Unveiling city's exciting past of revolutionaries
James Bond creator Ian Fleming once called Richard Sorge “the most formidable spy in history.”
The “red James Bond” is best known for having gone undetected for nine years in Tokyo, and alerting the Soviets to Hitler’s plan to attack.
But it was in Shanghai, where he arrived in 1930 and spent two years, that Sorge recruited Hotsumi Ozaki, later one of his most important informants in Japan. The network he developed in Shanghai covered informants from more than 10 countries.
“Shanghai was called the ‘Oriental Casablanca,’ but intelligence activities in Shanghai then was more thrilling than the Morocco city that was a net of spies in World War II. Casablanca was the ‘Western Shanghai’,” Su Zhiliang, history professor at Shanghai Normal University, told Shanghai Daily.
“Shanghai had all it required to be a metropolis, so whatever was trending in the world was resonated here quickly.”
Those hot new trends were not only obvious in the real-life espionage, or thriller movies on silver screens in the city that didn’t sleep, it also included internationalism, revolution, communism, charity and architecture, among others. Some of these traces are still being unearthed today, while those involving, Chinese or expatriate, are still remembered.
Last year, Su discovered the old site of the East Asia Secretariat of Communist International (Comintern) at 177 Changzhi Road (known then as Seward Road) in Hongkou District. It was set up by Grigori Voitinsky in 1920, about one year after Comintern was established in 1919.
“Shanghai was not only the birthplace of the Communist Party of China, but also the center of the international communist movement in East Asia,” Su explained, adding the secretariat in Shanghai had three branches covering China, Japan and Korea.
According to Su, Lenin had a great interest in China, former Soviet Union's largest neighbor. Voitinsky was sent in 1920 to observe what was going on here.
He first went to Beijing, where he met some of the most influential Chinese intellectuals who became founding members of the Communist Party of China a year later. But the capital was strictly controlled and there was little space for activities.
Then he traveled to Shanghai, a place he evaluated as “the center of China’s modern industrialization, with the most concentrated worker class, and many social groups who are either sympathetic to or supportive of communist.”
Under the cover of a journalist, he stayed and set up the secretariat in Shanghai.
Su listed four unique factors that made Shanghai the fitting place to establish the Party and to have gathered people, including many communists, from all over the world.
First, it was a metropolitan with quick information and convenient traffic to other places. The culture industry – education, publication, newspapers and journals – were well developed. Many top Chinese intellectuals also moved to Shanghai around 1920 and 1921. Many of them later helped with the Party’s establishment, as well as partnership with communists from other countries.
“And there were many expatriates in Shanghai, from all over the world,” Su added. “Some stayed for many years while others came and went, many of them also made their contributions in the city's history.”
Su cited the example of Robert Jacquinot de Besange, a French Jesuit who set up a safety zone model in Shanghai, which was imitated in other Chinese cities during the Japanese invasion. The model was acknowledged in the Protocols and Commentaries to the 1949 Geneva Convention.
Following his example, expatriates in Nanjing, including John Rabe, sometimes called "Schindler of China," created the famous Nanjing Safety Zone that sheltered more than 200,000 Chinese from the Nanjing Massacre.
Jacquinot de Besange, then known to locals by his Chinese name Rao Jiaju, arrived in China in 1913 as a missionary. He was not only fluent in French, English, Latin and Greek, but also learnt Mandarin and Japanese, and could converse in Shanghai dialect. The knowledge in these languages and cultures later helped him organize volunteers from various countries, and to negotiate between Chinese and Japanese authorities regarding the safety zone.
When the Japanese army invaded Shanghai in 1937, Jacquinot de Besange helped negotiate a demilitarized zone for Chinese civilians. Both Chinese and Japanese armies had various concerns and conditions for this new proposal, when the French Jesuit communicated between the two battling parties, as well as organizing and calling for help from other social groups.
The safety zone, set in a part of the Old Town of Shanghai, was respected by both sides of the war until shortly after he left the city in 1940. It saved more than 300,000 Chinese civilians during the three years, providing shelters, food and hospitals and even a home for the elderly.
Another notable case was New Zealand-born educator Rewi Alley, whose 60 years of life in China started when he arrived at Shanghai's dock in 1927. He would later establish the Bailie education philosophy and schools in China.
"Such kind of charity work were fairly common in Shanghai at the time, often through collaboration of expatriates and local Chinese,” Su said.
"Now that Shanghai is back amidst the top cities in the world, looking back to the international collaborations then can help us communicate and work with other countries now."