A Dark Shanghai Story of Spy vs. Spy
By STEVEN SCHWANKERT
(Virtual China News, Dec. 7) After the outbreak of the Pacific War in the late 1930s, intelligence gathering in Shanghai turned from a broad activity aimed at foiling communism and social disruption to top-level spying. As the war spread, citizens of the Allied nations living in Shanghai were often prone to collaborate with the Japanese, either passively or actively.
More surprising, the Allies and the Axis powers spent as much time spying on each other as they did on the enemy. Britain wanted to avoid dragging Japan into the larger conflict, so the instructions given to British citizens living in Shanghai were never exact in stating what specific acts constituted collaboration. Shanghai therefore continued to do business as usual with the Japanese even after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, when war was officially declared.
Bernard Wasserstein's new book, "Secret War in Shanghai," takes a detailed and often chilling look at this cloak-and-dagger Shanghai of the 1930s and early 40's. Incredibly, the book casts the city in its pre-Liberation days in even darker tones than its stereotype as a pit of international intrigue, gambling, seamy sex and drug smuggling.
Sexual Habits
The book achieves this, first, by documenting acts of espionage carried out by the various powers in the International Settlement that is nothing short of shocking. This was made easier for the author by the fact that the Shanghai Municipal Police, a largely Anglo-Saxon coalition empowered to keep order in the Settlement, were scrupulous record keepers. They documented every scrap of information ever gathered on their subjects, from their sexual habits and personal histories to full lists of their known and suspected involvements.
Wasserstein is utterly balanced in his reporting, with the upshot that no sector of Shanghai's international community is excused from their nefarious activities or shown favor. If the reader begins to sense, say, that the British are getting away easily, that is just about the time the author brings out documented examples of British incompetence and treachery. All the foreign communities in Shanghai - the French, Germans, Americans, and Japanese - commit the same sorts of crimes, treating their concessions like little fiefdoms.
Bogus Aristocrat
The book paints compelling individual portraits of charlatans, murderers, and thieves. There's Eugene Pick, the Russian-born gangster who collaborates with the Japanese and, when not spending his evenings at the theater, is conspiring to have his rivals bumped off. "Count" du Berrier is a bogus aristocrat and genuine arms dealer available to the highest bidder. "Princess" Sumaire, another false member of a royal family, is a social-climbing Indian imposter who lived the high life and traded sex for influence, first among Western expatriates, and later, among the Japanese.
Sandwiched between these life stories of intrigue, "Secret War" offers an account of expatriate life in Shanghai that is amply documented at a rare level of detail. The description of Shanghai's various newspapers and radio stations operated by the Settlement's nations and entrepreneurs is especially fascinating.
Missing from this otherwise fine work of research is a map of old Shanghai that would have been helpful. Without it, the reader has no idea which concessions abutted the others, or the relation of the Chinese portions of Shanghai to the International Settlements. Wasserstein's tendency to use French and German phrases without offering a translation is also irksome. Aside from these niggles, "Secret War in Shanghai" is gripping non-fiction, with a novel-like narrative that's all too true.
"Secret War in Shanghai" is available at Amazon.com
