Policing Shanghai, 1927-1937 (review)

Reviews 281 Frederic Wakeman, Jr. Policing Shanghai, 1927-1937. Berkeley and Los Angeles : University ofCalifornia Press, 1995. xvii, 507 pp. Hardcover $45.00, isbn 0-520-08488-8. This masterfully researched work on the Nationalists' efforts to govern Shanghai during the Nanjing decade (1927-1937) focuses on Chiang Kai-shek's extraordinarily complicated relations with various forces in Shanghai's mysterious and malicious underground, a saga diat has so far been told only in fragments, more in Chinese than in Western languages, often by survivors in their reminiscences or in non-scholarly narrations. Now, drawing from an impressive array ofpublished works and archival materials, Frederic Wakeman provides readers for the first time with a comprehensive, balanced, and nuanced picture ofthis crucial and crisis -ridden period in twentieth-century China. The story of "policing" a city (any city) by nature belongs to the larger category or analytic framework of state-society relations. Conventional methodology here might include such approaches as exploring how the state penetrated society and/or the latter's responses to state penetration, the interactions of state and society , the role of existing intermediaries such as local elites, and so on. But die state-society relations involved in the Nationalists' efforts to police modern Shanghai were much more complicated than these stereotypical approaches can convey. As readers will learn from Wakeman's analysis, the Shanghai municipal police reform launched by the Guomindang government in 1927 and the state's efforts to professionalize its police in order to create a new civic order were complicated by a number of circumstances that might be found in other Chinese cities of that era—but in their full range existed in no single city but Shanghai, making the process ofpolicing Shanghai a multifaceted endeavor that reflected a number of important themes in Republican China. The policing efforts, first of all, had to deal with the formidable obstacle that modern Shanghai was an administratively divided city. The core ofthe city, known as the International Settlement and the French Concession, was under European and American control. The Chinese part of the city—essentially the old county-town south ofthe French Concession and the newly developed Zhabei area north of the International Settlement—which the Nanjing government deliberately named the "Shanghai Special Municipality," was virtually peripheral. Given such an administrative trinity, the playing out of the Nationalists' ambition© 1996 by University of regulating the city by establishing a modern police institution inevitably inofHawai 'i Pressvolved confrontation with the West. Indeed, as Wakeman tells us, Chiang's ambition was, in die first place, to make Shanghai a showplace in which to demonstrate that the Chinese were capable of governing a modern and complex 282 China Review International: Vol. 3, No. 1, Spring 1996 metropolis like Shanghai, and diereby pave the way for the restoration of the foreign concessions and eventually for the abolition ofthe extraterritoriality imposed by die "unequal treaties." The story ofpolicing Shanghai, therefore, is not merely a saga ofthe city itselfbut, more importantly, a drama tiiat encompasses the issues of twentieth-century Chinese nationalism and Sino-foreign relations. As an important consequence ofthe existence ofthe foreign concessions, Republican Shanghai hosted China's most complex, politicized, and notorious underworld . Gangsters, assorted criminals, warlords, local despots, playboys, dissenters —anyone who might be subject to the attention of the Chinese authorities—could escape by fleeing to die foreign setdements; it was simply a matter of crossing the street. By 1920, Shanghai's underworld consisted ofabout 100,000 hoodlums (liumang '/EL^ or baixiang ren éj fàA.). Wakeman paints a vivid picture of them; they were ruled over predominantiy by various bands of gangsters (bangpai %i$.) under the Green Gang (Qingbang ¦&%), and dieir bosses were popularly known as wenren SJA (celebrities), ofwhom the most famous (or infamous) were Huang Jinrong and Du Yuesheng, both ofwhom had a special personal relationship with Chiang Kai-shek (see Jiu Shanghai de banghui [Shanghai, 1986]). Wakeman exposes the scandalous relationship between the Nanjing government and the Shanghai gangsters, involving in particular their confrontation and collaboration in the opium trade, on which "modern Shanghai was literally built" (p. 34). The government and the gangsters coexisted by cutting deals, such as the one by which...