'I am not interested to rescue China from a position to which she has been brought largely by her own folly.'.

This is what the British Consul-General in Shanghai wrote soon after Japan bombarded the Chinese areas of Shanghai in 1932. Seven years before, he had grappled with a full-scale anti-British movement that followed the shooting of Chinese demonstrators by British policemen in the Shanghai International Settlement. These incidents suggest that the situation before the Shanghai crisis was far more complicated than conventionally believed.

Based on the study of a wide range of Japanese as well as British sources, this book throws light on the history of East Asia in the 1920s. It examines how the relations between China, Britain and Japan in Shanghai changed over time, and provides an objective analysis of the factors which ultimately determined Anglo-Japanese relations in the period.