By any standards, the 1920s and 1930s were
years of vicious organized crime, both of the
Western and Asian variety. Shanghai offers a
particularly brutal case study of violence and
excess. Scroll back to the Jazz Age, through the
clouds of opium den smoke and the flash of
Thompson submachine guns, and two Shanghai
godfathers emerge brazenly from the gloom.
Eighty years on, the careers of
"Pockmarked" Huang Jinrong and Du "Big Ears"
Yuesheng, still fascinate and repel. Both mobsters
dominated the Shanghai underworld at exactly the
same homicidal moment that Al Capone held sway
over blood-soaked
Chicago. Ultimately their
reigns of criminal terror were ended by Japanese
attack in 1932 followed by invasion in 1937 and
revolution in 1949. Yet even today both men still
cast long shadows. Just below the surface of
today's Shanghai traces of their lost crime
empires linger.
Shanghai reached its
apogee of crime in just over 80 years, from 1842
to 1925. The origins of the city's modern
underworld dated back to Chinese secret societies
operating in the areas since the 18th century but
were also the product of British free trade and
territorial ambition. In 1842, after winning the
First Opium War against the weak Qing Dynasty, a
buoyant British Empire pushed through the Treaty
of Nanjing.
With breathtaking effrontery -
resented to this day by most Chinese - the British
took possession of "leased territories" on China's
coast facing the East China Sea and South China
Sea. Under the treaty - gerrymandered a year after
the British had secured Hong Kong as a Crown
possession - they created five so-called Treaty
Ports: Canton (Guangzhou), Amoy (Xiamen), Foochow
(Fuzhou), Ningbo and Shanghai. Other European
powers would create similar arrangements along the
Chinese coast and on the Yangtze River up until
1907. The intention: privileged access to China's
largely untapped market for Western goods and
services.
It was a system - designed to
benefit 19th century Europe and Europe alone -
that would succeed beyond the wildest imaginings
of its original stakeholders. In the next 50
years, Shanghai was transformed into China's chief
commercial gateway, her "window on the world".
Shanghai's 20 square miles (32 square kilometers)
were divided into two Western settlements - the
largely British-run International Settlement (at
its high point totaling around 6,000 British
residents) and the French Concession. Both
encompassed around 12 square miles of the city.
Chinese citizens of Shanghai faced open
discrimination and were confined to Shanghai's
Chinese Quarter (eight square miles of the city).
Both Western settlements enjoyed their own legal
systems, police force and military protection and
were governed by the city's municipal council (the
British held a controlling majority until 1930).
Paris of the Orient By the
1920s, Shanghai remained a wildly prosperous
bubble sucking in workers from the surrounding
Chinese provinces. Those were turbulent years when
Chinese Nationalist leaders and warlords such as
Zhang Zongchang (known as "The Dogmeat General")
vied mercilessly for control of the nation. Trade
boomed and the labor force swelled after Shanghai
accepted thousands of White Russians fleeing the
Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
Shanghai
became China's largest and most international city
- the so-called "Paris of the Orient". The
population rose to 2.5 million in the 1920s (and
3.5 million by 1934). The city soaked up around
30% of total foreign investment into China as well
as hosting half of China's total factories. About
75% of Britain's investment in China went through
Shanghai.
The city's Western atmosphere -
typified by the international architecture of the
city's Bund (waterfront) and the British-only
Shanghai Club (1910) with its famous Long Bar -
electrified visitors and commercial chancers
alike. The city fizzed with energy, financial
empire-building, political ferment and arrivistes
of every imaginable character. The settlements
became an oasis of creativity for Western and
Chinese intellectuals and emigres attracted to
Shanghai's free-wheeling atmosphere, beyond the
influence of the warlords and the control of
China's ruling Nationalist government.
Inevitably, the virtues of booming trade
in Shanghai were followed by its many vices.
Shanghai's opulent Art Deco hotels, such as the
Cathay (built in 1929 by magnate Victor Sassoon),
co-existed with appalling poverty in the city's
factories and sweat shops, where children as young
as six labored from dawn to dusk. Shanghai in the
1920s was an environment of wealth and
exploitation in which crime flourished unchecked.
The memoirs of expats and Chinese writers
in Shanghai of this period paint a lurid picture.
This was the era of Shanghai's now vanished "Great
World" entertainment complex at the corner of
Thibet Road and Avenue Foch/Avenue Edouard VII, a
six-storey "pleasure pagoda" and dance hall where
every sense was catered for.
Elsewhere the
well-heeled - including Mrs Wallace Simpson,
future wife of the abdicated British monarch King
Edward VIII - could relax in the tea rooms of the
Bubbling Well Road or shop for Western goods in
the plush department stores on the Nanjing Road.
For the less salubrious the flesh pots of Soochow
Creek beckoned. "There is enough whisky and gin to
float a fleet of battleships," opined the left
wing British poet W H Auden on his own louche
visit to the city.
Asia's sin
city Shanghai was rightly notorious
throughout East Asia in the 1920s for its crime
bosses and criminal fraternities. Head and
shoulders above them all stood "Pockmarked" Huang
Jinrong, godfather of the city's most powerful
criminal group and secret society, the Green Gang
(Qing Bang).
Competing with their main
city rivals, the Red Gang, Huang Jinrong and his
brothel-keeping wife fought their way up to become
Shanghai's undisputed monarchs of opium and heroin
trafficking, gambling, prostitution, extortion,
labor racketeering, kidnapping and murder. By the
mid-1920s, Huang Jinrong - who also served as head
of Chinese detectives for the French Concession
police - was overseeing shipments of over 40,000
opium chests each year. "Pockmarked" also had a
protege: Du ("Big Ears) Yuesheng (aka "The Opium
King").
This feared drugs baron never
travelled anywhere in Shanghai without his tough
White Russian bodyguards and was rumored to be in
a menage-a-trois with Huang's wife. The trio
operated in the French Concession from the ornate
Donghu Hotel (built in 1925 on Donghu Road). They
paid off the local French police - who turned a
blind eye to organized crime so long as "taxes"
were paid to the civic authorities - and enjoyed
close contacts with Chinese Nationalist (KMT)
leader Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek.
These contacts paid off handsomely in 1927
when Huang Jinrong supplied gangsters to assist
both Chiang's Northern Expedition army and a
20,000 strong multinational British, French and
American force sent in to crush a communist
uprising in the city. An estimated 5,000
insurgents were killed.
Like many a
mobster before them, "Pockmarked" Huang Jinrong
and Du Yuesheng eventually gravitated to
legitimate business and banking. Du Yuesheng rose
to be a powerful member of Shanghai's respectable
civic society and became a noted local
philanthropist. Throughout the Roaring Twenties,
Huang and Du's criminal associates mingled happily
with complicit Western bankers and journalists
across Shanghai, as their auburn-haired Chinese
and blonde White Russian mistresses, wearing the
latest 1920s "Flapper" fashions, sipped cocktails
in the city's most expensive bars.
The
party lasted until 1932, when the Japanese
attacked Shanghai. In 1937, Japanese forces went
on to capture the Chinese Quarter and in 1941
seized the entire city. Some of Shanghai's
gangsters stayed on and kept business going under
occupation but most relocated to Hong Kong after
the Second World War. Shanghai's pre-WWII moment
as Asia's undisputed "Sin City" was over and was
replaced in 1949 by the austerity of the new
Peoples Republic of China (PRC). Neither of the
kingpins were brought to justice - both slipped
into exile. Du Yuesheng died of suspected opium
poisoning in Hong Kong in 1951, "Pockmarked" Huang
Jinrong just two years later.
It would be
the mid-1990s before Shanghai's reputation as an
exciting "Paris of the Orient" returned. Today,
the party is in full swing once again, albeit
without the violence of the past. With the
exception of recent knife-crime statistics in some
parts of the city, today's Shanghai happily enjoys
an extremely low violent crime rate. Du Yuesheng's
former haunt, the Donghu Hotel, survived its
notoriety and today is the popular four-star hotel
70 Donghu Road.
The godfathers of Shanghai
may be long gone but their careers still prompt
beguiling questions today. In 1920s Shanghai which
man - "Pockmarked or "Big Ears - was the worst
gangster and why were both never convicted in a
court of law? To modify the old press adage: You
pay your (protection) money and you take your
choice.
Ronan Thomas is a
British correspondent. He was based in East Asia
during the 1990s.
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