Marcia R. Ristaino, Port of Last Resort: The Diaspora Communities of Shanghai

Marcia Reynders Ristaino. Port of Last Resort: The Diaspora Communities of Shanghai. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. xviii, 369 pp. $60.00.

Ristaino, Senior Chinese Acquisitions Specialist at the Library of Congress, has produced a novel examination of two diaspora communities, one Jewish and the other Slavic, that found sanctuary in the Chinese treaty port of Shanghai between 1900 and 1950. Ristaino is well-qualified to produce such a study, as she has published extensively on the history of nineteenth and twentieth century Shanghai and the city’s Central and East European refugee populations. The author reveals that several thousand members of these groups, whom she terms “involuntary migrants,” came to Shanghai for two primary reasons. The city was well-known outside of Asia for its economic success and also for its moderately tolerant government, which had been under strong foreign control since the Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century and required no documentation for entry. For those Europeans who were fleeing such tumultuous events as the Bolshevik Revolution and the rise of Nazism, however, Shanghai ultimately proved to be not as safe or welcoming as many had anticipated. The new arrivals, nearly all of whom were unfamiliar with the China’s language or culture, were forced to adapt to onerous living and working conditions. Social and linguistic assimilation were not these individuals’ only problems, however. As most Slavic and Jewish refugees could not prove that they intended to live in Shanghai permanently, they lived in fear that they could be expelled from the city at any time in accordance with Chinese immigration laws. Early in her approachable narrative, Ristaino clearly establishes that the city’s foreign immigrant population struggled to find either social acceptance from Shanghai’s other foreigners or Chinese inhabitants. In addition, economic prosperity remained an

illusion for many. As members of a new “underclass” within Shanghai’s foreign community, Slavs in particular struggled to find their niche in the city, and frequently those who had fled the chaos of the 1917 revolution and subsequent Civil War found themselves in occupations that were either undesirable or poorly-paying. Employing both published sources and interviews with former refugees, Ristaino tells the story of the Slavic women who avoided unemployment and possible deportation occasionally turning to prostitution or other illicit activities in order to support themselves and their families. Ristaino devotes considerable attention to the plight of Shanghai’s foreign immigrants during the early 1930s Japanese attack and subsequent occupation of the city. She highlights the circumstances of the city’s diverse population of Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews which, while always tenuous, were made somewhat more tolerable by the efforts of Sugihara Chiune, the Japanese vice-consul in Shanghai, who was known as “Japan’s Schindler.” Chiune disobeyed official directives by granting Japanese transit visas to European Jews, thus allowing them to flee Hitler’s Reich and start a new, if not challenging, life in Shanghai. Throughout her discussion, Ristaino uses a variety of sources, including documents in English, Japanese, Chinese, and German, to paint a compelling portrait of Shanghai as a cosmopolitan urban environment. While the city was plagued by crime, the divisive racial policies of a puppet government administered directly from Tokyo, and onerous inflation, Shanghai was a relative bastion of order and security in a world beset by war and revolution. A sad coda to Ristaino’s study is the history of its Eastern European Jews, many of whom had great difficulty in leaving the city after the end of the Second World War.

These individuals, who were unwelcome after the 1949 revolution in China, were forced to compete with more numerous German and Austrian Jews for emigration slots under the United States’ Displaced Persons Act. In sum, the author’s argument that Shanghai played a unique historical role as a refuge for two major refugee groups during the first half of the twentieth century is cogently conceptualized and expressed. Although this text deals with a subject matter unfamiliar to most undergraduates, it is highly suitable for an upper-division class in Chinese or Russian history as well as a graduate-level seminar on diaspora history.

Christopher J. Ward Ouachita Baptist University