Xiao Bai - French Concession

III.

There are no other documents concerning Hsueh apart from that photograph. Given his position within the Political Section, he would certainly have been able to expunge any record of his own illegal activities. But traces thereof can be found in the collection of personal essays published during the 1980s by retired special agents who escaped to Taiwan with the Kuomintang government. They would have been censored by the Taiwanese authorities, and the deleted portions must exist in an archive somewhere. The clues they contained led me to the records kept by the Tokkô, the Japanese secret police. In them, I found an affidavit written in French and signed with a flourish by our friend Lieutenant Sarly, testifying that he gave Hsueh permission to make contact with the White Russian woman. The rapid progress of Hsueh’s career and increases in his salary can be deduced from police salary records. He received many awards, including a medal from a visiting admiral of the French Navy, and his signature appears on many search warrants and police reports.

IV.

During the spring and summer of 1931, Ku’s assassination squad appears frequently in Shanghai’s Chinese and foreign newspapers. Although certain details of these stories were probably invented by their writers, in aggregate they show that Ku’s group made a big splash in Shanghai. Diplomatic correspondence of the time has now been declassified, and several letters to London and Paris from consuls in Shanghai (approved or forwarded by their respective embassies in Beijing) allude to “frequent assassinations in the concessions” and a certain “Free City” plan. They were often mentioned only in the notes appended to an official report, as was standard diplomatic practice for dealing with sensitive subjects at the time.

V.

As regards the Shanghailanders’ speculative scheming (the policy of appeasement practiced by European powers in the 1930s being nothing more than the logical culmination of such schemes): in Shanghai, the Kuomintang government’s urban development plan, known as the Greater Shanghai Plan, centered on the northeast of the city, putting it at odds with the plans of foreign real estate developers. The latter aimed to increase the value of land to the south and west of Shanghai by building roads beyond the borders of the concessions. After the Japanese attacks during the January 28 incident in 1937, the Greater Shanghai Plan was literally reduced to rubble. Not long after the war, roads were rapidly built to the west of the concession and large amounts of capital for new roads, apartments, commercial buildings, entertainment venues, and high-end spas poured in. It goes without saying that there is no evidence to support any inferences these facts might suggest.

VI.

Ku Fu-kuang, Lin P’ei-wen, and Leng Hsiao-man’s activities scarcely appear in these documents. They must be the province of other, highly classified files. But perhaps if the author were to point out that this gives him all the more room for invention, the gentle reader would not blame him?

XIAO BAIwas born in 1968 in Shanghai and began writing in 2009. He quickly made a name for himself as a writer of fiction and essays. His first book, a collection of essays entitled Horny Hamlet (2009), was a prize winner in China. His debut novel, Game Point , followed in 2010, and French Concession , his second novel, appeared in 2011 in China. It is being widely translated and is his first book to appear in English. In 2013, his novella Xu Xiangbi the Spy won the Tenth Annual Shanghai Literary Prize. Xiao Bai lives in Shanghai.

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