The British appointed a new Consul-General to Shanghai in November 1948 -- Robert Urquhart. With the Chinese Communists making great progress, and the Nationalist government looking ever-more shaky, Urquhart made the following comments to the annual meeting of the British Residents Association at the Country Club in Bubbling Well Road:
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"We are under no immediate threat. Most of the fears which have been conjured up are founded on rumour and pure imagination. It takes all sorts to make a world, but give me always the man or woman who looks twice at a rumour - and who thinks twice before abandoning his settled ways ... Of course stabilising conditions will return and nothing in the world can stop China from becoming a prosperous commercial and industrial power. Now, as the situation unfolds we may have our ups and downs. We shall worry off and on whether or not we have cause for it. But we will stand by Shanghai if we possibly can. It will take the extreme of human folly, of military disaster, to dislodge us; as a community, we have seen Shanghai in the days of prosperity, under foreign occupation and now under the approaching threat of civil war; Shanghai is home to us as a community, not merely a trading post, and we are not going to up and leave our community home at the first signs of an approaching storm. Does anyone suggest that if there is a change of government here, the new one will be so unreasonable that they will make civilised life and normal trading impossible? I have great confidence that the government of China will not fall into the hands of any but responsible men, who will have the interests of their country at heart. And we foreigners -ask for nothing more."
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