SHANGHAI

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLVII, Issue 111, 7 April 1927, Page 8

SHANGHAI

CENTRE OF WORLD'S INTEREST,

“MELTING POT” OF CHINA

Within Shanghai, all of the racial disputes that burn in China are drawing to a focus, states an overseas writer. There are ten or .fifteen nationalists now making Shanghai a bubbling “melting-pot,” and we, too, are helping the pot to boil over. Shanghai was designed for business, combined with pleasure. Wines, servants, and good living have been cheap; foreigners had leisure for luxurious amusement. Even the rich Chinese, freed here from danger of bandits, displayed as nowhere else their wealth. The result was the forming of international “fast sets,’ which are renowned in the Orient for their glitter. Down Foochow Road, where sing-song girls cluster on carved balconies, and nights are loud with gongs and flutes, assemble the merrymakers of every nationality. In other quarters are theatres, gambling houses, opium resorts. [Elsewhere are American jazz palaces, with floors shining for the fox-trot; Bubbling Well Road invites the motorist; clubs offer polo, golf, bridge. One hotel boasts the “longest bar in the world,” a moist stretch of 110 feet. And in the haunts of sailors and beachcombers at Hongkew are ancient dives . where robust clipper captains first invented the active and transitive verb “to shanghai.” Business reigns by the harbour. Here over 60 per cent, of all China’s foreign commerce is discharged to the world. Tea and tobacco come down the Yqngtse by steamer or by junks, with tiger-stripod sails; from Kiangsu, the densely-populated coastal province, come rice, cotton, and “the finest white silk in the world.” The Bund and its environs hold well-known firms and shops, and some 21 international banks.

MEDLEY OF RACES;

Avenues lead f.way, a strange medley of racial influences, belonging to neither world. Tramcars run through lanes gaudy with gilt signs and lanterns. The traffic is as various as a circus parade. There . are turbaned Hindus, Persians, Malays, Miaos, Fukienese women with silver spears in their hair, kimonoed Japanese in motor cars, and derby-hatted Americans in* rickshaws. Black smoke supersedes gilt signs in-the industrial areas. One may see there processions of trousered factory girls riding to work in wheelbarrows, six to a load, pushed by straining porters. These are among the most important industrial areas in the Orient. Their cotton spinning mils compete, with the advantage of low labour costs, with white labour all over the wold. This is a city where 450,000 woi ..srs may be obtained at an average wage of less than six dollars a month. But the Chinese, Japanese and foreign millowners, though they avoid high wages, do not escape agitation. Half China’s yearly strikes occur here, and endless oisputes over labour laws. The International Settlement has had to use its Sikh policemen as strike breakers.

The International Settlement, the region by the Bund, is mainly run by British and American co-operation. There are also a French settlement, policed by imported Anamite gendarmes, and a Japanese community. And, near by, self-governing, and so separate that many foreigners have never caught more than a glimpse of its edge, stands the mysterious Chinese city. Tho streets of the latter’s labyrinth are narrow and confused. Their darkness is noisy with a perpetually marching humanity. Hundreds of thousands of labourers live here, and skilful artisans in silver, ivory, or feathers. There are skullcapped soothsayers to be seen, beggars rolling underfoot, merchants of rare birds, jade dragons, white maro’s milk, or false teeth inlaid with rubies. The policing and management of such varied communities is the kernel of agitation in Shanghai to-day. Even the patrolling of the streets in the foreign sections is a source of racial feeling.

INTERNATIONAL POLICE,

In the International Settlement the British have imported groups of turbaned Sikhs from the mountains of India. They aro famous fighters, and they direct traffic with barbaric gusto, yelling and belabouring coolies with their sticks. The Chinese have resented bitterly these blows from tho hands of Indian aliens. Once offenders are caught by Japanese, Chinese, or Hindu police, the problem of judging them becomes a tangle indeed. Who shall judge a Chinese accusing a Belgian, a Belgian accusing a Russian, or two Chinese? Aj vast machinery of international law has evolved here. The mixed court tries all Chinese offenders. A fantastic procession they are, portly and solid merchants, kidnapped singsong girls, ex-pirates, No. 1 boys, withered crones with smuggled opium in their teapots. But the peculiarity which distinguishes this from other Chinese courts is the fact that, beside the robed Chinese judge, whenever a foreigner is plaintiff, sits a foreign “assistant” judge. . Each foreigner, on the contrary, accused of wrongdoing, is brought before a judge of his own nationality and tried by his own law. The Chinese complain, that it works out in fact as the foreigner’s method of. winning all cases.

CENTRE FOR OPIUM SMUGGLING

Every kind of irritation that exists in China finds a focus in Shanghai. It is the “premier city in China for wholesale smuggling and traffic in opium and narcotics,” say reports. About 10,000,000 dollars worth is seized yearly. And two years ago, at a famous bonfire, was destroyed a mil-lion-dollar collection of opium from Persia, India and Siberia, and morphia of Switzerland, Germany and England. The guarding of this traffic is an international trouble source.

When an army or a bandit group in inland provinces seizes missionaries, problems are raised for the leading centre of Chrititian influence, Shanghai. Here are schools, colleges, churches, and chapels of many denominations, from Greek Orthodox and American Baptist to the Deutsche Evangelische. Here are the business headquarters of mission work. And gunboats, riding at anchor at the mouth of the Yangtsekiang, here assure the safety of inland missionaries.

The whole of the Yangtse river issue is joined to that of Shanghai. The basin of this longest of China’s water arteries holds a population of 18,000,000 and its ports are the outlet for 6ilk, steel, porcelain, cotton and oil products. The two railroads to Pekin, the nominal capital, branch from its shores-—at Pukc-w and at Hankow. Who owns Shanghai holds the country’s heart. RIGHTS OF THE WESTERNER. Westerners defend their rights to this vital spot on many grounds. They supplied the capital and initiative which built tho foreign city and its commerce. They took over its government to insure tho safety, from a sani*"~j ns well at: military point of view;

and its courts to protect themselves from the bribery and torture prevalent in medieval imperial Chinese justice systems. They hold its revenues as security for their loans to China, and its harbour as a guarantee of their place in Far Eastern trade. The Chinese, both violent radical and ultra-conservative, republican and monarchist, are aligned together against the West. They may not agree on anything else, but they unite in feeling a lack of love for tne ways of the foreigner. The Cantonese radicals declare that they, hope to unify China under modern principles and give it a government strong enough to guaranthe safety for the foreigner as well as control for themselves. 1 Others, the old conservatives, feel that China should own her own soil, as a natural right, regardless of her competence to suit any one else. And, above all, they remember and resent the historic interference of the West in their country. The swamps of Shanghai were opened to the trading world by Great Britain, victor in the so-called Opium War of 1841-2. French and Americans, though they had not taken part in the fighting, eagerly availed themselves of the advantages of the new port. They acquired “settlements” of their own from the Chinese Empire, and with the land they also took over responsibilities.

HOW THE POWERS SEIZED THE CUSTOMS.

Freedom from Chinese courts of justice, as from government, was secured by series of treaties. Each power won the right to esifiblish oonsular courts. There have boon as many as fourteen meeting in Shanghai at once. Revolution next placed the revenues of the port in foreign hands. The Tai-Ping rebels in the |so’s were busy destroying Yangtse River cities and leaving tqem to / bleach and crumble to rum on mountain slopes. They are said to have ended more than 10,000,000 lives. Imperial Chinese officials fled from Shanghai when the rebels battered at its seven-gated walls. The foreigners in their absence assumed the charge of collecting the customs and have been doing it ever since. Later they extended their sway to the other open, ports of China. \