Hiding out in Shanghai – Ten Years in China or Ten Years in a California Jail?

This story caught me eye the other day – from November 1930….Would Shanghailanders tolerate an arsonist coming to live among their ranks??

Here’s what happened…

In San Francisco a man called Michael Walsh set fire to his neighbour’s house. He was arrested and convicted and sentenced to ten years in jail.

Walsh suggested to the judge the novel idea of going into voluntary self-exile in Shanghai for ten year – that is to say, he would leave America for Shanghai and promise not to return for a decade.

Bizarrely, the judge accepted the premise that ten years in Shanghai was the equivalent to ten years in the jug, agreed and ordered Walsh to catch the next boat to Shanghai.

The China Weekly Review and the Saturday Evening Post both slammed the Californian judge as idiotic. However, the trail runs cold there and I can’t find out whether Walsh ever did make it Shanghai.

But consider this if he did – Arriving at the end of 1930 he would have had a great ten year and then been able to go back to America at the end of 1940, thereby avoiding Pearl Harbor, the Japanese occupation of the city and later internment of allied nationals for the duration.

If Michael Walsh did make the trip, slip into the city under the newspaper’s radar and then keep himself-to-himself for a decade then he was a damn lucky fellow.