This guest post comes from Yutong Wang, a fourth-year PhD Candidate in History at the University of York. Her research focuses on the urban governance of the International Settlement through policing practices of the Shanghai Municipal Police (SMP), illustrating the dynamics between the ruler and the ruled and to what extent the authorities exercised powers at the grassroots in this ‘semi-colony’ in the early twentieth century. Her article, “Slum clearance in a ‘semi-colony’: coercion and restraint in policing practices in 1930s Shanghai” was published in Urban History in October 2024.
At 8 o’clock on 10 July 1936, the Reserve Unit, the riot squad of the Shanghai Municipal Police (SMP), the force that policed the International Settlement, received an urgent call from officers at Yulin Road Police Station, to assist in removing slum huts in the Eastern District. Upon arrival, more than 50 Chinese and foreign detectives, along with a party of armed police, were met by approximately 600 residents blocking the road with sticks, bars and bricks. Women and children were in front, staging a barricade with night soil buckets. After a short while, a crowd of approximately 2,000 people had gathered, some of whom came from nearby areas scheduled to be demolished later in the year. The residents became increasingly defiant, showing their determination to protect their homes by throwing the buckets on the ground and attempting to force the police to withdraw the demolition order.[1]
Such a confrontation between slum-dwellers and the SMP was not unusual in the Settlement. Although Shanghai’s industrial and commercial heartland boasted modern houses, commercial buildings, and public water systems, makeshift settlements, viewed by the authorities as slums, had expanded in parallel with this rapid urban growth. Most significantly, in the 1930s, due to the outbreak of hostilities between China and Japan in 1932 and 1937, with the latter conflict resulting in an occupation lasting until 1945, large numbers of Chinese refugees made their way to the Settlement seeking sanctuary, most of whom ended up in informal settlements within and on its borders. In 1936, there were 25,345 Chinese resident in such areas in the Settlement (out of 1,120,000 in total), roughly equal to the total foreign population (28,823).[2] Figure 1 shows in the background a typical hut constructed of bamboo poles, with matting and mud-covered walls and a thatched roof. The floor area was about eight by fifteen feet, and residents could barely stand up inside.[3]
Chinese women and their slum huts in Shanghai, c. 1930. HPC, Billie Love Historical Collection, BL04-85
Such makeshift huts, made from salvaged material without proper drainage systems, had long been a significant concern for urban governance in Shanghai. The SMC perceived these dwellings as potential breeding grounds for infectious diseases and as fire traps, and altogether a major ‘nuisance’ to the well-being and security of residents in the Settlement.
Apart from the considerations of public health and security, what made these settlements a notable concern for the SMC to address rested on the fact that they became hotbeds of social and political protest in the 1930s when various political activists, especially the Guomindang (Chinese Nationalist Party, GMD) after establishing a national goverment in China in 1927, attempted to intervene in Settlement affairs. As the slum issue became a prominent part of the broader political crisis, upsetting the Settlement’s stability, the SMC decided upon a systematic demolition programme. The process started with registering existing huts in November 1931. All such buildings erected without sanction from the authorities after that registration period were considered by the SMC to be unregistered and would be demolished as soon as they were detected. The task of slum clearance was assigned to the Public Works Department (PWD). However, considering the sheer number of settlements involved, the Council assigned the SMP the task of supervising demolitions.[4] Figure 2 portrays a typical scenario where the SMP officer monitored the PWD labourers as they pulled down slum huts. In principle, the SMP did not directly intervene in slum clearances. They preserved order at the site and deterred any untoward incidents arising from resistance by residents.
Fig. 2. Labourers taking down a hut supervised by a SMP police officer in the 1930s. Source: IAO, Virtual Shanghai§x
However, it was rare for the SMP to proceed with clearances without confrontation with the slum-dwellers. Returning to the incident on 10 July 1937, encountering such a tense situation that clashes were on the verge of breaking out, the SMP did not adopt heavy-handed measures, such as drawing truncheons and firearms, for instance, which were what police officers, especially the Sikhs (Fig. 3), were authorised to do when facing threatening situations.[5] Instead, both detectives and armed police officers exercised restraint, choosing negotiation with the slum dwellers’ representatives, and finally, all parties agreed on a five-day extension to remove the constructions. The demolition was later temporarily postponed until late summer 1936 under the mediation of Yu Qiaqing, a Chinese Councillor of the SMC.[6]
Fig. 3. Mounted Sikh on daily patrol, SMP, 1937 Source: HPC, Malcolm Rosholt Collection, Ro-n1035
Although batons could effectively facilitate slum clearances, in practice, policing measures were shaped by multiple considerations. In a report by the Special Branch in July 1936, Clerical Assistant John Fairbairn noted that most slum-dwellers were organised by ‘loafers’, a term used to refer to local gangsters and low-level thugs (流氓, liumang), as well as the ‘watchmen’ of the land employed by the land-renters, who collected protection fees or ‘rents’ from these communities. Realising that successful demolition would remove a source of revenue, these social ‘undesirables’ would urge slum-dwellers to oppose evictions with violence. Fairbairn further contended that to solve slum problems, arresting ‘undesirables’ would likely yield better results than using coercion against ordinary occupants.[7]
However, another important consideration was that the authorities realised that, unlike beggars (Fig. 4), most slum occupants were gainfully employed. T. K. Ho, an SMC Assistant Secretary, noted in a report in July 1936 that most slum-dwellers were industrial workers and almost no beggars resided in the huts.[8] Clashes between police and slum-dwellers in the 1920s had led to strikes, which had interrupted the Settlement’s day-to-day operations. The police were, therefore, instructed to treat slum dwellers as a part of the industrial workforce and to be cautious in deploying violence towards them.
Fig. 4. Begging in Shanghai, 1937 Source: Malcolm Rosholt Collection, Ro-0302
It is further worth highlighting that the SMP restrained from exercising ‘corporal punishment’ against this section of the Chinese population due to close collaboration between slum-dwellers and the GMD in the 1930s through the Hut-dwellers’ Association. The Association, established in 1936, was initially put forth by slum-dwellers as an organisation for mutual assistance and a vehicle for collective negotiation with the Settlement’s authorities.[9] However, as a Chinese organisation, it was subject to the leadership and guidance of the GMD’s Party Branch Office representatives in Shanghai, whose task was to arrange anti-imperialist propaganda among the Chinese and to agitate against the SMC.[10] Hence, understanding that violent measures might provoke radical resistance at the grassroots, escalating disputes over the life of ordinary Chinese into diplomatic issues, the SMP chiefly deployed non-coercive measures like monitoring, patrolling and parleys to guarantee the slum demolition.[11]
The cautious policing practices were broadly effective. From 1932 to 1937, on the eve of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the SMP assisted in demolishing around 500 slum huts every year.[x12]
This case study has explored the role of the SMP as a vehicle for the SMC to impose order on society through slum clearances in semi-colonial Shanghai. By foregrounding SMP’s caution in adopting violent means to tackle this urban ‘nuisance’, this study points to the frailties of semi-colonial governance in Shanghai and the need for negotiation between ‘rulers’ and those ‘ruled’ in a time of demographic, political and social crisis.
[1] Shanghai Municipal Archives (SMA) U1–16–2200, squatter huts demolition attempt failure, 10 Jul. 1936.
[2] Shanghai Municipal Council censuses, 1865-1942, accessed March 12, 2024, https://www.virtualshanghai.net/Texts/E-Library?ID=1354.
[3] Gustav Schwenning, ‘An attack on Shanghai slums’, Social Forces 6, no. 1 (1927): 128.
[iv] ‘Settlement’s hut dwellers agree to official census’, The Shanghai Times, 19 November 1931, 4. SMA U1–14–5762, demolition of unregistered beggar huts, 20 October 1932.
[v] Yin Cao, From Policemen to Revolutionaries: A Sikh Diaspora in Global Shanghai, 1885-1945 (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 84; Isabella Jackson, ‘The Raj on Nanjing Road: Sikh policemen in treaty-port Shanghai’, Modern Asian Studies, 46 (2012), 1672–704.
[vi] SMA U1–14–5275, a report on the straw huts by Public Works Department, 18 Jul. 1936.
[vii] SMA U1–14–5275, a report on beggar huts, 31 July 1936.
[viii] SMA U1–14–5275, huts in the Settlement, Assistant Secretary of the SMC, 20 June 1936.
[ix] ‘Hudong huxi penghu lianhe hui’ (‘The Association of Eastern and Western hut-dwellers’), Da Gong Bao, 8 August 1936, 14.
[x] NARA D3358, Citizens Federation, 8 March 1938.
[xi] ‘Hut village demolition is completed’, The Shanghai Times, 10 May 1937, 1.
[xii] SMC, Report for the Year, 1931–37. For SMC Council members’ satisfaction with the slum clearances, see the example Qian Zhang, ed., The Minutes of the SMC Vol. XXVII, 6 May 1937.