Wartime Shanghai Research Articles

Why “Trying to Keep the War Alive”?: Exploring the Shanghai Postcolonial Flâneur in J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun

ABSTRACT J. G. Ballard’s novel Empire of the Sun narrates how Jim, a British boy, survives in wartime Shanghai, particularly after the 1941 Japanese invasion. Existing interpretations of this story as a “Bildungsroman” have largely neglected Jim’s abnormal inclinations to “keep the war alive” even as the Japanese army faces defeat. To unravel this paradox, this paper draws upon the concept of “postcolonial flâneur”, and proposes that as a flâneur Jim’s Shanghai life encompasses evolving forms of mobility, reflecting shifting colonial relations. On the surface, Jim’s journey may appear as a tale of personal growth, yet it exposes an underlying colonialist mentality infused with imperial chauvinism. By placing the novel within the comparative context of Western and Eastern coming-of-age narrative traditions, the study also explores why Western interpretations tend to accept this paradox as natural, while Eastern perspectives may take a more critical stance.

Sophie, Greta, Cuiyuan, and Feminist Desire

Sophie, Greta, Cuiyuan, and Feminist Desire

When a Global War Befell a Global City: Recent Historiography on Wartime Shanghai

Abstract Shanghai was the first Chinese city to bear the full brunt of Japanese aggression during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). This historiographical article reviews the development of the study of wartime Shanghai in Chinese- and English-language academia in the past two decades. In the People’s Republic of China, Shanghai’s history during World War II has long been a favorite topic for academic historians. In the English-speaking world, however, the history of Shanghai’s wartime experience has only recently become a popular research topic. This article introduces many significant works related to wartime Shanghai, lays out important areas of inquiry, and identifies key historiographical trends. Its conclusion offers some suggestions on how the study of wartime Shanghai can be further advanced in the future.

The Membership of the Jewish Refugees from Poland in Political Organizations in Wartime Shanghai (1941–1942)

When in the early 1940s a vast number of war refugees – mainly Jews, reached (via Japan) Shanghai, they got stuck in the city due to the eruptionof the Pacific War. While being mostly Polish citizens, they depended on the diplomatic care of the Embassy of the Republic of Poland in Tokyo, led by the Ambassador Tadeusz Romer and after its closure – the Polish Consulate in Shanghai, where the ambassador was moved. The diplomats became engaged in the organisation of refugee groups, livelihoods and visas necessary for their evacuation. The aim of this article is to characterise the political and social groups of Polish citizens, who benefited from the Polish consulate’s help and were therefore registered in the diplomatic records.

The Discourse of Guohua in Wartime Shanghai

Abstract This article looks at artists’ engagement with artistic activities carried out in wartime Shanghai, with a particular focus on guohua (lit., ‘national painting’). Drawing on primary sources such as archival materials, diaries, paintings, magazines and newspapers, it explores the layered meanings attached to and social functions of guohua and the institutional structure of the Shanghai art world from the gudao (solitary island) period to the advent of full occupation from December 1941 onwards. As a symbol of Chinese elite culture, guohua continued to dominate the Shanghai art world with support from Wang Jingwei’s regime and the occupying Japanese, and was deemed the root of East Asian art and one of the crucial pillars of the East Asian renaissance in the discourse of the new order of East Asian art. Through closely examining the discourse of guohua in occupied Shanghai, this article advances our understanding of the production and consumption of art in wartime Shanghai by going beyond the paradigmatic binary of ‘collaboration’ and ‘resistance’.

Writing in wartime China: Chongqing, Shanghai, and Southern Zhejiang

ABSTRACTThe outbreak of the full-scale Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) brought an end to the printing and publishing industry centered in Shanghai in the 1930s. Chongqing then emerged as a nerve center of information and opinion. Writers everywhere worked under wartime conditions of social dislocation, economic dependency, and political control. This article examines the writing and publishing of three notable pieces of work completed in wartime Chongqing, Shanghai, and southern Zhejiang, respectively. The article explores the context in which each work was written and then evaluates the broader significance of the texts with regard to a historical assessment of the Chinese intellectual experience during wartime.

Suspended animation: The Wan Brothers and the (In)animate Mainland-Hong Kong Encounter, 1947–1956

ABSTRACTThe Wan Brothers produced Princess Iron Fan (1941), the first animated feature film in Asia in wartime Shanghai. In order to produce their second animated feature film, The World of Insects, the Wan Brothers went to Hong Kong in the late 1940s and did not go back to Shanghai until the mid-1950s. The Wan Brothers’ encounter with Hong Kong was noneventful and non-spectacular, because the production of The World of Insects was suspended due to the lack of funds and artistic talents in postwar Hong Kong. The Wan Brothers’ sojourn in Hong Kong can be concluded as a period of suspended animation, a state of deep hibernation in history of Chinese animation. If we locate the Wan Brothers’ encounter with Hong Kong in the longue durée, however, we can see that it was still a necessary and important springboard for their later integration into the animation industry in socialist Shanghai and also for the belated emergence of the local animation industry in Hong Kong. The Wan Brothers’ inanimate encounter with Hong Kong would soon be reanimated and would even explode with outbursts of repressed artistic creativities and energies on both sides of the border, despite being belated.

Wartime Shanghai and the Jewish Refugees from Central Europe: Survival, Co-Existence, and Identity in a Multi-Ethnic City, Irene Eber (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), xiv + 245 pp., hardcover $154.00, electronic version available

Wartime Shanghai and the Jewish Refugees from Central Europe: Survival, Co-Existence, and Identity in a Multi-Ethnic City, Irene Eber (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), xiv + 245 pp., hardcover $154.00, electronic version available

Regeneration and mobility: the spatial dynamics of industries in wartime Shanghai

During the three-month long Sino-Japanese hostilities in the summer of 1937, Shanghai industries suffered the heaviest loss ever sustained during any previous military conflict in the city. Yet as has been shown in a previous study, local industries seem to have recovered fairly quickly. All statistics point to a return to pre-war levels of production in most sectors by the end of 1938 in some cases and during 1939 for most industrial branches. The purpose of this paper is to try to highlight the spatial dynamics at work in this recovery process. It relies not just on original sources, but on the unique capabilities GIS offers in processing large amounts of historical data and exploring connected issues in land use, demography, and urban life. The paper argues that Shanghai industries went through a thorough phase of relocation and migration within the city, but also of inbound migration from the surrounding regions. This study is based on a particular set of documents produced by the Shanghai Municipal Council, the largely independent body that administered the International Settlement. In this study, therefore, I shall argue that what happened in the territory of the International Settlement mirrored what happened next door and possibly in other parts of the Chinese-administered/Japanese-occupied areas. Beyond the issue of industrial movement, this paper also examines connected issues in land use, demography, and urban life.

Middlemen in the Chinese Welfare State: The Role of Philanthropists in Refugee Relief in Wartime Shanghai

This paper examines the impact of different models of public/private partnerships for refugee relief. Through case studies of different refugee relief programs in China, the paper shows that philanthropists are attractive but risky partners for state officials in welfare provision. Their cooperation can indeed expand access to welfare, improve state capacity, and enhance state/society relations. But because philanthropists can control significant resources and gain considerable social prestige, weak states can find it very difficult to control and contain them. In some circumstances, the relationship can turn competitive, and philanthropists can even threaten the state’s efforts to expand its capacity and build up its own legitimacy. The key to the balance of power between state officials and private philanthropists is control over the funding for the partnership.

Dubious prosperity: Women and entertainment in wartime Shanghai

Wartime Shanghai (1937–1945) was a crucial period in women’s Yue opera history, during which the opera took roots in the city and was transformed into a modern art form. The opera established itself as a dominant presence in the city’s popular entertainment in the first half of the 1940s and gained national and international influence in the 1950s and 1960s with its masterpiece plays such as The butterfly lovers and Dream of the red chamber. The rise of women’s Yue opera in wartime Shanghai was more a ramification of long-term developments in urban migration, urban cultural transformation, and women’s integration into society that ran through the entire Republican even the early PRC periods.

Between Shanghai and Hong Kong: The Politics of Chinese Cinemas. By Poshek Fu. [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. 288 pp. £14.95. ISBN 0804745188.

Despite its short length (152 pages excluding reference matters), this pioneering study in English of “the Shanghai–Hong Kong nexus” in Chinese cinema succeeds in placing wartime Shanghai and Hong Kong cinemas in specific (albeit not always “proper” as Poshek Fu claims (p. xvi)) institutional and industrial contexts, bringing to light the “humanity” of the filmmakers, the “multiplicity of the historical situations,” and the “complexity of the cultural politics” of filmmaking and film criticism (p. xv). Most impressive of all is Fu's dedication to primary research, reading hard-to-find print materials as well as conducting interviews and watching rare films. The book's incredibly rich information (e.g. studio assets, production costs, ticket prices) will certainly interest scholars of modern Chinese history and culture, and Fu's accessible stories should attract general readers as well.After a preface outlining Fu's aims, chapter one, “Mapping Shanghai cinema under semi-occupation,” traces the rise of Zhang Shankun's Xinhua Company in Shanghai and reveals the ambiguities, contradictions and ironies of “Solitary Island cinema” between 1937 and 1941 – a cinema that defied political boundaries and thrived against odds. Chapter two, “Between nationalism and colonialism,” based on Fu's similarly-titled previous study (in The Cinema of Hong Kong: History, Arts, Identity, edited by Fu and David Desser (2000)), discusses Hong Kong's “double marginality” between “Sinocentric” nationalism and British colonialism, and critiques the “Central Plains syndrome” in Shanghai filmmakers stranded in Hong Kong in the late 1930s. Against the Chinese syndrome, Fu asserts, Cantonese films like Southern Sisters (1940) articulated “a both/and hybridity” constitutive of a new “local consciousness” or emergent identity (p. 87). Chapter three, “The struggle to entertain,” derives from Fu's previous article (“The ambiguity of entertainment: Chinese cinema in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, 1942 to 1945,” Cinema Journal, 37.1 (Fall 1997)) and argues against a binary view of either/or (e.g. resistance/collaboration, patriots/traitors). Fu depicts “occupation cinema” as a space of entertainment for the colonized to “escape from Japanese propaganda” (p. xiv), although the both/and logic also compels him to note the paradox that occupation cinema ultimately “helped normalize and naturalize the everyday violence of the occupation” (p. 131). In an epilogue, “Filming Shanghai in Hong Kong,” Fu goes through the changing political–economic situations in post-war Shanghai and Hong Kong.

In the Shadow of the Rising Sun: Shanghai under Japanese Occupation. Edited by Christian Henriot and Wen-Hsin Yeh. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xii +392 pp. £50.00. ISBN 0-521-82221-1.

Henriot and Yeh have produced a rich and highly readable volume on Shanghai during the 1937–1945 Japanese occupation period. Many of the path-breaking essays are based on primary sources from newly accessible Shanghai archives.The volume is divided into three sections, broadly on economic, political and cultural history. In the first section, Christian Henriot and Parks Coble both demonstrate that the Shanghai capitalists left in the city were caught in a tight situation: they had little choice but to co-operate with the Japanese, who wanted to make Shanghai into another economic powerhouse in their Co-Prosperity Sphere but who were also exploitative and driven by military rather than commercial needs. On the other hand, the exiled Nationalists considered Chinese businessmen who co-operated with Japan to be collaborators, rendering them vulnerable to assassination during the war and condemnation after it. Frederic Wakeman explores the way in which smuggling became part of the economic and cultural landscape in supplying wartime Shanghai, and Sherman Cochran looks at a “fixer,” Xu Guanqun, who played for high stakes selling medicines across enemy lines, demonstrating that the neutral “island” of the foreign concessions in Shanghai from 1937 to 1941 was hardly an impermeable one. Allison Rottmann completes this section by rethinking the rural narrative of Communist Revolution, showing that Shanghai helped to supply and shape the politics of the central China base area.

Rice, Power and People: The Politics of Food Supply in Wartime Shanghai (1937–1945)

Rice, Power and People: The Politics of Food Supply in Wartime Shanghai (1937–1945)

Rice, Power and People: The Politics of Food Supply in Wartime Shanghai (1937–1945)

Rice, Power and People: The Politics of Food Supply in Wartime Shanghai (1937-1945)* by Christian Renriot During the Sino-Japanese war, food became a vital object of concern for the Shanghai population and a major stake among the authorities that competed for the control of the city. Either as a result of objective factors-such as devaluation of the Jabi, population increase due to refugees, and bad harvests-or of intended and unintended moves by the authorities or the merchants, the price of foodstuffs remained on a constantly ascending course. Yet crude statistical tables only tell one part of the story. To many people an increase of a few yuan could make the difference between subsistence and starvation, or fear of starvation. What made the food supply situation especially critical, and eventually disas- .trous, was that itbecame "hostage to politics."1 This paper will examine the issue of food supply and control in Shanghai during the war. It will argue that the enormous difficulties and hardships the population endured were not so much the result of economic problems as the consequence of deliberate and inherent political struggles between and within the various authorities in charge of overseeing or administering the city. The first part of the paper examines the evolution of prices, supplies, and the policies implemented by the local authorities, especially in the foreign settleme~ts. The second part is devoted to the attempt to organize a relief program for impoverished groups of the population, its failure, and its ultimate transformation into a rationing system. The last part focuses on the implementation of a policy for developing a "controlled economy" (tongzhijingji) in Shanghai under the Wang Jingwei government, and its counterpart, the thriving black market that developed as a result of the authorities' inability to provide the population with adequate food supplies. FOOD SUPPLY AND FOOD PRICES When armed conflict between Chinese and Japanese armies started in and around Shanghai, all communications were suspended at once. * The transporta- * Thispaperisbased on documentaryresearchconducted in associationwith Feng Yi,junior research fellow at the Institut d' Asie Orientale. Twentieth-Century China, Vol. 26, No.1 (November, 2000): 41-84 42 Twentieth-Century China tion of food and other commodities became impossible for three full months, and resumed only slowly thereafter. As soon as the conflict erupted, the authorities of the foreign settlements began to worry about supplies. The situation was made especially critical by the influx of hundreds of thousands of refugees from the areas under Chinese administration. As the war moved inland, however, the situation gradually returned to "normal" in Shanghai. Obviously, many problems remained, but despite the destruction of buildings and displacement of the population the local economy quickly bounced back. Although the Chinese municipality was occupied by Japanese troops, the foreign settlements were preserved, at least until December 1941, and provided free access to overseas markets. In 1937, Shanghai had a population of 3.8 million.2 It is very difficult to assess with accuracy the needs for rice of the city during the war.3 A July 1939 report from the U.S. consulate placed the monthly requirements at 25,000 tons.4 A French source gave 20,000 to 25,000 tons in May 1941, while the British consulate indicated a higher figure, 32,000 tons.5 This would place the annual requir~ments for rice during the war in the range of 240,000-300,000 tons. To feed its inhabitants, the city depended on its vast hinterland, especially the ricegrowing provinces of Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Anhui. The privileged location of Shanghai, at the confluence of the Yangzi and Huangpu rivers and in the middle of a dense network of canals and rivers, made the supply of the city very smooth. In years of bad harvest, rice was purchased abroad from Australia, Indochina, or even North America. Throughout the Republican period, the population remained very sensitive to price increases. During the Nanking decade, the authorities had. to intervene several times to rein in the movement of prices or to distribute cheap rice to low-income families.6 Except under exceptional circumstances (such as in 1931), however, Shanghai was guaranteed a regular and endless supply of foodstuffs...

Rice, Power and People: The Politics of Food Supply in Wartime Shanghai (1937–1945)

Rice, Power and People: The Politics of Food Supply in Wartime Shanghai (1937–1945)

The Shanghai Badlands: Wartime Terrorism and Urban Crime, 1937-1941 (review)

258 China Review International: Vol. 5, No. 1, Spring 1998 technical assistance contrasted with a suspicion of the Japanese. The historical residue of past prejudices on both sides, bitter memories ofJapanese aggression, and insensitive behavior by Japanese businessmen remain as negative factors against any real partnership. Last but not least is the Sino-Japanese problem of disputed territory, of which the disagreement over the Senkaku Islands (Diaoyutai) provides the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Professor Taylor misses the linkage between the islands and the entire continental shelf underlying the East China Sea to which China lays claim. More is at stake than uninhabited rocks over potential oil and gas fields. He also misstates the Soudi China Sea problem, alleging "frequent armed clashes" where there has only been one, in 1988, and erroneously includes Indonesia as one of the claimants to the Spratly Islands. Fortunately, none of diese items detracts from the excellent economic analysis of this pivotal relationship, which is of regional and potentially global importance. Allen S. Whiting University ofArizona Allen Whiting is Regents Professor ofPolitical Science at the University ofArizona specializing in East Asian international relations. Frederic Wakeman, Jr. The Shanghai Badlands: Wartime Terrorism and Urban Crime, 1937-1941. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. xvi, 227 pp. Hardcover $49.95, isbn 0-521-49744-2. History is mostiy detective work, and good history should read like a mystery thriller. Frederic Wakeman's new study, The Shanghai Badlands, is such a book. The author, who is Haas Professor of Asian Studies and Director of East Asian Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, has written extensively on modern Chinese history, including his masterful Policing Shanghai, 1927-1937, published in 1995. The present book under review is an equally impressive followup in which Wakeman deftly unravels a tangled web oflocal, national, and international intrigues and terrorism that had become an accepted part of daily life in y niversi y war_torn Shanghai between 1937 and 1941. Here is an absorbing drama replete with espionage, counterespionage, murder, sex, and drugs, in which loyalties were ambiguous and deceptive. ofHawai'i Press Reviews 259 The author has done a remarkable job in elucidating an extremely complicated story, and he has done so with great clarity and verve. Basing his study primarily on recently released confidential Shanghai police files and American and British diplomatic records, Wakeman has been able to detail the inner workings ofShanghai's gangster and terrorist organizations, presenting a compelling social history ofShanghai's underworld during the crucial five years prior to Pearl Harbor . His book also deepens our understanding ofthe politics ofterrorism in China. Wartime Shanghai was, like Casablanca, a cosmopolitan international center, with several million residents, Chinese and foreign, many ofwhom were only recent arrivals and sojourners. It was also an isolated and deeply divided city. Once the Japanese had occupied the Chinese sections ofthe city in 1937, Shanghai immediately became the focal point for both resistance and collaboration. It was bitterly contested among the Chinese, Japanese, and Westerners, with unending terrorist warfare involving soldiers, politicians, bankers, journalists, and gangsters. The most brutal and devastating struggles were between the Chinese themselves, who supported either the puppets of the Japanese or Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists . Assassinations and bombings were brazenly employed by all sides in the fight for control of the city. One ofthe most disputed areas was the western suburbs, a veritable noman 's land tiiat everyone called the Badlands, where millions ofdollars were laundered daily through underground gambling, narcotics, and prostitution rackets . Immense amounts ofmoney made strange bedfellows ofboth collaborators and patriots. With the crackdown on gambling in the International Settlement in 1940, the racketeers simply moved their operations to the nearby Badlands, where they easily paid offpolice and politicians for protection. It was common knowledge that vice was an important source ofrevenue for both the local puppet regime and Wang Jingwei's collaborationist government in Nanjing. Because everyone relied on illicit money to fund everything from plots to regimes, it was impossible to put a stop to organized crime and violence. As Wakeman correctly points out, "It was . . . becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish crime from conspiracy as the two converged to pulverize whatever shreds remained of...

Collaborators and Capitalists: The Politics of "Material Control" in Wartime Shanghai

From November 1937 to August 1945, during nearly the entire period of the Second Sino-Japanese the Chinese City (huajie) of Shanghai was under Japanese occupation. After December 1941 the International Settlement and the French Concession also fell into the hands of the Japanese, ending the Sino-Western condominium of the city that had existed for nearly a century. In Shanghai, as everywhere else in occupied China, the Japanese enlisted the help of Chinese collaborators. Their dependence on that help, however, was greater in the city than in most other places. It was impossible for the limited number of Japanese troops to maintain peace and order in a metropolis of more than five million people.1 More important, mobilizing through the city the economic resources of Lower Yangtze for support of the China War, a major objective of the Japanese occupation in Shanghai, created a special need for obtaining cooperation and assistance from the city's business elite.