Page 29 - WashingtonSyCip_Bio_Excerpt_2nd_Edition

Passenger on a Ship

stiff resistance from Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek. A Communist-led strike
was seized upon by Chiang as an opportunity to decapitate his enemies. An account
relates that “With the help of Shanghai’s underworld leaders and with financial
backing from Shanghai bankers and foreigners, Chiang armed hundreds of gangsters,
dressed them in Kuomintang uniforms, and launched a surprise attack overnight on
the workers’ militia. About 5,000 Shanghai Communists were killed. Massacres of
Communists and various anti-Chiang factions followed in other Chinese cities.”

Wash’s grandfather, a devout Presbyterian, had started his company in 1897, and by
the time Wash arrived it had grown considerably. “He was clearly very prosperous by
the time,” Wash says, “because I remember that the house had a Western sitting room
and a Chinese sitting room. And I guess he was wealthy enough to be kidnapped.”

Indeed, Wash’s grandfather became the target of a kidnapping attempt. He had a car,
a Buick—at that time a prestige marque—and it was a touring car, with a canvas roof
and low doors all around. The design saved the old man’s life, or at least his freedom.
Once, he was kidnapped in his car while he was leaving his house, and as they drove
over a bridge, Mr. Bau heard a voice urging him to jump, and he did, landing in the
water and being picked up by a boatman. But the jump broke something inside him;
they say it weakened his heart, and it was of a heart attack that he would die some
years later.

But he was still alive when Wash was there, and Grandfather Bau took the rosy-
cheeked boy around in his Buick to the printing press, possibly racing the electric
trolley cars that ran shoulder to shoulder on Jiujiang Road or driving down the Bund
in the towering shadow of the wedding-cake-like Customs House. It was a divided city
in more ways than one. One observer, the reformer Rewi Alley, saw this “Shanghai of
two halves” created by foreign conquest and by the crush of native poverty: “On one
side it was a foreign-run, international metropolis, affluent, gay, rich, steaming with
the sound of jazz and the last opium-dazed colonial cocktails. On the other, utter
destitution and want, child labor, and appalling living conditions for the majority of
its inhabitants.”

Much later in his own life, the boy would return to these realities, and witness China’s rise
to global power. In 2000, Washington SyCip would revisit the plant; it had long been
taken over by the Communist Party. Wash had come as the head of the Asian Advisory

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