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6 Ballrooms and Bombs Cabarets, Underground Intrigue, and Occupation Politics, 1937–1941 On the night of September 18, 1937, at the Shanghai cabaret on the corner of Guangdong and Fujian Roads in the International Settlement, a large crowd was reveling on the dance floor when all of a sudden a missile burst through the ceiling and penetrated the hall. The merrymakers immediately panicked and rushed for the exits. As it turned out, a Japanese anti-aircraft gun had fired the missile at Chinese bombers circling over the Huangpu River, who had hoped to shoot at a Japanese warship.1 It had missed its target and arced back down into the city, blasted through the roof of the Yongle Inn above the cabaret, and left a large burning hole right in the center of the dance floor. Miraculously, it injured no one.2 The year 1937 marked another major watershed year for Shanghai and for China. That July, Japanese armed forces had launched a full-scale assault on the country, starting with the now-famous skirmish at Lugouqiao in the vicinity of Beijing, then rapidly making their way down the coast and into the interior of China, thus precipitating an undeclared war between the two nations that would last eight years.3 Both sides staged key contests for control of Shanghai. Between August and October, Japanese land, sea, and air forces attacked and occupied the areas of the city surrounding the two foreign settlements . Chiang Kai-shek sent his crack troops to defend the city, and Chinese forces mounted a heroic struggle, but the Japanese military ultimately defeated them by dint of superior coordination and firepower.4 The battles of August 1937 that took place along the Huangpu River signaled the beginning of the so-called “lone island” (gudao) period (1937–1941) in the history of Shanghai. It emerged as a “lone island” since while most of the city fell under Japanese control, the areas within the settlements remained neutral zones and thus functioned as relative havens of safety for millions of Chinese refugees who crowded into them to escape the war. Though Japanese forces came to occupy the area known as Greater Shanghai (they consolidated their position by November of 1937), they did not overtake the settlements. The French Concession began to allow Japanese infiltration and intervention Shanghai.indb 177 2010/5/11 11:48:59 AM 178 · Shanghai’s Dancing World soon after the formation of the Vichy government in June of 1940; yet until the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, when Japan declared war against the Allied powers, the International Settlement continued to operate as a neutral international sector.5 The immediate reactions of Shanghai’s cabaret operators to the Japanese invasion reflected the mixture of patriotism and pragmatism with which the Chinese population as a whole received this onslaught. Soon after the beginning of a full-scale invasion of China by Japan in August of 1937, a number of nightclubs shut down temporarily. As a patriotic gesture, several owners, including those of the Ambassador, Lido, and Vienna Gardens ballrooms, closed theirs halls and allowed them to be converted temporarily into makeshift hospitals to accommodate the wounded in the city. The Metropole on the other hand, though owned entirely by Chinese, continued to operate during the height of the war and placed a British flag on its grounds, indicating its neutrality in a gesture that many deemed cowardly and unpatriotic.6 When questioned by the Crystal, one of the owners of the Metropole defended his company by pointing out that many people made a living through the cabaret and could not afford to be put out of work.7 Meanwhile, Shanghai revelers continued to dance amidst the shower of bombs and shrapnel that rained down upon the city from September through December. The Tower Club of the Cathay Hotel proved an excellent lookout point over the carnage and debris that the Sino-Japanese War had wrought over the Chapei (Zhabei) and Hongkou districts.8 After tightening its grip over much of coastal and central China by force, Japan began to recruit top GMD officials and Shanghai capitalists to govern occupied China, including the most important collaborator Wang Jingwei, a top GMD official and former rival of Chiang Kai-shek. In 1938, Wang agreed to head the collaborationist government in Nanjing, known as the “Orthodox Nationalist.” Meanwhile, Chiang Kai-shek and most of his followers fled Nanjing and finally settling in the city of Chongqing, 2...

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