Meanwhile, in the German concession, the Germans were busy doing important things - like shipping an entire brewery and all its equipment piece by piece from Bavaria, along with the recipe for a light lager. The brewery is still in operation, and you can get Tsing Tao, made from the same recipe, at the same brewery, at your local liquor store.
A few folks are forgetting to factor in context here - the China of the European Concessions wasn't the warm and fuzzy inclusive haven for State sanctioned mediocrity that we now claim to be the best way to run a society - but the China before that wasn't either. This myopic mistake is repeated again and again by people who really should know better, or who do, but have a political or social agenda to follow. In the China before the Europeans, there wasn't some wonderful familyhood of peoplekind at play - most people lived their lives in the street or in the field. They were born, lived, and died with nothing. It would not be unusual to see people near to starvation on a daily basis. So let's leave the social Marxism to the university professors and middle class rich kids. Life sucked for the average person both pre- and post- European involvement, got worse when the Japanese arrived, and maintained a pretty sh*tty level through the 50's, '60's, 70's, 80's, all the way up to today. Mao inadvertently killed 5 million people by starvation because he thought birds were eating all of their crops - his answer was to kill probably billions of birds (there is film on this) the end result was that insects who would normally be eaten by birds ate the crops, 5 million people starved - government response? Oops, move on. That's Communism for you, bury your errors and move on. So put the revisionist history to one side and at least try to be realistic.