Restless Empire (26 page)

Two examples of New Nation fashion stand out. The
qipao
, the long, sleeveless dress for women that became popular after 1910, and the
Zhongshan
two-piece suit, which, reincarnated in a cheap form as the Mao suit, was to clothe China’s men and women after the Communist victory. The qipao was a Westernized version of Manchu upper-class dress from the nineteenth century. It became popular because it was
both
Chinese and Western, because it could be made cheaply or expensively with all kinds of cloth, and because it could be as revealing
or strict as the circumstances warranted. The Zhongshan suit had a similar purpose. It was adapted from German military-style school uniforms that Sun Yat-sen saw in Japan, and was named after Sun’s honorific name Zhongshan, Central Mountain.
⁷
Sun himself began to wear this simple form of suit in 1920, and it represented the need for regimentation and militarization of China to achieve the nationalist revolution. By the 1930s it had become de rigeur for nationalists and Communist alike, at least when a political point needed to be made. The status of the person who wore it was recognized by the cut or the quality of the fountain pen worn in the left breast pocket.

Chinese material culture in the twentieth century was increasingly eclectic, as was the case in most countries. The foreign blended with the domestic to such an extent that it quickly became impossible to say which was which. Sometimes, as with the qipao or the Zhongshan suit, quite a few Chinese started believing that recent imports were originally Chinese and ancient, and sometimes used that belief to attack those who wished to dress differently. But mostly the eclecticism of Chinese dress or building styles or consumer patterns were accepted in a society that most people realized was in flux. The encounter with the foreign in China happened within a context of intense social change, in which a mixing of traditions and patterns was common. In this sense, Chinese material culture changed in patterns similar to other parts of the world where change came quickly and, for most people, unexpectedly. There was not much difference between the experiences of peasants in France, Italy, or those who worked the land in the western parts of the United States, and those of their Chinese counterparts. A few decades of divergence in timing often obscure processes that were remarkably similar in content. Even less of a difference was there in the cities, where the concepts of what was modern were created. By mid-century, Chinese urban life was taking on most of the characteristics of cities everywhere, from Paris and Berlin to New York and Tokyo. And first among the modern Chinese cities stood Shanghai.

C
HINESE MODERNITY WAS CREATED
in Shanghai. In technology and organization, in taste and style, the great city at the mouth of the Yangzi river shaped the hybrid patterns that gave meaning to modern China. Shanghai modernity was always contested. Some Chinese abhorred it because of its foreign cravings and moral perturbations, and its ability to rattle their concepts of the native, national, or original. In the imagination of leaders from the Empress Dowager to Mao Zedong, Shanghai was unclean, the great whore whom everyone moved in and out of but who belonged to no one. It was chaotic, uncontrollable, and un-Chinese. In 1949 Mao and the Communists seriously contemplated abolishing the city and driving all its inhabitants out into the countryside, Pol Pot–like. But for most Chinese who saw the city, who lived in it or who dreamed about it, Shanghai symbolized the kind of existence they wanted for themselves and their children—cleaner and more well-ordered than the actual city, perhaps, but with the dynamism, fun, and riches that was contained within it as nowhere else in China.

In 1936, Shanghai, with its three and a half million inhabitants, was one of the world’s largest cities. Much of the central city fell within the International Settlement (made up of the original British and American zones), with its eight square miles roughly twice the size of the French Settlement to the south. Most of the population lived in the old Chinese city outside the settlements or in the vast industrial zones to the east or in shantytowns that grew up on the city’s edges. All who could afford it had the right of residence in the foreign settlements. But only foreign residents who owned land of a certain value, around ten percent of the total foreign population by the early 1920s, could vote in elections for the Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC), the governing body of the International Settlement. The SMC appropriated power from the foreign consuls during the early part of the century, and its own adminstration also grew in importance. Mostly British or British Indian in composition, the SMC civil service handled policing, public utilities, roads, and, increasingly, schools and hospitals. Up to 1927,
civil or criminal court cases in the Settlement, even those that only involved Chinese, were decided by a so-called Mixed Court, in which a foreign assessor sat with a Chinese judge and generally dominated proceedings. Shanghai, with all its extensions, was a hybrid city, where its perhaps 70,000 foreign citizens, often joined by parts of the Chinese elite, became increasingly determined to exclude the Chinese state from any influence in their affairs (an attitude, by the way, which foreign consuls looked upon with a great deal of suspicion).

Foreigners who arrived in Shanghai found ways of sticking together. They could join clubs for modern, Western activities like ballroom dancing or playing bridge, which long excluded Chinese. Even if they could not participate at the same tables or on the same dance floors, foreign activities and tastes influenced natives as well. Mao Zedong always liked to dance to Western music, and the last position Deng Xiaoping ever held, in the 1990s, was chairman of the Chinese Bridge Players’ Association. Other associations had a broader purpose. The YMCA, established in China in the 1890s, reached its peak in the 1920s, when it ran large public education programs, including public health education, vocational training, sports events, and English classes. From being an exclusively foreign organization, the Y became increasingly Chinese, and a number of China’s late twentieth-century radical leaders confessed that they had benefited from their association with the Y.

Not least because of the protection that the foreign settlements provided, modern journalism in China was also born in Shanghai. English-language newspapers, such as the
North-China Daily News
, established in the 1850s, and the more sensationalist
Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury
, established in 1920, inspired Chinese papers like
Shenbao
(from 1871),
Dianshizhai
(the first pictorial, from the 1880s), and tabloids such as the
Libao
(from 1935), published by the newspaper magnate Cheng Shewo, with a circulation of more than 200,000.
⁸
By the 1930s Shanghai had a flourishing newsmarket, with papers published in Chinese and English, and in German, Russian, Japanese,
French, Polish, and Yiddish. Its book publishing houses were the most important in China, often co-owned by foreign and Chinese interests, but managed by Chinese editors.

Pre-1949 Shanghai is often dubbed Sin City, and with some right, even though sin is often defined by those who object to what they see as cultural or even racial miscegenation. The main sin, in the eyes of many Chinese, was gross inequality and the flaunting of wealth, which was blamed on the foreign presence. For foreigners, and especially the English, sin was often about sex, usually in situations where one of the partners was Chinese. Many new histories of Shanghai attempt to break the focus on nightlife and entertainment, shopping and gambling. But “Shanghai beyond the neon lights” is not an easy construct, since the neon lights were, quite literally, visible from all over the city.
⁹
If they were not blocked by racial discrimination, everyone who could afford it participated in some of the entertainment that the city offered. They could go to one of thirty-seven cinemas, the horse and dog race tracks, or the great leisure centers, such as the Da Shijie, Great World, on Edward VII Avenue, with its restaurants, dance floors, theaters, circus, and casinos. Or they went shopping or window shopping along Nanking Road, where the two great department stores, the Wing On and the Sincere, faced each other across Asia’s busiest street. People who were not appropriately dressed or seemed “the wrong sort” were thrown out, just as they would be in Shanghai’s mega-malls today. But that did not prevent them from coming back, even if in the meantime they had joined a revolutionary society to oppose the depravity and oppression of Shanghai.

The owners of the two great Shanghai department stores had all learned their initial lessons in commerce abroad. The brothers who started Wing On, Guo Yue and Guo Quan, had lived in Australia, where they converted to Christianity and began working as greengrocers. When they returned to China around 1900, they settled in Hong Kong and spread their commercial empire from there, with the key branch soon being in Shanghai. Sincere Department Store developed
the same way, also started by two brothers, Ma Yingbiao and Ma Yongcan, who had lived in Australia and then settled in Hong Kong. The Guos and the Mas came from adjacent villages close to Macao in Guangdong province. They even married sisters from the same family, one of whom, Huo Qingtang, became one of the founders of the YWCA in China. Chinese merchants such as the Guos and the Mas in the twentieth century drew on their own traditions, on their new freedom to travel, and on their ability to associate with foreigners to enrich themselves and promote their quest for a modern China. They learned from the foreign companies they worked with, and they helped build business enterprises in China that were neither entirely foreign nor entirely Chinese.

The big foreign companies in China were also transformed in the early twentieth century. Through working closely with Chinese middlemen, Jardine Matheson had become a conglomerate, which—in addition to trade—was running wharves, warehouses, and cotton mills, developed mining and engineering companies, and had its own railways and steamship companies. It became a limited company, with considerable Chinese capital invested in it, in 1907 and moved its headquarters to Shanghai in 1912. Jardine’s filled a series of functions, most of them connected to transport in the broadest sense. It linked British India, Malaya, Singapore, and Australia with China and Japan through shipping and related services. Across the river from Shanghai, Jardine’s wharves in Pudong (where the city’s new financial center now is) became the central point in one of the world’s great trade networks. All Chinese towns of any significance had a Jardine’s agent, who could handle transport, insurance, and often banking. Crucially, Jardine’s developed a Chinese web of business that went far beyond the compradors who worked directly with the company. In many parts of the country—and in Hong Kong not least—small Chinese-run companies grew through their links with Jardine’s or similar companies, which provided the services they needed for their expansion.

China remained a favored country for foreign investment up to the beginning of the 1930s. Companies saw opportunity there in spite of China’s domestic political turbulence. They also appreciated the absence of a strong central power that could limit their activities. As late as 1932, roughly five percent of all French investment abroad, for instance, went to China (which is about ten times the rate of such investment in the 2000s
¹⁰
). Most of the profits these companies made in China never reached the Chinese. But the knowledge that major international players—Standard Oil, Shell, Singer Sewing Machines, British-American Tobacco—brought with them led to a major transformation of Chinese business, particularly with regard to business models and management. Gone were the days when members of the Chinese elite felt caught between Confucianism and business acumen. By the 1920s most believed that the Confucian emphasis on family, hierarchy, personal obligation, and thrift could be easily wed to foreign management principles. The mostly American prophets of “scientific management” from the interwar years were keenly studied in China (more so, in fact, than they were in Europe or Japan). Most Chinese business leaders realized that rationalization and reorganization were crucial if they were to compete with foreign companies. In some cases, workers were treated more harshly by their Chinese bosses than they were by foreigners, which fueled resentment against the foreign system of capitalism. As workers flocked to Shanghai or other big cities to find work in factories, some of them began to dream of another world in which they themselves owned the means of production.

A crucial capitalist principle that took a long time to get established in China was that of the limited liability company. Chinese preferred private ownership, with a family in charge, and most companies kept a very narrow circle of shareholders comprising family members and long-term associates. The limited availability of credit from banks and the cumbersome nature of the capital structure of private partnership restricted the availability of working capital up to the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937.

Only gradually did Chinese entrepreneurs learn how to expand without giving up control of their companies, or, if they wanted to, to give up control to maximize profit. Businessmen learned how to look after their shareholders after the company had gone public. In a country where legal protection was weak, such an application of Confucian principles was both necessary and profitable. A master of the process was Liu Hongsheng, who started his business career in a Sino-British mining company, and went on to form successful cement and matchstick companies of his own. His Hong Song Match Company became the main producer through a series of mergers and takeovers. In 1936 he set up the China National Match Manufacturers’ Production and Sales Union, which was in effect a cartel that, with government blessing, controlled prices and production. In the 1930s, as today, business in China worked best when it could work with the government.