Nothing could be further from the truth than to imagine that the Englishmen in Shanghai represent an English outpost or share the English point of view. The Shanghailanders hold that loyalty begins at home and that their primary allegiance is to Shanghai. They proclaim that British property is in danger when they need British troops to defend them, but have shown during the last few months that the acceptance of this assistance does not in any way prevent them from doing what they can to make impossible the realisation of a British policy which they do not like. They make difficult any good understanding between England and China because just as we at home are apt to think of them as English, so the Chinese, in China, make the same mistake. English newspapers take from three to six weeks to reach China. English policy and thought are therefore judged by the Chinese from the newspapers published in English in places like Shanghai and Tientsin. The Chinese naturally turn to these papers and judge England and England's policy by what they find there. It is impossible to persuade them that what they find is an expression not of the British but of the Shanghai mind.

This is lamentable because of certain characteristics of that mind. Of these the most important is that it has been entirely unaffected by the events of the last twenty-five years. Whereas both England and China have been profoundly affected by the war, the Shanghailanders behave and talk as if the events that have followed 1914 had passed, so far as they are concerned, in a different planet. For them the last important political event was the suppression of the Boxers. Europe is far away from them and China, at their very doors, seems almost as far. They seem to have lived in a comfortable but hermetically sealed and isolated glass case since 1901, and since English information on China and Chinese information on England comes for the most part through Shanghai and similar places, it cannot be too clearly understood, both in England and China, that Shanghailanders of English extraction belong, if they belong to England at all, to an England that no longer exists.

These people "think imperially" in the manner of the Rand magnates at the time of the South African War. They are at pains to see in the present stage of the Chinese revolution a new Boxer rebellion, to be put down by force. They think of "anti-foreignism" as China's original sin, to be exorcised by periodical penances. They look round on their magnificent buildings and are surprised that China is not grateful to them for these gifts, forgetting that the money to build them came out of China. Controlling the bottle-neck through which the bulk of Chinese trade must pass, they prosper upon it coming and going and forget that it is the trade that is valuable to England and not the magnificent buildings which big profits and small taxes have allowed them to erect. English prestige is at stake when their interests are threatened, but unless English policy coincides with their own they are prepared at any moment to be the Ulster of the East.

This they deny, but no impartial reader of the Shanghai newspapers during the critical months of January, February, and March of this year will be prepared to support them in that denial. Extremely conservative, like most business communities in foreign countries, they are prepared to have their country go to war for them rather than to adjust themselves to inevitably changing conditions. They were at first incredulous and then disgusted to find that the English Foreign Office took a longer view. Their point was not gained when England decided to send out the Shanghai Defence Force. What they wanted was a reversal of England's policy, or such events as should make that policy impossible. Day after day in their newspapers they advertised the coming of the troops, while England's policy of conciliation towards China was tucked away in small paragraphs. England explicitly declared her neutrality as between the opposing parties in China. Day by day the Shanghai newspapers poured abuse on the party of the Nationalists. The Shanghai Commissioner of Police went out of his way to express his sympathy with the suppression of Kuomintang propaganda. No Chinese, reading the Shanghai newspapers, could have had any other impression than that the important part of British policy was the sending of the troops and that England was fundamentally and irrevocably hostile to the only movement in China which had as its object the freeing of the country from the wholly unscrupulous war-lords who secure Shanghai's approval by suppressing labour and the resentment of the whole country by the wholesale robbery which is making its normal development impossible. Finding that England definitely did not mean to go to war with Chinese Nationalism, Shanghai proceeded to speculate on the mistrust of Russia which is so well advertised by newspapers at home.

If England could not be persuaded to suppress "the new Boxer movement," she might be induced to "fight Russia in China," and Shanghai expanded to fantastic proportions the very small body of military and civilian advisers who are with the Nationalists, while being oddly silent about the very large number of Russian officers and men who are fighting on the opposite side. Actually the strongest propaganda of a kind to produce hostility between England and Nationalist China is that of the Shanghai daily newspapers published in English. Shanghai's policy and Great Britain's are not the same. The danger is that Great Britain will knuckle under to Shanghai, and not the other way about.

The Shanghailanders are not moved to greater concessions towards English policy by the presence of British troops, but the reverse. Secure behind the troops, they are less than ever ready to revise their attitude.

That attitude is definitely bellicose. The Shanghai newspapers magnified the damage done by British guns at Wanhsien, and magnified the damage done by Chinese mobs at Hankow and Kiukiang. All that calculated insult could do to disincline the Nationalists to come to agreement with us at Hankow was done by them. When the Nationalists did come to agreement with us on the lines of expressed British policy in China, the agreement was described in Shanghai as a betrayal. The Shanghai mind regards the outrages at Nanking as a means of altering British policy, and is disappointed that the Note sent to the Nationalists is not strong enough, even though it calls upon the Nationalists to assume responsibility for acts which only person whose brains have been so steeped in propaganda that they have ceased to be minds could possibly believe to have been desired by the Nationalist Government. But, for Shanghai, the Note is not strong enough, since it leaves a chance for British policy to escape shipwreck. Shanghai will not be satisfied unless Sir Austen Chamberlain's winter policy is scrapped and, with high water on the Yangtze, a summer policy takes its place with a naval demonstration up the river, the "occupation of strategic points," an open attack on the Nationalists, and an attempt to plant the war-lords once more on the lid of the boiling Chinese cauldron.

From Arthur Ransome, The Chinese Puzzle. London, Boston: 1927 (originally published in the Manchester Guardian).