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Throughout the war, on orders from Moscow, the Reds had arrayed themselves in the "united front" with Chiang against the Japanese.* Liaison man between the Communists and the government was Wu's old schoolfriend, suave Chou Enlai. Chou was often heard to say at Chungking parties: "Wu and I used to go to school together. Now we fight together." Wu did not share this pally mood. Chou made him nervous. Said he once: "Chou En-lai puts me on the jitterbug."
K. C. Wu's jitters proved amply justified.
The Technicians of Chaos. For a time it seemed as if Chungking's—and all China's—heroic endurance had been rewarded. In 1945, after 14 years of fighting, the war was over: the Japanese surrendered. Men like K.C. Wu were sure then that they would get the time and the peace so desperately needed to build and organize a modern China. But, within sight of realization, their hopes came to nothing. While the technicians of order labored to build, the Red technicians of chaos labored to perpetuate disorder. Immediately after V-J day, the Communists and Nationalists were at war.
In 1946, Chiang Kai-shek assigned Wu to tend Asia's most desperate sore of disorder: Shanghai.
It was not a city; it was the double-distilled epitome of chaos. Sediments of every evil that Asia has seen in a century, and the residue of every Western movement for good in Asia, had been washed ashore on the Shanghai mudbanks. When Wu took over, Shanghai was a compound of patient, unlettered Chinese coolies, British traders, American, French and British missionaries, White Russian blondes who lived by their wits, refugees, adventurers, prostitutes, gangsters—and Communist agents. Nobody was astonished at hotel rooms that cost $150,000 (Chinese) a night, at small boys who peddled blackjacks in public, or at homeless children dying nightly in the streets.
Mayor Wu's first act in office concerned the 97,000 dead who, during the war, had accumulated in the city's morgues because relatives could not transport them inland to their ancestral burial grounds. Wu ruled that henceforth no corpse might stay unburied more than 30 days.
Wu proved an efficient, smart administrator against overwhelming odds. He managed to keep Shanghai's astronomical budget from soaring into outer space, did his best to fight black markets. As in Chungking, he dashed in person from crisis to crisis. On one occasion, he harangued nearly 3,000 rioting students for 18 hours, persuaded them to go home peacefully; another time, students beat him up. Once when workers in the city's big textile industry demanded pay raises, Mayor Wu gave a big tea party for the union bosses and their families. They were so pleased at being allowed to rub elbows with the mayor that they cut their demands by 75%.
But Wu's fight for order was in vain. The technicians of chaos carried the day. The Communists (and their obedient echoes in the U.S.) screamed about China's weakness and confusion while, swinging the torch of civil war, the Reds themselves desperately increased the weakness and the confusion. As the Reds approached Shanghai, Chiang ordered Wu, who was seriously ill, to go to Formosa.