China Bound by Robert Bickers
Author:Robert Bickers
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472949950
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
12
Flight
Tom Lindsay spent his first night of freedom between crisp clean sheets in a soft bed in CNCo shipping manager Yang Xiaonan’s Shanghai home. But thereafter, it seemed, all was horsehair, sackcloth and ashes, for post-war China was bewildering and frustrating, and their wartime allies seemed to regard the British as enemies, barely better than the Japanese, and treated them and their interests as such. For the Swire firms, in the decade after the defeat of Japan, we might focus on three themes: rehabilitation, which was only partially successful; adaptation, which was cut short by the radical political reordering of East Asia after 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party seized power; and innovation, upon which the company’s future came to rest. This is also in the main a story of reorientation, for by 1955 John Swire & Sons and its companies had been forced to withdraw from China, their assets first held hostage and then surrendered in an ‘all for all’ deal: that is, all assets were set against all liabilities. This was hardly a fair exchange, but it was the best that could be agreed. It was carefully arranged and legally watertight, in the context, that is, of the revolutionary legality practised by the new regime. The origins of the profound redirection of the prime focus of the firm’s operations and interests that characterised its history across the 1960s and 1970s lay in the triumph of Chinese nationalism in 1945, the Pyrrhic victory of the Guomindang that year as one of the allied coalition and the destruction of their power on the Chinese mainland by 1950.
The Second World War made nations, many more than it broke. As the conflict drew to a close, colonies began to fight themselves free with armed force or unarmed might and moral power: the Philippines, India, Burma, and then Indonesia, and Indo-China would all soon be free of formal European and American imperial power.1 The Japanese empire was dismantled. China brought back into the Republic the Manchurian provinces seized in 1931, and it brought into it for the very first time the island of Taiwan. China came into its own in other ways as well; the long search for dignity and recognition that had been a feature of its politics since the humiliation heaped on its negotiators at Versailles in 1919 seemed to have ended in triumph. It was one of the allied Big Four during the war, at least, but most importantly, symbolically and rhetorically, it was a founder signatory of the United Nations, and took a permanent seat on the Security Council; it played a leading role in the establishment of the World Court and UNESCO. There was to be no turning back to the days and decades of extraterritoriality, and the century of partial subjugation and degraded sovereignty. That same nationalism, too, combined with viciously tight discipline and substantial if ambiguous Soviet assistance, fuelled the rapid growth in the north-east of the National Government’s nemesis, the Chinese Communist Party and its armed forces, which in October 1949 proclaimed the establishment of a People’s Republic of China.
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