Cultivated Lands

Driving out of Shanghai's International Settlement to the westward, one notices the broad, quiet residential streets suddenly give way to a crowded, garish area, bright with neon signs and highly colored billboards, a section in which there is many a long, luring arcade leading to gambling halls, opium dens, places of "special" entertainment. This is Shanghai's notorious Badlands, most vicious hell-spot in the East.

The Badlands have been patrolled by slovenly, bullyish Japanese-controlled Chinese policemen known as the Ta Tao Boys (for the puppet Ta Tao Government), who are quick and careless at the trigger. Japanese assassins working for the Wang Ching -wei Peace and Reconstruction Movement use the Badlands for their base; and Puppet-elect Wang's own fortified hideout is within a dice-throw of the most notorious opium and gambling joint in the whole area. No day goes by without at least one shooting in the Badlands. The section has naturally infected the adjacent International Settlement--so much so that no one is particularly surprised at advertisements in the American-owned Shanghai Evening Post & Mercury setting out the fine points of certain bullet-proof vests. Shanghai's "biggest jail in the world," Ward Road Gaol, is expected before the end of 1940 to house 10,000 prisoners, most of whom have spilled in from the Badlands.

Japan's Army could clean up the Badlands overnight. But Japan's Army knows better. It much prefers to cultivate the Badlands as: 1) a source of needed revenue; 2) a point of pressure on the International Settlement. For over a year the policing of Shanghai, both inside and outside the Settlement, has caused a two-way controversy. The Japanese want control of Settlement patrols (which would be the next thing to getting control of the Settlement) and the Settlement's Municipal Council wants to help keep order in outlying areas. Last week the Municipal Council won a slight concession. An agreement was signed permitting Settlement police to "help" patrol part of Japanese-controlled Hongkew, which is technically part of the Settlement anyhow. Still wide open were the Badlands.

So little prospect was there of cutting out this cancer and preventing its spread to foreign areas, that last week, after six back-to-the-wall years on the Municipal Council, which also had to triple its $1,000,000 budget last week to keep pace with the stumbling Chinese dollar, Council Chairman Cornell S. Franklin announced his intention of resigning. Cornell Franklin hails from Mississippi, home State of Author William Faulkner (who is married to Cornell Franklin's first wife). A good sport and a fighting gentleman, Cornell Franklin has transplanted the South--mint juleps, hunting dogs, polo, a white house with a proper portico--right to cosmopolitan Shanghai. He and his pretty second wife are tired of all this warrin' and ready for a little Reconstruction.

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