Thus, "when Japan took full control of almost 6 million tons of rice in Indochina, it certainly had the weapon to force the inhabitants of the occupied Chinese areas to 'cooperate' with it."

This weapon is also used very specifically as a means of controlling society. For example, between September 1938 and October 18, 1939, there were several shootings of Japanese people. In retaliation, the Japanese military police cordoned off small alleys in suspicious areas, "sealing them off so tightly that in some areas for so long that it is said that several people starved to death."

The shortage of rice and the rise in prices have weakened people's courage and provoked an uproar.

On August 23, 1939, the price of rice rose from 15 yuan to 45 yuan per quintal. As is customary, profiteers have been blamed for the price increase. In the evening, the "hooligans" tried to rob the rice shop on Siu Sha Du Road for the second time, and a group of people broke the doors and windows of a pharmacy on Wade Road, where grain was said to be stored.

The next day, more than five rice shops in western Huxi were attacked and looted with stones. Although the government tried to regulate the food distribution system, by November, long queues had formed in front of most rice shops to buy food, so much so that the police had to maintain order to avoid riots.

The queues were mainly women and children as they had time to wait. On December 15, 1939, the Police Department of the Ministry of Industry and a Chinese team held a football match at Yat Yuen (dog run) in the French Concession. After a foul, a Chinese player was sent off the field.

His companions left the stadium with him, causing 20,000 Chinese spectators to pour in, pull up the stakes of the goal, and throw stones and bricks at the police who came to stop the riots.

Police reinforcements were sent, and fire brigades sprayed water into the crowd with the aim of driving rioters into the streets. More than 30 people were injured. If rice prices continue to rise, the riots are a harbinger of worse things to come.

As a result, Wang Wei's puppet government and the authorities of the two concessions distributed or sold the rice they could buy to the residents at a considerable discount, in order to cover the lid of unrest at a time when political relations with Japan and the puppet government were becoming increasingly tense.

One of the main tensions in Shanghai is the long-term nature of the police power in the areas where the public concession and the French concession are crossed.

For 15 years, the Chinese police and the concession police fought over control of the roads and the buildings along them. After the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war, the dispute, which had been partially resolved before 1931, was revived, and throughout 1938 and 1939 the controversy intensified as the crime in western Shanghai increased.

On January 22, 1939, a notice from the Huxi Branch of the Shanghai Police Department was posted at the door of all the pseudo-police stations and branches in Huxi.

In the past, it was a mistake for residents of the cross-border road construction areas in western Shanghai to report to the concession police all cases involving peace and order. The police department of the Ministry of Gain's Ministry of Industry has police authority only over the streets, not the areas between the roads, which are controlled by China. In the future, residents of Huxi should report the case to the Huxi Police Station instead of the Police Department of the Ministry of Industry.

The proclamation was signed by Wang Delin, chief of the Huxi Police Bureau.

At that time, in January 1939, the Huxi Branch of the puppet police station did not have the power to bring rule of law and order to Huxi, especially after the number of opium parlors and casinos increased day by day.

But Police Chief Lo Ying has also continued to expand the size of the police presence in the Western District, from 64 patrols in January to 230 in early February, with about half of them carrying pistols or rifles while patrolling.

The Chinese patrol was also supported by the Maonai Gendarmerie Detachment (stationed at No. 94 Jisifeier Road, adjacent to the Huxi Police Station at No. 92). The Japanese gendarmerie was equipped with eight machine guns for the Chinese police, but only supplied medicine when needed.

As the police force has strengthened, the Chinese police have become more and more confident in front of the police department of the Ministry of Industry, and they have been instructed by the Shanghai municipal government to "take a tough stance on the police authority in the cross-border road construction areas in western Shanghai." ”

The Huxi sub-bureau also reduced the number of patrols to six groups (five people per group), and well-equipped patrols were given five rounds per gun instead of one. This means fewer patrols with guns, which reduces the risk of mutiny.

At the same time, the requirements for increased ammunition were met. The number of armed gangsters in western Shanghai is increasing, and well-equipped patrols are needed around gambling houses and tobacco houses. By April 1939, the number of regular police officers of the puppet government in Shanghai had increased to 5,155, an increase of almost 6% from February.

On 10 April, the Japanese Secret Service also set up an armed police force, consisting of 400 surrendered Chinese guerrillas, all armed. At that time, the remuneration was $10 per month, and he was promised $20 per month thereafter.

The headquarters of the armed police is located in Huangjia Garden in the western district, and is commanded by Han Jun, who served as a brigade commander under Wu Beifu. And the adviser of the Japanese Army's Secret Service Department is a colonel named Nishimura.

Its intelligence room or detective team is headed by Gu Zhuhua and Hu Anbang. The latter had previously been a member of the Green Gang engaged in the drug trade. The Japanese eventually planned to recruit 15,000 paramilitary policemen for the armed police, each armed with a rifle and 50 rounds of ammunition.

The 200 pseudo-police officers who fought the guerrillas were paid 30 yuan a month. They were stationed at the headquarters, and the rest were evenly distributed among the sub-bureaus in western Shanghai and Pudong.

The anti-Japanese guerrillas there were expelled by the Japanese regular army in March. In May 1939, he served as an officer of the Police Department of the Ministry of Industry as Deputy Inspector and became Chief of Staff of the Armed Police. The armed police were granted legal authority to take charge of crimes in Pudong, including those committed by anti-Japanese elements.

The petty hooligan characteristics of these hastily recruited pseudo-police officers can be glimpsed in the following examples. On May 21, 1939, four plainclothes detectives affiliated with the Armed Police Headquarters walked into a casino on Kang Naotuo Road. After sitting down, each "policeman" pulled out a pistol and placed it on the table. The other regular patrols present mistook them for armed strongmen and called for reinforcements. When a large group of police officers arrived at the casino, they discovered that the thugs were plainclothes patrolmen officially hired by the armed police.

For the police department of the Ministry of Industry, these new pseudo-police officers are tantamount to robbers, so the situation in the land is almost out of control. Ballistics studies have shown that 90 percent of the armed crimes in which handguns are seized or bullets are found using "hot weapons" stolen from Chinese and Indian patrols on duty.

On January 4, 1939, eight gangsters engaged in a shootout with police officers from the Ministry of Industry in Huxi. That night, 12 Britons and Americans returning home from the American General Assembly were robbed by armed thugs on the right side of the Columbia Road and Great West Road police stations, but the pseudo-police made no effort to intervene.

In the Public Concession and the French Concession, long-term Western residents believe that the "crime spree" that flourished in western Shanghai was simply because the criminals were sheltered by the regular police of the puppet government and the secret police at No. 76 Jisifeier Road, and the gangsters usually fled there for protection.

"No. 76" ...... Not only is it the center of the local political underworld, but it is also a haven for murderers, thieves, thugs, robbers, and other fugitives caught by the Concession police.

"No. 76" also detained Chinese who were waiting for ransom, as well as other Chinese who passed by its door but have not been heard from since.

Agent 76's headquarters has eight or more backbone groups. The police stations scattered in the cross-border road construction area around the dirt - Jalan Jisfier, Jalan Sinkapo, Jalan Yidingpan, Jalan Kang Naotuo and Jalan Baili – etc. Each branch has five officers with pistols.

Four of them each supervised a three-month training course of 20 members, who eventually formed an assassination squad, such as the Youth Regiment stationed at 119, Lane 37, South Baili Road. The Youth League was only a peripheral organization of the pro-Japanese Revival Society and the Zodiac Society.

In view of the obvious connection between the underground elements and the botched pro-Japanese activities of Agent 76, when British Major Ashmore led troops on January 13, 1939, forcibly closed the puppet police substations on Great West Road and Columbia Road, the Western residents of the Public Concession applauded enthusiastically.

The British expelled a group of Chinese plainclothes policemen and barricaded the gate with barbed wire.

After a period of relative calm, Shanghai experienced a "serious terrorist frenzy" in February 1939, which, according to foreign authors, was carried out by Kuomintang military agents in Chongqing. On February 1, Geng Shoubao, the head of the detective team of the puppet police station, was assassinated by secret agents of the Kuomintang.

This was followed by a series of attacks on pseudo-police stations and various assassinations of pro-Japanese collaborators.

These include the February 5 assassination of Zhu Jintao, director of the puppet social bureau; February 6 Assassination of Qian Hua, a former star journalist of the Declaration, who had been an adviser to the Japanese-controlled newspaper censorship since December 1937; the February 7 assassination of Zhou Jitang, director of the Jiangsu-Zhejiang Foil Tax Bureau and adviser to the Ministry of Finance in Nanjing; the February 10 assassination of He Shushuang, director of the Education Division, and Zhang Zhaoqi, president of the Shandong Provincial People's Court; On February 16, the assassination of Tu Zhenhu, the president of the Nanshi District Court, and Gao Hongzao, the sheriff of the puppet water police station.

The assassinations culminated on Sunday, February 19, when the Restoration government's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Chen Zheng, was murdered in a flagrant manner and two Japanese and their female companions, two Japanese dancers, were attacked.

Major newspapers described Chen's assassination as "the most important assassination attempt in Shanghai since 1937 for patriotic reasons." ”

At the age of 61 at the time of his death, Chen had studied at the Majiang Shipbuilding School in Fuzhou, received a law degree from the University of Paris, served as an editor at the Hanlin Academy of the Qing Dynasty, and was appointed Minister of Mexico (1914-1918) and France (1920-1927) by the Beiyang Warlord Government.

After the Kuomintang seized power, Chen Zheng became vice chairman of the negotiating committee of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. After the Japanese invasion, he remained in Shanghai and agreed to serve as Minister of Foreign Affairs in the new government of Liang Hongzhi. His son, Victor L Chen, who married Zhang Xueliang's sister, was the puppet director of the General Affairs Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The assassination of Chen Zheng was instigated by Wang Mutian, the (former) director of the Shanghai Bureau of Military Command, in order to impress Daley. Zhao Guangyi, the head of Wang Mutian's operations group, has carried out numerous mass assassinations in Shanghai and is a major figure on the wanted list of the Japanese gendarmerie.

In the early autumn of 1938, Zhao Guangyi began to organize two other special teams in addition to Xu Enzuo's semi-amateur team. Among them are Ping Fuchang and Tan Baoyi, graduates of the special training school of the Military Command Bureau.

Ping Fuchang, 24 years old, his hometown is in Funing, and he was born in Zhabei, Shanghai. He studied at Nanshi Primary School and later at Yuqing Middle School. He dropped out of school at the age of 18 and worked in his father's optical store in Minamichi. He must have felt that grinding lenses for his 63-year-old father was a very boring task.

He lived in such a closed environment with his young stepmother, who was only a year older than him, that he decided to join Daley's military command organization in 1935 (when he was 20 years old).

Ostensibly just an agent of the Hubei Police Force in Hankou, Ping Fuchang was in fact part of the Second Division of the Central Bureau of Statistics of the Central Military Commission, which was responsible for monitoring and investigating the actions and thoughts of the actors working at the Yongxing Garden Cinema

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In June 1937, Ping Fuchang was sent to Shanghai by the cinema. Within a month of the outbreak of war between China and Japan, Ping Fuchang joined a plainclothes spy organization and became a squad leader in the Jiangsu and Zhejiang Action Group led by Zhu Xuefan.

After the Japanese seized the Chinese border in Shanghai, he continued to work underground in the French Concession until he was ordered to report to the Linli training class of the Military Command Bureau in Hunan. The special course is divided into two branches: the Military Service, the Operations Service and the Intelligence Service. Ping Fuchang graduated from the military department, but was sent to the action group.

In September 1938, he was ordered to return to Shanghai to report to a business executive he called "You Heqing". But this person is better known as "Zhao Guangyi".

Just after the Double Tenth Festival, Ping Fuchang and three other military commanders Jiang Su, Shi Zheng, and Lin Ziren arrived in Shanghai via Hong Kong. A military commander agent named Wang Luzhao immediately contacted the first group, claiming to represent Wang Mutian, "chairman of the Shanghai branch of the Military Commission." Later, Taira revealed a lot of information to the Japanese counterintelligence officers who interrogated him

"Our leader is Wang Luzhao, but Mao Wanli leads the organization throughout Shanghai, and the leader of the assassination operation team is Zhao Guangyi...... I don't know if the leaders of the organization have ties to the Chongqing government or the guerrillas in Shanghai.

That Mao Wanli is Daley's most trusted deputy and cousin of his relative, Mao Renfeng. Mao Wanli's assistant, Wang Luzhao, was the captain of the military command that attempted to assassinate Wang Jingwei in Hanoi on March 21. In this operation, although he did not kill Wang Wei, he killed his confidant Miyue Zeng Zhongming.

According to Ping Fuchang, Wang Luzhao told the trio that they would be ordered to assassinate those who had been listed for assassination in Shanghai as soon as they appeared; Wang Luzhao also paid each person a salary of 48 yuan per month.

At the same time, Ping Fuchang and Shi Zheng moved from a low-cost room to another in the French Concession to avoid surveillance. Of course, they still maintain frequent contact with Wang Luzhao."

Nearly four months later, a second group arrived in Shanghai, including 23-year-old Tan Baoyi. Slightly less experienced than Pingfuchang, he was the son of a farmer in Songjiang, whose elder brother was a grain retailer in Shanghai, and his cousin was a clerk in a southern goods store.

Tan Baoyi studied primary and secondary school in Songjiang and graduated from Shanghai Zhonghua Business School in Nanshi. Before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, Tan Baoyi had been an inspector at Hengyang Hanyeping Iron and Steel Company.

At that time, he signed a contract with the military commander and received training at the Linli special training class in July 1938. After two months of six-month training, he was transferred to Changsha by the Military Command Bureau, where he was ordered to go to Shanghai to direct anti-Japanese activities there.

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