Xiao Bai - French Concession

Horns tooted in the yard. A car was ready for Consul Baudez’s wife. Once, when he was in a good mood, Baudez had told Sarly that there were three beautiful women in the villa. His wife and daughter were two of the three, of course. The third must be the half-naked marble statue in the center of the pond, guessed Sarly, but luckily he didn’t say that aloud. No, the third was the pond itself, which narrowed on both ends but widened in the middle, curving outward like a woman’s hips. Consul Baudez does have conventional taste in women, thought Sarly. Did that make the camphor tree bending toward the surface of the pond a lecher? One of its branches was pointing at the woman’s breasts.

“The gangs in Shanghai tipped us off that these people aren’t Communists,” Mr. Tseng from Nanking insisted.

“The Green Gang is a sworn enemy of the Communists, just like you.”

“Speak for yourself!” Tseng retorted.

“Indeed. Maybe the Concession Police should take more responsibility for combating the Red Threat in Shanghai. We can’t let Nanking do all the work.” Like all Corsicans, Lieutenant Sarly had a way with words. The Nanking investigators were temporarily silenced.

“Nanking overrelies on brute force to suppress dissident parties. That won’t work nowadays, but your Kuomintang politicians are stuck in the past. They don’t know how to govern a modern city. When the Communists in Kiangsi executed one of your men and set his head afloat on a raft on the Kan River, I heard you shot a bunch of jailed Communists in Nanking and Shanghai to retaliate.” Unlike the other Shanghailanders, Sarly read Chinese newspapers and took a real interest in what the Chinese thought. The poetic headline had lodged itself in his mind: Silently the waves bear him home.

“Shanghai could be a model city for China, a modern city where law and order prevail,” Sarly concluded. Only Mr. Blair, attending the meeting as a diplomatic policy observer for the British government, approved of these abstract musings. Blair listened dutifully, but his eyes looked weary and sad.

“The chaos in Shanghai is all your doing. You only want to appease the Communists so you can make money off the Chinese. Half the problem is that you restrict Nanking’s freedom to maneuver in the concessions. The reason why the Communists are based in Shanghai is that you’re too shortsighted to crack down on them!” a young man from the investigative commission said indignantly.

“Sun Yat-sen was right about modern China. We’re not ready for democracy yet, and there has to be a period of political tutelage during which the Kuomintang governs. But one day we will have this city under control, maybe when the Greater Shanghai Plan has succeeded.” The young man sounded a little defeated.

They had strayed from the topic of the meeting. These larger questions would have to be resolved by politicians in London, Paris, or Nanking. Commander Martin said it was time they returned to the matters at hand. If Nanking’s people were permitted to move freely in the concessions, they would contribute more to the intelligence exchanged among all parties, Mr. Tseng said as the spokesman for the investigative commission.

On behalf of the two foreign governing authorities in Shanghai, Lieutenant Sarly and Commander Martin negotiated with the Nanking investigators regarding the carrying of firearms, wireless frequencies, and special license plates, and permitted them to set up an operation base in the concessions. But Sarly reminded them that Nanking would have no authority whatsoever to make arrests within the territories of the concessions.

The meeting became more amicable. Whereas all the parties disagreed heartily in principle, negotiating on concrete matters helped them to find common ground. Under the current arrangement, Nanking submitted names to the concession authorities, which would then carry out the arrests. Tseng pointed out that the delay often caused them to miss their best opportunities for interrogations. He suggested that Nanking be allowed to make arrests within the concessions, on condition that they report all names to the concession authorities retrospectively, and share the intelligence so obtained with all parties. But Lieutenant Sarly insisted that the consular jurisdiction of the concessions must be protected. He warned that if Nanking made any unilateral arrests, the French Concession Police would be compelled to view them as kidnappings.

Commander Martin broke the ensuing silence. It is true that the Nanking authorities have a home advantage in dealing with Chinese matters, he said. Perhaps we could agree to call these operations neither arrests nor kidnappings. Let us say the Nanking commission were to invite a couple of individuals to discuss something at their office, eyewitnesses agreed that the parties in question were not coerced into doing so, and the police forces of the concessions were given a reasonable explanation of the circumstances. Let us say that the results of this discussion would be made available in their entirety to the police, and within a certain time, say forty-eight hours, these individuals would be turned over to the police authorities of the respective concessions, and lawfully tried or extradited. I would have no objection to that.

Sarly insisted that all interrogations would have to be carried out in the presence of an observer appointed by the French Concession Police or the Shanghai Municipal Police. Eventually they agreed that written notice of Nanking’s actions would have to be given directly to the Political Section within twenty-four hours, upon which the police would send an observer. During those twenty-four hours, the Nanking investigators would be free to discuss matters of interest with their subjects in a friendly manner.

“So who are you planning to ask out on a friendly date?” Sarly brought the discussion to a close with what he intended to be a lighthearted question.

Unlike the other Chinese, who were always too serious around Westerners, Mr. Tseng did have a sense of humor. “As we agreed, whoever they are, we will notify their parents within twenty-four hours of issuing an invitation.”

“That’s enough time to get someone pregnant,” Colonel Bichat added cheerfully.

The Nanking investigators filed out of the temporary meeting room, a side room on the second floor adjoining the large living room. After these five bookish Chinese men had made their way across the balcony and down the exterior stairs onto the lawn, and their black sedan car had driven through the gate, Commander Martin cried: “Did they have to send all that many people to one meeting? Are there really too many people in China?”

Consul Baudez appeared only after the Chinese had left. His position was equivalent to that of a colonial governor, which meant he remained detached from most practical affairs. He handed Mr. Blair a memo his secretary had just written, to be passed on to the British consul. It had been drafted in accordance with Lieutenant Sarly’s suggestions.

“We have reliable information that the underground organization we have been discussing is acquiring a more dangerous arsenal of weapons. We do not yet have a full picture of their movements. But this constitutes concrete evidence in favor of our hypothesis that Shanghai is turning into a battleground for the struggle between the Communists and the Kuomintang, which would affect our interests here. The French government has committed to redeploying some French troops from Hanoi to Shanghai, to address recent developments. We urge other European governments with strong interests in the concessions to do the same.” Sarly hoped chiefly to influence the romantic Mr. Blair, who acted as an observer for the Foreign Office. He was now infamous for his way with women in the Concession. Surely he could not object to doing something for the men?