In a remarkable example of history as detective work, Brian Martin pieces together the fascinating and complex story of the Shanghai Green Gang and its charismatic leader, Du Yuesheng. Martin sifts through a variety of fragmentary and at times contradictory evidence--from diplomatic dispatches to memoirs to police reports--to produce the most comprehensive account of this chaotic period of Chinese history. In analyzing the Green Gang's system of organized crime in Shanghai, the author broadens our understanding of a critical aspect of Chinese urban history and sheds light on the history of drug trafficking and organized crime worldwide. Martin argues that the Green Gang, the most powerful secret society in China during the first half of the twentieth century, was a resilient social organization that adapted successfully to the complex environment of a modernizing urban society. Illustrating its multilayered and complex relations with the bourgeoisie, the industrial proletariat, and the foreign and domestic political authorities, Martin demonstrates how these factors led to the Green Gang's absorption into the corporate state system after 1932. In a remarkable example of history as detective work, Brian Martin pieces together the fascinating and complex story of the Shanghai Green Gang and its charismatic leader, Du Yuesheng. Martin sifts through a variety of fragmentary and at times contradictory evidence--from diplomatic dispatches to memoirs to police reports--to produce the most comprehensive account of this chaotic period of Chinese history. In analyzing the Green Gang's system of organized crime in Shanghai, the author broadens our understanding of a critical aspect of Chinese urban history and sheds light on the history of drug trafficking and organized crime worldwide. Martin argues that the Green Gang, the most powerful secret society in China during the first half of the twentieth century, was a resilient social organization that adapted successfully to the complex environment of a modernizing urban society. Illustrating its multilayered and complex relations with the bourgeoisie, the industrial proletariat, and the foreign and domestic political authorities, Martin demonstrates how these factors led to the Green Gang's absorption into the corporate state system after 1932.

In a remarkable example of history as detective work, Brian Martin pieces together the fascinating and complex story of the Shanghai Green Gang and its charismatic leader, Du Yuesheng. Martin sifts through a variety of fragmentary and at times contradictory evidence—from diplomatic dispatches to memoirs to police reports—to produce the most comprehensive account of this chaotic period of Chinese history. In analyzing the Green Gang's system of organized crime in Shanghai, the author broadens our understanding of a critical aspect of Chinese urban history and sheds light on the history of drug trafficking and organized crime worldwide. Martin argues that the Green Gang, the most powerful secret society in China during the first half of the twentieth century, was a resilient social organization that adapted successfully to the complex environment of a modernizing urban society. Illustrating its multilayered and complex relations with the bourgeoisie, the industrial proletariat, and the foreign and domestic political authorities, Martin demonstrates how these factors led to the Green Gang's absorption into the corporate state system after 1932.

In a remarkable example of history as detective work, Brian Martin pieces together the fascinating and complex story of the Shanghai Green Gang and its charismatic leader, Du Yuesheng. Martin sifts through a variety of fragmentary and at times contradictory evidence—from diplomatic dispatches to memoirs to police reports—to produce the most comprehensive account of this chaotic period of Chinese history. In analyzing the Green Gang's system of organized crime in Shanghai, the author broadens our understanding of a critical aspect of Chinese urban history and sheds light on the history of drug trafficking and organized crime worldwide. Martin argues that the Green Gang, the most powerful secret society in China during the first half of the twentieth century, was a resilient social organization that adapted successfully to the complex environment of a modernizing urban society. Illustrating its multilayered and complex relations with the bourgeoisie, the industrial proletariat, and the foreign and domestic political authorities, Martin demonstrates how these factors led to the Green Gang's absorption into the corporate state system after 1932.

This detailed study of the modern Chinese police force shows how the Nationalist forces under General Chiang Kai-shek set about to return Shanghai to Chinese rule, competing with the consular police forces of France, Japan and the International Settlement.

Utilising individual interviews and focus group discussions, primarily from two Chinese cities, The Chinese Mafia: Organized Crime, Corruption, and Extra-Legal Protection contributes to the understanding of organized crime and corruption in the Chinese context, filing a significant gap in criminological literature, by investigating how extra-legal protectors-corrupt public officials and street gangsters-emerge, evolve and operate in a rapidly changing society. China's economic reforms have been accompanied by a surge of social problems, such as ineffective legal institutions, booming black markets and rampant corruption. This has resulted in the rise of extra-legal means of protection and enforcement: such is the demand for protection that cannot be fulfilled by state-sponsored institutions. This book develops a new socio-economic theory of mafia emergence, incorporating Granovetter's argument on social embeddedness into Gambetta's economic theory of the mafia, to suggest that the rise of the Chinese mafia is primarily due to the negative influence of guanxi (a Chinese version of personal connections) on the effectiveness of the formal legal system. This interplay has two major consequences. First, the weakened ability of the formal legal system sees street gangsters (the 'Black Mafia') providing protection and quasi law enforcement. Second, it allows for escalating abuse of power by public officials; as a result, corrupt officials (the 'Red Mafia') sell public appointments, exchange illegal benefits with businesses and protect local gangs. Together, these outcomes have seen street gangs shift their operations away from traditional areas (e.g. gambling, prostitution and drug distribution), whilst corrupt public officials have moved to offer illegal services to the criminal underworld, including the safeguarding organized crime groups and protection of illegal entrepreneurs. A study of crime and deviance located within a fast growing economy, The Chinese Mafia offers a unique understanding of these activities within contemporary Chinese society and a new perspective for understanding the interaction between corruption and organized crime. It will be of interest to academics and students engaged in the fields of criminology and criminal justice, sociology, and political science, with particular interest for those researching China and Chinese politics and governance.

Between August 1937 and December 1941, when the Chinese sectors of Shanghai were occupied by the Japanese, terrorist wars broke out between Nationalist secret agents and assassins of the Japanese military authorities. The most intensely disputed area was the western suburb, the Badlands, but warfare was not restricted to that zone. A spate of assassinations, bombings, and machine gun raids took place under the noses of the authorities. Thanks to the release of secret Chinese police files by the CIA, the inner workings of these terrorist groups and their links to the notorious Green Gang can now be exposed for the first time. In so doing, this book also explores the social history of Shanghai's underworld, the worsening relations between the US and Japan before World War II, and the rivalry between leaders Chiang Kai-shek and Wang Jingwei during China's War of Resistance.

"In the 1930s, Shanghai was a haven for outlaws from all over the world: a place where pasts could be forgotten, fascism and communism outrun, names invented, fortunes made--and lost. 'Lucky' Jack Riley was the most notorious of those outlaws. An ex-Navy boxing champion, he escaped from prison in the States, spotted a craze for gambling and rose to become the Slot King of Shanghai. 'Dapper' Joe Farren--a Jewish boy who fled Vienna's ghetto with a dream of dance halls--ruled the nightclubs. His chorus lines rivaled Ziegfeld's. In 1940 they bestrode the Shanghai Badlands like kings, while all around the Solitary Island was poverty, starvation and genocide. They thought they ruled Shanghai; but the city had other ideas. This is the story of their rise to power, their downfall, and the trail of destruction they left in their wake."--Jacket

Prewar Shanghai: 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 topics: 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.

This set comprises a comprehensive selection of colonial Western scholarly texts on Chinese secret societies from the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. It includes a selection of important papers on Chinese secret societies by a variety of scholars, missionaries, and colonial officials.

Wakeman's authoritative biography of the ruthlessly powerful man who led the Chinese Secret Service during the violent and tumultuous period after the fall of the Imperial system.