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.

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.

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. 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.

First published in 1966, and now available once more, this pioneering work examines the relationship between the Chinese civil and military authorities and the British trading community in Guangdong province on the eve of the Taiping Rebellion--one of the most calamitous events in Chinese history. The book explores the various factors that led to the progression of rebellion and the inevitability of revolution.

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.

An innovative study of colonialism in China, examining Shanghai's International Settlement as the site of key developments in the Republican period.

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 this groundbreaking volume, based on extensive research in Chinese archives and libraries, Jan Kiely explores the pre-Communist origins of the process of systematic thought reform or reformation (ganhua) that evolved into a key component of Mao Zedong’s revolutionary restructuring of Chinese society. Focusing on ganhua as it was employed in China’s prison system, Kiely’s thought-provoking work brings the history of this critical phenomenon to life through the stories of individuals who conceptualized, implemented, and experienced it, and he details how these techniques were subsequently adapted for broader social and political use.

Through a detailed study of the process as it took place in Chengdu, a key provincial capital in the interior, this book shows how urban reformers sought to remake Chinese cities by promoting a new type of orderly and productive urban community in population centers that before had been treated mainly as hubs for trade and seats of central government"--BOOK JACKET.

"Practicing law" has a dual meaning in this book. It refers to both the occupational practice of law and the practicing of transplanted laws and institutions to perfect them. The book constitutes the first monographic work on the legal history of Republican Beijing, and provides an in-depth and comprehensive account of the practice of law in the city of Beijing during a period of social transformation. Drawing upon unprecedented research using archived records and other primary materials, it explores the problems encountered by Republican Beijing’s legal practitioners, including lawyers, policemen, judges and criminologists, in applying transplanted laws and legal institutions when they were inapplicable to, incompatible with, or inadequate for resolving everyday legal issues. These legal practitioners resolved the mismatch, the author argues, by quite sensibly assimilating certain imperial laws and customs and traditional legal practices into the daily routines of the recently imported legal institutions. Such efforts by indigenous legal practitioners were crucial in, and an integral part of, the making of legal transplantation in Republican Beijing. This work not only makes significant contributions to scholarship on the legal history of modern China, but also offers insights into China’s quest for modernization in its first wave of legal globalization. It is thus of great value to legal historians, comparative legal scholars, specialists in Chinese law and China studies, and lawyers and law students with an interest in Chinese legal history.