Policing Shanghai, 1927-1937

Wakeman Shanghai Trilogy #1

by Frederic E. Wakeman Jr.

Prewar casinos, brothels, Green Gang racketeers, narcotics syndicates, gun-runners, underground Communist assassins, Comitern secret agents. Frederic Wakeman's masterful study of the most colorful and corrupt city in the world at the time provides a panoramic view of the confrontation and collaboration between the Nationalist secret police and the Shanghai underworld.

In detailing the life and politics of China's largest urban center during the Guomindang era, Wakeman covers an array of the puritanical social controls implemented by the police; the regional differences that surfaced among Shanghai's Chinese, the influence of imperialism and Western-trained officials. Parts of this book read like a spy novel, with secret police, torture, assassination; and power struggles among the French, International Settlement, and Japanese consular police within Shanghai.

Chiang Kai-shek wanted to prove that the Chinese could rule Shanghai and the country by themselves, rather than be exploited and dominated by foreign powers. His efforts to reclaim the crime-ridden city failed, partly because of the outbreak of war with Japan in 1937, but also because the Nationalist police force was itself corrupted by the city.

Wakeman's exhaustively researched study is a major contribution to the study of the Nationalist regime and to modern Chinese urban history. It also shows that twentieth-century China has not been characterized by discontinuity, because autocratic government―whether Nationalist or Communist―has prevailed.

Genres: China, History, Politics, Asia

548 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Frederic Evans Wakeman, Jr. (Chinese: 魏斐德; pinyin: Wèi Fěidé) was a prominent American scholar of East Asian history and Professor of History at University of California, Berkeley.

His father was the novelist Frederic E. Wakeman, Sr. (publishing as "Frederic Wakeman")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederi...

Reviews

[Max]

An excerpt from my Twitter feed about halfway through Policing Shanghai 1927-1937 : "The driest book it is possible to write about communist assassins disguised as stage magicians." Which is unfair, because this is very much an academic history, concerned with recounting facts and dates and trends; the dryness may even be a rhetorical pose adopted to protect the author against accusations of prurience for embarking on a history of gangsters, assassins, and crooked cops.

While this book displays immense, admirable, and awe-inspiring scholarship, most of the work of connecting the data into a coherent narrative is left (say it with me now) as an exercise for the reader. Which is strange indeed, because this book is full of fascinating characters, situations, and telling vignettes that would have transformed it from an interesting history to riveting reading along the lines of Jonathan Spence's God's Chinese Son. For example:

Du Yuesheng, poor laborer's son who rose to become the opium kingpin of Shanghai—and a key player in national politics, as Chiang Kai-Shek's nationalist government used his operation to finance its war against the Communists. Not to mention a notable financier and proprietor of patriotic clubs and organizations throughout the city!

Huang Jinrong, crooked cop and one-time iron ruler of the Shanghai underworld, later eclipsed by his student and protege Du Yuesheng

Gu Shunzhang, vicious Communist assassin masquerading beneath the cover of, I kid you not, a *famous stage magician*, who was picked up while *trying to assassinate Chiang Kai Shek* and turned as a double-agent against the Communists.

Wu Tiecheng, mayor of Shanghai, loyal to Chiang Kai-Shek but increasingly pulled into the vortex of money and criminal authority that dominated Shanghai in the early 30s.

Dai Li, the Nationalists' treacherous and powerful spymaster.

Tan Shaoliang, bookish and intellectual chief of the International Concession's Shanghai Municipal Police, who staffed his force with college graduates—who also established a close working relationship with...

Lu Liankui, voluble and corrupt shoot-first-ask-questions-later head of the SMP's Criminal Investigations Department, famous for his quick strike with the baton.

Yes. I swear. One of the major police working relationships in pre-war Shanghai was between a solitary bookish intellectual and a fiery hard-living hard-drinking rulebreaker. TOGETHER, THEY FOUGHT CRIME. And it gets better.... because Tan Shaoliang later became a Japanese spy! (And then, with Dai Li's intervention, a triple agent).

I'm not saying this needed to be the blockbuster movie-style history I'm envisioning in my head even now as I write this, but the author could have hung the book on his characters and let the facts and figures unfold naturally from those stories. Or, he could have emphasized the unfolding theme his introduction promised—of continuity between systems of control in Imperial, Nationalist, and (ultimately) Communist China. Instead, both characters and theme require considerable reader investment.

But if you're willing to do some of the heavy lifting yourself, Wakeman will give you the stone blocks you need to build your own vision of the "heaven on top of a hell" that was Shanghai before the war.

[Nils · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliantly researched academic history of the literally tortured interrelationship between the Nationalist government's efforts after 1927 to introduce professional policing into shanghai (probably then the world's most licentious city, besting Berlin and Tangiers) and the desire to suppress Communists. In the end, the efforts to professionalize the police into a general force for social control ran afoul of the temptations on the part of the government to turn narcotics regulation into its own revenue stream, resulting in the fact that the major drug dealing organization (the Green Gang) became the primary "drug suppression" force. All this would become a major source of anti-Guomindang propaganda by the Communists. At the same time, however, the policing strategy was effective at rooting the Communists out of Shanghai, though this too would have unintended consequences, in that it would push the Communists to organize instead in the vast countryside, which would eventually, by the late 1940s, allow them to strangle the nationalists in the city. Wakeman adopts a studiously anti-sensationalist mode of discourse, and the documentation is nothing less than prodigious.

[Lynda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Readers who want to gain a keener understanding of Shanghai during the 1930's, and who may not necessarily have a background in security or an interest in policing per se, would still find this book worth their time. Through the viewpoint of the Nationalist' efforts to establish a modern police force in Shanghai during 1927-1937, the reader will meet all sorts of important figures in modern Shanghai, understand how society worked, how foreigners and the Chinese co-existed or fought with one another to preserve their interests, and how the twin forces of the burgeoning Communists and the persistent Japanese invaders ultimately derailed Chiang Kai-shek's hope for Shanghai: "If the Shanghai Special Municipality cannot be regulated, then China's military, economic and communications systems will be in a hopeless tangle" (page 288). His vision was not to be. It came to an end in 1937, a watershed year for China.

The book has an extensive notes and bibliography section, worthy of any enthusiast of modern China to delve deeper into that particularly turbulent time period of Shanghai.

[Jindřich Zapletal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lurid. From White Russian prostitutes to police bosses running opium cartels to dozens of bodies encased in concrete and buried by Communist enforcers, the interwar tabloid obsession with Shanghai crime scene comes to life in this book. For those of us who like lurid as long as it is safely dead, a great read.

It is quite difficult to read this book responsibly, though. The reader needs to have a good background in early 20th century China history, as the author does not really explain any of it in coherent way. The exact extraterritorial status of various city parts is not explained, only illustrated by anecdotes. The same for the function of many legal entities appearing throughout the book. Many local place names are used without the least effort of identifying the places on a map etc.

Reliability may be a sticking point too. I looked more carefully into one of the anecdotes. Citroen organized a legendary car expedition Beirut-Beijing in 1931. Its leader, Georges-Marie Haardt, Citroen's factory director, died on the way back in Hong Kong, having stopped in Shanghai. The present author is selling us the story that his death was caused by poisonous mushrooms he ingested during a dinner at the house of the famous gangster-cum-French police boss Du Yuesheng; several other people perished as well. Now, where does Wakeman get this story? From Faligot's book on Chinese Communist secret service. Faligot certainly writes much faster than he thinks, he lists many trustworthy sources in his book but has real trouble actually tracing his anecdotes to his sources. That is certainly why Wakeman does not trace the story any further. None of the actual expedition participants seem to believe any foul play occurred. And so it goes.

[Ian Racey · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’ve seen other reviews slate this book for its dryness, but I didn’t find it overly dry. To be sure it’s an academic history, not a popular one, but I still found it plenty readable. An exploration of how the Chinese government, Shanghai underworld and illicit drug trade all intertwined during the Nanjing decade, focusing overwhelmingly on the threat they perceived from the Communists to the exclusion of fighting back against the Japanese.

[Karl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chiang Kai-Shek (Jiang Jieshi) the man, the enigma. This one details how he attempted to govern Shanghai in the midst of foreign encroachment, organized crime and gangsters (remember the beginning of Indiana Jones??) and how he attempted to impliment his campaigns to rally support for the GMD (KMT) Nationalist Government. An interesting work by the late Frederic Wakeman.

[Joshua Tintner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Detailed, precise research. But a plodding read that could have been as entertaining as it was enlightening.

[Tony Henderson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Useful when researching my novel The Shanghai Circle