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Champions Day: St. Joe’s scholar’s new book shows how a 1941 Shanghai horse race gallops through U.S.-China relations today

In the 1930s, Shanghai was “the Paris of the East,” a neon-bright international treaty port known for glamour and decadence, a magnet for those looking to make a buck and those who already had.

James Carter, chair of the history department at St. Joseph's University, has written a new book on an unusual subject: horse-racing in China, and how one historic race near the start of World War II holds important lessons for U.S.-China relations today.
James Carter, chair of the history department at St. Joseph's University, has written a new book on an unusual subject: horse-racing in China, and how one historic race near the start of World War II holds important lessons for U.S.-China relations today.Read moreJOSE F. MORENO / Staff Photographer

Everyone went to the horse races in Shanghai: American, British, and Chinese, soldiers and civilians, wealthy and poor and in between, all drawn to the excitement at the heart of one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities — right up to the day it all disappeared.

St. Joseph’s University China scholar James Carter wasn’t there on Nov. 12, 1941, but he might as well have been.

In his new book, he takes readers up to the rails of the racing oval, close enough to smell the dirt and the dung, during what would turn out to be the last competition for the vaunted Champions Cup. Weeks later, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor would plunge the world into war.

”The racecourse was the center of Shanghai and all it stood for,” Carter writes in Champions Day: The End of Old Shanghai. “It was even shaped like the eye of a hurricane. For a hundred years it had been just that, but after Champions Day, never again.”

People tend to think of Shanghai as always being the way it is today: the largest city in China, with a population of about 25 million, a global financial hub defined by futuristic skyscrapers, and host to both a Disneyland and the world’s largest Starbucks.

Back in the 1930s, Shanghai was “the Paris of the East,” a neon-bright international treaty port known for glamour and decadence, gambling and jazz, fashion, art and architecture, a place where cars, trolleys, and rickshaws competed for space on the streets. Its nightlife drew movie stars and criminals, those looking to make a buck and those who already had.

It was a place, noted Paul French in his 2018 book City of Devils: A Shanghai Noir, for those who had nowhere else to go: the refugee and the fleeing, those wanting adventure, those seeking escape from the misery of the Great Depression or sanctuary from fascism and communism. As war neared, the fates of all the disparate peoples in Shanghai grew more uncertain.

Racing had come into China along with the British, and by the 1920s, there were tracks in more than a dozen cities, among them Beijing, Qingdao, Harbin, and, most important, Hong Kong and Shanghai.

”No institution,” Carter writes, “better exemplified Old Shanghai than the Shanghai Race Club, and the pinnacle of the Shanghai Race Club’s season was Champions Day. Twice a year — each fall and spring — Shanghai gathered for the city’s biggest race, a contest among all the season’s winners.”

What might the story of a Champions Day horse race have to do with modern U.S.-China relations? With a Trump administration that rages against “the China virus” and issues sanctions that have helped drive the relationship between the two powers to its lowest point in decades?

More than you’d think.

The world of Champions Day, Carter said, exerts lingering influences.

One is as a flawed but hopeful example of how cosmopolitanism and internationalism can create a society greater than the sum of its parts. Shanghai was neither Western nor Chinese, but at the same time both Western and Chinese, a combination that’s only possible through a free flow of goods, people, and ideas.

Today, both the American and Chinese governments view that kind of globalism with suspicion, he said, because both have built their legitimacy on nationalism.

“For the Chinese side, that means making clear that the Chinese Communist Party ended the era of colonialism, and the foreign influence [that especially lately] is seen as an echo of colonialism,” Carter said. “For the Trump administration, it means putting up borders and obstacles to trade. … Neither side embraces cooperation.”

Old Shanghai was far from perfect, Carter cautions in Champions Day. It was international and diverse, but also racist, and the gap between haves and have-nots was huge. For the rich, every whim was within reach, while a poor underclass toiled to provide it. It’s no accident that the Chinese Communist Party, devoted to ending the exploitation of workers, chose Shanghai as the site of its first meeting in 1921.

Carter, 51, chair of the St. Joe’s History Department, ranks among the nation’s top thinkers on modern China, turning out books, studies, and essays. He ferries both student groups and congressional staff delegations to China for on-the-ground learning and insight.

Carter contends: Everything happens in China. From roughly 1860 to 1970, the country experienced war with Britain, invasion by Japan, occupation, World War II, famine, revolution, and civil war, followed by the economic ignition of the 1990s and 2000s that lifted millions out of poverty.

To help tell that larger story, he turned to a single day, as the city’s elite prepared to test their best horses at the Shanghai Race Club. Across town, others celebrated the birthday of Sun Yat-sen, the first president of what was then the Republic of China. Thousands more attended the funeral of China’s wealthiest woman, the Chinese-French Buddhist widow of a Baghdadi Jewish businessman, her death signaling the passing of a generation that had seen Shanghai rise to world prominence.

The biggest crowd of all gathered at the track.

“In horse racing, there was always part of me that was a frustrated sports writer,” Carter said. “The racetrack was this physical and symbolic space at the center of the city that was controlled by foreigners, but was a mixture of foreign and Chinese.”

The membership of the racing club was rich and white. But the crowd at the Nov. 12, 1941, race, as at many others, was, well, everyone. Chinese, Japanese, Indians, Americans, Europeans. The track was a diversion. It promised fun at a time when life was hard — the Japanese had invaded China in 1937 — and the prospects were it would get worse.

On that day, in a city of wealth and poverty, people didn’t know they were attending the last Champions Day race. Or what that end would mean.

Life changed on Dec. 8, 1941 — it was Dec. 7 in the United States — when Japanese troops attacked and occupied Western settlements across China. The citizens of the Allied nations were interned, their homelands newly at war with Japan.

At first, horse racing continued; the Japanese wanting to keep up a show of normalcy. Of course, the British and Americans and others couldn’t attend — they were in camps. The last, lesser races ended in 1945, days before the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

Full-scale Chinese civil war between the Communists and Nationalists followed the end of World War II. Mao Tse-tung declared the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, and the victorious communists saw horse racing as an imperialist, colonial institution. The Shanghai track did not reopen.

Shanghai, closed from the world, stagnated for decades under communism. Its renewal took hold in the 1990s when leader Deng Xiaoping pushed for it to become an engine of the nation’s financial awakening and reform.

Today, even in modern, glass-and-steel Shanghai, elements of a bygone horse racing era can still be found. The old racetrack clubhouse is still there, converted into the Shanghai History Museum. People can walk the curve in the road that follows what was the turn of the racing oval.

“That century that Mao looked down on was in many ways the peak of Shanghai,” Carter writes, “and while it was an era dominated by foreigners, the people of Shanghai — even the international settlement — were always overwhelmingly Chinese. … Shanghai’s golden age was framed and enabled by colonialism, but it was also a time to which many of today’s Shanghai residents see their city returning.”