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.Gambling, prostitutes, and narcotics were available throughout the city.Opium had grown in popularity since the Opium Wars.By the dawn of the Republic, poppy cultivation had spread to most provinces, and domestic opium rivaled the Indian imports.Opium became an important source of peasant income in many places and a mainstay of rural taxes.Opium use spread into the countryside, and it has been estimated that as many as one in ten Chinese were addicts.11Since opium was technically illegal, its clandestine trade provided employment opportunities for thousands of gangsters.Indeed, Shanghai’s gangs alone had 100,000 members by many estimates.From the beginning, narcotics were an integral part of Shanghai’s economy and politics, bribes and deals forging intimate connections between officials and gangsters.The opium trade was an important source of revenue for the Nationalist government.Chiang Kai-shek promised to stamp out the drug by taxing it – and the Nanjing regime became addicted to this revenue stream.Indeed, Sun Yat-sen had already established the precedent of the Guangzhou opium monopoly.But government–gangster–police–business contacts were not limited to opium.One of the top leaders of the Green Gang was chief of detectives in the French Concession during the 1920s.His successor as boss of the Green Gang, the notorious Du Yuesheng, was appointed by Chiang Kai-shek to be in charge of opium suppression.Chinese and foreign officials felt they had to tolerate the Green Gang since only it could manage labor relations and keep any kind of order over Shanghai’s vast underworld.In return, the Gang not only paid vast bribes that amounted to a significant portion of the revenues that kept government functioning, but it also played a role in the White Terror, which continued to hunt down Communists throughout the Nanjing decade.Through the Green Gang, the government assassinated dissenters and rival GMD faction leaders, though often to so much public outrage that the regime lost more than it gained.Over the course of the 1930s the ties between gangsters, business leaders, and officials grew more intimate.Chiang Kai-shek was personally involved in decisions that gave the government a greater take of the narcotics business.By254Nationalism and revolution, 1919–37all accounts, Chiang personally detested drug use but saw no alternative ways to raise revenue.Attempts to reform drug policy (legalizing supplies for addicts, establishing detoxification clinics) were also sabotaged by Japan’s decision to manufacture narcotics to sell in north China, both to disrupt Nanjing’s finances and simply to weaken the Chinese people.The Shanghai police were part of a system where the lines between corruption and legality were blurred.The historian Frederic Wakeman has concluded that Chiang Kai-shek’s efforts to nationalize the police just as the Shanghai gangsters were trying to become respectable “created a new set of circumstances in Shanghai which made it difficult to distinguish between policing and criminality, between patriotism and terrorism” and amounted to “criminalizing the government.”12In sum, the contradictions of state-building crippled the Nanjing regime.Chiang was unable to imagine new ways of organizing power, delegating power, and dealing with the polyphonic interests of a vast nation.He used his control of the Nationalist armies to dominate the Guomindang and the government.However, de facto independent armies remained strong in many parts of China until the Communist consolidation of power in the early 1950s.Chiang’s real but limited efforts to modernize ironically destabilized the very status quo that he depended on.If the GMD was “warlordized”during the Northern Expedition, it was also “bureaucratized” with the absorption of the bureaucrats of the former warlords and the skeletal central government – men who felt no commitment to the Three People’s Principles.In some cases, this mattered little.A few ministries managed to become efficient, effective, and at least partially shielded from political interference.13The Ministry of Foreign Affairs consistently attracted talented and highly educated men to its service, and made progress toward one of the government’s most popular goals: treaty revision [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]