The Empire Trilogy - J. G. Farrell [424]
One was clearly intended to be Churchill, but a Churchill with slanting eyes and an Oriental look, manifestly the work of a Chinese pastry-cook. It took him a moment longer to recognize the fourth head, thin-featured, high-cheekboned, facing Churchill diagonally across the room but eventually he realized that it must be Chiang Kai-shek. How patriotic the overseas Chinese remained and, considering everything, how well organized!
In the past three years while the Sino-Japanese war had continued to boom and crash like a distant thunderstorm here and there over the mainland there had been a great multiplication of so-called ‘Anti-Enemy Backing-up Societies’, not all of them, alas, controlled by the Kuomintang. Sinister letters by courier from Shanghai to the Malayan Communist Party had been intercepted (according to the Combined Intelligence Summary), declaring that ‘a victorious war for China will be the overture for an emancipation movement in the colonies.’ A memorandum from the Special Branch of the Straits Settlements Police warned against the influence these patriotic societies might acquire with the Malayan Chinese, thanks to their anti-Japanese stand. In appearance, harmlessly engaged in collecting funds to support the Chinese army, many of these ‘National Salvation’ and ‘anti-enemy’ organizations were in fact under the control of the Communists.
Finding no other food in the dining-room and unwilling to interrupt his train of thought by summoning one of the ‘boys’, Walter broke off one of Mr Webb’s ears and munched it, pacing up and down. How many of his own employees who had perhaps subscribed to these effigies in cake of hated imperialists were at the same time secret members of, say, the Overseas Chinese Anti-Enemy National Salvation Society or of the even more outlandishly named Youth Blood and Iron Traitor-Exterminating Corps (the latter, to be sure, thought not to be Communist-led and, despite its bloodcurdling title, specializing in nothing more violent than the occasional tarring of a shop in the city for selling scrap-iron to the Japanese), not to mention more conventional gangs like the Heaven and Earth Society? Walter found it disturbing to know so little of where the real allegiance of his employees might lie. ‘Not with us, anyway! Or only when it suits them.’ The strikes which throughout this summer of 1940 had caused the foundations of the Colony to shake were, moreover, only a local manifestation of an ominous awakening of labour throughout the Far East. Shanghai at this very moment was in the embrace of a transport strike which, as it grew, scattered pollen far and wide. First, the British-owned Shanghai Tramways Company, then the China General Omnibus Company had stopped work. Pollen had been carried on the wind from the International Settlement into the French Concession to fertilize workers of the Compagnie Française de Tramways et d’Eclairage Electrique de Shanghai.
‘And the next thing you know they’re all at it!’ One of the cables which Walter had glanced at a few minutes earlier brought news of a meeting organized by the Shanghai General Labour Union on the 27th at which some ninety-odd unions had been represented. The rubber workers’ union, the restaurant workers’ union, the weaving and spinning workers’ union, the bean sauce workers’ union, the silk filature workers’ union, the ordure coolies’ union, the wharf coolies’ union … and so on and so on. Shanghai, despite its almost incredibly precarious political situation, was important to Blackett and Webb. But Walter was more worried by the general implications of the strikes, for where Shanghai led, the rest of the Far East had a habit of following. Admittedly, workers in Shanghai were in real desperation. All the same Walter did not doubt but that the pollen could be carried across the South China Sea to Malaya and Singapore.
Walter halted in