Shanghai – First Impressions No.11 – Vincent Sheean Gets to Shanghai, 1927

Fantastically Artificial – Vincent Sheean – 1927

Vincent Sheean (1899-1975) was only 27 when he arrived in China but already knew that China would be a stepping stone to greater things and had already cultivated the air of the ‘roving reporter deluxe’

Sheean himself pitched up in China in 1927 (when he was just 27) also intending to cover events in Guangzhou. He had dropped out of Chicago University and taken a job at the Chicago Daily News and the North American Newspaper Alliance. Despite his youth Sheean had an urbane air that allowed him to charm warlords, revolutionaries and diplomats alike. He walked into an early scoop few days after arriving when he secured an interview with Chiang Kai-shek in Nanjing. Following this he returned to Shanghai (a city he didn’t like for its all pervading atmosphere of colonial repression and self-declared superior foreigners) and proceeded to bag an interview with TV Soong, Madame Chiang’s brother and then China’s Finance Minister in the middle of cleaning house financially and establishing the Bank of China. Also deciding to follow the action to Hankou the prematurely greying Sheean (which helped his ability to be accepted by everyone) found the more politically committed leftists a rather dull bunch. He disliked Chen seeing him as ‘venemous’ as well as the overly serious Bill Prohme (who equally disliked Sheean for his bourgeoise tastes which included a fondness for Scotch and Egyptian cigarettes) but found Rayna more bearable – intellectually rather than physically – after the New York Times’s Frank Misselwitz introduced them. He described himself at this stage of his life as still really a ‘middle class dilettante’ and Rayna agreed with his assessment of himself calling him a fence-sitter event though he loosely adopted her socialism and became rather infatuated with Borodin, although his infatuation With Rayna was initially a rather non-committal way to enter a rather fun and loose social circle as opposed to a dedicated belief in the theory of Permanent Revolution. Still, what Sheean understood, despite his often flippant attitude (at that point in his life anyway) was that in 1927 Hankou was the crucible for those hoping for a Chinese revolution, particularly a Trostskyist version now their hopes of permanent revolution were fading in the Soviet Union as the brutal contradictions of that upheaval became increasingly apparent as Stalin consolidated power.

Despite his left wing position Sheean’s grasp of Chinese history is not always entirely free of the prejudices of the day – Shanghai existed before the British arrived and many in China would argue that the idea that the Qing Dynasty ‘did not want it’ and so gave it away is wrong; rather were forced to concede it at gun point as a consequence of their defeat in the Opium Wars and subsequent ‘unequal treaties’.

Revolution!

I arrived in China at the most fateful moment of the national revolution, that in which the victors surveyed the field and took stock of themselves. It was not a good moment for a journalist: from the professional point of view, I was too late. The capture of Shanghai and the sack of Nanking had been the high points of interest for the newspapers in America, and by the time I got to Shanghai the ‘story’, as we say in the language of the trade, was already fading into obscurity.

I returned to Shanghai, the atmosphere of which had already begun to seem fantastically artificial. Its inhabitants considered that they had built Shanghai out of nothing, and, in the most obvious sense, they had; the site of the city had been a worthless mudbank, given to the British, Americans and French because the Chinese did not want it. The British, Americans and French had reclaimed the land, built upon it with increasing pompousness, and now regarded it as an exhibition of their own superiority to the despised natives of China. It never seemed to cross their minds that every penny spent upon Shanghai had been wrung from the Chinese in one way or another, either by the exorbitant profits of foreign trade – the exploitation of what is called an ‘undeveloped market,’ which is to say a market made up of people who do not known they are being cheated – or by the direct exploitation of Chinese labor. The second source of wealth was more recent, and its profits had been enormous. The British, Americans and Japanese were able to employ Chinese people of all ages in their factories for any number of hours a day, for wages so small that they barely supported a half-starved and ever-threatened life.

The coolie population, which never had enough to eat and often no place to sleep, was easy prey for manufacturers who wished to make the modest profit of a thousand per cent. Against any mention of these unpleasant facts the Shanghai foreigner, sipping his cocktail reflectively in the cool recesses of one of his clubs, would reply with a number of statements that seemed to him irrefutable. He would say that many Chinese of the middle class, compradors, had grown rich wit the foreigners; that conditions in the British and American factories wee not so bad as in the Japanese, and conditions in the Japanese factories not so bad as in the occasional Chinese establishments; that the prosperity of Shanghai benefited all China; and that, in any case, the Chinese were an inferior race, had never been used to anything but starvation and overwork, misery and oppression, and consequently ‘don’t feel anything – not, at least, as we do.’ I never met anybody in Shanghai who revealed the slightest feeling of shame, the slightest of consciousness of degradation, in this taking advantage of human misery in its most appalling forms. On the contrary, the Shanghai foreigners felt virtuous because they gave their coolies a slightly better chance of survival than did the worst of the Chinese employers. Shanghai saw itself as the benefactor of all China, and was horrified at the rising Chinese demand for better conditions of life and a recognized share of the spoils.

Vincent Sheean, Personal History, (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1934, Boston)