Beyond My Control

The Great Shanghai Plan was a plan formulated by the Nationalist Government in Nanjing to build a new Shanghai and break the monopoly that the Shanghai International Settlement and the Shanghai French Concession held over the city center.

As part of the Great Shanghai Plan, a new municipal government building was naturally constructed. Situated at the heart of the plan, at the intersection of the four main roads—Three Principles, Five Powers, World, and Datong—stood that very building.

After the Battle of Shanghai, the Nationalist Army retreated in defeat, and Japan occupied the area, turning it into the office site of the puppet government. Now that Wang Zhaoming's faction had resolved to establish a puppet Nationalist Government, this municipal building naturally passed into the hands of the Wang Puppet Government.

As director of the Economic Bureau, Ming Lou's office was located there. Today, the Economic Bureau had invited Shanghai Bund's industrialists and businessmen to discuss the future of Shanghai's economy. The meeting was arranged at a venue not far from the municipal building.

For an event like this, practically every businessman on the Shanghai Bund had come. They had no choice. They still needed to do business, and they were doing it in Japanese-occupied territory. Previously, they had been governed by scattered local puppet governments; going forward, they would be under the unified puppet Nationalist Government. They had to obey its orders, follow its rules, and pay the prescribed taxes.

Of course, the puppet government was working for nothing. The wealth extracted from every industry and from China's impoverished masses ultimately ended up, for the most part, in the hands of Japanese conglomerates and the Japanese government.

But from another perspective, high-ranking figures like Wang Zhaoming, Chen Gongbo, and Zhou Fohai were doing quite well for themselves. They remained rich as