ABSTRACT
Shanghai was a city of more than three million with about 50,000 foreigners, half of them Japanese. The French Concession existed largely as a base for the operations of the criminal gangs rooted in the old network of Yangtze Valley secret societies. The principal leader, Tu Yueh-sheng, was treated with deference by both the Kuomintang and foreign authorities and was invariably referred to in the Chinese and foreign press as 'a prominent merchant' and 'philanthropist'. The Chinese Communists were small bands of fugitive guerrillas in Central China mountain hideouts or scattered squads of beleaguered Party militants underground in a few cities. The Shanghai Municipal Police had its own 'Special Branch' to deal with political matters and, like the Kuomintang, it recruited defectors and informers from among the Communists. Chiang Kai-shek's semi-private, semi-official anti-Communist apparatus came to include the Lan I-Shang, called the Blue Jackets taking on some of the styles and methods of Mussolini's Black shirts and Hitler's Brown shirts.
