Carl Crow - A Tough Old China Hand: The Life, Times, and Adventures of an American in Shanghai

18. Business Over: The Escape from Shanghai

18 Business Over: The Escape from Shanghai Persona Non Grata Crow and Helen sadly packed up their belongings andjoined some 5,000 other Americans and British as well as thousands more other Europeans and an equal number of Japanese civilians who boarded hastily-arranged evacuation ships in the aftermath ofBlack Saturday. With foreign business upping stakes and leaving China entirely or looking for a safe haven somewhere else, either further inland or in British-controlled Hong Kong, Shanghai started to grind to a halt. Crow also had good reason to fear what might happen if he remained. It takes a large dose of realistic fear to make someone pack up and leave 25 years of their life and a business they have built from the ground up. However, his anti-Japanese and pro-Chinese sentiments were well known and marked him as an obvious target for Japanese retribution. This was no idle fear. Crow's old colleague, fellow Missourian, friend and sometime business partner J. B. Powell chose to remain and found himself at the top of the Japanese occupying force's list of most wanted foreigners. Powell was regularly intimidated, even having a hand grenade thrown at him and his bodyguard - the bomb was faulty and didn't explode - as he left the American Club one day after lunch.1 He was shot at 212 CARL CROW - A TOUGH OLD CHINA HAND twice and reduced to working on the China Weekly Review at night for his own safety, with the door guarded by tough Mauser-toting bodyguards from Shandong. Ralph Shaw, who stayed on too, described approaching Powell's office “It was like entering a citadel."2 Eventually Powell was arrested, taken to the notorious Bridge House Jail and tortured. At Bridge House he developed beriberi: his feet swelled up and tumed black from infection. He was eventually transferred to hospital by which time he had lost so much weight that the nUTses called him “Gandhi." He finally left Shanghai in 1943 on one of only two repatriation ships allowed to leave the city during the war after the initial evacuations in 1937, and had to have both feet amputated dUTing the voyage. He died just two years later. Crow was widely known for his views too and had been involved in arguments in the American Club as late as July 1937 with fellow members who believed that it would be best if Japan came in and “cleaned up" China; and the Japanese singled out the Shanghai Evening Post, which Crow had founded, as particularly irksome to the Japanese military for its militantly pro-US and Nationalist Chinese views.3 The Japanese intimidated Randall Gould, the Post's Editor, who had a bomb planted on the steps of his building, though it did not explode. Crow's original employer, the China Press itself, also came in for a lot ofattention from the Japanese and the situation became even more hazardous as the pro-Japanese Shanghai Times had offices in the same building which were a target of Chiang's secret police chief Dai Li's Nationalist underground movement The situation in Shanghai worsened as the Japanese encroachment across China proceeded. Six gunmen raided the China Press's printing works. When a secUTity guard tried to stop them entering, the police became involved and a full-scale gun battle broke out on the street leaving two dead, including a local American bar owner, Tug Wilson, and several more people wounded. Shortly afterwards, in July 1940, Samuel “Sammy" H. Chang, editor of the Shanghai Evening Post 's Chinese language edition, was shot in the back and killed by an unknown assassin while having lunch at a Nanking Road restaUTant. A hired killer from the pro-Japanese puppet govemment was blamed but never caught. With hindsight, Crow's decision to evacuate himself and his wife may have prolonged his life. As the Sinologist and sociologist BUSINESS OVER: THE ESCAPE FROM SHANGHAI 213 “panicky" in “abandoning" Shanghai, things were obviously becoming bad in the autumn of 1937.5 A “stray" Japanese bullet killed one journali仗， Pembroke Stephens of the London Daily Telegraph. There was no doubt the writing was on the wall. Japan's puppet ruler of Shanghai, the Chinese Pètain Wang Chingwei issued a blacklist of 80 Chinese and seven foreign joumalists in Shanghai that it wanted. That Crow's old 企iend Powell was the major target was not...