INTERNATIONAL: Shanghai Warning

Shanghai is two cities: one a sprawling, sinful Oriental beehive of nearly 3,500,000 Chinese, the other the 60,000 foreigners living along the Whangpoo in the snug, smug plutocracy of the International Settlement and the more raffish French Concession. Since the Japanese took over the Chinese city in 1937, the Settlement has been an island in a sea of intrigue and guerrilla warfare. Round it have prowled gunmen, tough, graft-hungry Japanese soldiers, the gangster bravos and police of the puppet Nanking Government.

The taipans, the “Great Managers” of Shanghai’s foreign businesses, know well that the Settlement has been living on borrowed time. In 1940 the Japanese virtually took over the French Concession, this year they bowed and hissed their way into control of the independent Government of the Settlement itself, dominated for nearly 100 years by the British. If war should come, the Settlement, guarded only by a handful of U.S. Marines and the small Shanghai Volunteer Corps, must fall into Japan’s lap.

Shanghai last week was no longer a city of easygoing riches and casual luxury. The Cathay, the smartest hotel on the Bund, into which Sir Victor Sassoon sank some of his Indian millions, was reduced to rationing its guests to two bath towels a week. Outside the Settlement, the Japanese guarded barbed-wire barricades, strong-armed any passer-by who they felt might be a Chinese “terrorist.”

Many British and U.S. citizens had already left the Settlement. Their firms had transferred their offices to Singapore, Batavia, Manila. Taking their places were hundreds of Germans who had fled from the Philippines and The Netherlands East Indies, and who did not get on well with Shanghai’s poverty-stricken colony of 18,000 anti-Nazi refugees. New and strange national quarrels flared up. In a dive on Blood Alley a group of White Russians drinking to Soviet success rioted bloodily with French sailors who objected.

The old China hands who were left took no comfort from their drinks at “the longest bar in the world” in the Shanghai Club, but they were determined to stay until the bitter end, until actual war made them move. For a storm warning they looked to Shanghai’s famed Fourth Marines. So long as the U.S. kept the Marines in Shanghai, die-hards reasoned they would be safe.

The 750 men of the Fourth Marines are all that remain of the Fourth Marine Regiment which was sent from Honolulu to protect U.S. property in 1937. In four years they have become a part of Shanghai life. Each week the Settlement turns out for their parade on the Racecourse and thousands of Chinese crowd the movie theater where they hold their Sunday services.

Free-spending and with plenty of money to spend since they are paid in U.S. dollars (each worth 20 Shanghai dollars), the Marines have been popular with the Chinese. They are insatiable curio buyers, far more polite than the bullying Sons of the Sun. The Chinese also like the Marine Band, follow it whenever it marches down Bubbling Well Road, skirling Oriental approximations of its marches.

But last week it seemed that the storm warning had finally gone up. Though U.S. authorities denied it, Shanghai rumor insisted that the Marines would move out by the end of the month. For the taipans it was the end of Shanghai.