However, two days later, a famous banker was killed, and a mass massacre ensued.

The banker, Ji Yisheng, 29, is the son of the owner of a local money bank and a well-known Sichuan official.

A few days ago, Ji Lingsheng, who lives in the American (Village) General Association, just 75 yards from the police department of the Ministry of Industry on Fuzhou Road, published an article in the journal Finance and Commerce calling for investment in Free China. And this article angered the banking authorities of the puppet regime.

On August 15, when the bomber walked out of the American (Rural) General Assembly and was about to cross the street to his car, five gunmen hiding in a sedan opened fire on him, and he died in front of the general meeting on the spot. Before the Assassins could escape, police officers rushed out and opened fire on them.

In the ensuing shootout, a Chinese patrolman wrecked the engine of a car (which had been stolen a week earlier outside the Paramount Ballroom on the border of the Badlands), and the Assassins fled on foot west to the Extreme Race Road.

The police pursued them on motorcycles and opened fire until they reached the Laozha Road Arrest Quarter, where they killed one terrorist, captured three others, and confiscated their weapons.

During the pursuit, three civilians and two policemen were killed, and eight pedestrians and three policemen were wounded. On the same day, a patrol officer from the Huxi Special Police Headquarters was about to inspect the baskets of two men when he was shot dead on the dirty Baili South Road.

On August 16, a gunman shot and wounded Wang Shuxun, a well-known lawyer who was a friend of Wu Shibao, the head of the Nanjing Political Police Headquarters at No. 76 Jisifeier Road. While a Japanese employee at the Toyota Yarn Mill was pumping up the bicycle, two terrorists shot him in the chest.

The manager of a coal importing company was kidnapped in front of his home on Fuloli Road. The ferry on the Huangpu River, Chaozhou Maru, had just picked up passengers at the Bund Pier on Nanjing Road when a big explosion occurred.

On August 17, the owner of the "Big Stage" theater at 663 Jiujiang Road was attacked by an assassin and mortally wounded in the back. During the six days from August 23 to 28, a Japanese employee of the Shinsho Yarn Mill was seriously wounded at the Japanese Navy Cemetery, and two Japanese Army civilian officers were killed in an ambush by four Chinese gunmen.

The bombing of the Huguang and Jincheng Theaters, the killing of a Japanese civilian and a Chinese civilian in the service of the Japanese Army in Hongkou (which again led to the blockade of roads), the theft of up to 300,000 yuan worth of gold from a bank in the French Concession, the kidnapping of the general manager of Zhongyi Trust, the attempt by terrorists to burn down the third warehouse of Mitsubishi Corporation, and the killing of a member of the Pudong security team by Chinese gunmen.

As early as August 17, the Japanese set up new barbed wire barricades on the border of "Greater Shanghai". The border between Xujiahui and the Hongqiao area is covered with a fence, so that many small roads have been blocked. All the bridges on the Yangshupu River were blocked, and only two bridges were not absolutely blocked.

Nowadays, Chinese travelling overland to Shanghai have to pass through military checkpoints and are subjected to strict scrutiny to prevent them from carrying weapons. "Little Tokyo" in Hongkou has become an impenetrable fortress.

After 28 August, the Chinese were not allowed to enter the "city" between 7 p.m. and 5 a.m., and when they crossed the Suzhou Creek during the day, their clothes, parcels, luggage, vehicles, and themselves were searched by sentry posts, which doubled the number of sentry posts compared to previous days, and doubled the number of sentry posts at the bridgehead. Armored vehicles patrolled the streets of the north of Suzhou through the night, and all entrances and exits from Hongkou to the south bank of Suzhou Creek were closed.

The puppet regime has also taken drastic measures. In late August, the Nanjing government promulgated Shanghai's new criminal law, which referred all thefts from the public and French concessions to the local central affairs authorities. In other words, all the cases that were previously tried by the civil courts were tried by the Nanshi City Court in accordance with the "interim agreement" of February, and now the Wang Wei regime has made unilateral judgments in accordance with military law.

In fact, this means that Mayor Chen Zhibo instructed Pan Zhijie, the head of the Huxi Special Police Department, to extradite the armed gangsters and kidnappers to the security forces.

This farce of militarizing the criminal law took place in a new special environment after the reorganization of the police system of the Nanjing government.

Combined with public information and Xu Enzo's confession. On 16 August, the Ministry of Police was downgraded to the General Directorate of Police and placed under the direct control of the Ministry of the Interior. Similar to the Chang Kaishen regime's separation of the Central and Military Commands, Wang Weiwei's political police department was placed under the leadership of the Military Commission's Investigation and Statistics Department.

At the same time, the Ministry of Social Affairs was included in the Social Welfare Promotion Commission, which was considered to be responsible for the clandestine work of non-police officers, i.e. supervising public gatherings, student activities, and labour affairs.

The Nanjing authorities believe that if such institutions no longer exist in the form of "ministries", their activities will not be clearly exposed to the public.

Although these changes were part of the general policy of centralisation of the police, they also stemmed from the political struggle between Police Minister Lee Si Kwan and Social Minister Ting Mo Chuen. Before August 16, Wang Wei and Zhou Huhai were increasingly dissatisfied with these two, especially Li Shiqun.

Zhou Huhai, the "finance minister," was visibly annoyed by Li Shiqun, because very little of the illegal tax revenue flowing into 76 Jisifeier Road made its way into the central government's cash closet. As the head of government, Wang Weiwei feared the growing power of Li Shiqun and did not like his use of "open and even arbitrary means to carry out police activities, especially those activities that attracted the public's attention too directly."

Li Shiqun's freewheeling independence, both as the leader of the gangsters and traitors who controlled "No. 76" and as the veteran police minister, also annoyed the Minister of Internal Affairs, Chen Qun.

Chen Qun, an official in the former Restoration government with a solid Japanese background, did not like the unruly way of doing things of Li Shiqun and Wu Shibao. Therefore, when Chen Qun insisted that the two men be placed under his jurisdiction, Wang Wei necessarily consented to this. Ding was appointed to another position of the same rank, but with less power, and Li Shiqun became secretary general of the Suzhou-based Qingxiang Committee.

All of these changes had a noticeable impact on the activities of the puppet regime's secret agents at 76 Extreme Phil Road. Although this agency is now headed by Tong Keming, Li Shiqun's former deputy and vice minister of police, Li Shiqun has completely withdrawn from the stage, and Nanjing has ordered secret police activities to be carried out in a much more secretive manner.

Today, Zhou's finance ministry has more direct control over the collection of "No. 76", including gambling commissions. Clearly, Chen Qun's claim that the Ministry of the Interior has the right to control all secret police organs is the same move as General Lu Ying's transfer to the head of the Shanghai Chinese Police (with its headquarters in Nanshi) in July.

The current situation is that Lu Ying replaced Pan Zhijie as the head of the Huxi Special Police, controlling the Gangland and the rabble there, as well as the collaborators who acted as secret agents.

So, does the claim that the Nanshi police control all kinds of thugs, secret agents, terrorists, untrained patrols at No. 76 Jisifeier Road, and the Huxi Special Police really turn the "bad land" into a "good land"? The answer is almost no.

Nanshi itself was different from Huxi, and throughout the autumn and winter of 1939, it remained a safe haven for gambling and drug dealing. Swedish journalist Karl? Karl Eskend wrote a major newspaper report that portrayed the situation in Nanshi as "a cross between the impoverished Chinese countryside and the poor Monte Carlo, with six large casinos open day and night, playing a primitive form of roulette, using numbered tables and dice, providing gamblers with free wine, beer, cigarettes, etc., and even milk for their children."

The casinos used the proceeds from the sale of opium in their upstairs tobacco rooms, as well as the proceeds from the winning smoking, to cover their expenses. Adjacent to these casinos and opium parlors are a number of pawn shops where unfortunate gamblers can dispose of their valuables and even their clothes.

Imposing the rule of Nanshi on the "bad land" did not turn it into a "good land". The war of terror continued, especially with regard to the control of banks and currencies and the dominance of newspapers. Homicide and crime rates are spiraling upward.

Despite the full cooperation between the Ministry of Industry and the Japanese Gendarmerie in the encirclement and suppression of the Blue Coat Society, the last directors of the Ministry of Industry and the Japanese Consul General continued negotiations on the final control of the police in the concession.

In the event of war with Japan (which seems obvious to many nowadays), the Public Concession (which for many of the Chinese living in it is already a nominally independent entity) will be handed over to the puppet regime, which will be a mere illusory victory of Chinese sovereignty.

At the same time, the gap between rich and poor continued to widen, with both sides overwhelmed by worsening wartime inflation. For Chinese workers, prices have risen tenfold since the start of the War of Resistance in 1937; For foreigners, the monthly cost of living has risen by almost 9 percentage points.

For two months before the city fell to the Japanese army, beggars and thieves stole food from street stalls until the stall owners had nothing to sell, while the police turned a blind eye.

The concession authorities tried to keep the price of rice at 130 yuan per quintal, but profiteers prevailed, and even the upper middle class began to realize that the coming struggle for survival was mainly focused on the competition for food and daily necessities.

"It seems that the isolated island is sinking into the boundless sea of suffering."

Is this sentence a journalist Percy? Percy Fch's vivid depiction of the early days of the Japanese occupation of Shanghai was published in the newspaper.

At that time, the war of terror had just begun. And at the end, you can take a look at Vanya? Vanya Oakes' pessimistic view of pre-Pearl Harbor Shanghai

"Shanghai is a city of evil and violence, a city of wealth and incredible poverty, a city where the wheels of roulette are whirling, where gunfire and begging are everywhere. Far from being the epicenter of the world upheaval that began in 1937, Shanghai is now living in perpetual panic and erratic, with explosions and destruction, abnormal trade, currency chaos, Japanese cunning infiltration, an influx of refugees, an endless rise in prices, the outbreak of war in Europe and its repercussions on the Jing'an Temple Road, making Shanghai a tacky city of refugees and gangsters. ”

The "isolated island" experience of the past three years has become a "terrifying nightmare" in the eyes of most people. In fact, Shanghai has indeed been a city that has suffered a lot in recent years.

In 1937, Shanghai was second only to Berlin, London, Moscow, New York, Paris and Tokyo in terms of population. Due to an unequal treaty imposed on the Qing Dynasty by Britain, the United States, and France after the Opium Wars, Shanghai was divided into three cities.

The first is the public concession along the Huangpu River. The concession was established under the second paragraph of the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, approved by the original land charter drawn up in 1845 and signed by the ambassadors of the Western powers in 1869. To the southwest of the concession, along the Huangpu River, was the second city of the Qing Dynasty in 1844 as a special zone for French residents.

The French Concession drafted its own land charter in 1868. The third city is China's municipal administrative district, located on both sides of the Huangpu River, surrounded by 320 square miles of urban and suburban areas, divided into Nanshi, Jiangwan, Zhabei, Pudong and Wusong districts.

In November 1937, the Japanese drove Chang Kaishen's troops out of Shanghai, and that part of the Public Concession (i.e., "Little Tokyo" in Hongkou) and the third city they occupied (the Old Town) formed a cordon around the other two cities, the Public Concession and the French Concession.

Together, they formed "islands" that provided refuge for Chinese fleeing Japanese rule, seeking their own extraterritoriality, and avoiding the Sino-Japanese conflict that had plunged Europe into war. In this way, the metropolis of Shanghai became a battlefield of contention, because if Japan wanted to seize the concession by force, it would not be possible not to risk war with Britain, the United States, and France.

There are many aspects to this dispute, and bloodshed is the price of the most chaotic struggle, because it is the most basic struggle. On the one hand, there were Chang Kaishen's supporters of "Free China", who withdrew from Nanjing to Wuhan in 1937 and then traced up the Yangtze River to Sichuan, where they used as their base camp until the end of the war. On the other hand, there were those who wanted to cooperate with Japan, who wanted to end the war and undermine the united front between the Nationalist government and Chang Kaishen.

The Japanese side, especially those anxious to get out of the Chinese quagmire, needed to find a Chinese politician who could help the Japanese make the best use of Shanghai's economic resources to compensate for the attrition in the war of expansion in South Asia.

Judging from Xu Enzo's activities, the ultimate purpose of the Kuomintang's so-called heroic assassination activities is not clear, especially when secret agents of the Nationalist government betrayed other patriots to the security apparatus of the enemy in the name of politics.

The fact that the collaborators made their own deals with the Kuomintang promising to rise up against Japan if the United States used Chinese mainland as a springboard to conquer Japan from the sea made their choice even more uncertain.

(The trials of collaborators after Japan's defeat and China's purge of suspected double-agent functionaries in the former Shanghai underground party in the early '50s show just how uncertain loyalty was during the war.) ）

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