The Tribune

A FRIEND has kindly lent me a new book about the business activities of the Sassoon and Kadoorie families in China and Hong Kong during the last century. Entitled “The Last Kings of Shanghai”, it is written by British journalist and author Jonathan Kaufman, and was published earlier this year. Impressively comprehensive and evidently well researched, it is billed as the story of rival Jewish dynasties that helped create modern China.

I found it a most interesting read because it explains what in part makes China tick – the nation’s attitudes and priorities - and its motivation in spreading its economic wings far and wide, including in the Caribbean. It is surely important to understand all this in determining how to deal with China as its power grows and its rivalry with the US intensifies.

This book might also evoke interest amongst Bahamians because the author describes how Sir Victor Sassoon – the heir to the family fortune who was an active industrialist and, in his heyday in the 1920s, one of the richest men in the world – settled in Nassau after having left Shanghai for the last time in 1948 before the communist takeover the following year. He established his headquarters here and “built a scaled-down tropical version of his one-time Shanghai empire”, buying a pink office building he called Sassoon House and establishing an insurance company and other “investment vehicles”. Victor Sassoon died in Nassau in 1961 at the age of eighty.

In addition, the book is revealing about the

historical special status of Shanghai as a mercantile city which, as home to about half of China’s banks and factories, was the country’s economic centre in the 1920s. With its “international settlements and concessions”, administered by the British and protected by British troops, business in Shanghai thrived and the city became known as the Paris of the Orient.

After Britain had invaded China in the middle of the 19th century to protect the opium trade, the Sassoons later cornered the market for it and, when opium was later banned, invested in property, stocks and companies, factories and buildings – and they went from strength to strength in the succeeding years.

So Shanghai had made them rich, but this was against a background of extreme poverty, overcrowding and the despair of the masses that gradually sowed the seeds of communism.

Future Chinese leader Mao Tse-tung had himself lived in Shanghai where the Communist Party began to grow in the 1920s. But, after a communist insurrection was quelled by Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, he was forced to flee the city. Later, the Party gradually built momentum and the Communists gained power in 1949.

Reportedly, in Shanghai the notion of extraterritoriality had been increasingly challenged and eventually they took over the Sassoon and Kadoorie businesses.

Meanwhile, as recounted in the book, by then in Hong Kong the Kadoories had quickly understood that the world had changed. India had gained its independence and Britain was seen to be in retreat. They realised that the territory was caught between Red China and the Free World and that in order to survive and prosper it had to adopt a policy of wary neutrality, maintaining strict impartiality in any issues with a “political tinge”.

At the same time, while not wishing to provoke China, there was no reluctance to show the Hong Kong populace the benefits of capitalism in developing living conditions that were better than in mainland China.

Hong Kong was useful to China because it was a window on the West and offered a way for it to do business with western companies and earn foreign exchange without capitalism infecting China itself. As Victor Sassoon had said so tellingly, “the Communists do not like foreigners but they will do business with us to the extent it suits their interests”.

Until President Nixon’s visit to China in 1972 when the US began restoring diplomatic and economic relations, in the eyes of the West the country had been cut off from the world for 30 years.

After the disaster of the Cultural Revolution followed by Chairman Mao’s death in 1976, new leader Deng Xiaoping sought to unleash the country’s potential by embarking on a reform programme to modernise and rejuvenate China’s economy with foreign help, open it up to the West and join the global economy.

But, as explained in Dr Henry Kissinger’s seminal work entitled “On China”, published in 2011, the Chinese approach to world order has always been vastly different from that of the West, in its belief in the special nature of its ancient past and the powers of Chinese Emperors and a distrust of the “barbarians” both on its doorstep and further away.

During the course of his informative narrative, Jonathan Kaufman observes that the Communist Party has tried to erase the history of China from the time of the opium wars up to the Party’s takeover of the country.

According to him, the Party claims that, despite their creating wealth and stimulating development, business dynasties like the Sassoons and Kardoories exploited the Chinese working class, leaving people to live in squalor, ignorance, poverty and a haze of opium.

The author concludes that, as China embarks on what many consider to be the “Chinese century”, those concerned still like to portray their country, even as it rises inexorably, as an historical victim – and claim that it was only Mao and his devoted army of communist guerrillas who toppled those rapacious capitalists and enabled China to stand on its feet again.

He says, nonetheless, that the issues China now faces are the need to work with foreigners and balance nationalism and political control with openness, diversity and change.

This means that, if it is to succeed in the long term, “it will not be just because it emulates the spirit of Beijing, centre of China’s political power, with a leadership that embraces a repressive state and quashes dissent” – rather, it will be because it also emulates Shanghai as the city that helped to propel China into the modern era.

Dangerous times in America

In this column two weeks ago, I suggested that in the aftermath of a close election result president-elect Joe Biden ought – perverse as it might seem - to welcome President Trump’s legal challenge of the outcome on the grounds that resolution of the matter in the courts would serve to strengthen his (Biden’s) legitimacy as the winner.

I still believe this to be the case. However, subsequent developments are beginning to ring alarm bells in some quarters to the extent that, with more and more allegations of electoral fraud, the country is moving into dangerous new territory.

Of course, everybody is watching and reading essentially the same news so more comment now might be considered superfluous. But, having watched the Trump rally in Georgia over the weekend – when he spoke in inflammatory terms about “finding a way to win” and about the Supreme Court “stepping forward to save our country” – I offer my own ten penny-worth now because many believe that what is happening in the US could potentially lead to disaster. What is more, serious political upheaval there, together with a breakdown of law and order, would inevitably affect us indirectly here in The Bahamas.

It seems that what is now disturbing to many people, regardless of their political persuasion, is not so much Trump’s refusal to accede at this stage – since he has the right to contest the outcome – but rather what is emerging as evidence of irregularities and fraud in the electoral process in certain swing states like Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Pennsylvania and, above all, Georgia.

The mainstream media declines to give credence to any of this, but reports suggest the average American is concerned about the hundreds, and maybe thousands, of sworn affidavits by people involved in the presidential election who have also given oral evidence of fraud in various forms and have done so under the threat of perjury and a possible jail sentence. Having watched the hearings in Michigan, Georgia and other states – when so-called whistle blowers have given evidence before various local state committees – it seems to me unlikely, if not inconceivable, that even a small proportion of them is failing to tell the truth.

At the very least, their extensive testimony will now have to be tested in court. But, if any of the Trump lawsuits reaches the Supreme Court, it is hard to believe that the outcome of this presidential election could be overturned. There is no comparison to be drawn with the Court’s intervention in the disputed Bush/Gore election of 2000 which turned on the validity of a relatively small number of ballots in the state of Florida and which did not involve allegations of electoral fraud. But, if fraud has taken place in this year’s election and it turns out to be as extensive as alleged - and, as a result, the Supreme Court did take such a decision - America would surely erupt in flames.

Let us hope, therefore, that wiser heads will prevail and the outcome will be an admission of irregularities – and yes, perhaps fraud as well – but that these are judged to be insufficiently serious to justify overturning the election result. This would require the whole electoral process across many states to be cleaned up. But, having made his point and exposed such irregularities and fraud which should never happen again, Trump could concede to Biden on a high note. The alternative of the nation descending into disorder and conflict is surely too ghastly to contemplate.

December - a month of wartime disasters

Of all the terrible occurrences of the Second World War, the Japanese surprise attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, is one which sticks in the memory of most people.

Termed by President Roosevelt “a day of infamy”, it is widely recalled not only because of the horror of the attack and the huge loss of life and ships - with more than ninety vessels of the US fleet in harbour - but also on account of its strategic significance insofar as it marked a turning point in the war; namely, the immediate entry of America into the conflict.

Thereafter, most people knew there could only be one outcome. Hitler’s and Mussolini’s fates were sealed and Japan would likewise be defeated, however long it took.

In his book chronicling the history of the war, Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill wrote that “to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy” for he knew that, with effective application of overwhelming force by the Americans, the Allies would, indeed, ultimately prevail.

But what is perhaps less well known is that Japan simultaneously attacked Pearl Harbor, Hong Kong, Guam and Midway. Historians are clear that it was intent on acquiring a Pacific empire and coveted the colonial possessions of the British, the French and the Dutch.

To protect the great naval base of Singapore, Britain had despatched a surface fleet to intercept Japanese invasion forces while they were still at sea. But, only days later, Churchill was in for a terrible shock. On December 10, the British battleships HMS Repulse and HMS Prince of Wales were spotted off Singapore and attacked by Japanese fighter-bombers. Without their own fighter cover, both were sunk and two months later Singapore fell to the Japanese army.

Churchill wrote that, after being given this news by telephone, he was thankful to be alone at that moment because in all the war “I never received a more direct shock”. That was his low point.

But, by contrast, less than a year later after the victorious Second Battle of El Alamein in the desert of North Africa he uttered his famous words about the war – “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

The tide had turned for the Allies. But, apart from the massive deployment of their forces in Europe, including, of course, in the D-Day landings and beyond, it still took the Americans four long years after Pearl Harbor to defeat the Japanese in the Pacific. After the attacks on December 7, 1941, however, it was clear that there would be no other conclusion.