Phil Carradice - The Shanghai Massacre

Chen Bo'er: actress, novelist and revolutionist.

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by

PEN AND SWORD MILITARY

an imprint of

Pen and Sword Books Ltd

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Copyright Phil Carradice, 2018

ISBN 978 1 526738 89 9

eISBN 978 1 526738 90 5

Mobi ISBN 978 1 526738 91 2

The right of Phil Carradice to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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This short glossary covers people, places and organizations that are important when reading the text. There are many others but these are the significant ones. Use it as a check list, an aide memoir, something to refer back to as the narrative unfolds.

Abbreviations

People

Places of note

Gather together any disparate group of people; take them from the pub or golf club, from the street or cinema auditorium, and ask them what they know about the Shanghai Massacre of 1927. In 90 percent of the cases, perhaps even more, the response will be blank faces and vacant stares. Shanghai what, Shanghai when? they will say. These days the massacre is a largely unknown, almost forgotten incident in history. It is easy to see why.

We have always needed villains in our livesreal ones like Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm and Adolf Hitler. Fictional characters like Dracula, Bill Sykes or Jaws. Without them our own lives seem puny and unfulfilled; villains are what make the world go around.

In the 1950s and 1960s there existed a thriving media-induced paranoia about the power and influence of one particular group of villainsor good baddies as we children used to call them. Mao Zedong, Chairman Mao as he was universally known: he and his warriors from the Peoples Republic of China became the new bogeymen of world politics.

Maos Communist hordes, it was threatened, would soon engulf all of western democracy. Drop the bomb, Mao saidor we were told he saidwe dont care. Therell still be enough of us left to pick up the pieces afterwards. Even for the most relaxed and objective of thinkers, people who would otherwise shrug their shoulders and turn back to their radio, book or newspaper that was something of an uncomfortable image.

Such dreadful warnings and dire prophesies suited the rabid anti-Communist ideals of postwar America. They fitted beautifully with the fears engendered by events like the growth of the Cold War, the building of the Berlin Wall, Chinese involvement in the Korean War and, perhaps worst of all, the McCarthy witchhunts back home in America.

Of course, with America happily ensconced as the new global leader and proponent of all things good, people believed what the US wanted them to believe. America was at the pinnacle of a new world, gleefully paddling its canoe against the stream and selling off all its many standards and ideals. It was inevitable that American attitudes quickly pervaded all of western culture.

It was cleverly done although, in many cases, not always so subtly achieved as the Americans might have liked. In childrens comics, in newspapers, in films, in television programmes, the message was exported to the world with all the force of a sledgehammer: Communism was a force for evil, an ideology that was preventing self-expression and, perhaps more importantly, was equally as hell bent on stopping honest men and women from making an honest buck. Subtle, clever or not, the world lapped it up.

The same media frenzy somehow managed to firmly engulf Maos Nationalist opponent Chiang Kai-shek, albeit from a different end of the spectrum. If Mao had become the bad guy, Chiang was suddenly imbued with the role of prospective martyr or victim. Mao bad, Chiang good. In the eyes of the west Chiang was quickly established as a noble freedom fighter, waging a hopeless battle against the onrushing power of the left-wing thinkers and politicians of the world: To the world Chiangs lean, trim, erect figure bespoke resoluteness and determination. His asceticism and personal austerity seemed to befit a man of dedication to the ideal of a China resurgent against insuperable odds.

The fear was that Chiang might always lose the battle. He was already on the back foot and if he lost, America would lose and, consequently, so would the world. That fearand the somewhat skewed understanding of the two sides then fighting for control of Chinahas somehow never quite left us.

The end of the Chinese Civil War in 1950 had seen the military defeat and withdrawal of Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalists to the island fortress of Taiwan some 110 miles off the eastern seaboard of China. Chiang was battered but unbowed and on Taiwan, not unlike the part-time soldiers of Britains Dads Army in 1940, Chiang and his force of two million Nationalists hurled defiance and rhetoric at their conquerors.