Shanghailanders (Journal Article)
From Urban Press
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This article was presented at the 1994 Joint East Asian Studies Conference, Leeds, on 'Nationality and Nationalism in East Asia', and at a Berkeley Center for Chinese Studies Colloquium in 1995. 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 the article in its entirety is, as always, recommended.
British settlers in China were a sore problem for the British state as it attempted to re-negotiate its informal presence in that country in the face of the Nationalist Revolution of 1923-8. The most problematic group resided in Shanghai and called themselves Shanghailanders. These were the small treaty port people, whose fortunes were inextricably tied up with the existence of the British concessions and extraterritorial privileges in China. They worked in treaty port service occupations( administrative, service sector, police), or worked for, or ran, utility companies, land investment and real estate firms. Regardless of their social class or economic clout, their livelihoods were largely non-transferable, unlike the expatriate British businessmen who worked for the largest China companies (Jardine Mathesons, Butterfield and Swire), or for the multinationals (British American Tobacco, Imperial Chemicals Industries, Asiatic Petroleum Corporation), and whose interests and activities form the subject of most accounts of Sino-British relations.(Bickers 1998, p 161)
Aspects of Shanghai's history have dominated much recent research on republican-era Chinese history, but the foreign presence is still underexamined.(p 163)
We need to understand the varieties of the foreign presence in China if we are to understand the intractability of the problems they presented; and, in the case of Shanghai we can only understand their politics if we accept that Shanghailanders actually formed the settler society that they 'imagined' for themselves.(p 159)
the British community in Shanghai actually provides a clear model of what a settler community looks like and how it develops. The nature of its multilayered identities and their interaction are also clearly identifiable. Shanghailander identity was always British and imperial, but Shanghailanders' local 'imagined' identity, so easily and readily dismissed by contemporaries and by historians, was of crucial importance to them.(p 164)
Domestic class, nationality and gender tensions were exported with settlers, administrators and missionaries; and these tensions found new modes of expression, especially as they interacted with issues of race, as they underpinned the improvised communities of empire." This was particularly true in the outposts of Britain's informal empire in China.(p 164-165)
The International Settlement and the Shanghai Municipal Council
Shanghai became China's biggest, most industrialized and modernized city. The cauldron of Chinese cultural, intellectual, industrial and political innovation before the establishment of the communist regime in 1949, it was the most important focus of trade for Britain... Shanghailanders formed the largest single British community in China and had political and military control of the heart of the city until the late 1930s. Despite being largely ignored by posterity, they had developed a complex and distinctive identity by the 1920s and actively attempted to follow policies of their own and influence the policies of the British and other foreign governments. There never was a grand 'Yangtsze Protectorate' based on the city, which some agitated for in the late 1890s, but Shanghai thrived and was soundly protected... There was no equivalent of the viceregal establishment which kept the unofficial British in India in their place, nor was there a colonial administration to lord it over the men of business. The China consular service were small fry; Shanghailanders governed themselves.
...The SMC was annually elected on a property-based franchise that excluded most Britons from voting, and even more from standing for election, while others held multiple votes depending on the number of properties they represented.'?... Only in the late 1930s did more than one-sixth of the British community get the vote, and then only to assist the gerrymandering necessary to hamper Japanese activism.
Shanghailanders much preferred this restrictive arrangement. They did not need to vote for the SMC or serve on it to feel that it was their body: as will be shown, they worked for it and paid for it, and they lobbied for policy implementation in the press.(pp 167-168)
By 1922, some 600, mostly British employees, were employed in the Secretariat, and in the Revenue, Public Health, Public Works and Police departments, supervising a far larger number of Chinese. The SMC had become by far the biggest employer of British personnel in the settlement.(p 169)
Exactly who the SMC was answerable to always remained unclear. The British Minister in Peking could not formally order the Council, as a body, to do anything, although the Land Regulations themselves were subject to diplomatic agreement and the SMC was subject, as a body, to claims made against it in a Court of the Consuls, convened when necessary, of those foreign powers with interests in the settlement.
Unshackled then by formal consular or diplomatic control, the SMC consistently arrogated to itself greater and greater degrees of autonomy as it grew in size and influence over the century of the settlement's formal existence...The Chinese, who formed the majority of the settlement's population throughout its history, were denied representation on the Council until 1928, when three new seats were allotted them. The Chineseness of the foreign settlement, which often surprised Europeans arriving there for the first time, must always be borne in mind. Shanghailanders constructed their community in the midst of China's most populous metropolis.(pp 169-170)
Under the Shanghai Municipal Council's motto, Omnia Juncta in Uno (everyone together as one), overt British dominance was cloaked by rhetorical cosmopolitanism. This rhetoric was important because it provided the basis on which British settlers differentiated between their Shanghailander and their British identities; it also lent some credence to their periodic demands for a city-state. Such cosmopolitanism was, however, always limited in its scope; the Chinese, Japanese and White Russians were excluded. It was certainly the case, as has been observed, that foreign and Chinese families lived side by side, both in the French Concession and in the International Settlement, but actual, physical proximity meant very little(p 170)
Even a proposal to distribute a questionnaire soliciting the opinions of ratepayers on orchestral policy was rejected in 1934 as it might 'establish an undesirable precedent in respect to other municipal activities and it may be assumed that the section of the public which has advocated the disbandment of the orchestra would take advantage of the opportunity to renew its demands'... The SMC was rightly seen, then, by ratepaying and nonratepaying residents alike, as a secretive, self-perpetuating oligarchy composed equally of the managers of the expatriate trading companies, who bowed willingly to diplomatic pressure, and the representatives of some of the big property-owning interests, who were less amenable to such influence...
For most of its history, however, the Council represented the settlers and their ambitions because securing Shanghai for expatriate trade meant, ipso facto, securing the International Settlement for the Shanghailanders. The SMC usually managed to balance the interests of these groups. On the whole, the Council's expansionist policies and steady accumulation of powers inside the settlement suited the unenfranchised and the ratepayers very well.(p 171)
Business interest groups such as the China Association and the Shanghai British Chamber of Commerce also failed to represent the Shanghailanders: they took their cues from London. John Swire and Sons' director, Warren Swire, summed up the relationship accurately in 1933 with characteristic bluntness: 'There is a difference in opinion between people like ourselves and the small treaty port people and ... we are not going to sacrifice what we consider to be bigger national interests to their desire to go backwards'.
The small treaty port people had never had any intention of going backwards; in fact, they desired to go forward by making their identity more tangible and permanent. As early as 1862 there were demands for the creation of a self-governing city-state and, in various forms, this proposal was made again and again until the 1930s.(p 172)
Accompanying geographical expansion, the SMC developed more and more autonomy over the years in the settlement itself. It excluded Chinese authority, reserving to itself the right to arrest Chinese in the settlement upon production of the necessary warrants, to tax the Chinese and to prohibit external Chinese tax collectors. Furthermore, it developed the machinery of an efficient, modern municipal government, which insinuated itself into all areas of settlement life, Chinese and foreign, despite opposition from both sectors of the community.(p 174)
an independent, foreign-controlled Shanghai would have been in a hugely insecure position; physically, it would have been a tiny, and indefensible, toe-hold on the Asian mainland. But such ambitions should be taken seriously. They were sustained by the not unreasonable Shanghailander belief that Shanghai, as it existed, was so valuable to China that Chinese governments would continue to acquiesce in the situation which had developed, and so valuable to British trade that the diplomats would continue to allow Shanghailanders free rein.(p 175)
Shanghailanders
After 1843, a complex community of Britons developed in this legal grey area - less than formal colonialism but more than mere informal influence - assisted by what can only be termed the benign neglect of the British state. Identifiable groups with British passports or under British protection were excluded in varying degrees from this community: from its formal and informal gatherings; from its self-ascription; from its public discourse; and especially from its memoirs and commentaries. The Sephardic Jews, who came from Baghdad via Bombay and Hong Kong certainly saw themselves as British but, the odd millionaire apart, were not regarded as such on a social level. ...There was also a large Indian community, mostly policemen or night-watchmen; they totalled 1,842 in 1930, but were counted as a separate group in the SMC's census." Hong Kong Chinese, who were also British proteges, were excluded. This racially defined barrier was stronger in Shanghai than, for example, in Sumatra, and, as will be shown, was reinforced by social and sexual taboos.(p 175)
By 1935, at least 10,000 Britons lived in the various parts of the city, sharing the International Settlement along with some 20,000 Japanese, 3,000 White Russians (technically stateless refugees and often in the direst povertyj/" 2,000 Americans, 1,000 Germans and 1,100,000 Chinese. Forming just over half of one per cent of the population of the International Settlement, the stridency of the Shanghailander articulation of their specific identity is not unexpected. Unless they made themselves heard, they would have been swamped.(p 159)
By the early 1930s some families, such as the descendants of G. L. Skinner, had been in Shanghai for three generations. ...If we assume, crudely, that all adult British women in the settlement were married (and, nurses and teachers apart, female employment - from which married women were conventionally barred - was the dramatic exception rather than the norm until the 1930s), and if we remain aware that a significant proportion of the men were forbidden from marrying during their first term's contract, then the decreasing percentage of excess men gives an indication of the shift towards more settled family life in the community in the twentieth century... Shanghai marriage registers also show that, whereas up to and around 1930, most men married women who had come out especially from Britain, in the 1930s many more married the daughters of local Shanghailander families.(pp 177-178)
The 1900 Boxer Rising and its suppression, far from frightening off wouldbe migrants as might be expected, actually advertised to the world the opportunities for foreign employment offered in China, and the security of life there, devastatingly protected as it was by foreign armies.(p 179)
Settlers
First and foremost, the Shanghailander was a settler, not a temporary sojourner in a foreign land. It was in these terms that Shanghailanders saw themselves, and were seen by their compatriots at the time.t" They were usually loyal: first, to their local community; secondly, to the wider British presence in China. The primary identity was local, but British and imperialist identities persisted and came to the foreground in emergencies of the Shanghailanders' own devising (30 May 1925) or of those facing the British state... in the First World War, for instance; among the dozens killed were thirty-seven members of the elite Shanghai Club alone." Meanwhile, Shanghailanders strutted their stage in costumes borrowed from the Raj, used its vocabulary, mimicked many of its rituals, and even decorated their parades and balls with Sikh policemen to 'add colour'.(pp 178-179)
It might be argued that comparisons could be made with the 28,OOO-strong British community in Argentina in 1914. The British there were certainly a powerful economic and cultural force, but theirs was textbook informal empire. The Shanghailanders, by contrast, had political and military control of their polity... A distinctive Anglo-Argentine identity certainly developed (exhibited in language, accent, social habits, and so on), but it lacked the sharp focus of hegemonic political control. The autonomous claims of the Shanghailander were born directly out of the logic of their situation." The British presence in China generally constituted informal empire, but Shanghai was another matter. Shanghailanders arguably had much more in common with what has been termed the 'colonial nationalism' of Australians, New Zealanders [or] Rhodesians... These settlers paid nominal allegiance to the empire and paraded their loyalty on ritual occasions, but the gulf between their ambitions and those of the empire for them grew wider year by year.(p 179)
As Shanghailanders they also had, like Australians, regional and local priorities and problems of their own which conflicted sharply with those of the British state and British trading interests in China, although like most of the Dominions in the interwar period they ultimately relied on Britain for their defence. 51 Shanghailanders, as we have seen, had no real prospect of carving out an independent domain for themselves, but they thought they did, and often acted as if they had.(p 180)
Economics
First, Shanghailanders worked for the treaty port service industries and the SMC or the SMP...Some in this category worked for the expatriate China companies as locally recruited staff, or in non-managerial positions - as seamen...
Secondly, Shanghailanders were property owners and land speculators, such as those who controlled the Shanghai Land Investment Company, or Algar and Co., founded by Skinner's son-in-law, Albert Algar, and managed from 1928 to 1949 by Skinner's grandson, Noel Kent, a third generation Shanghailander" Skinner's son Charles worked in shipbuilding and rose to become a director of the New Engineering and Shipbuilding Company.
Thirdly, Shanghailanders were small businessmen and women: shopkeepers, dairy owners, boardinghouse keepers, piano tuners. None of these jobs or opportunities - or possibilities of access to them - would have existed without the treaty port system. Although actual occupational statistics are hard to obtain, it can be fairly confidently stated that, following the definition presented above, by far the greater proportion of the British community in the city at anyone time was composed of Shanghailanders.(pp 158-159)
Among the expatriate and Shanghailander elites, with no governing colonial administration to snub them, there was a degree of meritocracy, but there was also an observable and observed hierarchy. Policeman Maurice Tinkler's letters, for example, are replete with his bitterness at the rigidity of British class-consciousness, emphasized still further for him by his contrasting experiences with American society in Shanghai and, above all, by the fact that he felt he was being treated little better than the Chinese. Other accounts also make it clear that the British members of the police were often treated as the servants of the Shanghailander elites... Elite Shanghailanders had more in common with elite expatriates than with their fellow settlers, and this too was evidenced in patterns of sociability, and in club, society and of course Council membership.(p 183)
The Other: Expatriates and Chinese
The Shanghailander identity emerges still more strongly in the course of a contrasting delineation of the expatriate 'China hand'... They were moved around from post to post, which prevented geographical loyalty, were discouraged from overt political activity, and worked hard. These men believed in Swires or BAT. They considered themselves socially superior to the Shanghailanders of all classes, who were often described by expatriate businessmen and consuls as 'low whites' or 'lesser Europeans'. They attended different clubs and different Masonic lodges, and often lived in different parts of town. Expatriates were more likely to enjoy (and more able to afford) the night-life that Shanghai was supposedly famous for, than was the 1930 letter-writer who signed himself: 'Clerk and family: 25 years and no home leave'...
The strongest delineation made, of course, was between Shanghailanders and the Chinese. Shanghailanders defined their identity against a range of others - Britons at home, China hands, their neighbours the French, missionaries - but in the broadest possible sense the Shanghailander position, like the British position in China generally, was underpinned by prevailing notions of 'Orientals', and Chinese, as 'racially' different, and 'racially' unequal. These ideas were widely believed and propagated, and there was a large literature on such topics which sold well and was widely respected.(p 184)
When the Chinese were not different and inferior, they were different and exotic.
Shanghailanders had gone abroad to work, not to discover new cultures and peoples. The apparatus of theory and prejudice that characterized their attitudes towards the Chinese certainly helped Shanghailanders to justify their brusque insularity, but life abroad was also such a fundamentally normal and routine part of the British experience, that it should hardly surprise us that Shanghailanders made little effort to adopt any other attitude other than isolation and derision... The tenuousness of the social position of the lowest Shanghailanders, men such as Maurice Tinkler, quite possibly underlies the virulent and violent racism often evidenced by them. But the fundamental contradiction at the heart of Shanghailander identity, the absolute necessity of the Chinese, dictated the constructs of China, and the Chinese, with which all Shanghailanders worked.(p 185)
Socialization and the Maintenance of 'Racial' and Sexual Boundaries
So little was taught about China in Shanghai's foreign schools in 1930 that one contemporary critic saw the curriculum as a source of 'race' antipathy. 70 Shanghailander children became British before they were allowed to become Shanghailanders again.
Shanghailanders were not only born so...they were also made so, rather quickly and comprehensively. The community reproduced itself by effectively socializing newly arrived Britons. Maurice Tinkler's correspondence shows, for example, that through his police training, through informal talks in bars and canteens, through his club, through his Masonic lodge, and through his desire to become one - it was after all the location of the career he had chosen - he quickly adopted the mores and beliefs of a Shanghailander. The evidence was exhibited even in his first letter home. Tinkler quickly became a firm believer in what he termed the 'good old China"." During the crisis years, 1925-7, with the zeal of the converted, he did his best to defend what little of the 'good old China' was left in Shanghai.(p 186)
As was often the case, issues of race were also informed by issues of class, and often confused with them." Frequently, the only Chinese met by Britons, as by most other foreigners in China, were rickshaw-pullers, servants, compradores and staff, and sometimes interpreters... Social isolation from the Chinese was a key value. Shanghai was a 'city in which a man is lost if he has not at least one club at his disposal' , and the Chinese were barred from most clubs, most sports clubs, most Masonic Lodges and treaty port schools. As clubs often formed the limits of the British community's social world, it was not surprising that 'one lived amongst one's own kind'.(p 187)
More intimate relations were seen as transgressions. Taboos against marriage with Chinese, indeed, against open sexual contact with Chinese women or men, were strong. Such relationships certainly occurred, as they did throughout European empires in the twentieth century - in the nineteenth century elite men had very often established Chinese concubines, while at the other end of the social spectrum, Cantonese 'salt water sisters' specialized in servicing foreign sailors." But pressure was exerted by relatives, colleagues and superiors to make sure that young men did not get involved with Chinese, Eurasians or even with Russians.(p 189)
The taboo was also highly gendered. Taboos against women marrying Chinese men were much stronger than those against British men marrying Chinese women. 'If you went out with an Asiatic [man] in Shanghai you would never live it down', wrote Tinkler to his sister." In the mid-1930s, British women who intended to travel to China to marry Chinese men were interviewed by the Far East Department of the Foreign Office in an endeavour 'to persuade [them] to give up the idea of such a marriage'
French journalist Henri Champly's salacious reportage, popular in the interwar years, was predicated on a sexual undermining of 'white' racial superiority and purity through European prostitution in Shanghai; such themes had a strong presence in other popular writing and attitudes." Chinese men were excluded from close physical proximity with foreign women for this reason: for example, in swimming clubs. The Shanghai Rowing Club refused to allow Chinese to join the club in 1930, as it provided 'facilities for mixed bathing to which the Chinese would not be welcome'.(p 190)
Shanghailanders spoke English, but they added to it a self-consciously imperial jargon compounded of Anglo-Indian terms spiced with pidgin-English argot. In this way they marked themselves off from other Britons and Westerners, and demonstrated their distance from Chinese... The need for distance and the linguistic limitations of the average Shanghailander forced direct communication with Chinese to be largely undertaken from the opening of Shanghai onwards in pidgin-English, at once a language of demand and command, but also quickly a vehicle for ridicule.(p 191)
Learning and speaking Chinese was unpopular, partly because it was difficult, but most importantly because it was considered demeaning or deracinating. The need to communicate so intimately with Chinese labelled the speaker as either a 'poor white' or else as the lowest in Shanghailander status (foremen or those in supervisory roles).... As was common in colonial societies, pidgin, gesture, and a limited vocabulary of loud imperatives, summed up the communication skills of many, and distance was effectively maintained.(p 192)
Relationships with Chinese, and with other proscribed groups, undermined and diluted Shanghailanders' self-ascribed identity. Moreover, acknowledging that those who married into the group were also part of the group (as was sometimes the case in Sumatra) would have meant dismantling the social barriers which maintained the Shanghailander identity...
For similar reasons, expatriates and Shanghailanders of all classes shared an interest in keeping the city free of the poorest Britons, who were felt to undermine the 'prestige' of the 'white race' in the city in the eyes of the Chinese, and the character of the community in the eyes of the diplomats. The accommodations poor foreigners had to make to tailor their poverty to Shanghai's high costs meant transgressing the norms of the community: marrying or cohabiting with Asian, Eurasian or Russian women; living in Chinese housing; and working with or for Chinese. In contrast to British India, for example, Shanghailanders and the SMC were unable to deal with all such foreigners. 'Distressed British Subjects' could be shipped home, criminals could be deported to Hong Kong after serving their time and dismissed policemen could be refused their superannuation unless they took it back to Britain, but Russian poverty and destitution could not be hidden.(pp 192-193)
Shanghailanders earned a living and mostly had a better lifestyle than was possible for them in Britain, but while Shanghai was and is the subject of a great deal of retrospective exoticism, it was actually a pedestrian community, with pedestrian lifestyles and values. Shanghailanders lived in a grimy, polluted, congested city, which was for many Britons about as exotic and mysterious as Slough. Maintaining their identities also meant that Shanghailanders had imported their far from exotic British lifestyles, cuisine and domestic habits. Few concessions were made to either China or cosmopolitanism: the heightened and insular Britishness of Shanghailander society was a rejection of the Chinese world which otherwise swamped them, physically as much as metaphorically.(p 193)
Shanghailander Self-Imagery
Let these words become emblazoned on your shield.
I believe in Shanghai!
I pledge allegiance to the city in which I live and which affords me peace and livelihood I shall keep faith with Shanghai and thus it shall keep faith with me!
I recognize and believe in the opportunity which lies right ahead
And I shall make every effort to bring it to Quick realization!
I believe Shanghai is destined to become the greatest city of the East
And by keeping this pledge I know that it will fulfill its destiny(Asia Reality Brosure quoted in ibid, p 195)
The sentiments expressed in the poem were typical of the self-serving self-mythologization of the foreign community in Shanghai... Asia Realty was in fact an American company which had borrowed the very English image of the crusader, upon whose shield the 'pledge' was inscribed, and upon whose chest was the flag of St George. Recent works on the politics of Shanghai's foreigners in the 1920s have tended to portray the British as the villains of the piece, corrupting decent Americans like the employees of Asia Realty with their imperial ways.101 While decent Americans in Shanghai seem to have been quite corruptible, this was intentionally a British image, and in the propaganda and puffery published by Shanghailanders even more florid appeals to self-belief and to history were often to be heard.(p 194)
Contrary to received wisdom, the British laity in China were usually opposed to the missionary enterprise, fearing that its active confrontation with Chinese society would endanger all foreigners, and that missioneducated Chinese were leading the nationalist movement. Most Shanghailanders were still Christians though, and their sense of identity and values were as strongly influenced by Christian values and preconceptions... The nationalist revolution of 1923-8 was preceded and accompanied by mass anti-Christian propaganda and activism... Many [missionaries] fled to Shanghai. Protecting 'Shanghai' meant protecting a Christian identity too.
This self-image was also consciously masculine, and violent. Shanghailanders formed a society that was proud of its military past - such as the Battle of the Muddy Flat in 1854, when armed foreign merchants in the nascent Shanghai Volunteer Corps fought beside British troops to defeat Qing soldiers... The SVC enabled a large proportion of foreign men to be directly involved in the protection of the settlement.(p 196)
The twenty-eighth anniversary of the Battle of the Muddy Flat in 1882 saw the first of what became the annual inspections of the SVC by the assembled council members. In a pattern to be followed for the next six decades, the force marched from the Central Police Station near the Bund to the racecourse.'!" The annual Church Parade of the corps also involved route marches through the settlement, as did the ostentatious funerals with full military honours often given to SVC members. The Police Specials also did their share of marching;'!' These were public shows for the benefit of the participants, for the Shanghailander spectators, but perhaps most of all for the Chinese in the settlement, to remind them where military power lay.
This militarism was also manifested in the Shanghai Fascisti, a short-lived 'anti-Communist' organization of 1927-8, whose immediate programme included the formation of units to help the SMC defend the settlement.(p 197)
Imagining Shanghailander Community
As the Asia Realty pledge indicates, Shanghailanders were expected to believe in this identity, and they were certainly prepared to actively defend it when threatened. In lieu of the city-state denied them by the diplomats, they wrote and declaimed about their 'republic', which they 'imagined' - in Benedict Anderson's term - as meritocratic, egalitarian and democratic.
In the press, in books and pamphlets, in bad verse and worse prose, Shanghailanders circulated a constructed version of their history and society.(p 198)
Shanghailanders appropriated 'Shanghai' for themselves. The phenomenal growth of the port and later its industries was portrayed as solely their creation... Like the Boers in South Africa or the Deliaan planters in Sumatra, they saw themselves as having moved into 'empty' land.':" They had their founding legend - the mud-flats of the Huangpu river had turned to mercantile gold at their touch - and like many aspiring nations they had a founding victory, the Battle of the Muddy Flat. In this way they asserted their independence, self-reliance and communal spirit. Their public monuments on the Bund, the Margary Memorial, the monuments to Sir Robert Hart and to General Gordon's Ever-Victorious Army, all marked different facets of triumph over the Chinese, and celebrated distance from them. Shanghailanders heralded their fiftieth anniversary with a triumphant Jubilee celebration in November 1893: processions, parades and fireworks marked the event, and hymns to the city's cosmopolitanism were sung.(p 199)
By the twentieth century, the ...symphony orchestra and had become a key symbol in the struggle to maintain an identity as a 'civilized community', in the face of the financial and other problems facing the SMC in the 1930s. The band playing on summer's evenings in the Public Garden has often been the subject of florid reminiscence, but the ceremony of attendance - in 1919 often by over 2,000 residents - was symbolic of the wholesomeness of the community and also of its civilized nature. This summer evening ritual was a statement that Shanghailanders did not live in the 'sink of iniquity' that they had been accused of running as early as 1869 (by the duke of Somersetj.P" and that there was more to life in Shanghai than making money: theirs was a community that really existed; one in which the full range of human behaviour was present, and appreciated.(p 200)
The crisis of the mid-1920s forced the Council for the first time to treat its Chinese residents and ratepayers as proper residents and ratepayers. It promised to employ more of them and fewer Europeans, and to begin providing municipal education and health facilities... In May 1925, the SMC's image in the world press was hardly positive: it practised racially discriminatory policies affecting its parks and municipal employment; it failed to implement measures to counter widely publicized abuse of child labour; and it ineptly countered unarmed demonstrations with excessive armed force. Shanghailander ratepayers made things worse: they voted against the child labour by-laws and postponed measures to open the parks and council membership to Chinese.(p 200)
So successfully mastered was the habit of forgetting the importance of the Chinese community, and so distanced were Shanghailanders from social intercourse with their host community, that Chinese complaints about their lack of representation on the Council, and other discriminatory practices, were routinely countered with injunctions to 'like it or leave it'. The settlement was set aside for Western residence, ran the argument, and the Chinese had ultimately no right to be there, and certainly could not expect other rights and privileges.(p 202)
They believed that their very autonomy and their imagined identity served imperial interests... They saw themselves as forming a front line protecting the British empire's possessions in South-East and South Asia from Soviet Communism.(p 203)
Reasserting Diplomatic Control
Shanghailanders had lost the propaganda war by the end of 1927. The strictures of the Manchester Guardian's correspondent, Arthur Ransome, on the 'Shanghai Mind' and the 'Ulster of the East' won the day. These widely held contemporary beliefs were captured in the self-caricature of one of the Council members, who described Shanghailanders as 'Die-hards of the most virulent and bloodthirsty type; ... all suffering from a chronic species of Brain fever known as the 'Shanghai Mind' ... we spend our time deliberately insulting our Chinese friends and our money on the up-keep of huge orchestras to which no one ever listens'.(p 205)
Fearful of the betrayal of all they believed that they had built and maintained since the 1840s, Shanghailanders voiced their opposition to treaty reform in the China coast and domestic press, and organized themselves in various noisy interest groups, articulating their identity with force and clarity, not just in their words, but in their very capacity for organization.
The British Residents' Association (BRA), formed in 1931, seriously worried the diplomats. Its supporters were numerous and were largely drawn from the small treaty port people. Among its initial leadership were familiar names from the Shanghailander elite, but also from the more extreme community activists. The BRA was the logical result of the development and sophistication of the Shanghailander community. Its concerns did not extend to the broader issues of Sino-British relations. It articulated the fears of an independent society, British in origin, but rooted in Shanghai, in extraterritoriality, in the SMC and in the International Settlement.(p 207)
After 1937, and during the Pacific War, the BRA became a community support organization. 153 Settlers and expatriates subsumed their specific identities within a broader British, and imperial, identity. Unlike previous threats to their polity (in 1925 and 1927), Japanese aggression directly threatened Shanghailanders as well as wider British interests in China, and in East and South-East Asia. Shanghailanders moved their British and imperial identities into the foreground, in the confident belief that, even though they were expediently downgrading their local identity and kow-towing to the directions of the British diplomatic establishment, their identity was strong and coherent enough to survive this temporary alliance with the British state. They expected that their rights and privileges would be retained after the conflict, and continued to argue that their anomalous political position was actually their chief utility to the British empire.(p 208)
Conclusion
At once a distinctive community, the Shanghailander example also reminds us more generally of the ways in which new identities were constructed and formally and informally maintained by Britons who settled overseas: of the role of violence and of economics, and of the centrality of issues of race, gender, nationality and class.
In the institutions of the International Settlement, in their society's framework of taboos and conventions, and in media ranging from real estate leaflets to books of verse for children ('Oh, I LOVE Shanghai, don't you', finishes one rhyme accusingly), 156 Shanghailanders invoked their imagined but economically and socially tangible community. Many of them felt that they belonged there as much as did the Jiangsu and Zhejiang peasants who flocked to the city around the turn of the century. In organizations such as the BRA, Shanghailanders mobilized themselves to defend their position against the diplomats who by the late 1920s regretted their previous inaction, or who felt that Shanghailanders no longer served a useful purpose for Sino-British trade. Shanghailanders also struggled against public opinion, foreign and Chinese, which believed they had no right to be where they were.(p 209)
They saw themselves as progressive realists resisting attempts to send Sino-British relations back to the era when no extraterritoriality protected British subjects - and their Chinese colleagues, friends, tenants, workers and servants - from what Shanghailanders always regarded as arbitrary and cruel Chinese justice, from corruption, from militarists, from the expected relentless decline of the institutions they had created and the standards they believed they had established.(p 210)
Although diminishing numbers of Shanghai Britons can still be found at dinners and reunions in London and elsewhere, the Shanghailander community died in December 1941. It survives now only in the imagination.(p 211)
