The Much Troubled Alliance: Us-China Military Cooperation During the Pacific War, 1941-1945

Hsi-Sheng Ch’i’s The Much Troubled Alliance is a steep price, but if you’ve got a nice library that might solve the problem….It’s a well-trod subject but the author claims to have examined Chinese documents on the relationship not previously used much….

The topics of World War II and US-China relationship have been of much interest to academics and general public alike. This book challenges the conventional wisdom that has been produced on the topics over the past 50 years and offers the readers a new and balanced treatment of the topics. The scope of this book covers all the major political-military events from the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941 to the victory over Japan in August 1945.The scholarship in this subject area has long suffered from one serious flaw, i.e., unbalanced treatment. Although the leading works in the English language have aspired to conform to high professional standards, their intrinsic limitation is that they have only consulted English language materials, but have virtually failed to consult Chinese language materials. This phenomenon is unsatisfactory since wartime US-China alliance was a highly complicated “bilateral” relationship which can only be adequately narrated and analyzed by taking into account both countries’ data and perspectives. This book addresses this glaring deficiency by employing a large amount of original Chinese source materials, but also by discovering a considerable amount of new English language materials as well as subjecting other often-used English materials to a close scrutiny.This book enables the readers to take a completely fresh look at that important period of US-China relations.

A Very Knowledgeable Book Club Studies Carl Crow’s 400 Million Customers

The local book club of Denison, Texas chose Crow’s 400 Million Customers as its book choice for April 1947 (Carl was sadly deceased for 2 years by then). An interesting group we can assume as John Clift had been editor and written the “Yank About China” column for Stars and Stripes (the US Army newspaper) from Shanghai for several years before returning to America and his White Russian wife, Kyra Kuprianovitch Clift (born in Harbin in 1923 and her obituary here) worked for Time-Life in Shanghai – Time-Life and Stars & Stripes shared the same office in Shanghai after WW2 and, I believe, there was a company car shared by the Stars and Stripes Editor and the Time-Life correspondents …The Stars and Stripes was available in Shanghai from a newsstand by the Customs Jetty, every day except Sundays. I think (though it moved around a bit) that the office was at No.17 Bund, the offices of the North-China Daily News but also where many other publications were headquartered. It must have been a fascinating discussion….

How Some Show Girls Stuck it to the Nazis in 1936 Shanghai

The A.B. (Abe) Marcus Show was once a well known “Ziegfeld-like” touring company of showgirls (mostly American and British) that played around the world on long and grueling tours taking American burlesque and vaudeville global. Their Far East tours took in China, as well as destinations as disparate as Japan, Fiji, the Straits Settlements, Singapore, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Java, Borneo, India, New Zealand and Australia before heading to South Africa, up to the West Indies, and then across the United States and Hawaii. Legend has it that Abe Marcus was a New England dry cleaner who got stuck with a load of theatre costumes nobody ever came to collect so decided to start his vaudeville show. Their shows took inspiration (loosely – both in style and clothing) from all these places. They also recruited dancers in all the locations too – by the time they got to America in 1936 the show boasted several “Soo-chow Gals”. They were always running close to politics wherever they went – they were banned from landing in Japan in 1939, being considered too much of a display of “Occidental culture” for the authorities in Tokyo and Osaka. Their shows were invariably sell-outs, themed around “L’Orient”, “La Vie Paris” and the like but always with the headline “GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS“. The traveling company was usually composed of seventy-five people, and played two, two and a half hour performances per day. A few later stars, notably Danny Kaye and Fat Jack Leonard, started out with the Marcus troupe.

In 1936 the Abe Marcus show “La Vie Paris” hit Shanghai – sadly I’m not sure where it played – but it was a sell out. But there’s always one curmudgeon. And this time it was the German Consul in Shanghai, the rather dour Hermann Kriebel, who complained. It seems one of the Marcus showgirls came out on stage in a rather militaristic helmet the committed Nazi took offense to. It was slightly odd that Kriebel should object to militarism as he was one of the first members of the Nazi Party, had participated in the 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch and was a German delegate at the peace negotiations in Paris in 1919 where his infamous parting shot to the press was “see you in 20 years time!” It seems things also got a bit touchy in Hong Kong (though this was somewhat later on a tour in 1939) when a clown appeared on stage with an umbrella – to anyone who’d ever seen a newsreel an umbrella and a British accent meant that old appeaser Neville Chamberlain.

Hermann Kriebel – confirmed Nazi and German Consul to Shanghai

The Abe Marcus girls line up…

L’Orient Restaurant, St Giles High Street, WC2

My thanks to Rob Baker, a great poster of old pictures of London, for this image of St Giles High Street in 1956. This part of the street no longer exists as it is now under the site of Centre Point by the junction of Tottenham Court Road and Oxford Street’s eastern end. This end of St Giles High Street went and now probably many other similar streets that did survive in that area – Denmark Street, the old Tin Pan Alley, for instance – are also slated for partial or full demolition. This photo was taken by Allan Hailstone and is included in his book London: Portrait of a City.

Anyway our subject of interest is the L’Orient Restaurant. The sign indicates that it was an Indian restaurant though “L’Orient” is not a common name for an Indian restaurant. And so it seems L’Orient was somewhat more than an Indian restaurant. L’Orient was at No.56-59 St. Giles High Street (“Telephone: TEM 5717; Close to Tottenham Court Road tube; Open Daily for Lunches and Dinners”). The restaurant certainly did specialise in Indian food and claimed, in its adverts, to be “noted for curries and sweet dishes”. However, the restaurant also sold some Chinese and English dishes. Quite when they opened and finally closed I’m not sure. They were certainly open in 1947 when the restaurant made the New Statesman’s annual weekend review of restaurants.

The restaurant was also described as a “Linguists’ Rendezvous” in 1950 – i.e. a place where members of the Linguists’ Club went and met up. The Club, which was launched in 1932 and lasted until the early 1970s, acted as a meeting place and school for linguists, including interpreters, translators, language students, and other members who merely wanted to practice their language skills.

If anyone knows anything else – especially happens to have a menu? I’d love to hear.

It Won’t Be Long Now: The Diary of a Hong Kong Prisoner of War

Just out from Hong Kong’s excellent Blacksmith Books…..

It Won’t Be Long Now: The Diary of a Hong Kong Prisoner of War

by Graham Heywood

Japan marched into Hong Kong at the outbreak of the Pacific War on December 8, 1941. On the same day, Graham Heywood was captured by the invading Japanese near the border while carrying out duties for the Royal Observatory. He was held at various places in the New Territories before being transported to the military Prisoner-of-War camp in Sham Shui Po, Kowloon. The Japanese refused to allow Heywood and his colleague Leonard Starbuck to join the civilians at the Stanley internment camp.

Heywood’s illustrated diary records his three-and-a-half years of internment, telling a story of hardship, adversity, and survival of malnutrition and disease; as well as repeated hopes of liberation and disappointment. As he awaits the end of the war, his reflections upon freedom and imprisonment bring realisations about life and how to live it.

“Accounts of life in the internment camp differed widely. One friend, an enthusiastic biologist, was full of his doings; he had grown champion vegetables, had seen all sort of rare birds (including vultures, after the corpses) and had run a successful yeast brewery. Altogether, he said, it had been a great experience … a bit too long, perhaps, but not bad fun at all. Another ended up her account by saying ‘Oh, Mr. Heywood, it was hell on earth’. It all depended on their point of view.”

Heywood’s highly positive attitude to life is food for thought for all of us today, in the midst of increasing consumerism but decreasing spiritual satisfaction. We have enjoyed freedom and an abundance of material wealth in the 70 years since the end of the Pacific War, but we may not always recognise our true good fortune.

Royal Asiatic Society Beijing – 20/10/15 – “WORLD LITERATURE IN CHINESE CINEMA”

Please join the Royal Asiatic Society China, Beijing Branch, at the Bookworm for an Oct. 20 talk by Isabel Wolte on the adaptation of world literature classics in Chinese film.

WHEN: Tuesday, October 20th, 7:30-9:00 pm
WHERE: THE BOOKWORM, 4 Sanlitun Nanlu
HOW MUCH: RMB 75 for members of RASBJ or Bookworm, RMB 85 for non-members
RSVP: order@chinabookworm.com and write “Oct. 20 RASBJ talk” in the subject header. To pay online go to https://yoopay.cn/event/58538011

THIS EVENT IS CO-HOSTED BY THE BOOKWORM

Since the early 20th century, Chinese filmmakers have adapted masterpieces by world literary figures — from Guy de Maupassant to Oscar Wilde, from Nicholas Ostrovski to Gabriel Garcia Marquez — for their domestic audience. Foreign tales were appropriated, combined with Chinese cultural conventions and altered as deemed necessary for moral or political reasons. Dr. Isabel Wolte presents examples of this creativity, starting in the 1920’s. The talk will be moderated by long-time China correspondent Laura Daverio

MORE ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Austrian scholar Dr. Isabel Wolte has been watching and studying Chinese cinema for more than three decades. She is Executive Director of her own company, China Film Consult and regularly teaches and publishes on Chinese cinema. She has worked as location manager and assistant director for several Austrian and German film productions in China. In addition to having been the first non-Chinese student at the Beijing Film Academy on World Literature in Chinese Cinema, where she obtained her PhD, Isabel also has a BSc in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence and an MSc in Ancient Philosophy (University of Edinburgh).

Stalin and the Struggle for Supremacy in Eurasia

Alfred J. Rieber’s new study on Stalin and the Struggle for Supremacy in Eurasia contains some interesting comments on Xijiang and Manchuria as well as the nudging up of the USSR against Republican China and competition with Tokyo for influence in China…

This is a major new study of the successor states that emerged in the wake of the collapse of the great Russian, Habsburg, Iranian, Ottoman and Qing Empires and of the expansionist powers who renewed their struggle over the Eurasian borderlands through to the end of the Second World War. Surveying the great power rivalry between the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan for control over the Western and Far Eastern boundaries of Eurasia, Alfred J. Rieber provides a new framework for understanding the evolution of Soviet policy from the Revolution through to the beginning of the Cold War. Paying particular attention to the Soviet Union, the book charts how these powers adopted similar methods to the old ruling elites to expand and consolidate their conquests, ranging from colonisation and deportation to forced assimilation, but applied them with a force that far surpassed the practices of their imperial predecessors.

Tracking Down Shanghai’s Zeitgeist Bookshop

What do we know about the old Zeitgeist Bookshop in Shanghai? And why would we want to know more? Well, the Zeitgeist Bookshop was operating from at least the late 1920s from premises near Soochow (Suzhou) Creek on 130 North Soochow Road (now Suzhou Road North).Or maybe it was somewhere else – the American Communist journal New Masses lists the store at 130 North Soochow, but The People’s Tribune, published by the China United Press in 1933 gives the address as Bubbling Well Road. Of course, what I don’t have but would like is a photograph which would settle the matter?

The Zeigeist was run by a German woman (though Rewi Alley in his autobiography says she was Dutch – but he was 90 when he wrote that!), Fraulein Irene E.I. Wiedemeyer (or Wedemeyer, or sometimes Weitemeyer) and her younger sister. At some point Frau Wiedemeyer married Wu Shao-kuo, a Chinese communist party member she had met in Germany some time around 1925, but always retained her German name. At some point it appears Frau Wiedemeyer studied at the Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow around 1926-27. She was, according to the Shanghai Municipal Police, a member of the Noulens Defense Committee (a notorious comunist spy case) and the Society of Friends of the U. S. S. R. in Shanghai. As to what else we know about Wiedemeyer? she was a German Jew with, according to Ruth Price, a biographer of Agnes Smedley, “freckled skin, milk-blue eyes and unmanageable red hair.” (though how she knows this is not entirely clear as the source isn’t footnoted).

Why should we be interested? The Zeitgeist was generally regarded throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s as a “clearing house” for communist information. Frau Wiedemeyer had links to the Chinese communist movement as well as to the NKVD (later KGB) operating in the city during the decade through her close friendship with Mrs VN Sotov, the wife of the Head of the Russian News Agency TASS in Shanghai. As well as TASS/Comintern agents and Chinese communists, Hotsumi Ozaki, the Japanese informant in the Soviet spy ring connected to Richard Sorge frequented the shop. It was at the Zeitgeist that Ozaki met Agnes Smedley, the American communist. Sorge himself also made contact with Smedley at the Zeitgeist while Roger Hollis (later Mi5 director and suspected Soviet spy), American communist Harold Isaacs, the South African Trostskyist Frank Glass (who of course fell out with the Stalinists running the bookshop) and George Hatem (Ma Haide), the American doctor turned communist, also visited.

The Zeitgeist was in fact the Shanghai branch of the Zeitgeist Buchhandlung group of Berlin, a chain of shops that distributed pro-Soviet books and materials. Funding for the chain came from the coffers of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers in Moscow, a communist front organisation, and was arranged by the Comintern’s Willi Muenzenberg. The shop seems to have remained in operation until about 1933 or slightly long after which the Nazis in Germany cut off her contacts with the German Communist Party who supplied her with materials and books.

What did the bookshop look like? we only really have one or two descriptions and these are that it was about twelve by eighteen feet in size and poorly lit. Despite this rather small location the Zeitgeist did sell books in at least three languages (German, Chinese, Russian) and have the occasional art exhibition – for instance, an exhibition of new German graphic art in 1932.

Frau Weidemeyer was not to be put off. She visited Europe in late 1933 and returned to Shanghai in September 1934 to open a new bookshop in a new location, 410 Szechuan Road, this time as the Shanghai representative of the International Publishers company, an affiliate of the American Communist Party.