You Yuesheng

Du Yuesheng , Chinese 杜月笙 , Dù Yuèshēng, (also written Tu Yueh-sheng or Du Yueh-sheng , often called Mister Du; * 1887 in Gaoqiao , † August 16, 1951 in Hong Kong ) was the leader of the Green Gang, a triad in Shanghai .

biography

Du was born in 1887 in the small town of Gaoqiao to very poor parents whom he lost at the age of nine . In 1902 he left his hometown for Shanghai.

The city of Shanghai was ruled invisibly by various triads, the most powerful of which at the time of Dus's arrival was the Red Gang as import partner of the largest British opium trading company Jardine, Matheson & Co. and partner of the British secret service, which was led by Zhang Xiaolin . The Tong (Gang) , the League of Heaven and Earth, and the Green Gang also existed .

The Green Gang - originally a patriotic association in the milieu of inland navigation - had long been criminalized by the opium trade from the coast to the inland and at that time was filled with great ambition and the urge to expand. After undergoing the initiation rites customary in the Chinese secret societies in 1908, Du rose quickly and made the Green Gang a dreaded center of organized crime within 12 years.

The Green Gang's drug supplier was the French. While you appeared within the Chinese community as a fighter against Manchu rule , as a nationalist and a fighter for a Chinese republic, with the Green Gang he gained control over the majority of the exploitation of prostitutes in the primitive and luxurious brothels, dives and over the most of the opium dens .

His numerous heavily armed thugs, the so-called vagabonds, patrolled the district and the property of the Green Gang day and night so that no one disrupted the business of brothels and opium dens, or misappropriated goods and money.

Alliance with Huang Jinrong

The security of the business was taken over by Huang Jinrong, Chinese 黄金荣 , (Huang the pockmarked), the chief of the Chinese police inspectors of the French concession . He entered into the alliance with you under the influence of his young wife. Through bribery, intimidation and extortion, Huang held several French people firmly in positions of responsibility. Through this cooperation, the income of the strengthened Green Gang increased fivefold within a few years.

You moved into a splendid property at 6. Avenue Paul-Doumer. From here he planned to enter the heroin business and - worried about the emergence and strengthening of the communists - his alliance with the Kuomintang in the person of Chiang Kai-shek.

The main business was the so-called anti-opium pills. 10,000 pills were made from two ounces (31 grams) of pure heroin , 1/2 ounce of strychnine , one ounce of quinine , five ounces of caffeine , 48 ounces of lactose, and ten ounces of sugar . Huge sales were achieved. (In 1927, IG Farben delivered almost one and a half tons of strychnine with a single order from the Green Gang.)

In 1925, after Sun Yat-sen's death , the three gang leaders joined the Kuomintang and supported its new leader, Chiang Kai-shek .

In 1926 the gangs united under the leadership of the triumvirate and Du Yuesheng founded his own union with the “General Progress Association”.

The Shanghai massacre

In February 1926, the Chinese Communist Party organized a workers general strike against the foreign powers and the generals in Shanghai. The foreigners who supported Chiang Kai-shek expected that he would put down this strike, which he did not want to do himself for reasons of prestige, so that he and his troops advanced slowly on Shanghai and only shortly before the city on March 21st arrived. Chiang opened his arsenal to the members of the Triads and in the next few days the city filled with the heavily armed gangsters. On April 12, 1927, they began a massacre of all communists and many workers and in the following weeks and months practically wiped out the very strong communist organization and base there.

Du Yuesheng was named Major General of the Kuomintang and Deputy Governor of Shanghai as a reward. He also became honorary president of the US-owned Shanghai Power Company.

After the massacre

In August, Chiang Kai-shek transformed the opium ban into a state monopoly, the first license holders of which were the big three Du Yuesheng, Huang Jirong and Zhang Xiaolin. Despite the low tax burden, the government monopoly brought in $ 40 million within a year. Under pressure from foreign powers, the state monopoly was lifted at the end of 1928.

In 1930, the French captain Louis Fabre described the state of the police in the French concession as follows: “Our territory was under the total control of a group of Chinese. She had the police apparatus firmly in hand, the French chiefs of which were mostly corrupt and whose Chinese employees were hired and paid by her and were completely docile to her ... "

Du Yuesheng then received the concession for the newly established state lottery. In 1931 he freed himself from his own addiction and, according to Hans-Georg Behr's sources, devoted himself only to his trade union movement; The French authors Roger Faligot and Rémi Kauffer see it differently.

swell

• Roger Faligot, Rémi Kauffer: The master of shadows. Kang Sheng and the Chinese Secret Service 1927–1987. Ehrenwirth, Munich 1988, pp. 41-48, especially pp. 46-47.
• Hans-Georg Behr : world power drug. The business of addiction. Econ-Verlag 1980, ISBN 3-430-11283-4 , pp. 151-168.

literature

• Sterling Seagrave: The Soong Dynasty. New York 1985.
• Pan Ling: Old Shanghai - Gangsters in Paradise. Hong Kong 1984.
• Pan Ling: In Search of Old Shanghai. Hong Kong 1982.
• Marie-Claire Begere: L'Age d'or de la bourgeosie chinoise (1911–1937). Paris 1986.