When one contextualizes Shanghai Sanctuary, with 137 pages of text, within the vast corpus of Shanghai studies, it is clear that Gao Bei has added much original data to the extant literature, but not achieved two of the objectives outlined in her introduction and epilogue.

She defines her first task as redressing a situation in which “the story of the European Jewish refugees in China during the Second World War is still not well known” and “the relations of the Jews and the locals, the native Chinese in particular, have long been neglected by scholars of the field” (pp. 3, 128). She thereby flies in the face of vast multilingual bibliographies on the subject compiled by Joshua Fogel, Rudolf Loewenthal and Frank Shulman.

Second, she seeks to “reveal…that both the Chinese Nationalist government and the Japanese occupation authorities thought very carefully about the Shanghai Jews and how they could be used to win international financial and political support in their war against one another” (p. 10). Others have already told the story of Jewish refugees in China and Sino-Japanese policy considerations which underlay the admission of these refugees.

With respect to Chinese policy, Gao reiterates what Irene Eber, Marcia Ristaino and David Kranzler have already revealed. While Sun Ke, Jakob Berglas, Kong Xiangxi and Maurice William suggested mass settlement of Jews in Yunnan and Hainan, those grandiose schemes were never realized. Chinese consuls were happy to grant Jews entry visas to regions of China outside of their control. The Kuomintang leadership hoped humanitarianism would win much-needed support from politically influential American Jews at a time when it was far from clear whether China's major military alliance with Germany would endure (Eber, Wartime Shanghai, pp. 66–70; Ristaino, Port of Last Resort, pp. 117, 146; Kranzler, Japanese, Nazis, and Jews, pp. 30, 37).

With respect to Japanese policy, Avraham Altman, Gerhard Krebs, Maruyama Naoki, and Ben-Ami Shillony, established well before Gao that the head of the Navy Advisory Bureau on Jewish Affairs from April 1939 to March 1942, Inuzuka Koreshige, helped Jewish refugees settle in Japanese-occupied (and Navy-administrated) Shanghai. His army counterparts Yasue Norihiro, liaison officer with the Jews in Harbin in Japanese-controlled Manzhouguo, and Higuchi Kiichiro, military intelligence chief in Harbin from August 1937 to July 1938, aided Jewish resettlement there. Altman maintains that Inuzuka, Yasue and Higuchi were “using the Jews as tools in [their] government's efforts to get the U.S. to remain neutral,” a parallel effort to Chinese schemes to win US goodwill. Japan, like China, never went so far as to implement vast resettlement schemes such as those proposed by Tamura Kozo and Shanghai journalist N. E. B. Ezra (pp. 13, 99–104). Shillony demonstrated long before Gao that Higuchi, Inuzuka and Yasue all preached an “ideological anti-Semitism” but, at the same time, professed a “practical friendship” for Jews who wished to settle in Japanese-occupied parts of China” (Altman, letter to Jerusalem Post, 19 May 1982; Krebs, “Jewish Problem” in Bruce Reynolds, ed., Japan, pp. 113–129; Maruyama, “Facing a Dilemma” in Guy Podoler, ed. War, pp. 22–38; Shillony, Jews, pp. 201–207; Shillony, “Japan,” Middle East Review 18, pp. 17–24).

Gao has nevertheless added valuable data from Kuomintang and Japanese archives in support of existing theories. She documents the autonomy of some Japanese field-grade staff officers in China who acted largely independently of their commanding officers in the central government. She explains differences between Inuzuka's ideas which have sometimes been characterized as “the Fugu Plan” and Yasue's notion of Hakko Ichiu (universal brotherhood), concepts which were symptomatic of broader differences of opinion between the Japanese army, navy, and foreign ministry (pp. 58–92, 126). Gao confirms evidence from Polish sources that Japanese vice consul Sugihara Chiune's issuance of transit visas to Polish Jews in Lithuania in 1940 was a biproduct of, and perhaps even a cover-up for, his primary function as intelligence agent spying on the Soviets and Germans. Finally, Gao dispels the exaggerated claims of Chaim Lipschitz and Ezra Yehezkel-Shaked of Japanese “plans” to drown the Shanghai Jews in the Pacific at the behest of the Germans.

While adding this new information, Gao neglects Japanese policy toward the Jews after Inuzuka left Shanghai in March 1942. She omits the activities of his replacement, Saneyoshi Toshiro, and of Kubota Tsutomu, director of the Stateless Refugees Affairs Office set up in February 1943 to issue passes out of the Hongkou ghetto. Simultaneously, the Shanghai Ashkenazi Collaborating Relief Association, chaired by A. Cohn, was established to transfer stateless Jews into the ghetto. It was later transformed into the Central Board, with Cohn again as chairman. Gao fails to mention Cohn or these organizations.

Over and beyond these omissions, there is a troubling lack of consistency in Gao's argument. For example, she maintains that the history of Jews in wartime Shanghai “has been explored almost exclusively by Western scholars” (p. 3), thereby doing disservice to the commitments of Maruyama Naoki, Pan Guang, Tang Peiji, Xu Buzeng, Xu Xin and Zhou Xun. Inexplicably, she refers to these same scholars authoritatively elsewhere in her text (pp.7–9, 130). She also makes the unsourced claim that there are “limited source materials available from the Asian, especially the Chinese side” (p.7). In reality, there is an abundance of Chinese and Japanese source material which linguistically competent scholars of multiple ethnicities have mined for decades. But one example is Xiao Xian's textual analysis of images of Shanghai Jews between 1904 and 1948 in the newspaper Dongfang zazhi (Eastern Miscellany) which Gao, again inexplicably, cites authoritatively elsewhere in her text (pp.12–18). Careful proofreading could have eliminated these inconsistencies.

Gao's study further suffers from the omission of interviews, although there are many articulate ex-Shanghailanders with a broad range of opinions, including Chinese and Japanese eyewitnesses. She also fails to cite any of the city's ten German-language newspapers or its Polish, Russian and Yiddish press.

There are also some problematic characterizations of Japanese policy. Gao makes the unsourced claim that Yasue and Inuzuka “attempted to attract as many Jews as possible to Japanese-occupied China in order to exploit them ruthlessly” [emphasis mine] and that Japan's policy in the late 1930s was “intended to harm the refugees” (pp. 8, 136). There is a difference between exploiting Jews versus inviting refugees in as potential investors, experts, and influencers of American policy. There are two examples of Japanese treatment of Jews which can arguably be characterized as “harmful' and even “ruthless.” In 1933 Japanese kempeitai (police) officer Konstantin Nakamura helped kidnap and murder Russian-Jewish pianist Semion Kaspe. The often abusive and arbitrary conduct of the Japanese official Goya Kano (who liked to call himself “king of the Jews” in enforcing Shanghai ghetto restrictions) also appears to have been “harmful,” “ruthless,” and at least arguably anti-Semitic. But two examples do not a rule make, and Gao cites neither one.

Finally, while Gao acknowledges that a “complicated relationship” existed between “China, Japan, Germany, and the United States before and during World War II” she cites no German government documents and does little to unravel the intricacies of the relationship (pp. 3, 128). Most seriously, she fails to cite the pioneer scholarship of Gerhard Weinberg, who used German sources to show that by February, 1938 Germany sensed greater economic opportunity with Japan than with unoccupied China and therefore recognized Japanese-controlled Manzhouguo. Hitler was happy to see Jews who were fleeced of virtually all material possessions dumped in regions under the domination of his Asian ally (“Japanese Recognition,” World Affairs Quarterly 28 [1957]).

In summation, Gao's book provides some new supportive data demonstrating once again that it was the fortuitous convergence of the diplomatic policies of several nations, plus the energetic efforts of the Jews of the world, which spared some 17,000 individuals from almost certain annihilation at the hands of the Nazis.