‘Book pirating in Shanghai, an infringement of copyright’, not the most gripping title in the world. However, the task for this week’s tutorial was set, we had to find source material on law and order in Shanghai, and I thought this may offer an interesting alternative to the other material my classmates would be producing. As soon as I opened up the document I was rewarded, on its first page the word ‘confidential’ was stamped across the report, on the next page more stamped lettering, this time spelling out ‘secret’. At this point my interest was piqued and so I delved further into the document, the report revealed a conspiracy in which an anonymous member within the higher echelons of the international settlement had stepped in to cover up the actions of the British Women’s Association. The Association had pirated a first aid manual from the St. John’s Ambulance, printing 240 copies.

The source could be easily explained as a powerful man exercising his authority to protect a wife, friend or relative who was part of the association. However, this fails to explain the concern of the writer of the report, who states that if the Chinese were to find out there would be an international incident. Instead the source underscores the conflict between the racial views of the British, the state of the international settlement and the Chinese opinions of it. Firstly, the actions of these women contradict the prevailing ideas of racial superiority held by the British. The Chinese were considered to be ‘racially unequal’ when compared to Europeans and so required European overlordship so as to civilise them.[1] The actions of the Women’s Association undermined this, offering evidence of immoral activity among the British, a double standard to do with the implementation of law, as well as presenting men of status within the colony as being unable to control their women (within the confides of the patriarchal society they were operating in).  These thoughts would have trouble the British authorities who were trying to navigate an increasingly politically complicated Shanghai, with Chinese nationalist, Chinese communists and Japanese nationalists all fighting for control.

This concern mirrors constant attempts by the Chinese to undermine the International Settlement. Chiang Kai-shek had made it clear in 1927 that the purpose of new Shanghai municipal government was to bring law and order to one of the most crime ridden cities in the world.[2] A city which had been failed by the International community. These opinions by the 1930’s had spread throughout Chinese society, with literary scholars in Beijing accusing writers from Shanghai of interlacing their stories with sex and decadence.[3] It can, therefore, be seen that the British establishment saw it as prudent to suppress this incident so as to not provide the Chinese with evidence of perceived inequalities and inefficiencies within the government of the International Settlement.

[1] Robert Bickers, ‘Shanghailanders: The Formation and Identity of the British Settler Community in Shanghai 1843-1937’, Past & Present 159 (1998), p. 184.

[2] Frederic Wakeman, Jr., ‘Policing Modern Shanghai’, The China Quarterly 115 (1988), pp. 419.

[3] David Koren, ‘Shanghai: The Biography of a City’ in Jan Kolen, Johannes Renes, Rita Hermans (ed.), Landscape Biographies (Amsterdam, 2015), p. 267.

Bibliography:

Bickers, Robert, ‘Shanghailanders: The Formation and Identity of the British Settler Community in Shanghai 1843-1937’, Past & Present 159 (1998), p. 161-211.

Koren, David, ‘Shanghai: The Biography of a City’ in Jan Kolen, Johannes Renes, Rita Hermans (ed.), Landscape Biographies (Amsterdam, 2015), pp. 253 – 282.

Wakeman,Frederic, Jr., ‘Policing Modern Shanghai’, The China Quarterly 115 (1988), pp. 408 – 440.

Source:

‘During 1937-1941, “island Shanghai,” momentarily neutral like wartime Casablanca or Lisbon, was a haven for spies, intelligence agents, and provocateurs.’[1]

In the book The Shanghai Badlands: Wartime terrorism and Urban Crime, 1937-1941, Frederic Wakeman combines disparate narratives about crime and terrorism in Shanghai and attempts to present an account that not only demonstrates the ambiguity of Chinese resistance and collaboration, but that also helps to emphasise the chaotic nature of the Shanghai badlands and settlement from 1937 to 1941[2]. However, although a successful book, Wakeman’s work remains contained within its own body of sources and does not engage with any secondary works. Although this is unsurprising given the nature of Wakeman’s research, there are a number of other cities such as Casablanca and Lisbon that had similar wartime experiences to Shanghai that arguably warrant comparison. This has been studied in Neill Lochery’s Lisbon: War in the Shadows of the City of Light, a work which in many ways is remarkably similar to Wakeman’s in its use of sources, anecdotal nature and in its demonstration of Lisbon as a fundamentally complex and chaotic space[3]. Like Wakeman, Lochery used a vast amount of primary sources when conducting his research, including António De Oliveira Salazar’s (The Portuguese dictator from 1932 to 1968) official correspondence and the PIDE (Portuguese Secret police) archives[4]. However, unlike Wakeman, Lochery also attempted to used additional sources from the external forces acting in Lisbon, including British Foreign office correspondences and documents on the various intelligence agencies operating in Lisbon, arguably giving a fuller perspective to the activities than Wakeman’s work[5].

During the Second world war, Lisbon was the only European city in which Allies and Axis openly operated simultaneously. However, unlike Shanghai, barely a shot was fired in Lisbon. The city itself remained a space in which Allies and Axis powers vied for control whilst Portugal itself strove to maintain its neutrality. Lisbon also had its fair share of unusual activities, including a foiled German plot to kidnap the Duke and Duchess of Windsor[6]. Both Allied and German operatives were dispersed throughout the city, including a young Ian Fleming[7]. However their activities were predominantly non-violent and these agents were in turn monitored by the PIDE. This three-way relationship over the contested space of Lisbon is arguably not dissimilar to the relationship between Chinese, Japanese and Westerners found in Shanghai[8]. Although both cities received a large contingent of refugees, the numbers heading to Lisbon were incredibly marginal in comparison to the volume who fled to Shanghai during the war[9]. Furthermore, as a result of the harsh dictatorship of Salazar Lisbon remained tightly controlled and thus crime remained largely at its usual levels during this period. Despite this resistance and collaboration was still prevalent in wartime Lisbon, with numerous officers on the Portuguese side repeatedly changing sides to help either the Axis or Allies based on offers from the respective sides[10].

Unlike Shanghai, Lisbon and Portugal ultimately emerged from the war much wealthier than it had been at the wars instigation. Despite this, the cities ultimately faced very similar problems. However, whereas in Shanghai, ‘[it became] increasingly difficult to distinguish crime from conspiracy as the two converged to pulverize whatever shreds remained of Shanghai’s civic society’, for the Portuguese the war of subterfuge ‘represented as great an existential challenge [to the Portuguese] as it was a literal battle for [what] their lives would be’[11]. This was a battle that the Portuguese were able to successfully navigate, through subterfuge, double-crossing and scheming[12]. The volume of refugees, relative power of each political force and the volume of crime and methods used undoubtedly played a large role in the differences between Shanghai and Lisbon; two neutral cities which operated under ostensibly similar circumstances. It is arguably Salazar’s control over the political situation and the city itself that enabled it to avoid a similar fate to Shanghai, although further research would undoubtedly reveal additional factors that would also have led to differences within the cities themselves.

[1] Frederic Wakeman, Shanghai Badlands: Wartime Terrorism and Urban Crime, 1937-1941, First Edition (Cambridge University Press, 1996), p10.

[2] Ibid.  


[3] Neill Lochery’s Lisbon: War in the Shadows of the City of Light, (New York, 2012), p.

[4] Ibid, pp237-238.

[5] Ibid, pp237-238.

[6] Ibid, pp54-59.

[7] Ibid, p137.

[8] Wakeman, Shanghai, p10.

[9] Lochery, Lisbon, p44; Wakeman, Shanghai, p7.

[10] Lochery, Lisbon, p44.

[11] Lochery, Lisbon, p4; Wakeman, Shanghai, p110.

[12] Lochery, Lisbon, p227-231.

     ‘There it was, spread out largely on both banks, the Oriental capital which had yet suffered no white conqueror; an expanse of brown houses of bamboo, of mats, of leaves, of a vegetable-matter style of architecture, sprung out of the brown soil on the banks of the muddy river (…) Some of these houses of sticks and grass, like the nests of an aquatic race, clung to the shores, others seemed to grow out of the water; others again floated in long anchored rows in the very middle of the stream.’[1]

Such was the view that greeted Joseph Conrad as he ascended the central prang of the Temple of Dawn in Thonburi, the royal district of 19^th century Bangkok. Located on the Chao Phraya river, 35 km north of the Gulf of Siam, this city, apocryphally dubbed the ‘Venice of the East’, captured Western imaginations with its unique spatial hierarchy between the land and the water. For the first 50 years of its existence, beginning with the movement of the capital to Thonburi under Rama II in 1782, the right to reside on land was almost exclusively granted to nobles or to Buddhist institutions. Accordingly, by the mid-19^th century, 350,000 members of the rapidly growing city lived in semi-permanent rows of houseboats, anchored several layers deep on the Chao Phraya’s riverbanks.[2]

This arrangement, unlike any other in SE Asia, allowed a fluid, impermanent version of urban life to dominate. Houseboats were multipurpose dwellings, incorporating verandas which functioned both as commercial shopfronts during the day, as well as social spaces during the evening, when wooden frontages could be put up. Houses hence formed ‘streets’ and communities roughly corresponding to trade and/or ethnicity, albeit with the added advantage of mobility. George Earl, writing in the 1820s and 30s, wryly noted indeed the advantages that such an arrangement had for avoiding the flooding caused by seasonal monsoon rains, as well as the added benefit of being able to eject troublesome neighbours or move away from commercial competitors.[3]

Such a fluid, decentralised urban layout, bears a striking resemblance to the utopian vision of cities famously articulated by Lewis Mumford. Rather than focusing on urban spaces as purely physical, essentially static entities, Mumford’s view of the city was primarily as a social institution; an organic, fluctuating entity that functioned as ‘a theatre for social action’.[4] He moreover argued that in order to counter the social disconnections caused by modern cities becoming ever more massive and chaotic, it would soon be necessary to build ‘polynucleated’ cities, with multiple social and commercial focal points enabling all to participate in the drama of local social networks.[5] This vision of cities as encompassing multiple independent systems of social, economic and cultural exchange, with opportunities for fluidity created by an ever changing urban layout, is illustrated well by the dynamism of early Bangkok. This is both due to the strength of local associations found in the many polynucleated ethnic and commercial communities, as well as the ever-changing spatial layout of the city permitted by movement of living and commercial spaces.

The Bangkok witnessed by Conrad was gone in a fleeting instant. The Bowring treaty, and the onset of large scale commercial shipping, largely sounded the death knell for mass floating communities, with almost all houseboats cleared by municipal authorities by the 1920s. One observer indeed remarked that by the 1890s, the so called ‘Venice of the East’ had become merely an ‘Eastern Rotterdam’, of factories and wharves.[6] Traces of the old ethos still survive in Bangkok’s layout however. Even today, the lack of any single commercial or historical centre demonstrates the cities postmodern characteristics, with skyscrapers haphazardly scattered randomly across the city. In the brief history of Bangkok’s houseboat communities therefore, it is possible to see an accidental forerunner in many ways of Mumford’s influential ideas on polynucleation, with streets of boats forming urban communities in microcosm, characterised by fluid social dynamics and ephemerality.

[1] Joseph Conrad, ‘The Shadow Line’ (1917), in Maryvelma O’Neil, Bangkok: A Cultural History, (Oxford University Press, 2008), p.78

[2] Ibid., p.8

[3] George Windsor Earl, ‘The Eastern Seas of Voyages and Adventures in the Indian Archipelago in 1823, 1833 and 1834, in Ibid., p.79

[4] Lewis Mumford, ‘What is a city?’, in Richard LeGates and Frederic Stout (Eds.), The City Reader, (Routledge, 2003), p.94

[5] Ibid., p.96

[6] O’Neil, Bangkok, p.26

In his work, ‘The Bund: Littoral Space of Empire in the Treaty Ports of Asia’,  Jeremy Taylor attempts to examine the bund as a generic spatial form; analysing its importance in both sustaining the lifestyle of European residents and its significance to the Western residents of the treaty ports as space with military, commercial and lastly recreational functions[1]. He concludes by hoping that his work will stimulate further debate surrounding the questions of space and power within the treaty ports. Outside of treaty ports, Taylor’s work is part of a burgeoning field of historical discourse examining the importance of European urban expansion on cityscapes across the world. This can be seen in works such as Antony King’s Urbanism, Colonialism and the World-Economy: Cultural and Spatial Foundations of the World Urban System. Interestingly the Shanghai Bund arguably demonstrates King’s thesis that these colonial spaces are eventually integrated into what he calls the single world economy, transitioning from a colonial space with primarily military and economic functions to one that is largely recreational in its nature and ultimately part of the broader world economy[2]. Although Taylor demonstrates its importance to Westerners, he does not explore Chinese understandings or conceptualisations of the Shanghai Bund as a space[3]. However, a comparison of the Shanghai Bund with colonial buildings and Korea and Taiwan demonstrate that, despite fulfilling similar functions, most colonial spaces found in treaty ports and colonial cities have in fact been treated differently to the bund, which has arguably endured as an important space after the colonial period.

In Korea, the construction of the Japanese Western style colonial building in front of the Kwanghwa palace disrupted and challenged the ancient geomancy calculation known as Pungsu, which sought to enhance the vital energies of the ruler[4]. The intentions of the Japanese in overturning the cognitive map of the Koreans by constructing a modern western-style government building on this site is clear. In Taiwan, the central government building and redevelopment of downtown Taipei was finalised by the completion of the Sōtokufu in 1919. Although nothing was demolished to construct this building, the Japanese did raise the Yamen in 1931 to build the Old City Hall[5]. As with the bund, the construction of these sites was both conscious and deliberate. They were centrally located, western style buildings designed to convey both the modern and civilising intentions of the colonists as well as establish their dominance in the spaces in which they were created. Parallels with this can arguably be seen with the bund which remained a space of power through its use as an economic center and space which military might could be demonstrated. As these building were ultimately used as spaces that convey power, it is unsurprising that in many cases these buildings continued to be used until the end of the 20^th century. In Taipei, the Chinese were quick to occupy many of the buildings that were part of the Japanese colonial occupation, occupying the central colonial buildings and only bothering to switch on Chinese character in the name[6]. However, although they remained politically significant in both Korea and Taiwan these spaces continue to be contentious. In Taiwan the city government challenged the nationalist government’s building by moving ‘away from the downtown and into a new spatiality’[7]. Even with the demolition of the government building, restoration of the Kwanghwa gate and creation of the Kwanghwa square in 2009, the spatial configuration of  downtown Seoul remains intrinsically linked to their identity and history[8]. Ultimately the importance of these buildings as spaces of empire is now lost and unlike the Shanghai Bund, many are beginning to lose their significance as nations begin to recognise the colonial origins of these space’s associations with power.

Returning to an examination of the Bund, it is clear that perhaps the Shanghai Bund’s association with finance and business within the Chinese identity that has perhaps ensured its continued importance as a centre in Shanghai. In order to fully understand the typology of the Shanghai Bund as a space of empire, it is perhaps important to consider its perception amongst the Chinese in Shanghai, who have arguably enabled its transition from a space of empire to a space of economic entrepreneurialism.

[1] Jeremy E. Taylor, ‘The Bund: Littoral Space of Empire in the Treaty Ports of East Asia’, Social History, Vol. 27, No. 2 (May, 2002), pp. 125-142

[2] Antony D. King, Urbanism, Colonialism, and The World Economy: Cultural and Spatial Foundations of the World Urban System, (London, 1990), pp1-12.

[3] Talyor, ‘The Bund’, p128.

[4] Hong Kal, Aesthetic Construction of Korean nationalism: Spectacle, Politics and History, (Oxford, 2000), p45.

[5] Joseph R Allen, Taipei: City of Displacements, (Washington, 2012), p43.

[6] Allen, Taipei, p35.

[7] Ibid, p65.

[8] Kal, Aesthetic Construction of Korean nationalism, p1.

When I close my eyes and think of the most common images of Beijing, the first ones that come to mind are Mao’s portrait at the gate of the Forbidden City and a rickshaw leaning against a grey wall outside of a Hutong. The history behind this second mental image is described in the second chapter of David Strand’s “Rickshaw Beijing: City People and Politics in the 1920s.” The chapter, titled “The Rickshaw: machine for a mixed-up age” illustrates the social dynamics of rickshaw pullers in 1920s Beijing. The early 20^th century was an extremely turbulent time in Beijing. In 1900, Boxer rebels besieged the city. Eleven years later, the Qing dynasty fell and a republican government came to power under Yuan Shikai. The republican government was not able to consolidate control over the country and many smaller cities and rural areas were plagued by varying degrees of lawlessness and the corrupt rule of warlords.  Over this chaotic period, rickshaws became a tool of survival for those whose lives were upended. The famous author Lao She noted that the population of rickshaw pullers in Beijing was largely made up of those who had been laid off as a result of the end of the Qing dynasty and the subsequent breakdown of the bureaucracies and institutions that had brought stability to the city.[1]

Strand’s remarkably readable and detailed history of Beijing’s rickshaw pullers strikes me as significant because of the way it transcends its micro-historical scope to comment on broader class relations. Rickshaw pullers embodied the collapse of Qing-era social relations and Beijing’s transition into the contemporary world. Strand remarks that if “rickshaw pulling provided a channel for upward and lateral mobility among immigrants and the urban poor the job also functioned as an occupational life raft for downwardly mobile urban residents.”[2]  The rickshaw itself, despite ostensibly being a simple piece of technology, was a very modern form of transport at the time. It could be taken on both paved major roads as well as mud and dirt side streets. Between 1910 and 1920, rickshaws overtook mule-carts as the main mode of transport and tripled in number.[3] The more they proliferated, the more convenient they became for people who could afford it. Rickshaw pulling became an accessible and stable form of labour for those who had no alternative occupation. Strand alludes to the notion that the rickshaw pulling business stimulated a form of urban class consciousness. For the “downwardly mobile” like former Qing bannermen or officials, pulling a rickshaw was degrading, almost inhumane labour. The end of the dynasty and the advent of republican rule had caused their downfall and perhaps they sought an alternative that would promise them dignity if not prosperity. For the upwardly mobile, pulling granted them relative comfort. While they made a meagre wage, they could afford to feed themselves and live humbly provided they didn’t have many dependents. By being a part of an urban poor that were struggling but not totally deprived, they became a part of the largest social class in the city. They were also making daily contact with those of higher social status – making them reliant on the good-will of their passengers but also degraded by their physical juxtaposition. For both upward and downwardly mobile rickshaw pullers, one can speculate that the social dynamics of their occupation contributed to an elevated awareness of their social status and – subject to more research – more inclined to support the communitarian ideals that would soon sweep across China.

Bibliography:

David Strand, “The Rickshaw: Machine for a Mixed-up Age” in Rickshaw Beijing: City People and Politics in the 1920s (Berkeley; London: University of California Press, 1993).

[1] Page 31

[2] Page 32

[3] Page 27