Vanishing Metropolis

The first sting of winter hung over a dying city on the Soochow mud flats last week. Its International Settlement had been under Japanese military domination since August. Its tide of fleeing foreigners had reached flood last month with the evacuation of U. S. citizens; its foreign colony had shrunk to a scattering of bitter-enders: U. S. taipans unwilling to leave. White Russians and anti-Nazi refugees unable to leave, British nationals who had no place to go.

Every side of Shanghai's life breathed collapse. Automobiles, refrigerators, even baby carriages swamped the market as evacuees disposed of everything which could not be hastily packed up and carted off. The roulette tables at Joe Farren's, the Park Hotel's Sky Terrace. Sir Ellice Victor Sassoon's Tower Night Club had none of their old sparkle. Gangsters who had plundered weapons from dead soldiers on nearby battlefields turned Shanghai into a Little Sicily. With rice and coal under Japanese control, the bodies of starved Chinese were picked up in the streets by hundreds.

Industrial Shanghai was sinking fast. In the business not taken over by Japanese, import and export restrictions cut off raw materials and closed markets for the goods which could be manufactured. Cotton mills had reduced their output 30%. The tea and silk trades were at a standstill. U. S. oil companies were grimly bucking a Japanese attempt to establish a monopoly.

With splendid irony the Japanese military authorities posted a sign on the barrier blocking off the "badlands" of Western Shanghai: "People with evil intentions against the Japanese Army . . . are strictly forbidden to pass through here." Specifically forbidden was the man with the best possible reason for passing: Major S. R. Hunt, liaison officer between the British Consulate and the Japanese Army.

But if the Japanese had the white inhabitants of Shanghai in check, they still did not have good control of the Chinese. Puppet President Wang Ching-wei's Central China Daily News serves as an organ of Japanese propaganda. In it last week--between the lines of a gambling-house advertisement--a Chinese compositor had set the words: "Down with the traitor Wang Ching-wei!"

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