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life and times
Borrowed from the “Tale of Old China” website (http://www.talesofoldchina.com/shanghai/intro.cfm):
Old Shanghai was a very special time and place. The city was run by
foreigners but was not a colony, most residents were Chinese but it was not
ruled by China. It was the greatest city of Asia, completely eclipsing Hong Kong
and Tokyo. It was one of the most cosmopolitan places that ever existed, full of
growth and speculation, of rogues and adventurers, of color and life, and of
poverty and death.
Old Shanghai was the worst and the best of everything. It was the "Whore of
Asia" and also the "Paris of the East". It was a "paradise for adventurers", and
a haven to millions of people, both Chinese and non-Chinese, who sought refuge
there from the wars and the poverty that surrounded it.
The city had a such a bad reputation in certain quarters that it gave rise to
the verb "to be Shanghai-ed", which meant to be drugged and shipped off to sea
as a sailor, a reflection of the problem ship's captains often had when they
arrived in Shanghai in putting together enough of a crew to set sail again.
It was by far the biggest city in China with a population that by 1927 had
topped two and a half million. It was the most industrialised city in China, it
was a significant center of intellectual activity. For bourgeois thinkers, its
middle class pointed the way to the future for China, while to more
revolutionary thinkers, its vast ranks of industrial workers carried the promise
of revolution. Western visitors to Shanghai reported a "treaty port mentality"
amongst foreigners here, while Chinese residents were prone to "Yangjingbang
culture," a term describing the foreign-influenced habits, dress and speech of
many of Shanghai's Chinese residents. (Yangjingbang was the name of the stream
which separated the International and French Concessions. It was filled in and
became Avenue Edward VII and later Yan'an Lu.)
There were several Shanghais, and there was surprisingly little overlap
between the different worlds. Western visitors saw a western city and foreigners
living in the city had little need of contact with the Chinese around them. Very
few ever learned to speak even basic Chinese. The world of the "Shanghailanders"
was based on the classic British colonial model - there was the racecourse and
the Club, and a church. There were the trading houses and the banks. There was
the arrogance of racial and cultural superiority.
The Chinese in Old Shanghai also lived in their own world, denied many of the
comforts and privileges of the Westerners but nevertheless thriving in the
environment created by the existence of the foreign-controlled enclave.
The ambiguities of Shanghai's situation, the legal basis on which it was
founded and the support it could rely on, all started to come to a head in the
1920s. China was experiencing an internal upheaval as revolutionary forces
gained strength while central authority crumbled. Japan was flexing its muscles.
The certainties of the old world were disappearing and the home governments were
often ambivalent about the support they were supposed to give to Shanghai. The
Shanghailanders felt as a matter of faith that they deserved such support, but
the western governments increasingly had other foreign policy agendas that
Shanghai didn't necessarily tally with. It was the beginning of the end, though
few people noticed.
Shanghai was above all a young city. It had all the disregard and even
contempt for tradition that new cities and societies usually have, and a desire
to be up-to-date and fashionable in all things.
It pointed the way to the future of China, but paid the price for being
premature.