The Far East

ON THE WORLD TODAY

THE International Settlements and Foreign Concessions in China owed their progress and prosperity to foreign municipal control and foreign investments. Many Britons and Americans with knowledge of the situation felt grave doubts in 1943 regarding the expediency of renouncing extraterritorial rights and putting themselves and their countrymen at the mercy of Chinese courts and an inefficient police system. But a gesture to stimulate continued resistance by Chungking to the Japanese was considered necessary in London and in Washington.

Today the plight of Shanghai and Tientsin and Formosa is well known. Municipal obligations to employees who had earned pensions by long and faithful service, the rights of debenture holders, and the status of a number of trusts relating to hospitals, schools, and recreation grounds have been treated as nonexistent.

Before the war the International Settlement in Shanghai (known throughout the Far East as ‘The Model Settlement”) was a congested modern city with tall buildings, up-to-date public utilities, and a population of considerably over a million. In the last five years its deterioration has been incredibly rapid, especially since it passed under Chinese control.

Streets are in bad repair and littered with rubbish. The majority of the thoroughfares are lined on each side by hawkers’ stalls, which occupy a large portion of the pavements and encroach upon the roads. Chinese rest or sleep at the entrances to most of the buildings and on the pavements. Squatters have taken possession of vacant land, and in many instances have forced their way into residential and office buildings and taken over whole floors.

The police, admittedly underpaid, take bribes from all and sundry, and engage freely in blackmail and pilfering. It has been openly charged — and never refuted — that street hawkers pay police on their beats one or two thousand Chinese dollars apiece per day, in addition to allowing them to help themselves to any articles they fancy. Inexperienced coolie policemen are constantly invading offices and residences to demand the filling in of ridiculous forms, or to put impertinent questions about the work and incomes of the inmates.

There is little or no protection against robberies and burglaries. Telephoned complaints are ignored as a rule, the complainants being informed that they must present themselves at some police station in person before any action can be taken. Pickpockets ply their trade in every crowded thoroughfare, and the stealing of cargoes has attained incredible proportions. It is not unusual for an importer — say, of cosmetics — whose consignment has been stolen, to be offered his entire shipment by illicit receivers of his wares, before he has even had time to assess his loss.

Rackets, inflation, and starvation

Local labor unions have virtually a free rein to present extortionate demands and to intimidate employers, whom they often detain in their own offices for hours under threats of violence, including hanging. Many foreign-owned factories whose plants are more or less intact hesitate to resume operations, because of constant strikes and the preposterous compensation they are compelled to pay to workers who are discharged for inefficiency or insubordination. One British firm has had to pay out over three thousand pounds to rid itself of the incubus of inefficient and truculent workers.

The dominant Kuomintang evidently hesitates to attempt any disciplining of labor for fear that it will go over to the Communist camp. A number of old, established British and American firms are contemplating — and some have actually arranged for — the transfer of their head offices and plants to Hong Kong, to avoid the losses and uncertainties of operating under Chinese laws and so-called protection.

THE FAR EAST(continued)

The labor trouble for the most part is not caused by unruly unions disrupting business and production in an irresponsible way. It is due rather to the fact that official corruption, inflation, and utter failure to control prices have reduced workers so close to the starvation level that they might as well starve while striking as starve while working.

Currency inflation has attained astronomical proportions, but the cost of living exceeds even the inflationary standard. It is estimated that it costs foreigners well over four times as much today to live in Shanghai as it does in New York. American citizens have been warned that they must allow at least $12 (U.S.) a day for accommodation — when obtainable — and $16 (U.S.) a day for food.

Tax schedules which bear no relation to reality are supposed to be in force. The income tax, for example, starts with a monthly income which would not be accepted as a single rickshaw fare.

Graft and corruption

Hardly a day passes that the local newspapers, Chinese and foreign, do not reveal and denounce some fresh local scandal. Whereas in pre-Pearl Harbor days the Chinese would have reacted angrily to any exposures of alleged fraud, however well authenticated, — especially in the foreign press, — they now appear to have become absolutely shameless, and to look upon exposure of graft as a matter of course.

Possibly they imagine that these exposures are offset abroad by publication of elaborate and ambitious schemes for large-scale municipal improvements, such as a bridge or tunnel across the Whangpoo, an elevated street-railway, or the cutting up of the Race Course and Recreation Ground (regardless of the fact that they are the property of a foreign trust). None of these schemes is likely ever to get beyond the paper stage unless it opens up new channels for graft or for lucrative returns from the confiscation of foreign property.

Foreigners have no rights

Abolition of extraterritoriality is exposing foreigners to extraordinary hazards, of which the following may be regarded as typical. In the early hours — 5.45 A.M. to be exact — of August 12 a party of some fifteen Chinese alleged to have been members of the Woosung-Shanghai Garrison Headquarters — but only two of them wore uniforms — forced their way into an apartment building in Great Western Road, shooting and severely wounding a British resident who resisted.

All the occupants of this building, including an elderly Parsee, were dragged out of bed, handcuffed, and taken down to the ground floor, while the thugs pretended to make a search for forged United States currency. When the victims were released some six or seven hours later, they found that their apartments had been ransacked, and that money and jewelry valued at many millions of dollars had been stolen by the so-called military police. One of the residents telephoned to the nearest police station as soon as the raid started, but no action was taken. No redress has been offered to the victims.

About the same time four senior members of the staff of a charitable hospital were arrested and shut up in a filthy cell with a number of criminals because of the death of a woman in their institution. Someone had falsely informed the police that she had been operated upon against her consent, when the truth was that she died from a hemorrhage caused by her refusal to stay in bed. It was thirty-six hours before these members of the medical staff were released.

It is unsafe for foreign surgeons to operate upon Chinese under the archaic legal system now prevailing. It is equally unsafe for foreigners to drive their own cars. A Russian driver is serving a five-year sentence for allegedly causing the death of a woman who stuck her head out of a streetcar as he was passing, and was caught by the back of his truck.

In civil procedure the same “Alice in Wonderland” mentality prevails. On August 14, a certain Chen Chi-ling sued the Joint Savings Bank for the return four thousand fold of a long-term deposit made in 1940, with interest. His claim was based on the fact that the cost-of-living index had risen 4000 per cent since the deposit, and on a government regulation allowing the court to make adjustments of payment in legal transactions where an unforeseen change of conditions has rendered the original terms unjust.

Judgment was given for repayment of one thousand times the original deposit — namely, two million Chinese dollars — although the bank pointed out that it had patriotically invested most of its funds in Chinese government bonds, which were being redeemed dollar for dollar. If this decision becomes a precedent, many banks and other concerns which have issued debentures will be forced to go out of business.

Who is to blame?

Where does the responsibility for this chaotic state of affairs lie? Some of the examples given are inherent in the Chinese system — or lack of system — of administration. No well-informed Briton or American believed, during the war, that the much publicized “New China” was a reality, and that as a result of participation in a common struggle, the Chinese would develop greater efficiency in administrative matters or more honesty in municipal government.

The main blame for the deterioration of Shanghai must be placed squarely upon the shoulders of General Chiang Kai-shek. He is undoubtedly antiforeign. He is also medieval in his outlook, and to this, perhaps, owes his continued leadership of China during the war period. For he is a past master of intrigue, of playing off one clique against another, while himself relying upon reactionary and antiforeign advisers. Many of the men holding high positions in the Kuomintang hierarchy are notoriously corrupt.

Any progressive-minded Chinese leader would have realized that Shanghai under Chinese control was the supreme test of China’s ability to administer a large modern city with efficiency and honesty. Shanghai should have been regarded as China’s show window, and every effort should have been bent to make it so.

Against heavy odds

There are scores of able Chinese, educated in Britain and America, with stainless records, who, given the necessary support and authority, would have made the rehabilitation of Shanghai under a Chinese administration a success. One such, Wu Kuo-chen, graduate of Grinnell and Princeton, former Mayor of Hankow and Chungking, is now Mayor of Shanghai. But he was appointed too late, and has not been given the necessary authority.

He is struggling to restore order out of chaos, to eliminate corruption and incompetence, but with little hope of success. Hardly a day passes that he does not have to grapple with some new exposure of corruption under the regime of his predecessor, the Tokyo-educated, non-English speaking, antiforeign General Chien Tah-chun.

The present Mayor appears to exercise no control over the police force, beyond almost daily repudiating its arbitrary actions and pretensions. He is, moreover, obstructed and handicapped by the graft that now pervades every government department. How can he control the rationing of essential commodities like rice, sugar, and coal when corrupt, government monopolies handle importation and distribution?

The United States and Britain have given China lavish assistance during, and especially since, the Pacific War. We might reasonably have hoped that this aid would curb the innate xenophobia of the Chinese people. The abrogation of the so-called “unequal treaties,”with the restoration of the International Settlements and the Foreign Concessions to full Chinese sovereignty and with the abolition of extraterritoriality, should have put the Chinese on their mettle. But Chinese officialdom has proved irresponsible and inadequate.