China Seas

by John Harris

  The damage that had been done was very obvious, but most public services were functioning normally now and the trams were running again, their connector rods hissing and throwing off sparks as they always had from the overhead line. The smell of cooking fish and bean curds was strong along the waterfront where the city of sampans and ferry boats were moored, while the Bubbling Well Road seemed to have its normal complement of nightclubs, gambling dens, bar girls, gangsters, shoe shine boys, typists and beggars, and the neon signs were on again among the Coca-Cola adverts. There were now also huge screens set up portraying the heroic resistance to the enemy, and the industrious Chinese, always willing to make a living from other people’s leavings, had long been at work among the wreckage of vehicles, ships and aeroplanes left by the Japanese, which they were busy reducing to their component parts for sale as spares.

  The Nantao and Hongkew districts, devastated by the Japanese aircraft in 1937, had never been rebuilt and the shabby streets of Chapei had become a wilderness of deserted, decaying tenements, tin-roofed cotton mills, factories, godowns, depots, and lopsided hoardings carrying advertisements for articles that were no longer available. The open drains were blocked by refuse and beggars lived in shanties made from packing cases and tarred paper, while huge rats inhabited the streets, moving about without any sign of fear.

  The most noticeable thing was the adulation of Chiang. The Kuomintang had managed to reoccupy the city and there were huge pictures of him everywhere, with the cinemas showing newsreels glorifying his deeds. Though the Americans were also featured, even sometimes the RAF, there was no mention, he noticed, of the Communists who had struggled so hard in the fight against the Japanese. When the war had ended, the Nationalist armies had closed round the city, determined to fill the vacuum left by the retreating enemy, aiming to gain control of their weapons before the Communists arrived. Chinese renegade troops and the warlord militias who had sided with the Japanese had switched sides yet again and their aim had been to keep the foreign businessmen out of the city. None of the airborne food supplies that had been dropped by the Americans had gone to the Communists, and those of them who had continued to oppose the Japanese to the very end among the ruined warehouses of Pootung had been wiped out like the Japanese they had been fighting. The Communists’ role in the victory had been written out of the script.

  Faintly saddened and depressed, Willie went to look at his old home, but it was empty, not damaged but stinking of human excrement and devoid of furniture, all of which, he learned, had been taken by the Japanese. The city that had once meant so much to him was now a sad place struggling to regain its position, and the only consolation came when he got down to business with Da Braga and George Kee and found that his assets hadn’t diminished a great deal. Under the circumstances, it seemed not only safer but a fair reward to the other two to withdraw and leave everything to them, and an arrangement was drawn up to everybody’s satisfaction.

  Elliott was under no delusions about his position and was planning by this time to forget the East and take Polly back to the States to start up afresh in California. ‘America gave too much support to Chiang,’ he said. ‘If the Commies gain control, we can expect short shrift.’

  ‘The British here,’ Willie pointed out dryly, ‘take the opposite view and feel they’re under no immediate threat. As far as I can make out, they’re not even considering the possibility of a Nationalist defeat.’

  ‘The British are going to have a big surprise,’ Da Braga smiled.

  ‘All the same,’ Kee said, ‘China will have to do business with Europe somehow. She can’t live without the West and it’s unthinkable that Europe will let her shut them out.’

  Willie wasn’t so sure.

  As 1949 arrived, Willie was again in Shanghai cleaning up the last of his affairs. The winter had been cold, with the temperatures below freezing, but there seemed to be a tentative thaw in attitudes towards the Communists. Realising how shaky Chiang’s hold was becoming, people were trying to do business with them.

  Da Braga shrugged it off. ‘A waste of time,’ he said. ‘The Communists just aren’t interested, and the Nationalists are watching for any approaches to them.’

  The Royal Navy was very much in evidence again with several of its ships, keeping a watchful eye on things now that the Communists were poised in force on the banks of the Yangtze. Nobody was really worried, however, because Mao Tse-Tung’s was a land army and shipping remained under the control of Chiang, so that the Shanghai taipans continued to feel their future would be secure.

  Willie remained unconvinced. ‘If I were you,’ he suggested to George Kee, ‘I’d get out. There’s a place for you in Australia if you want it.’

  Kee smiled. ‘I’ll stay here,’ he decided. ‘I’m not afraid and, like them, I’m Chinese and quite prepared to work with them in any way they wish.’

  Despite the general belief that the Communists would never gain control, it seemed they intended to have a good try, and it was felt that if they attacked it would be across the river between Nanking and Shanghai. Willie, however, assumed that the Nationalists, as usual, were being told what they wanted to hear.

  ‘Inland Chinese aren’t sailors,’ he was told at the Club.

  ‘The Yangtze runs through the whole of China,’ he said. ‘There must be a few of them who know what they’re about.’

  His opinion was met with smiles. ‘The river’s a mile wide south of Nanking where they’re concentrating. It’ll need more than a few inland sailors to get across there, and soldiers don’t know the local currents and shoals.’

  In the belief that soldiers could be trained and that there were peasants and fishermen who knew the river, he couldn’t resist taking a ferry upstream to have a look. The northern bank of the river was peopled by men and women who, to the peasants of the far north, lived in what was a life of luxury because there were fish and every inch of the marshy land along the banks was cultivated.

  The captain of the new Fan Ling II had noticed other things, too. ‘There are bamboo groves behind the swamps,’ he said. ‘And there are trees shielding the villages. Men can hide there.’

  It wasn’t hard to see that from every creek, every hidden inlet along the hundreds of miles of river a motley flotilla of river boats was moving south. They ranged from junks and sampans to narrow fishing boats and even rafts, and along the bank there was intense activity as everything that had been damaged by the retreating Nationalists was hurriedly repaired. Soldiers were even being given swimming lessons.

  It was quite clear something was about to happen because even from the deck of the Fan Ling it was possible to see with the aid of binoculars that there were dozens of boats hidden among the reeds and in the creeks. Stripped to the waist, soldiers were breaking down the dams that contained them and digging channels to connect them to the river. Behind them, women carried away the soil in wicker baskets, and the villagers were making strange-shaped waterwheels.

  ‘Paddle wheels actually,’ the steamer captain said. ‘They attach them to sampans and then even soldiers can make them go forward.’

  At the other side of the river the Nationalist armies waited, with their trenches, artillery emplacements, blockhouses and machine-gun positions. Nationalist gunboats were patrolling the river and, as Willie knew, their air force could be over the area in minutes.

  Three weeks later he had occasion to go upriver again. One of his ships, the Gemelta, was lying off the bund at Shanghai, waiting for a cargo of rice that had somehow got stuck just beyond Sin Kiang and he had to get it free. This time he noticed that the Communist guns were clearly visible and that triumphal arches had been built, all with red pennants fluttering from them. Even from the river he could see huge portraits of Mao Tse-Tung surrounded by more red banners, and could hear martial music from on shore.

  He freed the rice and saw it on its way and, convinced by this time that the Communists were finally about to get rid of Chiang’s corrupt regime for ever, he returned to S
hanghai, determined to persuade Da Braga and Kee to move. Neither would agree.

  ‘My children grew up here,’ Kee pointed out. ‘They’d be alien anywhere else.’

  ‘Better alien than dead,’ Willie said. ‘The Communists are about ready to move. It’ll be too late when they arrive.’

  Returning from the Gemelta by launch, he passed the naval moorings near Holt’s Wharf. One of the Royal Navy’s frigates, her code number, F116, painted on her side in large letters, was just preparing to leave for a tour of duty upstream. The weather was mild, almost like an English summer day as the ship cast off her moorings. Veils of mist hung over the surface of the water, the frigate’s bows pushing them aside as she began to move. For a while Willie watched as the ship slipped slowly past, then he gestured to the coxswain and the launch headed for the bund and Da Braga’s office.

  ‘Amethyst’s just left,’ he said.

  ‘She’ll be all right,’ Da Braga decided.

  ‘They’ve cut it bloody fine all the same, Luis. The Communists have made it clear they’re intending to cross in a full-scale offensive at any time. I reckon she’s got only a few hours to get past before they start.’

  During the afternoon one of the clerks bringing in coffee to them informed them that news had arrived that the Communists were about to start crossing the river.

  Willie looked up quickly. ‘Where’s the ship?’

  ‘Amethyst, sir? She’s anchored at Kiang Yin.’

  Da Braga gestured. ‘The Chinese navy doesn’t allow passage by night. There are always warships at Kiang Yin these days, Chinese as well as British.’

  At lunchtime the following day, Willie headed for the Club for a drink. The first words he heard were ‘Christ, first the bloody Japs, now the Chinks!’

  ‘What’s happened?’ he asked.

  The bastards have shelled the Amethyst. Near Low Island. There’ve been casualties.’

  Willie swallowed his drink quickly, cancelled his lunch, and headed for the News office. Details of the incident had already begun to arrive.

  ‘It was an unprovoked attack,’ he was told. ‘Amethyst was about her business.’

  ‘A bit ill-conceived at the moment,’ Willie said dryly. ‘Why wasn’t she sent a week earlier?’

  The newspaperman had heard that the Communists had started firing because the warship’s wash had smashed up their newly-built rafts. ‘More than likely they assumed that any ship moving along the river just now must be Nationalist,’ he said.

  Willie’s contacts told him a different story: The Nationalist naval units had been expected to defect.

  ‘Which means,’ Willie said, ‘that if the Communists thought the Amethyst was a Nationalist ship they’d assume she was doing a classic Chiang double-cross. No wonder they fired on her.’

  It didn’t take long to learn that nobody had thought it necessary to notify the Communists of the ship’s movements. By this time the newspaper office was noisy with telephones and shouts for messengers, and by midnight it was clear the incident had been deliberate, but that the British government had done nothing in the way of a protest beyond a request for a cease fire.

  ‘Request a cease fire?’ Willie said to Kee. ‘Is that all? “Stop your war of liberation, please, old chap, so the bloody navy can move.” George, I have a suspicion things are never going to be quite the same again out here. More than ever, I think you should leave.’

  By the following morning they learned the truth. The Amethyst had been hit several times, her captain mortally wounded and two gun turrets silenced. Eight men had been killed outright and thirty wounded and, with her steering disabled, making it impossible to manoeuvre, the ship was now aground. Attempts by the cruiser London to reach her had been thwarted. With fifteen men killed and twenty wounded, the London had had to turn back and the Amethyst was now virtually helpless. With wounded still on board and seventeen bodies waiting to be buried, the Communists were expected to complete their crossing of the river at any moment.

  Thomas seemed to know more about the incident than anyone. ‘There are sixty-six ratings and Chinese employees on Rose Island,’ he informed Willie. ‘They had to swim and they’re barefoot or in underclothing. They’re at a farm and they’re being looked after, but there are still about seventy-six unwounded still on board. They’ve lost their doctor, but the RAF’s managed to get one to them, and they’re trying to get a new skipper there, though so far he’s not been able to make contact. They expect the wounded to be put on a train to Shanghai very soon.’

  Willie didn’t ask where he’d got his information, knowing it must have come from some of his old Communist friends waiting in Shanghai for the take-over.

  ‘Didn’t anyone think it necessary to inform the Communists she was about to pass through their line of fire?’ he snorted.

  The omission was significant and it seemed that old habits died hard. ‘I don’t think we’ve started to understand the quality of this new lot,’ he said. ‘It makes you wonder, in fact, if we’re attuned to the twentieth century.’

  Two

  The first wounded from the Amethyst arrived the following day, dirty, ragged, unshaven and shocked, many of them barefooted and all looking thoroughly dejected.

  What dismayed the British in Shanghai about the affair was the timid reaction of the government in London. But, as Da Braga said to Willie, ‘It looks as if Mao means business and, with what’s at stake here, nobody feels it’s a good idea to quarrel with the next government of China.’

  Communist newspapers in the city crowed their delight at what they termed a victory and all the British authorities could say in reply was ‘We have the situation under control.’ The non-Communist newspapers were deliberately silent and unaccusing.

  Chiang’s reaction was predictably excuses and the declaration of martial law in the city, so that trigger-happy Nationalist soldiers no longer waved to passing European cars. They stopped them and insisted on examining them.

  They were just trying to digest this when George Kee appeared in the office with the newspapers and a letter he had received.

  ‘They’ve decreed that all firms and individuals with holdings in gold, silver and US dollars have to hand them over at once,’ he roared.

  Willie’s reaction was one of relief that he had long since transferred most of his holdings. Then he saw that Kee was still spluttering with rage.

  ‘What have you got, George?’ he asked.

  ‘A little,’ Kee growled. ‘And I’m keeping it. It’s Chiang’s advisers who are behind it. It’s obvious what’s happening. He’s pocketing it to transfer overseas against the time when he has to bolt.’

  The consternation at the Club was noisy. For the first time the Europeans were really beginning to understand that they were no longer lording it over a British possession but were living in a country ruled by a government indifferent to their wishes.

  The edict was being applied by one of Chiang’s sons in person with a severity that horrified. George Kee brought in a list of Chinese financiers and merchants who had been put to death for trying to dodge the law.

  ‘They were friends of mine,’ he said, shocked. ‘And there are dozens of others I know who see the only alternative is to give up their life savings.’

  ‘For worthless banknotes,’ Willie growled.

  Chiang was clearly growing nervous and soon afterwards, in a panic move to protect the crumbling Nationalist façade, suspected Communists were dragged out and shot, and photographs of the executions filled the newspapers. Da Braga was beginning to look nervous, but when Willie once again suggested that he and Kee should take advantage of the Sarth Shipping Line and transfer their homes lock stock and barrel to Australia, their reply remained as before. It appeared to be madness, but it didn’t seem so strange when the evacuation of Europeans was advised by the European authorities and there was an almost total lack of response.

  ‘China’s home,’ Da Braga said.

  Remembering the chaos in Singapore and de
termined to do anything he could to start things moving, Willie offered berths at half-price on Sarth ships to anyone who wanted them. Only a few people took them and when the time came to sail half of those backed down. He could only put it down to the fact that the recent Communist take-overs of Peking, Nanking and Tientsin had been accomplished without blood-shed. He knew how people were thinking. Why, they were saying to themselves, should they help to destroy Shanghai, the greatest prize of all, when they knew perfectly well that the Nationalists would never fight for the place?

  A few people left. The Europeans were tolerantly treated, but rich Chinese trying to smuggle out valuables had their tickets torn up by Nationalist officers and their passages cancelled. A few British businessmen, known to be involved on behalf of their governments or firms with attempting to contact the Communists, found it expedient to leave. Journalists believed to be antagonistic to what they considered a corrupt regime were arrested and imprisoned without trial and, though they were later released, they emerged shaken by the experience and far from unwilling to go. Even shipping was in a straitjacket with Chiang obviously about to disappear from the political scene, his navy – one or two old destroyers, a few gunboats and launches – had retreated downstream, determined to prevent supplies reaching the Communist forces. The blockade had been in force for some time at Tientsin and Amoy and other ports already controlled by the Communists, but Willie’s ships had continued to slip through, occasionally aided and abetted by officers of the Royal Navy who placed their ships between the Kuomintang ships and the merchant vessels endeavouring to do business with beleaguered British businessmen.