Restless Empire (25 page)

Until the mid-twentieth century, the relationship between Chinese and foreigners within China was profoundly unequal. Most foreigners had rights of extraterritoriality, meaning that their legal affairs in China could only be handled by courts set up by their own country. Many lived in concessions or settlements inside Chinese cities run by foreign-dominated councils and administered by foreign officials. In a classic colonial mode of interaction, Chinese were often critical of foreigners
and their habits in private, while in public they felt a need to express admiration for the foreigners. This unhealthy and sometimes racist form of interaction often stood in the way of close personal relations between Chinese and foreigners but did little to diminish the exchange of ideas and practices, especially over time.

The numbers of foreigners in China varied year by year according to conditions in the country and internationally, but it is likely that the average in the first half of the twentieth century was between 300,000 and half a million (maybe surprisingly, the figures in 2005 were about the same).
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Of these, about half were Japanese subjects; the British, who long were the most influential, were never more than 15,000. Of the total, more than 100,000 came as refugees from troubles in Europe, including the Russian revolution and the Nazi persecution of Jews. Most lived in the cities though not always in the foreign concessions. Harbin and Shenyang had many Russians and later Japanese, and Shanghai had by far the largest number of foreigners, with 70,000 in 1932. But foreigners were also found in the countryside, usually as missionaries, teachers, or traders along the country’s edges. To the Chinese, the foreign presence provided a cornucopia of impressions of the outside world and inspired many to seek out a closer connection with non-native ideas and knowledge.

Some parts of the country were a world apart. These were the regions where foreigners aspired to full control—British-held Hong Kong, Portuguese-held Macao, and Japanese-held Taiwan and Manchuria (especially after 1931). There different forms of hybridity that the colonial experience created blossomed in full, with concepts of what was Chinese and what was foreign starting to blur. Eminent Chinese in Hong Kong became British subjects and were educated at Oxford, Cambridge, or the London School of Economics (LSE). In Taiwan, the younger generation of Chinese adopted Japanese language and culture, and some moved between mainland China, Japan, and Taiwan. Japanese tastes and habits in everything from art to baseball came to the island to stay.
The world sometimes returned the seed of Chinese emigration: A number of highly trained overseas-born Chinese from all continents came to China throughout the twentieth century and some played leading roles in the country that their ancestors had left. In spite of war and continuous political change, the first part of the twentieth century was China’s age of openness, an age in which foreigners delivered some of the key premises for the country’s development.
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In the first half of the twentieth century, much of China’s international trade was still in foreign hands. The main foreign powers set tariffs for goods imported into China, and the Chinese government was simply notified of the outcome. In 1917 there were ninety-two cities and towns open to direct foreign trade, of which about half had foreign concessions or settlements where foreigners had the right to reside, to trade, and to own property. Everyone who lived in such concessions was taxed by the foreign-led local administrations, not by the Chinese government, province, or city. The land on which the foreign concessions stood had been expropriated from its owners and leased in perpetuity to foreign powers, with subleases given by them to individuals or companies. As a rule, Chinese were not allowed to own land in the concessions, but some did so through proxy. Conveniently for subversives of all sorts—aspiring capitalists, revolutionaries, and religious fanatics—they too could make use of the extraterritoriality given to the foreign concessions. There, Chinese could be arrested by Chinese authorities only with the permission of the foreign consul in charge of the territory. Thus, the CCP held most of its founding congress in a former missionary school in the French concession in Shanghai, rather than in Chinese-governed areas.

Of the concessions, Shanghai was the biggest, but others were equally cosmopolitan and complex. The main northern port of Tianjin had seven foreign national administrations, with three British municipal districts. Wuhan on the Yangzi river originally had four concessions, which looked like miniature European cities: Orthodox churches,
British customs houses, German breweries, and French restaurants. It is, wrote a foreign visitor in the 1920s, “a bustling city, wholly Western in its architecture and layout, even though completely surrounded by China, among buildings looming high into the air, with several theaters, even though they offered only American movies, with automobiles dashing their imperious way up and down the river-front Bund.”
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The concessions, all on the rivers or at the coast, were defended by foreign naval ships, which patrolled day and night. Even though the foreign military presence was limited, it could be deadly. Gunboat diplomacy sometimes involved shelling of Chinese cities until the foreign power had got its way. For its China Station, the British navy developed the Insect Class of ships, small maneuverable vessels with six-inch guns. Small contingents of foreign troops were stationed in the main concessions and settlements. Then, of course, there were the Japanese troops on Taiwan and in Manchuria, the British in Hong Kong, and the French in Indochina. The foreign possessions in China could be well defended.

The main foreign concessions were reasonably self-contained. Foreigners often prided themselves on how little they had to do with ordinary Chinese in their businesses, a task better left to their Chinese middlemen. Even so, a surprising number of foreigners who lived in China learned the language well enough to communicate in it. Many also developed an appreciation for Chinese food (not surprising, since the most available foreign fare was English) and for Chinese art and esthetics. Personal relationships of all kinds flourished in spite of the restrictions that the colonial setting tried to impose: Chinese and foreigners met each other as friends, teachers, or lovers. Sir Sidney Barton, the British consul-general at Shanghai, was a fluent Chinese speaker and knew the business and government communities in his city like nobody else. Silas Hardoon, Shanghai’s richest property tycoon (who was born Salih Harun to a Jewish family in Baghdad) married a Chinese woman, Luo Jialing, and became a chief benefactor for Buddhist causes in the metropolis. Increasingly—even as they tried to keep apart—the
mores and attractions of the modern city brought Chinese and foreigners together, at the race track, the dance halls, and the cinemas.

But not all foreigners in China were wealthy citizens of the world. Some came as settlers, especially Japanese and Koreans who moved into Manchuria or Taiwan, or Russians who had come before the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. Some came as refugees, Russians after 1917 and German Jews after 1933, and some as servants of empires: Indians and Malays to Shanghai and Hong Kong, North Africans and Indochinese to the French concessions and to Guangzhouwan, the French-leased territory in Guangdong province. With the South Manchurian Railway zone, Liaodong peninsula, and all of south Manchuria open to Japanese settlement and investment, and preference for Japanese as advisors to the Chinese local government throughout the region, it is no surprise that half the foreign population in China were subjects of the Japanese Empire. Well before Tokyo’s puppet state in Manchuria, Manzhouguo, came into existence in 1932, the South Manchurian Railway Company operated a Japanese pseudo-state within northeast China, running factories and mines, shipping lines and warehouses, and setting up schools, hospitals, and public utilities. A very large number of those who staffed these operations were Koreans.

For the many Chinese who came to the foreign concessions to work as servants, street-sweepers, or factory workers—and even more for those who just happened to be passing through—the allure of the foreigners’ world competed with the horror at its values and ways of behavior. The greed, the exploitation, and the status that money brought rankled Confucians and radicals alike. In Beijing, where the foreign section—the Legation Quarter—had been set up only a few steps from the entrance to the old imperial palace at Tian’anmen, many Chinese were insulted that the quarter’s banks, shops, hospitals, churches, and hotels were for foreign use only. And even if the existence of a sign denying access to dogs and Chinese in Shanghai parks is an urban myth, Chinese were de facto barred from many clubs, parks, and sports
grounds in the foreign settlements at least up to the late 1920s. The essayist Yang Yibo saw Shanghai as “a seething cauldron. . . . I hope to utterly destroy this old Shanghai, to smash asunder this oriental bastion of imperialist domination, to inter forever those golden dreams of bloodsucking vampires.”
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To Yang and to most Chinese the foreign concessions produced a lasting impression of foreigners’ unceasing pressure for unique material advantage to themselves and their country at China’s expense.

C
HINA IS VAST
, and change came to its various regions with varying intensity. A traveler who visited the Chinese interior in the 1930s, following the great trade routes into Central Asia or moving along the edges of the northern plains from Shanxi to the mountain passes into Sichuan, would have reported on a country in which little had changed since the Western incursions began. But if the same traveler went along the main rivers or the coast or visited cities all over the country or smaller towns in the south, along the Yangzi delta, in Shandong or Manchuria, a very different story would emerge. It would be a story of change that had taken hold and was being indigenized, of a transformation of people’s dress, dwellings, and social interaction, of objects and technologies that had been integrated into Chinese life with an ease many visitors found astonishing, and not least of people’s embrace of change. Even revolutionaries, who wanted to use the tools of this new world to defeat its masters, dressed in Western-style clothes, read foreign texts, and adhered to political theories imported from abroad.

Things travel alongside ideas, and sometimes the material travels faster than the idea it came from. In China in the early twentieth century, products from the industrial revolutions in Europe and North America reached the far corners of the country, handed down from imports to middlemen to county fairs, traveling merchants, or the town store. Bicycles, batteries, glass, telephones, lights, cotton, leather shoes, perfumes, wristwatches, photography, and radios—all things foreign
and therefore modern created a sense of excitement in China just as they had done when they had been introduced a few decades earlier on the continents where they were created. Almost immediately the Chinese started to integrate such products into their own lifestyles and esthetics, and very soon the most advantageous of them were produced in China, for domestic consumption and then for export. Nobody who has studied the introduction of foreign products into China in the early twentieth century will be surprised at the speed with which the country was to become an export dynamo three generations later, when the political pendulum swung back toward enterprise values and interaction with the world. Although the willingness to adapt to rapid change also created resistance, the ability to find ways to integrate the Chinese with the foreign baffled many observers and made urban China seem well poised for being on the cusp of modernity.

The houses in which people lived and worked also went through a series of modern adaptations. By the 1930s most towns and even some villages had examples of new types of buildings, contemporary and utilitarian, with large glass windows and electric light and heating, designed according to standards developed by architects in Chicago, Paris, or London. The cities were of course the vanguard, and especially Shanghai, where tall buildings were rising up at the waterfront. The 1908 Palace Hotel, by the British architect Walter Scott, incorporated the first use of elevators in China. Across the street the Cathay Hotel, thirteen stories with the Baghdad-born financier Sir Victor Sassoon’s private apartment on top, was the most impressive building in China when it opened in 1929. By the 1930s, Shanghai had become a center for modern architecture, with the world’s top architects and designers competing for commissions. But styles changed elsewhere in China, too. In Beijing new public buildings were mostly in the Western style from the early part of the century, exemplified by the German architect Curt Rothkegel’s republican provisional parliament building.
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By the 1910s Chinese architects began designing new kinds of buildings in China,
which like those of their Western counterparts closely followed international trends in architectural style. While some architects, foreign and Chinese, experimented with incorporating elements of classical Chinese style into their new buildings, most clients were happy enough with moving into constructions that they felt served their purpose better than what the old-style houses had done.

As with buildings, styles of dress were also changing quickly. In the 1880s most elite Chinese wore their Western clothing on special occasions, but thirty years later it would dominate the way people looked in the cities and sometimes in village China, too. But it did so in ways that were often surprising to the beholder: Chinese elements woven into Western styles, Chinese modifications of imported fashions, appropriations of dress across class, nation, and sometimes gender. According to the Shanghai magazine
Shenbao
in 1912, “Chinese are wearing foreign clothes, while foreigners wear Chinese clothes; men are adorned like women and women like men; prostitutes imitate girl students, and girl students look like prostitutes.” The explosion in Chinese production of cotton cloth in the 1920s and the arrival of the sewing machine and talented Russian and German tailors spurred the revolution in fashion. Picture magazines and advertising spread the message of new fashion all over the country. People in China changed their clothing style for all kinds of reasons, as do people all over the world, but looking good often came with some form of message. In China this message was “New Nation.”
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