On February 16, 940, Rw Yorke, deputy chief of police and head of the Special Services Unit of the Ministry of Works, was shot by two Chinese as he left his home on Yuyuan Road. He shot back and drove them away.

The attempted attack on York took place on the first day after the Ministry of Industry Police suspended more than 60 police officers suspected of being bribed.

The causal link is clear as York was investigating the bribery and Lieutenant Bnchet, who held the same position in the French Concession Police Service, had been nearly assassinated by a hitman at 76 Extreme Ridge Road three weeks earlier.

As Consul General George explained to the British ambassador

The Shanghai Bureau of the Police Department of the Nanjing "Government", located at No. 76 Jisifeier Road, seems to be deciding to buy off the police of the French Concession and the Ministry of Industry. The obvious purpose was to induce the members of the two Western-controlled police forces to transfer their "duty" authority in the area to the secret service unit under the Shanghai Bureau of the Ministry of Police before the concession was truly "recovered." ”

As compensation, members of the Western police force were promised employment after the concession was "reclaimed." And if they are dismissed because of their political activities and are found out by Western police authorities, they can get the necessary relief.

The person in charge of the bribery was Pan Zhijie, the fourth division of 76 Jisfeier Road, who had served in the special patrol team of the Ministry of Works' police department for nine years.

Pan Zhijie, also known as Pan Da, Pan,. It is said that the chartered accountant bribed 400 patrolmen and 60 detectives from the police department of the Ministry of Industry and the French Concession police for a monthly salary of 20 and 60 yuan. Pan Zhijie was appointed by the city government as the head of the Huxi Special Police Team envisaged by the puppet regime.

Regardless of whether or not the police are bribed, the situation will not get out of control on the anniversary of the Xinhai Revolution on the "Double Tenth" Festival, but it is still a matter of concern for the police in the concession. Naturally, both sides want to be the protagonists of this National Day.

Therefore, the question of whether to hang the pro-Wang pseudo-flag or the pro-Chongqing flag has become particularly sensitive. In view of the recent rise in terrorist incidents, including the assassination of a senior official of a Japanese-run textile company, the Ministry of Industry and Workers' Police Department has taken very strict precautions.

At 6 p.m. on February 20, 1940, the Secret Service Unit was mobilized, and the Japanese authorities warned the Japanese residents to stay north of the Suzhou Creek for the entire emergency period.

In the middle of the night, all roads are blocked except for the main thoroughfare. At 5 a.m. on the morning of the 20th, barricades were set up on the southern and western boundaries of the public concession, and whistles were set up at intersections to search for terrorists. All vehicles and pedestrians are subject to inspection.

Many city defense units (U.S. Marine Corps, Italian Royal Navy, International Merchant Corps, etc.) set up sentry posts at the bridgehead to provide special protection for Japanese factories and factories in the concessions.

These precautions seem to have worked, and although there were still expected slogans and flag battles, the puppet regime's side had an overwhelming advantage in this battle. Paper flags with pro-marishes and slogans were affixed to buses, telephone poles, and trams.

The youth league distributed pro-Wang leaflets. A bamboo archway was erected outside No. 76 Jisifeier Road, and a small triangular flag decorated with the words "peaceful nation-building" was hung.

In Minami, local authorities held a meeting where representatives of various official institutions and 80 elementary school students sat and listened to speeches praising Japan and denouncing Chang Kaishen.

In contrast, Chinese loyalists posted only a handful of anti-Japanese slogans on the walls along Seymour Road and near the Zhongbai Company on Nanjing Road, and secretly distributed stacks of anti-Wang pamphlets.

The police department of the Ministry of Industry and Bureau in the public concession was so tightly controlled that it would be foolish to try to oppose Japan and the puppet regime in public.

Therefore, the only recourse left is to resort to terrorist activities. 1 Early one morning, Mayor Fu Xiao'an's cook evaded the attention of his bodyguards and slashed Fu Xiao'an's face and head in his sleep with a cleaver, causing him to die. The chef's name is Zhu Shengyuan, and he has worked for Fu Xiao'an for 12 years, but he is secretly recruited by Daley.

The assassination of Mayor Fu Xiao'an "caused the two factions in Wang's camp to fight to the death for control of the tax revenue of the illegal industry in Shanghai." The two contenders hoping to fill the vacancy of the former mayor are Chen and Zhou.

Wang Wei sent Zhou Huhai to Shanghai to test the truth, but there was a lukewarm reaction at home and abroad to his appointment as mayor, so the position had to be attributed to Chen Zhibo. One of the key factors was the reaction of General Dohihara's secret services.

During this period, Yuan Zhian, who enthusiastically supported Zhou Huhai as mayor, was assassinated in Nanjing. Subsequently, Lin Zechuan, another of Zhou's supporters, was assassinated in Shanghai, which implied that the Japanese Imperial Army Staff Headquarters supported Chen Zhibo as mayor.

One of Chen's first actions as mayor of Shanghai was to claim that he was determined to purge his jurisdiction.

He made this pledge when he took the oath of office, reaffirmed it at a press conference a few weeks later, and reaffirmed it in his speech. At a time when debt is maturing and crime rates are routinely rising, such a promise would be too rash.

During the week, on Monday, a particularly brutal murder took place in the Bad Land. At 1:20 p.m., H Uiha, a British employee of the Charity Spinning Factory, was buying stamps at the post office on South Berry Road. Three armed men walked in. One of them stood at the door, watching the wind, and the other two accosted Mu and another Russian woman, demanding in incoherent English that they hand over their money and valuables.

He only had a little more than a dollar in his pocket, but he impulsively pushed the man away and called the post office clerk to call the police. At this point, the robber of the Russian woman turned around and calmly shot her in the back.

After the robbers left the post office, the post office staff called the Shanghai fire brigade, who arrived at 1:25 a.m. However, by the time the ambulance arrived at the hospital, Mu had already died. And these kinds of incidents aren't just happening in the dirt, as Oakes reported

In other parts of Shanghai, at least nominally internationally shared, passengers in cars are held up with pistols and demanded for fake driver's licenses, and buses are driven by drivers who are neither allowed nor trained. Shanghai has become a city where it is common to find a dead body on the sidewalk on Saturday and still be there on Monday.

The number of kidnappings in the city has increased dramatically. Police arrested a gang of 131 men and women who had amassed 10 million yuan in two years. "Their activities ranged from abducting children and transporting them to Canton for sale, where domestic servants were in abundance, to kidnapping wealthy and self-satisfied merchants and bankers."

However, the crime wave of this year was worse in nature than in previous years, as recorded in the Miller Review.

"While last week's political terror continues to tighten the grip on Shanghai, armed robbers and small-scale criminal activity are reaching their annual peak as the Chinese New Year approaches. Last Thursday, which did mark the beginning of the wave of robberies that usually occurs in every case, was reported to have taken place before noon in the Public Concession alone. According to the police report, gangsters, robbers, and terrorists are active all day long. ”

Political assassinations provide a cover-up for the perpetrators of crimes to a certain extent. The businessman was killed, more out of the motive of extortion; The bomb was dumped on the store, more likely because of the non-payment of the "protection fee".

A new form of crime is robbery of passengers on buses. It appears to have started when a gang of thugs associated with 76 Extreme Fil Road refused to buy tickets and were attacked when the conductor of the British Chinese Bus Company insisted that they pay. From attacking conductors to extorting passengers, it was just one step away, and the vicious act quickly spread to the concession.

Armed robbers boarded buses there and forced passengers to hand over their valuables. One of the most spectacular heistees on City Avenue during the New Year period occurred on the 27th, when 10 robbers boarded a bus on Connaod Road and forced passengers to hand over coats and holiday gifts

Readers of the Miller's Review in the concession were repeatedly told that the source of the risks they encountered on a daily basis came from the bad land. They will continue to live in danger if they do not take appropriate measures to advance police governance in western Shanghai, in accordance with the agreement signed between the late mayor Fu Xiao'an and the general director of the Ministry of Industry, Fan Keling

Crime and misdeeds are rampant. More and more casinos are openly swaggering in front of Chen's pseudo-police. The Concession Police have tracked virtually every robbery in the recent wave of crime to the various hiding places in Huxi.

Contrary to rash assurances, Chen has set up all possible obstacles on the road to a satisfactory solution to the long-standing and prominent law and order problem. Although the Ministry of Industry Bureau met to discuss the outcome of negotiations with Chen Zhibo to set up a special police team in the cross-border road construction area, it was found that the latter's terms could not be accepted.

However, negotiations continued between Major Bao Wen of the Police Department of the Ministry of Industry and Colonel Lu Ying of the Shanghai Municipal Government's puppet police, and in view of the public outcry over the January crime wave, a provisional agreement was soon set about the formation of a special police team in the Gangland, with officers to be selected primarily by the Shanghai Municipal Government, but with officers to be appointed jointly by the concession authorities, the puppet regime, and the Japanese inspectors.

The agreement, reached by Lu Ying and Bao Wen, was submitted to the Ministry of Industry Bureau in Shanghai and the Chinese authorities in Nanjing for final approval.

The budget of the Ministry of Industry and the Police Department is a heavy burden for the public concession.

For many years, the Police Department of the Ministry of Industry had relied on the $81 million reserve fund from the sale of the city's power plant in 1929. In order to avoid another annual deficit, the Bureau of Works tried to raise the land tax from 14 to 16 in 1936.

However, Japanese taxpayers strongly opposed the move. Since before the war with Japan, the net debt of the public concession (secured by land and real estate worth 67 million yuan owned by the Ministry of Industry) had reached 39,692,284 yuan. Therefore, the Ministry of Industry had no choice but to withdraw another 2 million yuan from the power plant reserve fund to balance the 1936 budget.

The budget for 1937 was the same, with another $3.25 million drawn from the rapidly dwindling reserve fund. This is despite the fact that police spending has been cut by 8 and various police allowances have been reduced.

The war made fiscal expenditures worse, and the concession became increasingly dependent on taxes paid by the growing number of Japanese residents in Shanghai's international area (including, of course, the "Little Tokyo" of Hongkou). Fiscal affairs are also increasingly tinged with obnoxious political overtones.

By February 1940, about 87,000 Japanese subjects were living in Shanghai, 79,000 Japanese, 5,000 Koreans, and 3,000 Taiwanese. At the 1940 annual meeting of the Taxpayers of the Ministry of Industry, the Japanese taxpayers in Shanghai tried to increase their representation in the Bureau, but their proposal was not approved.

However, the Administration's financial difficulties in that year led to a special meeting of taxpayers convened on 23 December 1939 and a proposal was made to impose a surcharge of 40 on land contributions, with effect from 1 January 1940, together with an increase in the fees for general licences.

The Japanese Taxpayers' Association and the merged Maji Chamber of Commerce, led by their 70-year-old chairman, Yukichi Hayashi, strongly opposed the proposed tax increase, which would greatly burden them. However, due to the shortcomings of the composition of the representatives of the Ministry of Industry and Bureau, there is little hope that the tax payers will defeat the proposed tax increase. Not to mention the passage of an amendment to refinance the concession by means of bank loans.

A few hours before the meeting, in a meeting with the reporter of the "Shanghai Daily", Mr. Lin Xiongji said

"It is clear how today's meeting of the Ministry of Industry and Bureau of Taxpayers will end. My current mental state is the same as that of Mr. Kusunoki Masari (a famous Japanese general who committed suicide the day after his defeat on the battlefield). …… I hope to come here and show a true Japanese spirit. There is a limit to our patience. We will be forced to respond to violence with violence. I would like to be a stepping stone to my future progress. I will be happy and courageous to attend today's meeting. ”

The head of the Ministry of Industry is WJ Keswick, who is the manager of Jardine Matheson. "Tony" is seen by some as a pacifier of the July 5 handover of the land files and title deeds of the Chinese municipalities to the Japanese, which were originally stored in the public concession. This is the worst impression; The best impression is that others believe that he is only a temporary friend of Japan, and that the Japanese are cultivating a good opinion of him in order to protect the company's interests in East Asia at a time when Jardine Matheson is desperately in need of access to Japanese-controlled Chinese resources.

Although he is the director of the Ministry of Industry, he did not convene the meeting, which was attended by 2,084 local residents (representing 13,066 votes), who gathered in the grandstand on the racetrack opposite the racecourse on Wednesday, January 23.

The meeting was presided over by a senior diplomat, the Danish Consul General, Paul? Poul Scheel, who has not held an official office since Hitler seized his homeland. Even with some emotion, the tax increase proposal was passed by a show of hands, and Consul General Scheer simply equated the faces of non-Japanese people with the votes in favor without counting the exact votes against.

And this unconscious act of racism immediately led to a commotion among the Japanese in the open-air stands, with boos and paddles mixed together. Chairman Hayashi then proposed the amendment to the tax day, saying in a deep and angry tone that the current tax system is unjust, and insisting that, in any case, "certain banks" are prepared to meet any needs of the Ministry of Industry and Bureau, in accordance with commercial principles.

Many laughed when it was known that the Ministry of Industry had reached the limit of its creditworthiness. Lin Xiongji's face flushed with excitement and ended his speech with almost undisguised threats

"If these important proposals are unfortunately defeated by opposition from the powerful minority (which we remember vividly, they took advantage of the flaws in the electoral system to generate thousands of decisive votes in a recent election to directors),...... If the tax increase proposal is still passed in the face of opposition from millions of influential Chinese and Japanese, then I must point out that the consequences of this must be borne entirely by this minority and the Ministry of Industry."

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