French Concession
Page 35
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?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
XIAO BAI was 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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CREDITS
Cover design by Keith Hayes
Cover photograph © Imaginechina/Corbis
COPYRIGHT
FRENCH CONCESSION. Copyright © 2015 by Xiao Bai. English-language translation © HarperCollins. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Originally published in China in 2011 by Shanghai 99 Readers Culture Co Ltd. under the title Concessions.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Xiao, Bai
[Zu jie. English]
French concession / Xiao Bai ; translated from the Chinese by Chenxin Jiang.—First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-06-231345-4 (hardcover)—ISBN 978-0-06-231355-3 (pbk.)—ISBN 978-0-06-231356-0 (ebook)
EPub Edition JULY 2015 ISBN 9780062313560
I. Title.
PL2967.7.O2738Z8213 2015
895.13’6—dc23
2014037081
15 16 17 18 19 OV/RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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