Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Frederic Wakeman, Jr. is Haas Professor of Asian Studies and Director of the Institute of East Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth-Century China (California, 1985).

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Policing Shanghai, 1927-1937

University of California Press

The criminal is naturally demoralized. He is attracted to a place not so much by the opportunities he finds to commit crime as by the attractions the place offers to him to lead a life that appeals to his distorted mindwomen, gambling, and other forms of depraved amusement. . . . It is certain that Shanghai will continue to be highly criminal till such time as it is thoroughly cleansed of its worst evils: (1) illicit trade in opium, (2) gambling, (3) general looseness in forms of life, all of which not only attract and hold criminals to the place, but put in the hands of the principals enough money to maintain hordes of loafers in their pay and to defeat justice.
Shanghai Municipal Police Commissioner F. W. Gerrard, October 30, 1930

In 1933 several writers were asked to describe their visions of Shanghai in the future. Three of these visions suggest the activities in Shanghai that competed for priority in the decades we will examine. Invoking a popular image of a "heaven" built on top of a "hell," Ming San responded satirically. In the futurehe imaginedShanghai would have movie houses equipped with hot and cold running water; in addition to showing movies of "fragrant and voluptuous sensuality," the theaters would feature international dance troupes demonstrating the latest fox-trot steps in the nude. In each public park there would be a special office to teach the practice of kissing to young men and women who had not yet attained their majority. In addition to theaters there would be a host of circuses, athletic stadiums, horse tracks, greyhound racing tracks, bull fight rings, and cock fighting arenas. The courts would handle five hundred divorce cases a day. "There is no doubt that the future Shanghai will be a heaven on top of a heaven."1

Liu Mengfeianother writer speculating on Shanghai's futurewas probably not amused by Ming San's erotic tongue-in-cheek fantasy. "Shanghai," he sternly wrote, "is a vise compressing the exploited classes. It is a powder keg filled with contradictions." For Liu the fundamental contrast in Shanghai was between "upper class Chinese" (gaodeng Huaren ) and the shriveled "beggars of the street" (malu biesan ); the elementary confrontation was between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat

Central Shanghai, 1937

those "black insects" crouching beside the machinery in the mills of their ironhanded masters. The imperialists would redouble their tyrannical efforts and the warlords would continue to put the country on the auction block, but the time was soon to arrive for an end to the old Shanghai and the rise of a new city when the dawn would come and the "black insects" would shout victoriously, "Long live the New China."2

Wang Xiuhe's futuristic vision of the New China was much less apocalyptic and much more concerned with the construction of an orderly municipal environment by the Chinese themselves. He saw two possibilities for the Shanghai of the future: complete westernization or independent nationalization. In the first scenario the International Settlement grows to engulf the entire municipality, where the native Shanghainese turn into a spiritless, listless group only to be pitied by their foreign masters. In the second scenario, the municipal authorities of the Chinese government implement Sun Yat-sen's plan for national reconstruction. Gradually the International Settlement declines into a cold and deserted area, and eventually the foreigners return the concessions to the Chinese in order to maintain their trading relations with the country as a whole. Which of these two roads will Shanghai take? According to Wang Xiuhe, the outcome would depend upon the vigor with which the Chinese residents of Shanghai exerted themselves to control their own destiny and create a new civic culture free of vice and crime.3

Perceiving Crime and Disorder

Yet Chinese residents faced formidable obstacles to this third vision. For instance, Shanghai crime rates soared in the early 1920s. In 1922 there were 47 armed robberies reported in the International Settlement. Two years later the number had increased more than fourfold to 204 armed robberies, and by 1926 there were 448 instances of this felonyan increase of more than 950 percent within five years.4 The number of robbers arrested during this period also increased nearly threefold, which was not nearly at the same rate as the number of armed robberies committed. (See Figure 1.) By 1927, official reports spoke of a "crime epidemic" in the Lake Tai area just outside of Shanghai, where "armed marauders" robbed, kidnapped, and murdered the inhabitants.5 Within the Settlement there was a striking rise in the number of ax slayings both in crimes of domestic passion and in more public deaths related to robbery or revenge.6 And in parts of the Chinese section of the city known as Zhabei (Chapei), robberies were so severe that certain precincts felt their forces inadequate to cope with the crime wave.7 (See Figure 2.)

The causes of this statistically confirmed disorder and criminality (the

Figure 1
Reports of armed robberies, Shanghai International Settlement.
Source: CWR , 11 May 1927, 226.

Figure 2
Crimes recorded, Greater Shanghai.
Source: China Yearbook 1934.

two were often confused, especially by Chinese law enforcement officials) were multifarious.8 Western journalistswho took a certain hard-boiled pride in the opinion that "Shanghai has become the crime center of the Orient"usually attributed it to the prevalence of warlordism in China.9

The army is the finest school of training in crime. Nobody in China joins the army unless he is of the semi-criminal, loafer class, unable to earn an honest living. In the army he learns the use of firearms, and that knowledge he turns to his own account. Instead of any patriotic activity, he leaves the army and preys on his fellow men, using his army training to get a living at the point of a gun.10

The leading foreign businessmen (or "taipans") of Shanghai, on the other hand, simplistically associated criminality with the wave of radical strike activity and revolutionary mobilization that occurred before, during, and after the May Thirtieth Movement of 1925, when the populace tried in vain to push back foreign privileges in China.11 The foreign "griffins" believed that "Bolshevik propaganda" aroused "the greed and covetousness of the proletarian classes" in order to destroy all respect "for property and the rights of others," a belief shared by the International Settlement police (Shanghai Municipal Police or SMP).12 In that sense, revolutionary political activities were treated as a form of urban crime.13

In contrast to Shanghai's foreign businessmen, Chinese Nationalist officials had a more complex appreciation of the city's lawlessness, commonly identifying crime either with a general lack of social order (zhixu ) associated with urban commerce and industry, or with Shanghai's position as a semi-colonial treaty port.14 Eight reasons were usually given for the difficulty of "keeping the peace" (baoan ) in Shanghai: (1) the city's position as a great entreptt;15 (2) its openness of communications; (3) the complexity of human affairs in the city; (4) industrial expansion; (5) labor agitation; (6) the presence of the International Settlement spread across the middle of the city; (7) the presence of Communists; and (8) the existence of "reactionary elements" (fandongfenzi ) living within the asylum of the foreign concessions.16

Precisely because of its status as the country's major treaty port, Shanghai had by 1927 become a symbol to the new Nationalist rigime of the westernized world of international commerce that now occupied China's shores. Shanghai's crime problems seemingly stemmed from its victimization by the imperialists. The lawlessness of the city, after all, was directly related to the extraterritoriality of the foreign concessions, where

criminals could flee from arrest by the Chinese authorities for crimes committed in the native parts of the city.17 But it was also related to the sheer size and relative affluence of the metropolitan population, living in five different major zones under four different sets of rulers. In that respect crime and disorder, which were not clearly distinguished by the new Chinese revolutionary rigime after 1927, were linked concurrently to Shanghai's metamorphosis into a city with modern utilities and an entertainment industry (movies, cabarets, brothels, amusement centers) that transformed popular culture in the protective shelter of the foreign concessions.

Issues of urban control emerged clearly from these twin influences of metropolitan growth and foreign concessions. Shanghai's growth was unmistakable. The population of the city almost tripled between 1910 and 1930. By October 1930, the registered inhabitants of the city totaled 2,980,650. Of these, 971,397 Chinese and 36,471 foreigners lived in the International Settlement, 434,885 Chinese and 12,335 foreigners in the French Concession, and 1,516,092 Chinese and 9,470 foreigners in the Chinese Municipality.18 During those three decades of human growth the city underwent a profound physical transformation.

It might be said that reinforced concrete and the Electricity Department have made a new Shanghai. From the fluttering little experiment for which the rate payers voted Taels 80,000 in 1893, the Electricity Department has become a giant which outrivals Glasgow and Manchester, lights and heats a city of a million and a half people, drives their trams and runs a hundred mills.19 Meanwhile, reinforced concrete has given the builders an easy and expeditious medium with which to satisfy the house famine. . . . But already some owners are tearing down houses not ten years old to replace them with huge blocks of flats. With land even three or four miles from the Bund [the street running along the Shanghai riverfront] selling for eight or ten thousand taels a mow [7,620 square feet], it is necessary to economize in space.20

The International Settlement was incandescent at night, "a vast crucible of electric flame," its new twenty-story skyscrapers anchored to rafts of concrete that floated on long pilings in the alluvial mud below.21 The red neon lights along Nanking Road illuminated a new urban landscape of grand hotels and huge commercial palaces (the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank building on the Bund was the second largest bank house in the world at the time) that altered the cultural lives of its inhabitants.22 A long-time foreign resident wrote in 1926 that

Even twenty years ago . . . life was spacious and slow-moving; at the spring races we took up our carpets for the summer and at the autumn races we put them down for the winter; dinner parties broke up at 11:00, except on the rare occasions of a ball; there were no supper rooms, no night life, and the visit of a third-rate theatrical company was almost as much an event as would be the appearance of a dodo.23

Crime and Entertainment

During the civil wars of the early 1920s, a new form of night life appeared under the curfew imposed by the warlords' police forces: "Cabarets, night-clubs, Chinese sing-song houses [where story-telling prostitutes entertained], Japanese geisha houses, gambling houses and brothels were packed with polyglot pleasure-seekers who, locked in by the curfew, caroused all night and struggled home at dawn, when the ban lifted."24

Other Chinese entertainment patterns changed, too. In 1923 the Victrola was introduced; Shanghai gentry began renting gramophones from individuals who would come to their houses and operate them for a fee.25 And as early as 1903 moving picture shows started to play a big part in the life of Shanghai people.26 That year a Spaniard named A. Ramos began to show silent films, hiring an Indian to stand in front of the Shengping Teahouse on Fuzhou Road and play cymbals and a horn while the title of the day's showing was shouted out to the assembled crowds.

Five years later, Ramos built Shanghai's first movie house, the 250-seat Hongkew (Hongkou) Theater, at the intersection of Haining and Zhapu Roads.27 Ramos steadily expanded his cinematic domain; between 1927 and 1932 there was a tremendous growth of second-run theaters as well. In 1930 there were thirty-three to thirty-six movie houses, while the illustrated newspaper Dianying huabao (Movies Illustrated ) claimed to have a circulation of over one million readers.28 By 1933 the Da Guangming Theater, which was refurbished for $1 million and seated 1,951, and the Da Shanghai, which was bought for $800,000 and seated 1,629, were absolutely central to the entertainment life of the city.29 Together they provided an utterly engaging arena for lovers young and old, who could find romance on the silver screen above while courting in the darkened seats below. As one observer commented, "The real salvation of the Shanghai suitor [given the lack of room for privacy] is the moving picture theater."30 They also served as palaces of high-society cultureat least for the foreign community. "Shanghai did not offer much along the line of sophisticated entertainment. There was still no opera, no lectures to speak of, no Western stage. The first showing of a Hollywood

movie under these circumstances assumed the proportions of a major event on the social calendar with all the consuls and taipans attending in full evening dress."31

It is difficult to exaggerate the centrality of the cinema to Shanghai's mass culture. Movie actors and actresses were national celebrities and popular idols. Ruan Lingyu (191035), one of Shanghai's great silent film actresses who was often called "China's Garbo," impressed one quintessential image after another on the public's mind in her twenty-nine film appearances: writer, factory worker, wealthy society woman, social butterfly, flower girl, prostitute, nun, and beggar. Gossip about her divorce ultimately drove Ruan to take her own life, when, it was said, all of Shanghai wept.32

Western theater, Hollywood movies, and "modern" Chinese films were also readily taken as signs of degeneration. Movies like Shanghai hua (Three Shanghai Girls , 1926) seemed deliberately designed to promote the sales of modern products and to advertise the love mores of their westernized characters.33 They were thus despised by cultural conservatives as seductive media that drew provincial girls into the sordid life of the big city, as Ding Ling's first published short story, "Meng Ke," depicted in 1927.34 Qian Zhongshu's satirical masterpiece, Wei cheng , portrayed the influence of movies in cosmetic terms, like the foreign rouge plastered on the face of a teenage girl riding a Shanghai trolley car: "The girl's book covers were all decorated with pictures of movie stars. Though she was no more than 16 or 17, her face was made up like a mask, kneaded out of gobs of rouge and powder."35

If Shanghai had been transformed into a sexual marketplace as a result of overthrowing the old order, then why had there been a political revolution in the first place? Mao Dun captured a young progressive's dismay over the vulgarity of this change in an ambivalent, angry story about a political prisoner released after the Northern Expedition of 192628, when the Nationalists attempted to unify China:

The world had certainly changed. The girls had cut their hair and developed protruding pairs of breasts. Their faces were smeared with red or white, while their arms and legs were quite bare. Motion picture theaters had increased in number. They displayed wordy advertisements: "New drama of mystery and heroism." What lay beyond all this [the former political prisoner] did not know. One thing was certain. There had been a revolution, but the revolution had already proceeded beyond the wildest reaches of his imagination. He stood stupidly at a tram station on the street corner. All around him were perfumed women with gleaming arms

and legs, the rumble of vehicles, the noise of people, the arresting green and red electric signs. An indescribable disgust arose in him.36

Westernization, in this extreme form, represented the debasement of Shanghai's Chinese population, which was assailed on all sides by the temptations of gambling, narcotics, and prostitution,37 now vices for the masses.38

During the early twentieth century, for example, prostitution in Shanghai became a mass industry in which lower-class commercial whoring came to overshadow high-class courtesanship. By 1915 there was probably one prostitute among every sixteen females in the foreign settlements.39 Edna Lee Booker provides a vivid description of Northern Sichuan Road in the 1920s:

Narrow alleyways dimly lighted by red lights hanging over the doorways of low, tenement-like buildings stretched into the darkness. It was lurid. Figures slump along: Chinese girls with painted cheeks; Japanese women with calcimined faces of the Yoshiwara, Tokyo type; faded hags of almost any nationality. . . . Jazz notes from half a dozen brightly lit cabarets and bars . . . broke through the night. . . . Russian girls from Harbin, whose stock phrase was "my Prince, ples, you buy little Sonya small bottle vine" were there. American girls from the old Barbary Coast and women from the dives of Marseilles acted as hostesses.40

Whereas cabarets in the foreign concessions closed at 2:00 A.M. (except for Saturday nights, when they stayed open until dawn), the Chinese tea-houses (chalou ) virtually never shut down. And in the massage parlors along Avenue Joffre and Range Road, where Chinese masseuses had begun to displace the White Russian women who introduced these sexual services in the first place, conditions were "simply scandalous."41

Shanghai's range of erotic attractions may have entranced short-term visitors like the German film director Josef von Sternberg, who perceived the amusement resort Great World (Da shijie), located at the corner of Thibet Road and Avenue Edward VII, as a monument of exotic, if somewhat sinister, spectacles. "The establishment had six floors to provide distraction for the milling crowd, six floors that seethed with life and all the commotion and noise that go with it, studded with every variety of entertainment Chinese ingenuity had contrived."42 But long-time residents such as the American newspaper editor John B. Powell were deeply

offended by gangster-run amusement resorts like the Great World, where free beer was given away to all visitorsincluding children under ten years of ageon Sunday afternoons. "The shows inside were not fit for words, and yet they were open to children." Such "obscene entertainments" were "polluting the public mind."43

Chinese criminology experts also blamed the big "exhibition halls" (youyi chang ) such as the Great World or the World of Blessed Immortals (Fuxian shijie) for offering the middle and lower classes unhealthy amusements that fostered criminal behavior. Noting the lack of routine public intercourse between the many different classes of Shanghai's "extraordinarily complex" society, sociologists also remarked upon the way in which people clustered into small groups that became their own points of reference, encouraging criminal behavior and lacking a broader and more communal moral sense.44 Moreover, interviews with convicted criminals demonstrated how intimately felony was connected with the numerous "amusements" that Shanghai had to offer. Time and again it was shown that white-collar crime such as embezzlement was linked to houses of ill fame, where young clerks and apprentices often fell in love with the prostitutes and borrowed or stole to spend time together with them or try to persuade them to run away.45

Crime and Extraterritoriality

But to most Chinese living in Shanghai, these sociological explanations for the city's terrible crime waves, and especially for its robberies and murders, were probably far less compelling than the extraterritorial issue.46 The Nationalists firmly believed that the enormous narcotics, gambling, and prostitution industries of the city all depended upon the protection of the consular system of extraterritoriality set up under the "unequal treaties" of the nineteenth century.47 And while these forms of vice might be tolerated as necessary diversions for the city's sophisticated populace, even the most jaded urbanite had to be dismayed by the underworld's more violent manifestations in the form of kidnapping, robbery, and homicide committed by criminals who based themselves in the French Concession or International Settlement.48

The French Concession was particularly visible in this regard, especially when it came to vices that the more prudish authorities of the International Settlement had difficulty tolerating. "The tendency at the present time is that when anything socially unsound is discovered in the International Settlement," wrote one observer, "it is immediately removed to the French Concession, where it can comfortably settle down,

and therefore the French Concession in Shanghai today has become, morally speaking, the dirtiest spot in the Orient." Indeed, the French Concession had the largest opium dens, the fanciest casinos, the biggest brothels, and the most brazen prostitutes.49

When one takes a stroll along the Rue Montigny shortly after 7:00 in the afternoon, one will find a long row of girls ranging from the Great World amusement ground to as far as Nan-yang ch'iao. The French Concession police are doing nothing whatever to stop this immoral traffic. . . . [By contrast,] in the International Settlement, whenever such girls see policemen, they try to run away.

Most of this laxity was attributed to French attitudes about all their colonies: "let the 'natives' go to degradation and demoralization; their fate is no concern of the French nation."50 But it was also seen as a result of the foreigners' special privileges under the unequal treaties system. As one of Shanghai's Chinese police chiefs put it, the greatest "obstacle" to law and order in Shanghai was the system of tebie qu (special zones, i.e., the concessions).51 "Every person who performs criminal or treasonable acts makes the special zones his base area." All that a criminal had to do was to step over the concession border to slip from sight before arrest was possible.52 In the end the only way to get rid of these "evils" would be to abolish extraterritoriality altogether.53

As the Nationalists reasoned, the most persuasive argument for abolishing extraterritoriality would be a demonstration of effective law enforcement within the Chinese sectors of the divided city. Consequently, a top priority of the new Special Municipality of Shanghai that the Nationalists established on July 7, 1927, was to engender and guarantee "public safety" (gongan ).54 This would not only bring "peace" (anning ) and "order" (zhixu ) to the native inhabitants of the city, protecting their lives and property from criminal harm; it would also prove to the world that the Chinese deserved to recover control over the foreign settlements for themselves.55

The Public Security Bureau, established in Shanghai on July 22, 1927, was thus intended to be one of the primary instruments of the Nationalists' new order. As an agent of revolutionary modernization, it would help build a strong and honest municipal administration, create a healthy and orderly urban environment, and educate a twentieth-century citizenry to assume proper civic responsibilities.56 As a force representing the Chinese people and the new national government, it would also strive to recover long-lost sovereign rights by establishing the authority of the

Chinese state over those parts of the city it ruled. Its efforts to bring law and order to Republican Shanghai were thereby viewed as a crucial test of the overall effectiveness of the new rigime. In the Nationalists' eyes, a prime critical index of the Guomindang revolution itself would be the success or failure of their own Public Security Bureau, Shanghai's Chinese police.57

Excerpted from Policing Shanghai, 1927-1937by Wakeman, Frederic E., Jr. Copyright © 1996 by Wakeman, Frederic E., Jr.. Excerpted by permission.
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