Shanghai's "Dogs and Chinese Not Admitted" Sign
From Urban Press
| Journal Article |
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These annotations are provided for educational purposes only and copyright is retained by the original author. If you find this information interesting seeking out a copy of this article in its entirety is, as always, recommended.
For over 60 years before June 1928 most Chinese certainly were barred from the parks administered by the foreign-controlled Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC) of the International Settlement in Shanghai. As shown below, the enforcement of the ban varied over time but for the first three decades of the 20th century it was rigidly administered. Dogs, ball games, cycling and picking of the flowers were also forbidden, but the alleged juxtaposition of the bans on dogs and Chinese became notorious. The potency of "dog" as an insulting and dehumanizing epithet in China undoubtedly exacerbated the insult, and also made the story of the sign's outrageous wording seem all the more plausible. After all, Han Chinese had for centuries used the "dog" radical in characters referring to members of ethnic minorities living in China's frontier regions, and "running dog" (zougou) has been a potent political epithet since the 1920s.Bickers and Wasserstrom 1995, p 444)
The Recreation Ground's location on the waterfront near the thoroughfare that would come to be known as Nanjing Road is significant, since this part of the Bund soon acquired icon status, thanks in part to its impressive skyline but also to the modernity it came to symbolize, which boosted the symbolic importance of the Public Garden in both Chinese and Western minds... the discretion of the police, to those who were "respectable and well-dressed" (servants of Westerners, particularly amahs, as long as they were accompanied by foreigners, and city employees, such as the Chinese police constables, were also admitted). Complaints from Europeans about the numbers admitted led to the Council changing this policy in 1881, an action which angered of some of the Settlement's leading Chinese residents. They petitioned the Council for clarification of its policy and, unsuccessfully, for admittance. Between 1881 and 1884 the rules were properly laid out, and seem to have been displayed in the Gardens for the first time. A pass system was introduced allowing Chinese residents entry for themselves and their companions, for a week at a time. Access through this system was restricted in 1889 as a result of alleged abuses and because too many passes were being applied for. Admittance of any sort lapsed with the opening, in 1890, of the Chinese Public Garden, constructed by the SMC alongside the Soochow Creek (Suzhou river), to head off the continual complaints it had been facing and to "set at rest for good and all the intermittent attempts to interfere with the exclusive purpose for which the present garden ground was set aside."...
The 1903 regulations of the Public Garden included the following items: 1. No dogs or bicycles are admitted. 5. No Chinese are admitted, except servants in attendance upon foreigners. The 1913 "Revised Regulations," however, began: 1. These Gardens are reserved exclusively for the foreign community. 2. No dogs or bicycles are admitted. In 1917 the order had been altered to: 1. The Gardens are reserved for the foreign community. 4. Dogs and bicycles are not admitted.(pp 445-446)
Ye Qing reminded his readers that "Western colonialists in China committed monstrous crimes, too many to mention in fact; the sign placed at the entrance to the parks reading "Chinese and Dogs Not Admitted" is prime evidence of their guilt." He went on to caution historians explicitly: "Some people do not understand the humiliations of old China's history, or else they harbour sceptical attitudes (huaiyi taidu) and even go so far as to write off a serious historical humiliation lightly; this is very dangerous.(p 448)
Sceptics of the sign myth have certainly been persistent from the 1980s onward. Scholars such as Wu Guifang, one of Shanghai's leading local historians, and Nicholas Clifford, an American China specialist, have made a convincing case for seeing the "entire story's" version of this icon's history as an urban legend containing key details that fly in the face of the existing evidence." There is no question, as shown above, that exclusion was the official SMC policy before 1928. Wu and Clifford have made it quite clear, however, that it is simply not true that an official sign expressly equating Chinese to dogs was placed in a prominent location near the entrance to the Public Garden in 1885 and stood there until the SMC abolished its old exclusionary rules.
[However] clarifying the empirical case concerning the infamous notice does not necessarily invalidate basic assumptions about the history of the International Settlement, including a conviction that Chinese residents of this foreign enclave had good reason to feel aggrieved at the treatment they received from the SMC. In this sense, the stance toward the sign adopted by scholars such as Clifford and Wu should be differentiated from that of apologists for the SMC who have tried to suggest that scepticism about the historicity of the notice should lead to scepticism concerning the general notion that the treaty port system was offensive or disadvantageous to the Chinese. Scholars such as Clifford and Wu insist that, whether or not signs with the precise wording in question ever stood where they were said to have stood, the kind of prejudice that descriptions of the notice are typically used to conjure up certainly did exist, and that niceties of wording aside, native residents of old Shanghai unquestionably had good reason for finding the rules offensive, and for feeling that they were being treated as second-class citizens, even though the city they lived in was on Chinese soil.(p 449)
A Sign for Our Times
The earliest reference can be found in a novel by treaty port journalist Putnam Weale (B. L. Simpson) that appeared in 1914:There has just been a fierce controversy in the newspapers ... over the notices put up in the public gardens here. Some fool in the municipality had signboards painted with - "Dogs and Chinese Not Admitted." Rather rough I call it. If I were one of them I should kill some foreign devil just to equalise matters(p 450)
Western commentators have also referred to the notice when discussing the "foreign guests only" signs that became increasingly common sights in some Chinese cities in the late 1970s and 1980s. In short, it is used as a powerful symbol of imperialism's effects on China, and the country's troubled relationship with the outside world.(p 451)
[A famous scene in the Bruce Lee film The Chinese Connection] begins with Lee's character becoming angry when a Sikh policeman attached to the SMC-run Shanghai Municipal Police draws attention to the infamous sign... Lee's character is taunted with the suggestion that if he pretends to be a dog the policeman might let him pass. The highlight of the scene, and perhaps the film as a whole, takes the form of a slow motion sequence that shows Lee destroying the hated sign with a powerful kick. It is said that when the film was first shown in Hong Kong, this scene was greeted with enthusiastic shouts of approval from the audience.(p 452)
In the 1950s, the local representatives of the Party took an extra step to ensure that everyone who visited Shanghai would be reminded of the city's most infamous artifact, erecting a commemorative plaque in Huangpu Park that read in part as follows:Before liberation the park bore silent witness to the imperialists' aggression against China and their wanton trampling on her sovereignty. The gate of the park was guarded by police of the "International Settlement" and Chinese were refused admittance. To add insult to injury, the imperialists in 1885 put up at the gate a board with the words "No Admittance to Dogs and Chinese" written on it. This aroused among the Chinese people popular indignation and disgust, which finally compelled the imperialists to remove the board.(p 452)
One of the most comprehensive discussions of the issues can be found in a popular history of Shanghai published in 1971, which devotes nine pages to a chapter entitled "The Story of Huangpu Park." The second section of this chapter, entitled "Dogs and Chinese Not Allowed," begins by noting that the park's first name included the word "public" but that "... at the time, the word 'public' (gong) was taken to refer only to people from America and Europe," and not to the Chinese. To make this clear, the text claims, from the day the park was opened the SMC stationed guards at the entrance to exclude Chinese forcibly.(p 455)
A close reading of the early complaints and petitions suggests that the three things members of the local elite found most galling about the situation had nothing to do with the way regulations were phrased. What bothered them most was, first, that they were being excluded from a piece of land that stood on the soil of their native country; secondly, the foreigners in charge of the International Settlement sometimes seemed to view and treat them as if they were no different from "ordinary coolies" (who, in their eyes, might indeed be worth keeping out of the Garden); and thirdly, Japanese and Koreans were able to use this "Western" park. In 1909 Shenbao published a large photograph of the park captioned "(p 457)
the SMC's Parks Committee minutes record the exasperation of the Municipal Engineer in 1911 at the "difficulty of differentiating between Chinese and others dressed in the European manner."44 This may also account for the fact that Chinese guidebooks, even in the era of exclusion, still tended to include sections on the foreign parks.
The earliest Chinese reference that resonates with later accounts is the 1907 Shanghai xiangtu zhi (Gazeteer of the Shanghai Region) which states that "Orientals and Occidentals from all countries, even ... Indians, who are the chattels and slaves of the Westerners, are able to enter the gates, only Chinese are barred from entering," only they are thus treated "like slaves, like dogs, like horses."45 In Lao Shanghai (Old Shanghai) (1919) the park regulations are discussed in a passage worth quoting at length:The Public Garden regulations are very strictly enforced on Chinese by the police. At the Huangpu Public Garden, Chinese and dogs are not allowed to enter for recreation (bu zhun huaren ji gou runei youwan). They put the Chinese and dogs together. It is a great insult. But some of our country fellows do not know self-respect, they spit all over the place and also break twigs off trees and pick flowers, all forbidden by the park keepers.The actual rules are then itemized "to warn those who have self-respect."(p 458)
The most plausible reconstruction of the legend's origin involves linking a version of Reginald Johnston's 1927 suggestion, that some people began using the phrase "No Dogs and Chinese Allowed" to summarize the implications of the regulations that referred to people and animals in separate places, to an examination of the role of amahs in the spread of information in old Shanghai...The proximity of the rules relating to dogs and foreign exclusivity in the 1913 sign may have played a key role in the rise of this urban legend. If Ye Xiaoqing's thesis that the myth of the sign was "spread by educated people in order to spread nationalist ideology" is to be accepted, then this is only in the knowledge that while it was undoubtedly true for the period after the rumour had gained currency, say from 1923 on, in fact the ... urban legend may have taken hold as amahs and other servants... told other Chinese about the notice: point one, no Chinese; point two, no dogs. The strength of dog as an epithet in China deepened the insult. The story of the "Dogs and Chinese" sign might, in short, lie in the "scandalous tales" recounted by amahs which, it was feared by one correspondent in 1911, "are disseminated, and of course, grow in the telling." Such fears were normally related to gossip about the behaviour of foreign masters and mistresses, but stories about park rules could easily have spread in the same fashion.(pp 460-461)
The period 1907 to 1911 also saw a general regularizing and hardening of the regulations, in part as a consequence of the innovatory appointment in 1899 of a "trained specialist from Kew," Mr Arthur, as "Superintendent of Parks and Open Spaces." ... This was a period during which Indians, if badly dressed, were specifically banned from entering the parks, especially disreputable and dirty watchmen (1908); Japanese men were enjoined to dress in Western clothes or "haori and hakama" (1908); and amahs were barred from the seats during musical performances (1910)... This tightening must surely have caused friction between the park keepers and people, such as the amahs, who were already using the gardens (or students using Jessfield before it was properly completed). It is also known, at least in the case of the ban on amahs using seats, that changes in regulations included injunctions specifying that "notices be exhibited at the entrances to the Garden to which the police will give effect."(p 462)
However, imperialism in Shanghai, and throughout China generally, was a more subtle actor in its quotidian activities than the CCP vision of Chinese history allows. The successful development of Shanghai's commerce and industry, and society and culture, required engagement, cohabitation and dialogue between the Chinese and Western elites in the city. The conventional treatment of the notice does distort some aspects of Chinese and treaty port history, largely because it fits in a bit too nicely with the caricature of Western inhabitants of the Settlement as a group united by a common outlook (the 'Shanghai mind") that was narrow-minded, provincial and racist in the extreme. There were certainly residents whose attitudes were not very different from that of the stereotypical "Shanghailander" portrayed by Arthur Ransome in his famous 1927 essay on the "Shanghai mind," but there are three main problems with the caricature he helped to popularize.
There were some Western residents of the International Settlement who were openly critical of policies that excluded the Chinese from using local parks. Some criticisms came from predictable sources, such as J. B. Powell, who often satirized the policies of the SMC and mocked positions taken by the publishers of the British-owned NCH. Occasionally, however, even ardent defenders of the status quo expressed displeasure with this particular feature of local policy. For example, Major General J. Duncan, the commander of the British Shanghai Defence Force in 1927-28, could not stomach the exclusionary policies.
Secondly, businessmen were certainly too pragmatic to "spend our time deliberately insulting our Chinese friends," as one put it in 1927. Old Shanghai's cosmopolitan egalitarianism has certainly been much exaggerated by propagandists of the foreign regime; however, trade was not likely to function to anybody's advantage in an atmosphere of conflict.(p 463)
Restriction on entry to the parks was never merely a question of race, and focusing on the sign may lead one to forget how far class and/or cultural prejudices were as much an element as racial or ethnic ones. Europeans in Shanghai themselves were far from homogeneous: there were strictly observed class divisions even within British society in the city. The White Russian and, later in the 1930s, the Jewish refugees were low down the social scale. The Chinese elite too, hardly wanted to share its quiet moments with labourers or rickshaw coolies.
Furthermore if, as Emily Honig has pointed out, "the Jiangnan elite ... was defined by an association with - if only an aspiration to emulate - foreigners," then restrictions on entry to the parks fit this definition well. There were complaints about overcrowding in the parks when they were opened to all ticket-buyers in 1928, but the move served its purpose: it kept out the destitute of all nations, but especially the mass of Chinese residents (and especially Honig's Subei people), who could not afford to buy tickets.(465)
an officially-sanctioned sign explicitly linking "dogs and Chinese" never existed, and if it did exist elsewhere was definitely not a prominent and enduring part of the physical landscape of old Shanghai, the evidence relating to park rules does make clear that the kinds of biases this icon has been used to symbolize were indeed a prominent and enduring part of the social and cultural landscape of that city. John King Fairbank argued in Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast that "Shanghailanders, for example, whatever their racial origin, found a common bond in the pursuit of profit in the Foreign Settlement. Wu Chien-chang and Edward Cunningham were Shanghailanders." We would certainly accept the truth of this up to a point, but difference always remained important. It is surely significant on a symbolic level, that when the SMC and leading Western residents of the city sponsored public displays in 1893 to mark the 50th anniversary of Shanghai's opening to foreign trade, people who looked like Cunningham were allowed to stand within the cordon surrounding the speakers, but people who looked like Wu were kept outside: racial origin mattered.(p 466)
