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In a remarkable example of history as detective work, Brian Martin pieces together the fascinating and complex story of the Shanghai Green Gang and its charismatic leader, Du Yuesheng. Martin sifts through a variety of fragmentary and at times contradictory evidence—from diplomatic dispatches to memoirs to police reports—to produce the most comprehensive account of this chaotic period of Chinese history. In analyzing the Green Gang's system of organized crime in Shanghai, the author broadens our understanding of a critical aspect of Chinese urban history and sheds light on the history of drug trafficking and organized crime worldwide. Martin argues that the Green Gang, the most powerful secret society in China during the first half of the twentieth century, was a resilient social organization that adapted successfully to the complex environment of a modernizing urban society. Illustrating its multilayered and complex relations with the bourgeoisie, the industrial proletariat, and the foreign and domestic political authorities, Martin demonstrates how these factors led to the Green Gang's absorption into the corporate state system after 1932.
This is a study of the activities, ideas and internal life of the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai during its formative period. It investigates the party's relations to the city's students and teachers, women, entrepreneurs, secret societies and its workers, and examines the efforts to transform the CCP into a 'Leninist' party, exploring relations between intellectuals and workers, men and women, Chinese and Russians within the party. The book culminates in a detailed analysis of the three armed uprisings which led to the CCP's briefly taking power in March 1927, before being crushed by troops loyal to Chiang Kai-shek. The study highlights the extent to which the Soviet Union sought to manipulate China's national revolution, yet also reveals how divisions at every level of the Comintern allowed the CCP to achieve a degree of independence and to conduct policy at considerable variance with that laid down by Moscow.
This book posits that when foreign actors face high opportunity costs of intervention in a weak state, their behavior may foster state sovereignty. This occurs as foreign actors work with local groups to avoid their worst fear, domination of the polity by rivals. Drawing from primary and secondary sources, Ja Ian Chong examines this argument by considering China, Indonesia, and Thailand between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. The book augments existing perspectives on nationalism, sovereignty, and state formation by introducing insights from research on foreign intervention and local collaboration.
This is a history of student protests in Shanghai from the turn of the century to 1949, showing how these students experienced and help shape the course of the Chinese Revolution.
Between August 1937 and December 1941, when the Chinese sectors of Shanghai were occupied by the Japanese, terrorist wars broke out between Nationalist secret agents and assassins of the Japanese military authorities. The most intensely disputed area was the western suburb, the Badlands, but warfare was not restricted to that zone. A spate of assassinations, bombings, and machine gun raids took place under the noses of the authorities. Thanks to the release of secret Chinese police files by the CIA, the inner workings of these terrorist groups and their links to the notorious Green Gang can now be exposed for the first time. In so doing, this book also explores the social history of Shanghai's underworld, the worsening relations between the US and Japan before World War II, and the rivalry between leaders Chiang Kai-shek and Wang Jingwei during China's War of Resistance.
Explores China's most famous women warriors and wartime spies, shedding new light on the relationship between gender and militarisation.
This work explores interactions between society and environment in China's most important marine fishery, the Zhoushan Archipelago off the coast of Zhejiang and Jiangsu, from its 19th-century expansion to the exhaustion of the most important fish species in the 1970s.
This third volume of Michael Mann's analytical history of social power focuses on the interrelated development of capitalism, nation-states and empires.