Colonizers or Victims?
By: Jason Park
Tags: Nonfiction, China, Books, History, Book Review

Colonizers or Victims?

A review of “The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties that Helped Create Modern China” by Jonathan Kaufman

Of all the outlets to get a history of China over the last 175 years, I would not have expected a story of Jewish family businesses in Shanghai. But Jonathan Kaufman does just that in his new book, The Last Kings of Shanghai, and I was pleasantly surprised with how enthralled I was to dive into this unique story.

If you want to tell the tale of the creation of modern China, it makes no sense to tell it through the eyes of rich foreigners. That’s, like, Historical Responsibility 101 stuff. But Kaufman pulls it off by telling the story of these Jewish families, the Sassoons and the Kadoories, alongside the story of China instead of chiefly through their perspective. The two narratives continuously overlap, and that means you get a legitimate narrative of a story for those who may not know the established beats, but also from a unique perspective for those who are already familiar.

The Sassoons especially act as quasi-villains in parts of the story because they participated in the European imperialism of China. Through the events of the Opium Wars, the Boxer Rebellion, and eventually the fall of the Chinese dynastic system in favor of a republican system, the Sassoons are seen by the Chinese as the foreigners that are causing all of their problems, and Kaufman even paints them as such at times. While the reader has also seen where they have come from and thus doesn’t see them only as villains, one decision stands out: the Sassoons and Kadoories, although living in Shanghai, were so separated from Chinese society that none of them ever learned to speak Chinese.

At the same time, however, the narratives of the Sassoons and Kadoories cannot be dismissed as white European stories because of the discrimination that they had to endure as Jews. Anti-Semitism provides a backdrop for a lot of the book, especially the 1930s and 1940s when Japan’s alliance with Germany combined with the Japanese occupation of much of China led to the systematic, prejudicial relocation of thousands of Jewish refugees in Shanghai. Kaufman writes:

SS colonel Josef Meisinger, who had earned the moniker “The Butcher of Warsaw” by sending thousands of Jews to their deaths in Poland, was dispatched to Shanghai accompanied by another SS officer. In August, Meisinger met the Japanese officials at the Japanese Naval Headquarters in Shanghai and laid out several options to “deal with” the “problem” of the 18,000 Shanghai refugees. The Japanese could send the Jews to Manchuria and elsewhere to perform hard labor to help the Japanese war effort. They could set up a concentration camp for “medical experiments” on a nearby island in the Yangtze River. Finally, Meisinger spread out a large map of Shanghai and outlined his preferred plan. In a few weeks, on the first night of the Jewish New Year, German SS units would round up Jewish refugees attending services with their wives and children at Shanghai’s synagogues. They would seize the rest at their homes. The Jews would be marched through the streets to the harbor, loaded onto ships slated for demolition, towed out to the ocean, and sunk.

This plan did not come to fruition, however, because Japanese officials refused. But if there was any doubt, this event proves that the “Final Solution” was not about German genetic superiority but about a genocidal campaign to murder Jews wherever Germans could find them.

These Jewish families also provide a fascinating lens through which to view this era of Chinese history because of all that they lost in the Communist takeover of 1949. Kaufman follows the Sassoons and Kadoories through their doomed alliances with Chinese Nationalists, the loss of almost all of the capital gained through their businesses, and finally to Lawrence Kadoorie’s eventual deal to provide nuclear power to Hong Kong and parts of China. Kadoorie provided a bridge between Britain and China at a time it was sorely needed, as the deal to give Hong Kong back to China in 1997 was quickly approaching. This was one of my favorite parts of the book, as it circled back to many of the themes throughout and showed how China had changed immensely since the Communist takeover in 1949.

While I would love to read more in-depth about most of the larger events in this book from a pure Chinese point of view (one reason my next read is the new Chinese-perspective-on-world-history Superpower Interrupted), Kaufman provides a surprising perspective on a fascinating era of world history. Whether you already know the narrative beats or not, The Last Kings of Shanghai is well worth your time.

I received a review copy of The Last Kings of Shanghai courtesy of Viking Publishing and NetGalley, but my opinions are my own.