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Chapter 4 Migration and Diaspora The Afterlife of Chinese Cosmopolitanism MOST OF THE MAGAZINES discussed in chapters one through three ended before the beginning of the second phase of Shanghai’s wartime history—the stage of total colonization. The discussions in the preceding chapters try to prove that in spite of the use of a foreign linguistic medium and the participation of foreign-trained Chinese or non-Chinese writers, the magazines themselves were by no means “unlocal” in the sense of being unrelated to such pressing social concerns as colonization, nation building, modernization, Japanese invasion, or the proletarian revolution. At the same time, the magazines also took advantage of the novelty value of a foreign language and charted out a cultural genealogy that was different from the nationalist cultural history we know of. An implicit argument in previous chapters is that these English magazines provide a picture of a much“messier,” more dynamically multilingual and translational Republican China than what we have learned from official histories of this period. Since the formation of these cosmopolitan publics was closely related to the turn of history, it would be interesting to ask questions such as,“What happens when this social history changed?”“What other uses did people make of English after Shanghai had been completely occupied by Japanese army?” “Why was it impossible for these cosmopolitan publics to continue to exist?” Klaus Mehnert: Exile and Nationalism To answer these questions, we may want to revisit a magazine that was published in Shanghai between October 1941 and April/May 1945, covering almost the entire period of Japanese occupation.This magazine, entitled The XXth Century,was different from all the other periodicals discussed in this book in that it did not have any pronounced Chinese consciousness attached to it. Its editor, Klaus Mehnert, was an exile who shared a similar kind of itinerant life as some Chinese editors of The China Critic and T’ien Hsia, but he had a different relationship to China and Shanghai, where the magazine was 135 published. Born in Russia in 1906, Mehnert emigrated to Germany after the Russian Revolution and completed his education at the University of Berlin. Afterward he returned to the Soviet Union, where he worked as a reporter and writer for a German newspaper until he was forced to leave there in 1936. He then took up several teaching positions in Russian history at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Hawaii from 1930s to the early 1940s before moving once again to Shanghai in October 1941 to edit The XXth Century. Shanghai was but one brief stop in Mehnert’s itinerant life; however, taking a close look at his magazine The XXth Century would enable us to gain a new understanding of the city’s function in international communication.The very first article of The XXth Century published in October 1941 captures the exilic sensibility of its chief editor Mehnert quite well. Entitled “Aloha!,” a Hawaiian word that ambiguously denotes both greeting and farewell, this article by Mehnert describes both his excitement at the discovery of a paradise in Hawaii and his realization of its impending transformation. Mehnert confessed that he had had many departures in his wanderings in life, but none could be compared with this current departure from Hawaii, since not only was this a departure in physical terms but it also foreshadowed loss and transformation .“Hawaii’s transformation from a south sea paradise to a naval and military fortress of first magnitude seems inevitable.The time may soon come when people . . .will link the islands with nothing but coast artillery,bombers, and naval battles, as if Hawaii were another Gibraltar or Singapore,” Mehnert wrote.1 For him, leaving Hawaii meant not so much an escape from this inevitable transformation as it was a “journey to a war,” in a different sense from what the phrase meant to W. H.Auden and Christopher Isherwood. Mehnert’s appreciation for Hawaii did not go far beyond the islands’ natural beauty, and he had only a superficial understanding of its history. In a brief account of Hawaiian history given in this article, he neglected many harsh realities such the islands’ brutal colonization by European settlers, the economic exploitation of indentured labor, and complex race relations on the plantations. Mehnert depicted Hawaii idealistically as “a melting pot of races”: “Nowhere in the world can you study race problems better than in Hawaii, where you have not only Hawaiians, whites of all nationalities (called haoles...

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