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of Urban History

Incubator City : Shanghai and the Crises of Empires


Robert Bickers
Journal of Urban History 2012 38: 862
DOI: 10.1177/0096144212449139

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449139
2012

JUHXXX10.1177/0096144212449139BickersJournal of Urban History

Articles

Incubator City: Shanghai


and the Crises of Empires

Journal of Urban History


38(5) 862878
2012 SAGE Publications
Reprints and permission: http://www.
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0096144212449139
http://juh.sagepub.com

Robert Bickers1

Abstract
Shanghais peculiar status between 1842 and 1943, its sovereignty degraded in key ways, meant
that it gave sanctuary to, and spawned, a wide range of nationalist activity and counteractivity. This
essay examines five different layers of activity that the city hosted, and spawned, and explores
how they interacted, and touches also on their legacies. It outlines the three key factors that
gave shape to the city and to its overt and covert political communities: space, law, and time
(or the calendar). The essay explores the interplay of the physical and administrative realms
that cut across the city, the restrictions they imposed, and the opportunities they opened up,
and shows vividly how nationalism and the urban intersected in this site of multinational imperial power.
Keywords
Shanghai, policing, nationalism, colonialism, intelligence, calendar, extraterritoriality

A Shanghai policemans lot was always a busy one. The streets were full, crammed with rickshaws, wheelbarrows, motors, and trams and washed over always by pedestrians, peddlers,
idlers, loafers, jaywalkers, streetwalkers. There were about four million residents by 1941, all on
the move, and all chattering in a babel of tonguesfifty-two different nationalities at the most
recent formal count in 1935, and those of no-nationality too, and more than fifty-two languages,
including a much maligned but functional pidgin-English and numerous Chinese dialects. The
jails were full, the courts were full to bursting.1 The calendar was full. The pocket diary issued
to European members of the force that policed the foreign-run International Settlement in the
city contained three full pages of Anniversaries and Holidays. The 1943 edition contains some
anniversaries that might not have been listed in previous versions prepared before the onset of
the Pacific War, for it very fully represents the holidays of the Japanese who had taken over the
entire city on December 8, 1941, but its earlier incarnations would have noted many of them.2
This was no aide-memoire, of mildly interesting dates that a Shanghai policeman ought to be
aware of: it was not a multicultural guide. This was a security brief, a reminder of flashpoints, of
police leave to be canceled and duties to be doubled. This calendar was brim-full of trouble in
this city brim-full of people. It was a call to police action, to batten down hatches,

University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom

Corresponding Author:
Robert Bickers, University of Bristol, School of Humanities, 11 Woodland Road, Bristol, BS8 1TB, United Kingdom
Email: robert.bickers@bristol.ac.uk

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haul up barricades, check the sandbags, and prepare for the worst. These dates often marked the
contentious recent past, and mapped out contentious futures. For the days came around again and
again, inexorably.
What did these days mean in practice for a Shanghai policeman? Let us take August 9, for
example, and let us do so before the Japanese takeover. On August 6, 1940, the chief of the
Shanghai Municipal Polices (SMPs) uniform branch circulated a six-page outline of precautionary measures being adopted to deal with the third anniversary of the outbreak of SinoJapanese hostilities at Shanghai on August 9, 1937. On the evening of the 5th as a curfew came
into force, all available personnel, backed by the riot squad, had been raiding tea shops, lodging
houses, and hotels, detaining all known suspects, loiterers, those who fail to give a satisfactory account . . . of their presence in the Settlement. All were to remain detained at the discretion of Senior officers. Five bridges were closed; twenty-one street intersection barricades
were installed; traffic over four further bridges was to be inspected by police and military personnel. The Shanghai Volunteer Corps (SVC), the foreign militia, was mobilized, as was the
Specialvolunteerpolice. Defence force units from five different foreign powers patrolled
major streets. Special posts were established at newspaper offices, which had been a target for
bomb attacks.3 Mobilization ahead of anniversaries had become a routine feature of settlement
life well before the war. It was certainly inflected by the anomalous position of the settlement
after 1937, an unconquered island surrounded by Japanese-controlled territory. But it involved
a heightening of business as usual, and business as usual meant dealing with this congeries of
incendiary dates.
Shanghai then was like any major global urban center, yet it was also unlike all of them. It was
a palimpsest city, overlayered with different legal structures and policing agencies, and it was a
city of borders. Urban diversity itself was not unusual. Over a third of New York Citys population in 1920 was foreign-born; in Buenos Aries the proportion was higher. But all those city residents were subject to one legal system: at Shanghai there were multiple layers of laws. Now, this
singular city is not an everywhere, but on this relatively tiny but crowded Chinese stage was
performed yearly all the theater associated with the ritual life of a bewildering array of empires
and republics and their enemies. This was often presented as evidence of cosmopolitanism,
of amicable multinational encounter, getting merrily along in a babble of tongues, for the diplomats and consuls and leading lights of the different communities, were all kept convivially busy
attending each others shows and parades, spouting platitudes, raising toasts to mutual amity and
regard. Here was a happy united nations in Chinese miniature, an augury of global harmony to
come.4 But this performance of the nation was always also plainly competitive, and at times
adversarial or revolutionary in intent. Shanghai was the site of Chinese, Indian, Taiwanese,
Vietnamese, and Korean antiimperialist activism, and more besides, including a range of Zionist
activity, the Comintern, and also, for good measure, a branch of a Russian Nazi Party. It was, one
historian notes, the crucible in which the Japanese Communist Party was forged.5 Activists
plotted, students learned, spies hid, and policemen watched and searched.
Shanghais peculiarities gave sanctuary to, and spawned, a wide range of activity and counteractivity. This essay examines five different layers of activity that Shanghai hosted, and
spawned, and explores how they interacted, and it touches also on their legacies. Before it does
that it will first outline the three key factors that gave shape to the city and to its overt and covert
political lives. Those factors are space, law, and time, or more specifically in the case of this last,
the calendar. As the essay shows, the interplay of the physical and administrative realms that cut
across the city, their restrictions and the opportunities they opened upperhaps nowhere as
clearly and so polyphonically as Shanghaishows vividly how nationalism and the urban intersected. It was no melting pot, but it generated intense heat, transforming the aims and reach of
nationalisms and their enemies.

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Space
Increasingly in the twentieth century Shanghai was for people across China, and internationally,
an idea, but it was also a (fractured) physical site, a node, a vector. But it was a space. At its
basic level, Shanghai was one city, and always only one city. A thriving trading center, despite
its low administrative importance, it was opened to foreign trade in November 1843 under the
Treaty of Nanjing which ended the first opium war. A British settlement was laid out, along
the riverfront northeast of the original walled city, largely because residents refused to rent
property to the new arrivals. The French arrived soon after and claimed a settlement for themselves. The English ground grew, amalgamated with an American settlement, and became an
International Settlement, under no single foreign authority, administered by an elected
Municipal Council on which representation was, however, allocated by nationality (so many
seats for Britons, so many for Americans, Japanese, Germans). The French zone took a different
course, maintaining exclusivity and becoming a formal part of the French empire, under the
authority of the Governor-General of Indo China. The Consul-General ran that concession with
an advisory council.6
The original walled city and the new extramural suburbs were governed by an evolving form
of pretty much fractured administration until, in 1927, the new National Government of the
Guomindang established a single Special Municipality of Greater Shanghai. Its remit was to
contest and control the authority of the foreign settlements, and prepare to supersede them.7 A
key feature of the two foreign zones was that they expanded, officially, becoming far larger than
their initial small sites, and they remained hungry for more. They bought land beyond the settlement, laid out roads, and then claimed policing and other rights along them, aiming to move to
bring them and adjacent land into the settlements.8
Shanghai was a modest port of no particular standing but with clear potential for greater international trade when it was opened. Foreign trade, war, and rebellion changed all this. Refugees
from the Taiping rebels, and indeed Taiping refugees from the Qing, came into the settlements,
an important part of the business of which switched to focus on serving these new communities,
whose rents proved lucrative and presence long lasting. It was a property speculators dream.
Refugees never stopped coming throughout Shanghais modern history: they came from the
suburbs, from the Yangzi delta. They came in the 1920s from Russia, and in the 1930s from
Europe. War, as ever, fueled an economic boom that survived a bust or two.9 Shanghai became
a new pole in Chinas nineteenth century, and the site of much of Chinas twentieth, before the
country was brutally reshaped by the Chinese Communist Party after 1949.10 This party was,
naturally, founded in Shanghai. It was the industrial, financial, educational, and cultural capital
of the country, sucking in students to schools, colleges, and universities, and drawing in laborers
and, after 1895, factory hands. It was a point of arrival and departure for those studying overseas
who often sojourned there before departure or sought employment there after returning. It was a
publishing center churning out newspapers, journals, textbooks, translations. As Europe was
diverted by the First World War, Shanghai boomed again. The value of its international trade
doubled between 1912 and 1920, its manufacturing capacity greatly increased.11 After 1927, the
administrative capital of the republic was based at Nanjing, handily close enough for politicians
and bureaucrats to weekend in the city. Others across China dreamed of being there. There was
always much, much more to China than Shanghai, but for many of Chinas best educated and
most politically alert, not much more.12
So this one bustling city was run by three administrations. But in fact there were by the 1920s
about five or sometimes six distinct policing zones (seven if you count the harbor, under the
jurisdiction of the Maritime Customs River Police).13 Two of those were areas of at times fractiously

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if not bloodily contested sovereignty, for they were areas claimed by the foreign administrations,
who asserted policing rights. All three councils had their own local rules, regulations, and byelaws. It functioned physically as one city nonetheless, in the daily lives of its foreign and Chinese
residents. But obviously, there was great potential for playing games, for it was easy enough to
hop over a border, and take advantage of different political climates from one zone to the next.
The police forces negotiated hot-pursuit agreements, but it was a culture of wily location and
relocation that flourished, although the absence of a single unified administration certainly
helped stoke the rise of underworld gangs, who acquired tremendous power in the 1920s and
1930s.14 War brought further changes and created new zones. After the Shanghai battles at the
onset of the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, which crashed through the northern Chinese
suburbs, Japanese forces retained control of the northern districts and eastern districts of
the International Settlement, where the majority of Japanese residents lived.
We should also mention water, specifically the waterfront Bund, its riverside embankment, a
front face, viewed as such, of symbolic importance and so a key site and location of memorials
and quasi-public space. The Bund is important because this city in fact lacked other public space.
There were no squares or piazzas, and no commons. Private gardens and parks were established,
but only the Bund could function as a near public space. As a result, it was a site of display, and
a site of reference and thereby a site of insistent contestation. Always across the water, moored
opposite the Bund and downstream in the Huangpu were warships of the treaty powers, among
the opium hulks, tea clippers, and other merchant vessels, river gunboats, ships of the British
China station, or other European Asia squadrons. The citys spatial peculiarity shaped its local
politics, but also provided sites for various species of international politics and the performance
there of politics imported from elsewhere in Asia and in Europe.

Law, laws
So, as we shall see, space matters. However, overlaying these physical boundaries and anomalies, which except in emergency were never fenced or gated, or even guarded, was a multiplicity
of jurisdictions, twenty or so of them at their peak.15 So at least twenty different sets of laws
applied, as well as municipal regulations and byelaws. How so? Firstly, these two zones were
not colonies. Their Chinese residents were not colonial subjects. To a greater or lesser extent,
and in changing ways over time, Chinese subjects were always followed by Chinese national
law around the entire city. Sometimes, of course, they were accorded a protection from the state
by the foreign authorities, directly or indirectly. To protect its own autonomy, but also because
of a sympathy with some currents of political thought, the international settlement buffered
Chinese residents from the Chinese state. They could profit from a quasi status with little legal
underpinning, which created space for Chinese activities, although it was insecure and the foreign
authorities could be capricious.16
Foreign nationals from recognized powersthose that had formal treaties with Chinawere
subject to their consuls, in whichever section they lived or worked, or were arrested.17 And many
worked in one zone, and resided in another. A policemans job involved informing the relevant
consular authorities without delay when he took into custody a treaty national. His diary gave the
addresses of the consulates.18 Not all non-Chinese had this status, but nationals of the treaty powers were the most numerous in the city (Russians aside). This was a licence for canny entrepreneurs on both sides of the law, but most obviously for crime, for playing games with
extraterritoriality. A Spanish-owned, French-rented, American sublet, Mexican managed,
Russian-, Spanish-, British-, and Chinese-staffed casino on an extra-settlement road could tie up
lawyers and hamper effective policing. (This might seem absurd, but is in fact a recorded example.19) But in the same way a Chinese-language newspaper, registered at the U.S. consulate,

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Journal of Urban History 38(5)

because published, in some sufficient way, by an American national, could partly evade the full
rigor of Chinese press laws. Law thwarted policing.
The treaty system across Chinafor it became a system, a veritable if weird architecture of
treaty, agreement, protocol, and precedencemade new space physically and legally, a Chinese
frontier zone in which much was uncertain, for the letter of the treaties failed to account for all
the new possibilities of the China coast worlds. The virtue of the treaties in most foreign eyes,
was not what they laid out in their simultaneously translated pages but what they did not outline.
Vagueness was strength.
The casino example suggests that nonetheless there was such a thing as a clearly definable
British or Dutch subject. But the British presence, like the Japanese or the French one, was multinational by design, by chance, or by opportunity. The British brought Sikhs to the city to police
it, Sindhi traders came, Sephardis came from Bombay very early on.20 The British were southeast Asian Chinese, Australian and West Indian Chinese, they were Dominions nationals and
Chinese. The French brought Vietnamese. The Japanese in China could be Koreans, Taiwanese,
even, Chinese. National status was not fixed, either. It might be pragmatically extended; it might
be withdrawn from individuals and groups. It might be spuriously claimed as well, and often
was, most notoriously by Eastern European women working as prostitutes in the early twentieth
century, for foreign Shanghai preferred American girls in its brothels. As a result of the scandal this generated, the U.S. authorities eventually stepped in to clarify the situation, and restrict
American status to genuine U.S. citizens.21 And consular jurisdiction in some cases involved
more than a consul with a law book. The Japanese developed a sophisticated Consular police
service operating across China, with a large contingent in the city, adding another layer of policing.22 These layers of legal dominion and actual structures sometimes interacted, and could conflict, and they provided a singular challenge for administration of any part of the city, and many
singular opportunities.

Time
To turn again to the calendar. Shanghais residents lived in one city, under different laws. Guide
books and vade mecums helped them thread their ways around. They shared the days, but they
lived in fact by different calendars. The republican Chinese state marked the years since its
inception, in this case 1911, so that 1943 was Minguo 32 nian: the 32nd Year of the Republic,
but that aside it marked the days in the Gregorian calendar, the Western style (and called it
that): twelve months and fifty-two weeks. This was an issue of modernity and of a selfconsciously modernizing nationalist project. In practice, this city, like all of China, worked on
two calendars, even though one of these, the calendar of the lunar year, was illegal, supplanted
officially after 1928 by the modern Western solar calendar. The SMP monitored the public
use of the old calendar, enforcing the laws of the National Government, confiscating calendars
from publishers.23 The aim of this prohibition was a self-styled plan to modernise Chinese
culture. After 1911, the republican state aimed to make republicans out of Chinese, and so tried
to dispense with the agrarian year, which it deemed was unfit for twentieth-century China.24 It
still determined much of the annual cycle of life and businessdebts were paid off, employees
expected bonuses, the country shut down for the holidays. But the first President of the new
republic was installed officially on January 1, 1912, a significant date in the foreign calendar
deliberately chosen to mark a significant foundational event for the new Chinese order.25
The Western year was itself already home to a multiplicity of calendars of course.26 For every
foreign nation officially active in Shanghai brought with it languages and anniversaries: the
birthdays of monarchs, saints days, republican anniversaries, and national days. But the new
Chinese state now also deliberately marked out a territory for nationalist action through the

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calendar.27 It initiated this by building on understandings of republican civic culture overseas as


well as that demonstrated on its doorstep, and it was in many ways one of the most obviously
successful strands of the republicanizing project. Its enemies added fuel with every shooting,
bombardment, or invasion, for they red-lettered new dates in the nationalist year, and as we have
seen, dates were no mere anniversaries but sites of action.
The same year that the Western calendar was ordered to be used, 1928, the new Chinese government also set about populating it with official National days, mostly National Humiliation
days, 26 of them in fact. Only December lacked one. May was the busiest month, the cruellest
for policemen, the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 7th, 9th, and 30th all taken up.28 So official nationalism was
marked by these dates in the Western calendar, not by dates in the lunar year. There was a new
political rhythm to the year and, most notably felt, to the Chinese urban year.
A humiliation day was supposed to be a day of consciousness-raising activity. There might be
a public holiday, there might be covert events. Events on such a day might be party-led, or result
from popular activism. Meetings would be held, songs sung, dramas might be performed.
Handbills were distributed. Always there was a fear of their subversion by radical elements.
Marchers progressed to sites of memorial. Even where a site had had to be established outside
the International Settlement, a progression might symbolically tie it back in by marching through
the foreign-controlled streets. The police developed a set of generic routines for Anniversary
days, more or less operationalized as advance intelligence or the wider political situation suggested necessary.29
So spatial simplicity, and spatial complexity, and the parallel simplicities and complexities of
legal status, generated opportunity in this East China city. Modernizing projects provided a
framework for making sense of the political year, indeed for making it a properly political year.
And where the new republican state led, others followed, marking the days, waiting for the anniversary, waiting to swing into action. Hidden between or behind these lines are other dates, forgotten massacres, underground national days. Threading through all of three of these, of course,
are Shanghais peoples, the fifty-two nationalities of the 1935 census. Sheer variety itself is of no
import, nor is the fact of economic power being held by different national groups in the city. But
there were distinctive features to the Shanghai situation: first, the link between nationality and
formal power through control of municipal administrations, that is, the internationalizing of the
politics of municipal affairs; second, the deployment to and in Shanghai of nonmetropolitan
nationals by formal treaty nations for their own ends, and to destabilize their rivals; and third, the
functioning of the city as a refugee haven, and the functioning of its different zones in different
ways in that regard.

Layers
We turn now to look at five layers of activity that populated this policemans calendar: settler
nationalism, cosmopolitanism (or intraimperial solidarity), imperial and other nationalisms,
antiimperialist nationalism, and Chinese activism in the city.
The first layer seems the most parochial, and the least noteworthy, but it is intimately tied to
a wider world, and enmeshed in all other Shanghai developments. This was the development of
a conscious local settler nationalism, a Shanghailander identity, a variant of the British settler
or colonial nationalism more familiar to us from Rhodesia, Natal, or the Dominions. It was
Anglophone, loyalist, and had autonomous ambition. Shanghai, in this view, ought to be a free
city, a self-governing city republic, free of British and other diplomatic restraint. Unlike most of
the treaty port administrations, the settlement at Shanghai was not under consular heel. It zealously guarded its sovereignty from the ordinary practices of the Chinese state, and from treaty
consuls too. It called on the British state in times of crisis, but otherwise attempted to navigate

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its own way. This may seem absurd. But the hold of foreign consuls over the Council was
constitutionally weak and underdefined. The Council took a mandate, in its eyes, from its
foreignelectorate. This was a logical outcome of the imprecision of treaty, and these dreams
were pursued into the 1930s by local foreign actors and interests. On the whole, as long as the
international settlement municipality delivered the goods for the British empire, principally stability, the British empire tolerated its local peculiarities and anomalies, sniggered at its pomp and
pretension, and left it alone. When it failed to do so, most notably in May 1925, when the police
shot dead twelve demonstrators, sparking a nationwide anti-British and antiimperialist movement, then the state attempted to move back in.30
This identity had certain clear bounds. It was Anglophone, although it paid an important lipservice to cosmopolitanism and it had supporters in other national communities. It displayed
all the features of a nascent Anglophone settler state. This ambitious parochialism attempted to
build on the strong community of economic interests that enmeshed many of the Chinese and
foreign local elite to incorporate some Chinese interests into its autonomous vision. It was never
really going to succeed in that enterprise. But it was an identity aspired to by other national
groups, whose marginal status left them intensely vulnerable, in particular Russians.
This was a white nationalism, embedded in a parochial community of interests, but race and
imperial solidarities were part of the wider foreign establishment at Shanghai, as elsewhere in
China, and this is my second layer. Blood is thicker than water, American naval Commodore
Josiah Tattnall famously and dryly noted, defending his active involvement, though neutral, in
the 1859 Dagu forts battle between British and Chinese forces.31 And as news of the FrancoPrussian war hit the city on August 10, 1870, the response of the main English-language newspaper set this out clearly:
Few in Shanghai knew how thoroughly recent events had separated them from home
methods of thought and action, and how intense was the . . . feeling which bound them
together, till the news of a general European war stalled the settlement last week. The
feeling of half-amazement, half-incredulity, with which men who had daily been in communication regarded one another, on news that under other circumstances, they would be
at deadly feud, was probably peculiar to Shanghai; as was also the consciousness that here,
on the furthest limits of civilization, there might, without loss of patriotism, be substituted
other aims and means.
Recent events referred to the massacre of French and other foreign nationals in June that
year at Tianjin, but peculiar patriotism at Shanghai was often discussed. It was, noted one
historian, a deformed echo of metropolitan norms, but that is also to say that it was a colonial
norm for that always differed from home methods.32 Still, the French at Shanghai celebrated
Napoleons feast day that August 15 with a gusto that was clearly heightened by the news of the
war, and in turn, Germans in the settlement marked the Kaisers birthday the following March
with all the show of a victory party, but in formal terms, solidarity held, though it was tested.
The glory of France, declaimed the French Consul, directed that the ties which bound the
diverse communities and diverse nationalitiesEuropean, white communitiesshould be
maintained. He quoted approvingly the call from the British judge at Shanghai, for residents to
remember, that though you may be subjects of rival and hostile governments, your mutual relations are of a far more intimate and holy character. This was the holy character of whiteness
and Christian civilization.33
Foreign Shanghais public cosmopolitan life was in many ways anodyne by necessity. It performed a type of rhetorical cosmopolitanism, which aimed at limiting the giving of offence, save
in many ways to the overwhelmingly Chinese population of the city (although this was sometimes

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an explicit consideration in policy debates). In effect, Shanghai mostly followed Basil Fawltys
wise dictum and didnt mention the war, not in public at least, whichever the war that was going
on. After the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, and especially after the onset of the fullscale but undeclared war in 1937, the police and local byelaws were used to suppress Chinese
newspaper debate about the Japanese (so many publications reregistered as foreign-controlled
interests).34 After 1938, it also suppressed German and Austrian Jewish refugee criticisms of the
Nazi regime, owing to the international character of the Settlement.35 And in fact it performed
a bare minimum of specifically local communal events. The most well known was in 1893, when
it commemorated its Silver Jubilee.36 More often than not, its communal performances were
restricted to annual parades and inspections of the volunteer militia, and to funerals. The Shanghai
Volunteer Corps was a cosmopolitan corps under unified command, but it was organized by
nationality, and each unit wore its national uniform.37 The community marshaled solidarity at
moments of crisis or in the aftermath of disaster. In 1896 a German naval gunboat, the SMS Iltis,
freshly sailed from Shanghai, foundered on the Shandong coast. At Shanghai a memorial was
built to the men, on a river-side plot donated by the big British firm Jardine Matheson. It was
unveiled with all the paraphernalia of public, multinational, communal solidarity, but it was a
German memorial, and was also accorded thereafter specific functions within the German community (on Heroes day) and for German visitors.38
So there was no yearly cycle of display of Shanghais parochial cosmopolitan identity. On the
whole, Shanghais foreign communities most strongly demonstrated their cosmopolitan ethos
and interests when they assembled at the Shanghai Race Club for its Spring and Autumn meets.
There they spoke the simple lingua franca of the turf. There they were undoubtedly happy in
themselves.
The third layer has already been foreshadowedthe performance of national identity in an
international city. This had different drivers. For a start, integrating colonial outposts into wider
colonial circuits was always important to local interests, which needed to at least superficially
normalize their local anomalies, to make sure that the diplomats (who they always greatly distrusted) were gingered up and alive to the importance of their task. The visit of royal or indeed
republican celebrity was a crucial way to do this. There were the visits to Shanghai of the Duke
of Edinburgh (1869), Grand Duke Alexis of Russia (1872), the Duke of Connaught (1890),
Prussias Prince Henry (1898), Japans Prince Fushimi Sadanaru (1907), and of former U.S.
President General Grant (1879). The foreign community turned out en masse and en fte, all
participating. There were parades, salutes, lanterns lighting the waterfront, banquets, and
addresses. There was music, there was cheering, and always there were fireworks. Ideally there
would be some memorial to unveil on that riverside Bund, or a foundation stone to lay. The Duke
of Connaught unveiled a memorial to the British diplomat Harry Parkes. Prince Henry unveiled
the Iltis monument.39 The visits of lesser celebrity were also importantGeneral Charles
Gordons, for example, in 1880. These public events were certainly more than simply excuses
for a self-regarding treat; they were more than a little bit of fun and color to punctuate days on
the furthest limits of civilization. They were designed to send messages far and wide about the
place and meaning of Shanghai within wider British, German, French, or other worlds, and
locally too.
More routinely, the Shanghai year was punctuated by national communal celebration marking
royal birthdays and state holidaysnotably July 4 and 14and to a lesser extent (after its inauguration in 1903), Empire Day for Britons. The warships always in the harbor provided a supply
of marines of sailors to bulk out the crowds, and add some military color and style. Royal jubilees and coronations were marked out with festivities, more soberly too the passing of monarchs.
The pages of the August 1913 edition of a local illustrated magazine, Social Shanghai, show this
routine life. Here are reports on July 4 and 14, the latter with a torchlight parade and fireworks,

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and earlier celebrations in June marking the Silver Jubilee of the ascension to the throne of
Kaiser Wilhelm II, with electric illuminations of the buildings of the Bund, parades, thanksgiving services.40 There was a clear competitive edge to this, as there was to service in the SVC. The
bigger the British splash, and the more illuminating the German lights, the more surely, it was
assumed, imperial rivals and Qing officials got a message about the British or the German states
commitment.
This is all routine enough. It was important in the era of the new imperialism, in particular, for
it shows how expatriate communities tried to fix themselves into the circuits of empires, the literal circuits of royal and celebrity tours, and the metaphorical circuits of ideas, rituals, and novel
traditions of empires. But in the era of world war and the tense decades between the two wars,
republican and imperial chauvinism could also provide reason for conflict. The norms of cosmopolitan practice proved impractical. For example, communal self-reliance had seen the creation
of a Shanghai Volunteer Corps in 1854, which by the early twentieth century had a settled and
routine form and key function in settlement defence plans. Between 1914 and 1917, China was
a neutral power, and therefore its settlements and concessions were also neutralized.41 Germans
and Britons, the French and the Austrians, still lived and worked in the settlement. No greater
patriotism can be shown by the different communities gathered in Shanghai, editorialized the
North China Herald on August 8, 1914, than in determining to respect each others feelings for
the common good during the dark days of war. The common good was their heritage in
Shanghai.42 For three years thereafter, they had to ignore each other and to find ways of negotiating the streets and the business of the city, with minimal contact. This was difficult not least
because many, especially Anglo-German, interests were tightly entwined and because their
respective social headquarters both sat on the Bund. But also because of the integration of public
life. The German company of the SVC kept on drilling, but tacit agreement saw Allied and
Central power units of the SVC practice shooting each other in different parts of the city. At the
furthest limits of civilization, it was as well to be civilized about such things.
With the end of the First World War, the dreams of White solidarity were themselves shot. On
the early morning of December 1, 1918, persons unknownFrench sailors largelypulled
down the Iltis monument, ripping up for good this public manifestation of white cosmopolitanism.43 The German Club had been seized by the Chinese government, and thereafter became a
bank. A deliberate travesty of the cosmopolitan ensembles and decoration that formerly marked
the Settlement was held on November 21, when a victory parade made its way through the
Settlement as part of three days of celebrations.44 Trams were converted into floats bedecked
with the flags of the victors, one contrasting a gauntleted fist grasping the globeThe German
Aimwith a second globe, Kept Free by Victory. The Club Concordia was draped with a
banner proclaiming Hun Club, picturing a silhouetted picklehaube-wearing figure arms raised
in surrender. So cosmopolitanism was surrendered on the Bund.
Public commemoration of national days in the interwar years had its official round, but was
now sometimes far more pointed. These routine functions always served their precise moment,
swinging in and out of the forefront of public consciousness as the political landscape and situation suggested. In 1927 on the Kings Birthday, British troops staged a spectacular tattoo over
two nights at the Shanghai Race Course ground, burning down the Kremlin as part of the show
during their performance of the 1812 Overture. The anticommunist message at this high tide
of the Chinese revolution, and two months after the Guomindangs decisively bloody anticommunist purge of April 1927, was all too obvious. Loyalty and empire spirit were usually less
theatrically demonstrated on Empire Day and the Kings Birthday: this was triumphalism.45
The growing fractures and tensions in the European ranks found other outlets. Cinemas are a
case in point. While British soldiers marched and fired the Kremlin, Italian and French servicemen were mobilized to contest alleged slurs on national pride. French soldiers disrupted

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showings of Beau Geste in 1928, in parallel to French diplomatic efforts across the world to
thwart showings of the film. Italian marines raided another cinema in January 1929, seized its
copy of the film Street Angel, and burnt it publicly.46 The quasi-public space of the cinema
became a site for contestation. And very shortly afterwards was the site of similar attacks by
Chinese activists on films deemed anti-Chinese.47 Cinemas opened a new public space within the
settlement that was fought over.
The embarrassments and problems of intraimperial conflict were clearly a feature in settlement life and politics. The problems of antiimperialist activity within the foreign community
were too, and this is our fourth layer. An SMP Special Branch file notes the various arrangements made for March 29, 1932, the Birthday of the Japanese emperor. This was not entirely
routine, for the nasty, short Sino-Japanese war in Shanghai had only just come to a close, and the
Japanese were clearly intending this as a victory parade, but numbers of soldiers apart it was
really still a fairly ordinary national event.48 Troops were to march past the Japanese Minister to
China, the Consul-General, senior military officials and others, assembled in the International
settlements Hongkew Park. The Japanese community was to assemble; its children were to have
an afternoon of games after the review had finished with a 101-gun salute.49 This is what usually
happened on national days. Soldiers marched, and there was always a party for the children. A
twenty-three-year-old Korean, Yoon Bong-Gil, spoilt things, however, by bombing the dignitaries, killing two of them, and badly wounding others. As a Japanese subject, Yoon was able to
enter the parkChinese were excluded that day on security groundsbut while he will have
made use of his extraterritorial status in Shanghai, he and about one thousand Korean residents
in the city had pledged allegiance to the Korean Provisional Government, established in Shanghai
in 1919 after the failure of the pro-independence March 1 Movement.50
Either as a matter of deliberate policy, by deploying personnel or encouraging migration of
communities, or else by virtue of the attractions and opportunities that it offered, the imperial
presences in Shanghai were always multinational. This was their strength, but it was also a weakness. Colonial subjects came to the city under the colonial umbrella, and it became as a result a
significant and worrying site of anticolonial activism. Shanghai housed at least this one government in exile, which sponsored activities across China and Manchuria, despite its own internecine and strategic conflicts and contradictions.51 The Koreans were refugees in this refugees
city. A Korean could arrive as a Japanese national, could stay safely in the French concession,
but not the international settlement, where Japan had treaty rights, and the municipal police had
to liaise with the Japanese consular police to harass the Koreans.52 He or she could develop ties
with Chinese nationalists and others. The size of the urban throng and the porosity of the administrative borders within the city meant that the entire city could still be traversed, albeit with a
little caution. And all the benefits of siting this activity in an East Asian hub were clearbetter
Shanghai for them than a city further from the Japanese consular police, but less centrally placed
as a cross-road of people, ideas, and print. Only with Japanese victory in the greater Shanghai
campaign in late 1937 did the Koreans move out, heading west with the Chinese central
government.
Indian nationalists came for different reasons, and their political geography of the city was
different. They were mostly there as colonial security personnel, not refugees, or as economic
migrants. Sikhs became an important part of the SMP and, as a result, of the wider security world
in the city, as private watchmen for individuals and firms.53 There was recurrent unrest over pay
and conditions, but the slowly growing key issue for the British after 1914 was anti-British
nationalism in the shape of the Ghadr movement, and then during the war through German
actions to aid such revolutionaries. Shanghai, complained the Briton who was international settlement Commissioner of Police in 1915, was a haven of refuge for the seditionist who is afraid
to land in British territory, despite the arrest of many there that year. Even so, he resisted any

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pragmatic active collaboration with British Indian intelligence, which established an office in the
city the following year, to preserve the international character of the settlement police.54 Eight
years later, despite the introduction of new regulations to attempt to control the movement of
Indians, he complained that those who had openly Bolshevik tendencies . . . can vent their opinions and create discontent and alarm . . . with impunity in Shanghai.55 They could do so from
the safety of Zhabei, under Chinese jurisdiction, where the anti-British Indian Youth League
based itself.
In 1927, the Government of India detached an intelligence officer to the city, who worked
closely with the SMP to monitor Indian nationalist activists. Links between Indian activists and
the Guomindang and Comintern were feared, and with good reason. The SMP Special Branch
established in 1927 an Indian Section, which by summer 1929 had developed files on a thousand
men, 125 subversives among them, and photographs of another thousand. This period of
intense surveillance was scaled back by 1930, but a persistent threat remained from the Indian
Youth League, and other groups physically beyond British reach.56 The Sikh was a figure of
colonial power for Britons, and omnipresent on Shanghai streets. Chinese residents were often
virulent, and racist, in their antipathy to this presence. Chinese nationalists could find allies
within their community. And Sikhs, too, were a source of constant anxiety for the British.
These two examples are the most prominent, but there were others too. Vietnamese communist agents worked in the city to suborn colonial troops. As the American girls in the 1900s had
forced a tightening up of U.S. consular power over its nationals, so in a similar way, Korean
and Sikh activism dragged in new agencies of imperial states, prompted new regulations, and
prompted networking across colonies within and between empires. Their own rivalries could
hamper this, and both were hampered by the gray areas of law and jurisdiction that underpinned the Shanghai settlements. They took rough and ready action sometimes, when they felt
like it, but on the whole were constrained by law.
The greatest fear was the mirror of that complacent assumption of White solidarity despite
conflict. What if there was Asian solidarity, and an anticolonial solidarity? And of course, there
was. For what better incubator of anticolonial resistance could there be than fragmented Shanghai.
On March 1, 1929, the tenth anniversary of the Declaration of Korean independence, three hundred Shanghai Koreans assembled in a Baptist church in the French concession. A Korean detective from the International Settlement police recorded how they were addressed by leaders of the
Provisional Government, but also by a Taiwanese revolutionary and, via a letter read to the
meeting, by the Indian Youth League. Members of the association hope for Korean independence, it read, as well as Indian independence because they are brothers in the same condition.57 Some of the Koreans in the audience wore Chinese Nationalist Army uniform. This was
the nightmare of empires: antiimperialist solidarity across nationalist movements, Asians talking to
Asians. Show this report to the Japanese authorities, minuted the head of Special Branch. But
they probably had it already (not least as they had spies in the SMP). But the Japanese consular
police had been growing, although it had not reached its 1933 state of more than forty staff, outnumbering the SMP Special Branch. These were organized into sections devoted to the affairs of
Taiwanese, Koreans, Russians, and Japanese (mainly communists), as well as Chinese affairs.58
And of course, when a man held two different Belgian passports, and a Canadian one, but then
claimed two different Swiss identities, he was playing Shanghais well-known game, but he was
also operating as a well-trained Comintern agent. Jakov Rudnik, also known, among many other
noms de guerre, as Hilaire Noulens, ran the organization department of the Far Eastern Bureau
of the Comintern in the city until his exposure and arrest in 1931.59 What better city was there in
which to do so. The Comintern ran a legitimate trading company, registered at the German consulate, and Rudniks function was to support logistically the agents and recruits who passed
through the city, sucked in from across East and Southeast Asia, heading to training in Russia,

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heading into the colonial field, organizing funds and housing for them. Agents like him, and like
Richard Sorge, who spied for Soviet military intelligence, and foreign radicals and fellow travellers, were all as able to make use of the peculiar city as anyone else.60
Anticolonialism was succored by the imperial enemies of empires as well as nationalists and
internationalists. German agents worked to arm and finance Indian nationalists. The French seem
to have encouraged or at least protected the Korean movement by default, although its own internecine politics kept it busy, until it became too seemingly associated with Comintern initiatives,
and then they were harsher. But if it was useful in applying pressure on the Japanese, then why
not let them rumble on.61 The Japanese more systematically established a strategy of sponsoring,
or suborning, different national and nationalist groups. This was part Pan Asian ideology and
part pragmatic subversion. And all the powers devoted time and resources to surveillance of their
own colonial subjects, and to propaganda work among them.
Colonial political policing devoted much energy to preventing the intermingling of colonized
peoples, except on its terms, for example when it deployed men from one colony to another as
security personnel. Shanghai provided a singular challenge. The Indian Youth League could sit
safely in Zhabei, and could lodge representatives at Nanjing. The Guomindang could explore ties
with the Indian National Congress. Japanese agents could sponsor the activities of Irish nationalists, or the Independent Australia League. Koreans could hide out in French town. The
Comintern could establish itself covertly, setting the east ablaze from offices of the German
Metropolitan Trading Company, or from the many quiet rooms rented across the city by
Professor Noulens.
It may seem odd to leave until last the fifth and seemingly most obvious layer of Shanghai
nationalism, that of its majority Chinese inhabitants. But this is a story now often told, although
it bears a recap in this wider context. In doing so I want to highlight how its peculiarities were
inflected, inspired, and influenced by the layers already described.
That parochial White settler nationalism had a lasting impact. Chinese Elites protested council policies on access to municipal space as early as 1881, a story which rumbles on even today.62
Non-elite residents rioted over regulations of wheelbarrow traffic in the city. The settlement
acted as a safe haven for some anti-Qing activity, but was itself the site of, and cause of, new
protest in the early twentieth century, as the foreign scramble for China provoked a new nationalist scramble to save it. The assertive performance of autonomy by the international settlement
administration, and the routine incompetence of complacent colonialism, prompted in time wave
upon wave of nationalist reaction and contestation. Most notable were riots in 1905 over judicial
sovereignty, and riots, boycotts and a general strike after police shootings on May 30, 1925.63
But there were others, including politically inflected economic disputes, and contestations of
colonial power by organized crime. The stark performance locally of national identity or racist
discrimination also galvanized Chinese resistance and protest. National political movements
found their most radical home in the citythe 1905 anti-American boycott movement, sparked
by the renewal of racist immigration legislation, the 1919 May Fourth Movement, fueled by the
inequities of the Versailles settlement.64 The spaces of Shanghai helped grow this activity: its
legal gaps and gray areas; its parks, which hosted overt meetings and clandestine conference; its
teahouses, coffee shops, cinemas, hostels, and bookshops.
The consequence of these recurrent events and movements was contradictory. On one hand,
a set of responses, links, alliances, and rituals of protest recurred. Each explosion had its familiar
response. However, these alliances rarely held, and the nationalist politics of the city was
fragmentedby class, economic interest, politicsand so weakened.65 There was no sustained
nationalist coalition that took on the foreign-run authorities. Plainly, however, the most impressive of these, the 1925 May Thirtieth Movement, showed how such a collaboration could have
irrevocably reshaped the politics of the city. But even so, students and merchants, labor and

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finance, all knew what to do: how to hold a protest meeting, how to decorate it, run up posters,
author slogans, revise the lyrics of popular songs, print and circulate handbills, orchestrate demonstrations and stoppages, and send agit-prop teams into the streets. They knew how to despatch
public telegrams, secure press coverage, and find lawyers for those arrested. This was all embedded in the routine political culture of the city.66 This is not to say it dominated it, for the apolitical
commercial culture of the city was perhaps its major feature. Certainly, for those mocking the
Shanghai scene, it was a capital not of heady political activism but of sex and excess. Students
were represented not as young nationalist revolutionaries, but as feckless hedonists. The excitement of revolutionary activity, its conviviality, and its sexiness needs remembering.67 But always
in the background somewhere lurked the Sikh policeman, the Japanese gendarmerie squad, the
drunk naval rating in a rickshaw, the warship in the harbor, a reminder of the potential for incident and conflict, for bringing out all the stuff of nationalist protest.

Conclusions
Fragmentation created opportunity at Shanghai. These layers of activity overlap and interrelate,
and shaped each other. If cosmopolitan as such was a sham, a coy euphemism for race-driven
holy solidarity, then nevertheless a sort of common style of urban commemoration came to
dominate. German, French, British, republican Chinese commemoration all looked pretty much
the same, and took place on similar occasions: there were salutes and processions, addresses,
and buildings were bedecked with flags by day, illuminated by night, first with gas jets, later
with neon. There were lantern paradeslight was pervasive as a vehicle, which is worth further
research. We note easily stone and statue, but less often ephemeral illumination. There were
rituals around memorials, and around memorials appropriately placed. It all looked pretty similar. This is one concluding observation: that there developed in the city this shared repertoire of
commemorative practise.
A second would be that we learn also of the importance of these rituals and symbols, through
the warfare waged against them, the police orders and plans, as well as the physical destruction
inflicted on German memorials, and later on British ones during the Japanese occupation. Statues
were dismantled, streets renamed, buildings confiscated and reallocated. A third also comes back
to our policeman, to the inherent contradictions of the colonial moment at Shanghai, where the
virtues of the peculiar place, with its own aims and means, were steadily matched as they grew
by the inherent dangers of such laissez passez. This Shanghai gap needed better and better policing, for if you were a conspiracy hunter, an intelligence officer, it seemed to threaten the entire
East and Southeast Asian region. As the new imperialism unraveled, imperial rivals and enemies
exploited the citys potential to attack each other by proxy. For all concerned, their enemys
enemy was, in the short term, their possible friend. And in Shanghai they could find relative
refuge, mingle, intersect, pass over funds, organize shipments of arms or of people. Everything
was possible, which itself might be one definition of a city.
So, after 1916, intelligence and policing agencies, as they grew, began to liaise, to share information and tip-offs, to send agents to Shanghai, to build a system to cope with the happy destructive chaos of the city. Empire abhors a vacuum. These initiatives created what became a
remarkable cross-national, cross-empires network. One intelligence historian has concluded that
the only comparable international clandestine entity was in fact the Comintern, its key enemy,
but on the whole, the anticommunist and antinationalist system of imperial surveillance that
linked India, the British and European empires, and U.S. agencies, had the upper hand.68 The
same has been noticed for the solidifying relationship between Japanese domestic, military, and
foreign ministry agents. There developed a transnational chain of political security institutions
stretching across northeast Asia.69

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If the holy bonds of race solidarity were shattered by the First World War, security organs
reconstituted them in a functional alliance of surveillance, aimed at defending that common heritage of colonial mastery. Even taking into consideration the limitations placed on such developments, by finance, by lack of personnel and institutional and other jealousies and incompetencies,
visions of the free-wheeling city of myth, the paradise of adventurers, city for sale, Paris of
the east, need to factor in the pervasive presence in the city of the secret policeman. Somewhere
there lurked the spy, policeman watching the door, the agent provocateur, and back in the office
the clerks typing it all up and filing it away, sending telegrams to Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo,
Britain, cross-referencing, trying to give shape to the citys politics, and the regions. The SMP
Special Branch built up steadily and systematically its massive archive, adding photographs and
fingerprints, checking passenger lists, building up its card-index. It broke the Comintern in 1931,
but it never got Richard Sorge right. Its archive, on which this essay is largely based, and some
of its tactics for dealing with street disorder, found lives in the postSecond World War, informing the work of the CIAwhose researchers were still working through the archive in the
1950sand colonial policing in Cyprus and Singapore.70 Shanghai fostered nationalisms and
nationalists; it provided space and opportunities for solidarity, and for connecting. It also fostered their policing and their contestation, and opportunities and imperatives for police and intelligence agencies themselves to connect across space and indeed across time, in their own
international, guarded, solidarity in surveillance, recording, analysis, and repression.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.

Funding
Research for this article was funded by Economic and Social Research Council award
RES-062-23-1057.

Notes
1. Shanghai Municipal Council, Annual Report . . . 1941 (Shanghai: Kelly & Walsh, 1942), 32, 35.
2. On which see Carol Gluck, Japans Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton University Press, 1985); Shanghai Municipal Police, 1943 Diary (private collection).
3. U.S. National Archives & Records Administration, Record Group 263, Archives of the Shanghai
Municipal Police Special Branch [hereafter: NARA, RG 263, SMP] N297/1, Divisional memo
No. 332, Precautionary measures to be adopted on the anniversary of the outbreak of local hostilities
August 9/14 1940, August 6, 1940. This 7/7 anniversary supplanted the anniversary of the 1915 21
demands this year for the first time, which holiday/humiliation day was canceled.
4. Carl Crow, Foreign Devils in the Flowery Kingdom (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1940); O. M. Green,
The Foreigner in China (London: Hutchinson, 1943). On some of the limits to this see, e.g., Bryna Goodman, Improvisations on a Semicolonial Theme, or, How to Read a Celebration of Transnational Urban
Community, Journal of Asian Studies 59, no. 4 (2000): 889926; and Robert Bickers, The Scramble for
China: Foreign Devils in the Qing Empire, 18321914 (London: Allen Lane, 2011), chapter 11.
5. Erik Esselstrom, Crossing Empires Edge: Foreign Ministry Police and Japanese Expansionism in
Northeast Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009), 123. See also pp. 8387 on the partys
Shanghai theses. Russian Nazis: John J. Stephan, The Russian Fascists: Tragedy and Farce in Exile,
19251945 (New York: Harper & Row, 1978).
6. Linda Cooke Johnson, Shanghai: An Emerging Jiangnan Port, 16831840 in Cities of Jiangnan in
Late Imperial China, ed. Linda Cooke Johnson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993),
15181; Marie-Claire Bergre, Shanghai: Chinas Gateway to Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 10921.

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7. Christian Henriot, Shanghai, 19271937: Municipal Power, Locality, and Modernization (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1993); Frederic Wakeman Jr., Policing Shanghai, 192737 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Mark Elvin, The Administration of Shanghai, in The Chinese City
between Two Worlds, ed. Mark Elvin and G. William Skinner (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1974), 23962.
8. Nicholas R. Clifford, Spoilt Children of Empire: Westerners in Shanghai and the Chinese Revolution
of the 1920s (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1991).
9. Marcia R. Ristaino, Port of Last Resort: Diaspora Communities of Shanghai (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); Marcia R. Ristaino, The Jacquinot Safe Zone: Wartime Refugees in Shanghai
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).
10. The only recent well-informed overview is Bergre, Shanghai.
11. Shanghai, in China. The Maritime Customs, Decennial reports on the trade, industries etc. of the
ports open to foreign commerce... 191221 (Shanghai: Statistical Department of the Maritime Customs, 1924), vol. II: 2; Bergre, Shanghai, 295.
12. Lack of attention to varieties of Chinas urban experience is now being redressed in such work as
Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 19001950, ed. Joseph W. Esherick
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000); Kristin Stapleton, Civilizing Chengdu: Chinese Urban
Reform, 18951937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2000).
13. This was contested, nevertheless, and there were rival harbor police organizations.
14. Brian G. Martin, The Shanghai Green Gang: Politics and Organised Crime, 19191937 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1996).
15. M. J. Bau, The Foreign Relations of China: A History and a Survey (London: Nisbet, 1922), 291.
16. See, e.g., the cases of the Shanghai-published Subao newspaper, which was cushioned from Qing
jurisdiction by foreign power, and the Shenbao, which at points was not: J. Lust, The Su-pao Case:
An Episode in the Early Chinese Nationalist Movement, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African
Studies 27, no. 2 (1964): 40829, and Mary Backus Rankin, Early Chinese Revolutionaries: Radical Intellectuals in Shanghai and Chekiang, 19021911 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1971), chapters 4 and 5; Rudolf G. Wagner, The Shenbao in Crisis: The International Environment
and the Conflict between Guo Songtao and the Shenbao, Late Imperial China 20, no. 1 (1999):
10743.
17. The actual number changed with global political shifts, and Chinas diplomatic assertiveness: Police
Guide and Regulations, 1938, compiled by W. H. Widdowson (Shanghai, n.p., 1938), lists 14 for the
SMP to be aware of (pp. 1034).
18. See also Police Guide and Regulations, 1938, 1034.
19. Robert Bickers, Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai (London: Allen Lane,
2003), 117.
20. See, e.g., Claude Markovits, The Global World of Indian Merchants, 17501947: Traders of Sind from
Bukhara to Panama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Chiara Betta, From Orientals
to Imagined Britons: Baghdadi Jews in Shanghai, Modern Asian Studies 37, no. 4 (2003): 9991023;
Isabella Jackson, The Raj on Nanjing Road: Sikh Policemen in Treaty Port Shanghai, Modern Asian
Studies (forthcoming, 2012).
21. Barbara J. Brooks, Japanese Colonial Citizenship in Treaty Port China: The Location of Koreans
and Taiwanese in the Imperial Order, in New Frontiers: Imperialisms New Communities in East
Asia, 18421953, ed. Robert Bickers and Christian Henriot (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2000), 10924; Eileen P. Scully, Prostitution as Privilege: The American Girl of Treaty-Port
Shanghai, 18601937, International History Review 20, no. 4 (1998): 85583.
22. Esselstrom, Crossing Empires Edge.
23. Shanghai Municipal Archives, Records of the Shanghai Municipal Council [hereafter SMA], U1-42546, Alleged Unwarranted Seizure and Destruction of Calendars by Police [193536].
24. Poon Shuk Wah, Refashioning Festivals in Republican Guangzhou, Modern China 30, no. 2 (2004): 202.

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25. Henrietta Harrison, The Making of the Republican Citizen: Political Ceremonies and Symbols in
China 19111929 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
26. See, e.g., Bonnie Blackburn & Leofranc Holford-Strevens, The Oxford Companion to the Year
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
27. It is worth noting that the lunar calendar in Chinese understandings was situated within (basically) a
wider 60-year cycle, which could alsoin years deemed more or less auspiciousprompt, or at least
provide additional conceptual preconditions for action. The Gengzi year, 1900, a transitional year in
that cycle, is a case in point. Inchoate expectations of calamity fed into the political mix that fueled the
anti-Christian/antiforeign Boxer uprising in North China. More widely on this, see Luke S. K. Kwong,
The Rise of the Linear Perspective on History and Time in Late Imperial China, Past and Present
173 (2001): 15790.
28. William A. Callahan, China: The Pessoptimist Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010),
7071.
29. Instructions To Be Observed on Anniversary Days When So Ordered, April 29, 1932, copy in Conf.
Memo No. 119, September 3, 1936, NARA, SMP, D 7333; Humiliation dayMay 9thObservance,
May 10, 1933, NARA, SMP D 4851.
30. See Robert Bickers, Shanghailanders: The Formation and Identity of the British Settler Community
in Shanghai, 18431937, Past and Present 159 (1998), 161211.
31. Bickers, The Scramble for China, 173.
32. See the discussion in Bergre, Shanghai, 84129.
33. North China Herald (hereafter NCH), August 18, 1870: 119, 120, 13233. See also C. H. Maybon and
Jean Fredet, Histoire de la Concession Franaise de Changhai (Paris: Plon, 1929): 35254.
34. Frederic Wakeman Jr., The Shanghai Badlands: Wartime Terrorism and Urban Crime, 193741
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 115.
35. As the acting Commissioner of Police, H. M. Smyth put it in 1940: letter to Mark Siegelerg, August 21,
1940, NARA, SMP N309.
36. Bickers, Scramble for China, 3004.
37. There is no study of the SVC, but see I. I. Kounin, comp., Eighty Five Years of the Shanghai Volunteer
Corps (Shanghai: Cosmopolitan Press, 1939).
38. Robert Bickers, Moving Stories: Statues and Monuments in Treaty Port Shanghai, 1860s1945,
work in progress, 2011.
39. On this monument and its unveiling see Bruno Navarra, China und die Chinesen (Bremen: Max
Nossler, 1901): 52934.
40. Social Shanghai and other parts of China 16:2 (1913).
41. Xu Guoqi, China and the Great War: Chinas Pursuit of a New National Identity and Internationalization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
42. NCH, August 8, 1914, 407.
43. Bickers, Moving Stories.
44. NCH, November 30, 1918: 53239.
45. NCH, June 11, 1927: 47273; May 26, 1928: 334; June 9, 1928: 42627.
46. NCDN, February 22, 1928: 11; January 10, 1929: 13. On the wider controversies see, e.g.: David
Strauss, The Rise of Anti-Americanism in France: French Intellectuals and the American Film Industry, 19271932, Journal of Popular Culture 10, no. 4 (1977): 75259.
47. Zhiwei Xiao, Anti-imperialism and Film Censorship during the Nanjing Decade, 19271937, in
Transnational Chinese Cinemas: Identity, Nationhood, Gender, ed. Sheldon H. Lu (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997), 3557.
48. Donald A. Jordan, Chinas Trail by Fire: The Shanghai War of 1932 (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2001).
49. NARA, SMP D3566, Birthday of H.I.M. the Emperor of Japan, Official Celebration. The file on the
attack, SMP D3586, is missing from the archive.

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Journal of Urban History 38(5)

50. This was not the first Korean assassination attempt in Shanghai. Three men had attempted to kill
General Tanaka Giichi in March 1922, failing, and killing instead an American tourist: Esselstrom,
Crossing Empires Edge, 69; NCH, April 1, 1922, 2628.
51. Robert A. Scalpino and Chong-Sik Lee, The Origins of the Korean Communist Movement (I), Journal of Asian Studies 20, no. 1 (1960): 21.
52. Nym Wales and Kim San, Song of Ariran: A Korean Communist in the Chinese Revolution (San Francisco:
Ramparts Press, 1972): 113.
53. Jackson, Raj on the Nanjing Road.
54. SMC, Annual Report 1915: 24a; Richard J. Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British
Intelligence and the Defence of the Indian Empire, 19041924 (London: Frank Cass, 1995): 27172.
55. SMC, Annual Report 1923: 28.
56. NARA, SMP D8/8, Indian Section, June 17, 1929. By 1936, 250 files on seditionists were held,
280 more on sympathizers, and 3,500 more on other individuals who had come to police attention:
Section 4, Indian Section, Special Branch, February 11, 1936.
57. NARA, SMP D74, Korean Meeting, March 4, 1929.
58. NARA, SMP D4812; Esselstrom, Crossing Empires Edge: 12022.
59. Frederick S. Litten, The Noulens Affair, The China Quarterly 138 (1994): 492512; Wakeman,
Policing Shanghai, 14451.
60. On Sorge and his worlds see Chalmers Johnson, An Instance of Treason: Ozaki Hotsumi and the Sorge
Spy Ring (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). See also the polemical account in Major General
Charles A. Willoughby, Shanghai Conspiracy: The Sorge Spy Ring (New York: Dutton, 1952). The
SMP actually suspected that Sorge was a Soviet agent: NARA: SMP D 4718.
61. Popplewell, Intelligence and Imperial Defence, 25896; Esselstrom, Crossing Empires edge, 6672.
62. Robert A. Bickers and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom. Shanghais Dogs and Chinese Not Admitted Sign:
Legend, History and Contemporary Symbol, China Quarterly 142 (1995): 44466.
63. Richard W. Rigby, The May 30 Movement: Events and Themes (Folkestone: Dawson, 1980); Clifford,
Spoilt Children of Empire.
64. Tiina Airaksinen, Love Your Country on Nanjing Road: The British and the May Fourth Movement in
Shanghai (Helsinki: Renvall Institute, 2005).
65. Marie-Claire Bergre, Civil Society and Urban Change in Republican China, The China Quaterly
150 (1997): 32628.
66. Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China: The View from Shanghai
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Arthur Waldron, From War to Nationalism: Chinas
Turning Point, 19241925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
67. See, e.g., the students presented in Xiao Jianqing, Manhua Shanghai [Shanghai in Cartoons] (Shanghai:
Jingwei shuju, 1936); see, e.g., revolutionary student memoirs, for a sense of how, for some, revolutionary activism was initially an arena for personal and sexual indulgence: Wang Fan-hsi, Chinese Revolutionary: Memoirs 19191949 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).
68. Richard J. Aldrich, Intelligence and the War against Japan: Britain, America and the Politics of Secret
Service (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 2022. As Aldrich makes clear, however,
this system almost entirely failed to engage with Japan.
69. Esselstrom, Crossing Empires Edge, 69.
70. There was competition for the files: see NARA, RG 226, 1-261-30A, Sale of Shanghai Police Files,
April 20, 1949, OSS Washington. For glimpses of the later career of the archive see, e.g., the CIA buck
slip still appended to NARA SMP D4825, charting the course of this file across different desks in 1956.

Bio
Robert Bickers is Professor of History at the University of Bristol. He is the author of Empire Made Me:
An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai (2003), and The Scramble for China: Foreign Devils in the Qing
Empire, 18321914 (2011).

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