and long-suffering newspapers with long letters and full-dress debates about their pet hobbies. Much more serious is the plight of those exiles who have no chance of returning to their native countries. By far the largest and most visible of these groups, of course," consist of > the Russians, whose numbers are roughly estimated in the neighbourhood "of 20,000. Whatever their number, they are somehow able to ' support" three newspapers' and'they make a substantial contribution' to the musical and dramatic life of Shanghai. Whole streets in the French Concession, where most of the Russians live, display almost exclusively Russian signs: restaurants, bakeries, and shops of all kinds. "GONE WITH THE WIND." - Amongthe older Russians, especially among those who took an active part ml the civil war, one finds an outlook very similar to that of the Confederate veteran's who are depicted in "Gone With the Wind." They gather in their clubs and have their military reunions and fight over in imagination the campaigns of the civil war and discuss what might have, been, if only this or that military or. political manoeuvre had been made at the right time. Two things bind them together: passionate hatred of Bolshevism, and loyalty, a little pathetic, at times a little strained, to the old Russian ways and beliefs and customs that have indeed "gone with the wind." .

It is not only refugees who colour the' cosmopolitan pattern of Shanghai life. There are the huge turbaned Sikhs, brought in from India, who constitute a considerable part of the police force. There are men and women of all countries' of Europe and Asia and the Americas, coming for business or pleasure to the greatest port in the Orient. One does not have to walk far in Shanghai to hear a variety of tongues that might suggest the Tower of Babel. And over the city hover the clouds of uncertain political and economic complications.' Taking a last look at the skyline of the port as one sails away down the Whartgpoo River one wonders what destiny holds in store for Shanghai, ( which of its varied and competing racial influences ■will prove strongest and most enduring.