-
2. Turning Lazy Old Opium Smokers into Spry Jazz Maniacs: The Rise of Chinese Dance Madness and the First Chinese Cabarets, 1927–1931
- The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
2 Turning Lazy Old Opium Smokers into Spry Jazz Maniacs The Rise of Chinese Dance Madness and the First Chinese Cabarets, 1927–1931 The year 1927 signified a revolutionary watershed period for China and for the city of Shanghai, marking the end of one era and the beginning of another.1 In 1926, the National Revolutionary Army headquartered in Canton under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek marched to reclaim the country and wrest it from warlords and foreign imperialists. A time of great political and cultural ferment for Shanghai occurred during the tumultuous decade that followed the coming of Nationalist rule, as the city’s Chinese population accommodated to the new order, struggling to take part in the building of a new national polity and identity, while also striving to maintain the city’s distinctive identity as a cosmopolitan metropolis and a gateway between East and West. The city’s Chinese elites faced a difficult period of adjustment. The new regime arrived with a military-led revolution and bloody suppression of the political enemies of Chiang Kai-shek and his right-wing Nationalist faction— namely the CCP. On April 12, Chiang’s army worked together with the Shanghai Green Gang, the city’s leading criminal organization, to purge the city of CCP members, who had organized a series of workers’ uprisings to pave the way for the revolution. The operation entailed the round-up and execution of thousands of suspected communists. Later known as the White Terror, this gory event ostensibly protected the privileges and powers of the capitalist classes of the city. However, it sent a clear underlying message: Obey the dictates of the new regime, or suffer the violent consequences.2 While the GMD carried out the Nationalist Revolution with great gusto throughout the city and country, further change brewed in the hotel ballrooms and cabarets of China’s great metropolis. As Australian journalist John Pal later recalled in his memoir:3 Almost from the day the southerners [i.e., the Nationalist Revolution] came to town, Shanghai embarked upon an era of whoopee enough to send past emperors spinning in their marble tombs. The pace of the city’s world-famed night-life was Shanghai.indb 53 2010/5/11 11:47:40 AM 54 · Shanghai’s Dancing World stepped up out of recognition and the responsibility for this rested almost solely upon Chinese shoulders—youthful ones, for their owners were drawn mainly from the student classes. It wasn’t long before they were crowding foreigners off their own dance-floors, and they were big spenders, too. Then came the biggest of all changes. As Chinese, they wanted Chinese dancing-partners and that was something Confucius had not provided for. However, a group of smart operators from Canton speedily filled the gap and plastered Shanghai with a rash of new night-spots providing pretty little Chinese hostesses for the big-spending night owls with itchy feet; and keeping up with the current trend Chinese dancing academies sprang up all over the place, converting sing-song girls into taxi-dancers and lazy old opium-smokers into spry jazz maniacs rarin’ to go. Many observers, both Chinese and foreign, including Pal noted the explosion in popularity of dancing, and the key role that the institution of taxi-dancing played in spreading this culture amongst the city’s Chinese inhabitants. Certainly other foreigners in addition to Pal noticed the phenomenal rapidity with which Chinese elites in Shanghai took to social dancing. As remarked in the American journal Literary Digest, quoting from Shanghai’s own China Weekly Review:4 None of the writers on the Chinese Revolution [of 1927] have as yet touched on the passing of that Chinese institution, the “Sing-song girl,” but it is a fact that the attractive young lady who used to sit behind your chair at a Chinese banquet and screech in your ear to the tune of a scratchy Chinese fiddle, is rapidly passing, along with the old-style Northern militarists, the ancient ceremonial style of official addresses, the use of long gowns as articles of attire for men and women, and the use of trousers as attire for Chinese women. Up in Szehuen [Sichuan] and down in Kwangsi [Guangxi] the Sing-song girl is probably still holding her own against the inroads of progress and “modernization,” but in Shanghai the Singsong girl is in a bad way, and seemingly is on the road to oblivion, her place being taken by the modern jazz...