TERRORISM CONTINUES

Sun Yaxing's arrest failed to stop the attacks on hanjian simply because—as Sun admitted under interrogation— "[there is] more than one assassination group working on a line similar to that adopted by my squad."^[140] On February 19, 1939, one of these other groups astonished the public by assassinating the heavily guarded foreign minister of the reform government, Chen Lu, in his own living room in the French Concession.^[141] Liu Geqing led a team of Juntong assassins who shot down Chen Lu in front of his family and two guests.^[142] As Chen Lu's body fell to the floor, Liu Geqing drew out a scroll and threw it over the traitor's body. It read in large black characters: "Death to the Collaborators. Long Live Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek!" Another sheet, unrolled across the sofa, read: "Resistance Will Result in Victory. Construction of the Country Will Succeed. Keep China's Property Forever!" Both were signed by the "Chinese Iron and Blood Army."^[143]

Ten days later, the "Blood and Soul Traitor Extermination Corps" set off bombs simultaneously outside four Chinese dancing establishments: the Oriental Hotel, Ciro's, the Café and Paradise Ballroom, and the Great Eastern Ballroom. The terrorists left behind "A Warning to Our Dancing Friends" in the form of leaflets that read:

Dancing friends: some of you can dance the fox-trot, others the waltz. Why don't you go up to the front to kill? Some of you spend lavishly on brandy and whiskey. Why don't you give the money to our troops so that they can buy more munitions to kill the enemy?

Dancing friends: why spend your money for cosmetics when your bodies smell of the odor of a conquered people? The only way to remove that smell is to give your warm blood to the nation. You have been amusing yourselves over the Lunar New Year. Our meager gift tonight—bombs—will help to give you added pleasure.^[144]

This mixed animus against the new bourgeoisie and political hanjian reflected the Blue Shirts' distaste for Westernized Shanghai. Clearly, the terrorists were enlarging

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their range of targets to include "semitraitors" and the kind of "indirect assistants" that the Lixingshe propagandists had promised to wipe out in the first place. In other words, class hatred and xenophobia were converging—a nativist and Jacobin phenomenon that emerged most dramatically during the Cultural Revolution a little more than two decades later. As the late Lloyd Eastman once pointed out, in the eyes of Nationalist Blue Shirts and Communist Red Guards alike, Western styles of life rendered the treatyport bourgeoisie "traitors" (jian) to the rural "Chinese" (Han) values of the Volk just as much as their capitalist exploitation of the masses.^[145]

In early March 1939 the Shanghai branch of the Nationalist Party formed a People's Mobilization Society "to develop a wide-spread mass movement in Shanghai to carry on military, political, [and] all anti-Japanese and National Salvation work provided they are [sic] not contrary to the laws and ordinances of the Government." The society's manifesto read, "We swear [that] hereafter we will not live with the enemy robbers under the same sky, and will demonstrate the strength of the various classes of the people. Not only will the obstinate enemy in the suburbs be caused to shrink and to conceal themselves and to return Chinese territory to us, but also in the foreign concessions we should make known the heroic and unyielding spirit of descendants of our Chinese ancestors…. Some may assume responsibility for detection and secret service work; some may undertake the work of assaulting and killing the traitors."^[146] A few days later terrorists tried to kill Zhu Ganting, the head of the puppet tax bureau in Pudong.^[147] Though that attempt failed, the Nationalist "heroes" did succeed in their next major attack on a prominent hanjian: Xi Shitai, chief secretary (mishu zhuren) of the puppet police force in Shanghai.^[148]