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POLICING SHANGHAI 1927-1937 by Frederic Wakeman, JR. (Berkely: University of Califomia Press, 1995)
This volume undoubtedly represents the first study in any language centred on a modern Chinese police force. The fifteen chapters under five parts deal with many of the major issues about the Nationalist secret police and its confrontation and collaboration with the multilayered Shanghai underworld. The topics covered range from law and order, vice, narcotics, communists, implications of political choice for policing, Japanese occupation, the new life and national salvation movements, nationalising the police and criminalising the government.
The author focuses on the ten years of Nationalist (Guomindang) regime between 1927 and 1937, when Chiang Kai-shek tried to carry out the program of national construction left unfulfilled by Sun Yat-sen. A central feature of that program was the establishment of a special Chinese municipality...