Shanghai, the Paradise of adventurers

Shanghai, the Paradise of adventurers was published in New York in 1937. The author used a pseudonym, G. E. Miller, but his true identity, Mauricio Fresco, consul general of Mexico in Shanghai, was soon revealed. Fresco dealt with the foreigners, and especially the Spanish community, who lived in China under the legal framework of extraterritoriality. This regime, under which foreigners were not subject to Chinese law but to those of their home countries administered by consuls, had been imposed on China by foreign powers after its defeat in the Opium Wars of 1839-1842 and 1856-1860. In his book Fresco criticized this semi-colonial situation harshly for favouring illegal activity and attracting adventurers and hustlers from around the world.

Fresco’s book was a success in Shanghai. It coincided with the end of the regime of extraterritoriality for Spaniards when the diplomats of the Spanish consulate resigned after declaring their support for the military rebellion. In the absence of diplomats to apply Spanish law to Spaniards living in China, in the spring of 1937 the Chinese government declared that Spaniards would no longer enjoy this legal privilege. A few years later, this was cited as a precedent for eliminating extraterritoriality altogether.

The book, whose author was born in a Sephardi community in the Ottoman Empire, was a scathing and detailed description of the small but dynamic Spanish community in China, which found itself divided by the outbreak of the Civil War. A Spain in miniature, the community reflected some of the tensions that underlay the war, such as the fact that the largest Spanish investors and landowners in China were the Catholic missions, or the systematic corruption of the public administration, which sold passports and letters of protection to whoever could pay for them.

The main target of Crespo’s critique was the entire system of international concessions and open ports that undermined China’s sovereignty. The book proved to be very popular and would be reissued after the People’s Republic of China had been created. Its original publication caused such a scandal that Fresco left his post in China and went to the south of France where he would work with Mexican diplomats in facilitating the emigration of the thousands of Republican exiles who fled Spain in 1938 and 1939.