Blood brothers, p.5
Blood Brothers, page 5
From his headquarters in the Ju Bao Teahouse in the French Concession, Huang regulated the activities of robbers, kidnappers, gambling den operators and drug traffickers. The French were satisfied with pretending not to notice as long as crime was kept within tolerable limits—and provided they themselves received a share of the proceeds.49 While the arrangement between crime and the law was blatant in the French Concession, it was actually not unique. The chief Chinese detective in the Shanghai Municipal Police in the 1910s and 1920s was a man called Shen Xingshan—who was also the principal leader of the Big Eight Mob, which controlled the city’s narcotics traffic.50
By the mid-1920s, Huang had become Shanghai’s best-known gangland celebrity, or wenren, and dominated all the other crime bosses. He has sometimes been compared with Chicago’s legendary Mafia boss, Al Capone, but there are significant differences between the two godfathers. Al Capone began and ended his career as a gangster—Huang combined his duties in the detective squad with his criminal enterprises from the very beginning. His position was also much stronger; it was as if Al Capone had been not only an outlaw, but also the chief of the Chicago police. One striking similarity, however, is that Chicago’s gangsters made their fortunes by selling bootleg liquor during America’s Prohibition; Huang and his men refined and sold narcotics during a period when the authorities were attempting, ostensibly, to fight the opium trade and drug abuse.51
Huang needed a trustworthy lieutenant to run his opium rackets, and in the mid-1920s he found him: a man with big, protuberant ears who was always dressed in an ill-fitting robe. His name was Du Yuesheng, an almost illiterate urchin from the slums of Pudong across the Huangpu. In 1902, when ‘Big-Eared Du’ was only fourteen, he had left his mud hovel in Pudong and gone across the river to Shanghai proper to look for a job. After working as an errand boy for a fruit vendor, he drifted into gambling. Being extremely fond of both sex and opium, he spent a lot of his youth in the ‘flower-smoke rooms’. Those two addictions were to follow him throughout his life.
In the early 1910s, Du joined the Green Gang and became a follower of Chen Shichang, an opium trafficker in the Shiliupu area. Like so many other petty criminals, he combined his opium peddling with being an informer for the police—and that was how he had met the pock-marked Inspector Huang. They were members of the same gang, although Du belonged, through the lineage connected with his surname and background, to a younger generation than Huang. Notwithstanding this, the powerful gangland detective decided that he liked the urchin from Pudong, and let him sleep in a room behind the kitchen in his mansion in a lane off Boulevard des deux Républiques.
Being at least officially a police inspector, Huang kept a certain distance from overt crime—his de facto wife, ‘Miss Gui’, looked after such activities. A former brothel keeper from Suzhou, she was also known as baixiangren saosao, or ‘Sister Hoodlum’, and ran an army of bandits.52 Du became one of her foot soldiers, and soon proved his worth when a consignment of opium went astray. In the middle of the night, Du set after the culprits in a rickshaw, brandishing his pistol. He caught up with the thieves, and returned the opium to a delighted Sister Hoodlum. She persuaded her husband to take the brave young man into the inner circle of their family company, the Collective Prosperity Club, one of the largest gambling establishments in the French Concession which also effectively monopolised Shanghai’s burgeoning narcotics business.53 Under Huang’s patronage, Du came to control a string of theatres, opium dens, bathhouses, gambling joints and brothels in the French Concession.54 The French officers did not interfere, and their Annamese gendarmes just kept on patrolling the streets.
The almost surreal quality of the French Concession was further enhanced by the presence of large numbers of Russian refugees. The Communist victory in the Russian civil war had forced tens of thousands of people who remained loyal to the Tsar—hence the nickname ‘White’ Russians—to flee. The wealthiest ended up in Paris, London and New York, but those without money and contacts, and thousands of soldiers who had been trapped in the Russian Far East, crossed into Manchuria to settle in the city of Harbin. Some continued down to the new international metropolis Shanghai.
By the end of 1922, what so far had been a trickle became a flood. A Russian fleet of 27 ships—with 8000 men, women and children on board—left Vladivostok in October of that year, as the whole of Siberia was falling to the communists. Many of the children were orphans whose fathers had been killed in the civil war; they were, it could be said, Asia’s first ‘boat people’, looking for a refuge from civil war and oppression. The Russians first landed in Pusan in Korea, but the Japanese authorities there did not allow them to stay. After encountering a violent storm, in which one ship was lost, they sought refuge in the Yangzi and anchored off Wusong just north of Shanghai.55
With Christmas fast approaching, the fate of the refugees—and the presence of a large number of children among them—softened the hearts of the foreign community in Shanghai. Despite some initial hostility, the refugees were permitted to stay. Soon, more ‘boat people’ arrived from the Russian Far East, and the Bureau of Russian Affairs was set up to deal with what was becoming a crisis. Although no one was pushed out of Shanghai, the stiff-upper-lipped British did not consider the Russians ‘real’ Europeans, and treated them with disdain.
The situation became even more complicated in 1924 when China, now a republic, recognised the new Soviet regime in Moscow. The Russian Consulate near Suzhou Creek in the old American Settlement area was handed over to the Soviets, much to the chagrin of the White Russians, and even other foreigners in the city. Victor Grosse, the Tsar’s consul who had performed his duties for a regime that no longer existed, was forced to vacate the building.
The White Russians became citizens of nowhere, and never enjoyed the extraterritorial rights granted to other foreigners; the Russians were subject to Chinese laws, courts and prisons. There was also the question of where in the city they should live. The Anglo-Saxons did not want them, but the pragmatic French opened their Concession for Russian settlement, and before long its main street, Avenue Joffre (today’s Huaihai Road), was full of shops with signs in Cyrillic script. The street became known as ‘Little Russia’—or, in Russian, ‘Nevskaya Avenue’—a nostalgic reminder of Nevsky Prospekt in St Petersburg. Portraits of the Tsar and the Tsarina hung in the sitting rooms of Russian homes in the French Concession, several Russian Orthodox churches were built, two Russian newspapers appeared—the Shanghai Zaria (‘Shanghai Dawn’) and Slovo (‘The Word’)—and there were Siberian fur shops and Russian sausage factories.
By the mid-1930s, some 25 000 Russians lived in Shanghai, forming the single largest foreign community after the Japanese. Dispossessed and deprived of citizenship, socially they occupied a gray area between white expatriates and Chinese.56 Former officers in the Tsar’s cavalry became riding instructors for wealthy European families or, more often, bodyguards for anyone willing to hire them—including Big-Eared Du’s sons, who had trusted Russian gunmen following them wherever they went. The women became hairdressers, cabaret dancers and prostitutes, selling their services to all buyers, Chinese and Europeans alike.
White Russian men and women worked in nearly every night club in the city, from the most expensive to the sleazy bars in Blood Alley, as jazz musicians, bouncers, bartenders and ‘taxi girls’—a euphemism for high-class prostitutes. Although many of them, especially when they applied for jobs in more upmarket night clubs, claimed to be generals, counts and princesses, the vast majority were actually former merchants, ex-army officers, cadets, rich peasants and university teachers.57 But whatever their actual backgrounds, some of the White Russians were now so poor that they pulled rickshaws. White Russian and Chinese beggars died together in the streets.58
It was into this murky, permissive world of the French Concession that a 28-year-old school teacher arrived in the summer of 1921. He was Mao Zedong, a peasant-born revolutionary leader from Hunan, and he had come with some comrades to formalise the founding of the Communist Party of China. Shanghai’s French Concession was one of the most lightly policed, and therefore safest, places in the country for any band of dissidents or outcasts to meet. The communist revolution, which they wanted to instigate, also had to be based on the proletariat—and Shanghai was the only city in the country that had a sizeable working class. And, thanks to western education, there were also intellectuals who had received modern, egalitarian influences from abroad.
In the last week of July that year, twelve delegates met in a nondescript, grey brick building on Rue Wantz (now Xingye Road) which belonged to one of the founding members of the party. But even though regulations were lax in the French Concession, the unusual meeting of these twelve dedicated revolutionaries attracted the attention of the authorities. After a few days, it was interrupted by a stranger whom the delegates suspected was a spy from the French police. They hurriedly moved the meeting to Jiaxing county, 113 kilometres south of Shanghai, where they resumed their discussions on a pleasure boat on Nan Lake.59
The Communist Party of China was born, and the first resolution promulgated by the new party began with the sentence: ‘The basic mission of this party is to establish trade unions’.60 In other words, Shanghai had to be the base, and the CPC founded the Chinese Labour Secretariat in the city as well as left-leaning labour unions. Clandestine party cells were established in factories and other workplaces to coordinate the activities of the unions, which operated openly. These unusual movements among the Shanghai working class led to immediate, and inevitable, clashes with the interests of organised crime, which controlled the lives of most poor people in the city.
According to an early labour activist in Shanghai: ‘Our work met with many difficulties . . . Hardest to handle were the Green and Red Gangs. Finally we decided that several comrades should infiltrate their ranks’.61 A meeting was arranged between Li Qihan, a young student who had helped set up the Labour Secretariat, and a Green Gang boss. Surprisingly, he welcomed Li as a disciple, and a useful connection was established.
At first, relations with the Guomindang were also good. The party had been set up by a young Chinese doctor, Sun Yat-sen, who became the father of the Chinese Republic and its first president. He was not opposed to leftist ideas, and in 1919 the new Bolshevik leaders of Russia had relinquished all old claims to railways and mining rights in Manchuria, together with ‘all other concessions seized from China by the government of the Tsars, and by the brigands Horvath, Semyonov, Kolchak, the Russian ex-generals, merchants and capitalists’.62
No other foreign power had treated China with such respect, and in 1923 the Soviet-directed Communist International, the Comintern, sent a high-ranking operative to work with Sun and the Guomindang. His name was Mikhail Borodin, and he urged Sun to form a united front with the CPC.63 From 1923 to 1927, the two parties cooperated and Mao himself also served in various positions in the Guomindang, including a stint as the party’s propaganda director.
But the situation in China was chaotic. Sun had replaced the mediaeval Qing Dynasty with Asia’s first modern republic, a contradiction that led to warlordism and civil war. After a period of chaos, Sun died in March 1925 in Beijing at the age of 59. But Borodin had begun to groom a possible successor, whom he thought would carry on the special relationship the Soviet Union had managed to establish with the young Republic of China: a 36-year-old former clerk with the Shanghai Stock Exchange called Chiang Kai-shek.64
Like Mao, Chiang came from a peasant background. He was born in Fenghua on the outskirts of Ningbo south of Shanghai, and had studied in Japan. In August 1923, Borodin had sent him off to Moscow for military training, from which he returned, quite disillusioned, in December.65 Nevertheless, Chiang became superintendent of the newly established Whampoa (Huangpu in pinyin) Military Academy near Guangzhou, where an entire generation of republican army officers was trained.
On 1 July 1926, Chiang felt that the time was ripe to make an attempt to unify China. He set off from Guangdong with a combined force of Guomindang and CPC troops on a long military expedition north to defeat the local warlords, who were running their own fiefdoms all over the country. Changsha, the main city of Hunan, was captured on 11 July, and Wuhan in September. In December, Fuzhou was brought under the control of the United Front, followed by Shanghai and Nanjing in March 1927.
But Borodin had made a serious miscalculation if he really thought that Chiang Kai-shek could be useful for the Comintern’s interests in China. Mao never denied his peasant origins. Chiang felt ashamed of them and was no social revolutionary. Later in life, he even claimed that he was a descendant of the ancient Zhou Dynasty that had ruled China in the first millennium BC. With such pretensions, it was hardly surprising that his days in Moscow had turned him against the Russians and their suffocating communist beliefs.
As a Shanghai stockbroker, Chiang had befriended Chen Qimei, boss of the city in the first years of the Republic. Chen had mobilised the Green and Red Gangs to capture Shanghai during the 1911 revolution, and introduced Chiang to his gangland associates. Chiang was an avid but reckless gambler, winning a fortune just to lose all of it a year later. To fend off his creditors, Philippine consul general Ezpeleta remembers that Chiang:
turned to his loyal friends in the underworld and in the underground. There, he was always a brother . . . The initiation of Chiang into the secret societies in Shanghai was in later life of immense and incalculable use to him. It opened his eyes to new vistas, sharpened his mind to sly intrigues, toughened his heart to underground cabals and taught him the gentle art of eliminating prospective rivals.66
Whether Chiang himself also became a member of the Green Gang is disputed, but he himself did admit in a letter written to two colleagues in 1924 to having led a wild and dissolute life when he was a stock broker in 1919 and to becoming familiar with, as he put it, the ‘playboy world’ of Shanghai.67 Huang Zhenshi, a former Green Gang mobster boss, has asserted that Chiang indeed became a close associate of Pock-Marked Inspector Huang during his time in Shanghai. Moreover, Chiang’s name appears on a list of members in a Green Gang manual.68
Frictions had already emerged between the two parties in the United Front, and in January 1925 the Communists had stated at their fourth national congress that ‘one can easily find all sorts of reactionaries even in ordinary labour unions. The Guomindang is now plotting to amalgamate these anti-Communist elements under its own control’.69 The Communists responded by launching labour strikes in Shanghai, led by their left-leaning trade unions and their own militia. The bankers and the industrialists were grumbling and, in spring 1927, Chiang decided to strike against his rivals, the hated communists. It was going to be an urban campaign, making regular troops unsuitable for the task. Chiang turned to his old comrades in the Green Gang.
By then, Big-Eared Du had become one of Shanghai’s most prominent gangland bosses, and two British journalists described him as being ‘tall and thin, with a face that seemed hewn out of stone, a Chinese version of the Sphinx. Peculiarly and inexplicably terrifying were his feet, in their silk socks and smart pointed European boots, emerging from beneath the long silken gown. Perhaps the Sphinx, too, would be even more frightening if it wore a modern top-hat’.70
His mansion on Rue Wagner was one of the most famous in the French Concession, but it also had some very bizarre features. Big-Eared Du, who now was also known by an even less flattering nickname—‘Snake Eyes’—was a highly superstitious man who adhered to his own interpretation of ancient Chinese beliefs. For instance, he was born in 1888—the Year of the Rat—and therefore refused to let his servants disturb, let alone kill, any rodents in his house. As a result it was full of rats, and the stench and continual scratching noises were quite disturbing for important visitors who occasionally had to go there to see Shanghai’s boss of bosses.71 Many Shanghai oldtimers dismiss this story as fiction, which may well be the case.72 But it is nevertheless part of the legend that surrounded the wily urchin from Pudong.
As the conflict between the Communists and the Guomindang deepened, the Godfather of Shanghai did not hesitate to come to the rescue of his old comrade Chiang Kai-shek. Big-Eared Du mobilised hundreds of his and Pock-Marked Huang’s hijackers, kidnappers, bodyguards, pimps, masseurs, manicurists, pick-pockets, gunmen, hawkers, waiters and beggars, dressed them in blue and wrapped a band marked with the Chinese character for ‘labour’ around their arms. Guns were provided by Chiang’s high command. The attack began an hour before dawn on 12 April 1927, as the mobsters attacked the Commercial Press buildings where the workers’ militia were headquartered. The pickets surrounding the building were cut down by a hail of machine-gun fire. Almost simultaneously, the gangsters—supported by Guomindang artillery—assaulted the workers encamped at the Chinese Tramways Company.73 Rifle fire rang out again, and more pickets fell to the ground, bleeding profusely.
Seven hundred unionists were killed before the end of the day, and it took eight truckloads and several hours to cart away the dead and the litter. With them went the last of the alliance between the Guomindang and the communists; Chiang was the new overlord and Du his loyal lieutenant. They continued to hunt down Reds, and suspected Reds, until August of that year. A whirlwind of house searches followed. The British and the Japanese defence corps assisted too, delivering prisoners to the Guomindang garrison by the armoured truckload.74 Scores of communists, union workers and leftist intellectuals were arrested, tortured and shot, their heads kept in cages hung on telegraph poles along the streets.75
On 16 April, Chiang and his Guomindang established a new government, based at Nanjing further inland. From there, he continued the White Terror in Shanghai, which he called a ‘purification’. It was carried out ‘with the help of local labour unions and chambers of commerce [which] disarmed the Red labour pickets and kept Communist saboteurs under surveillance’.76 When the worst excesses came to a halt in August, it was estimated that over 5000 leftists, communists, members of the Guomindang ‘left wing’ and other activists—real or imagined—had been killed by the police and Green Gang mobsters.77
