In his autobiography, Pablo Neruda says that he was set up for a robbery by a dishonest rickshaw puller when he visited Shanghai in the 1920's. But when he was attacked, it was done very precisely - he was robbed of his cash and outer clothing, but his diplomatic credentials, passport, and inner clothes were left untouched.This is because the robbers were operating in an area controlled by the KMT, and the KMT was trying to court favor with foreign powers. The KMT had ordered local criminals not to kill foreigners, and if you were a criminal caught with a foreign passport, you would be brutally interrogated and executed by KMT cadres. This part of the story is not in Neruda's book (he probably didn't know this at the time), but this was apparently the situation.This indicates that the Chinese have a very high level of organization and social complexity. People in the criminal underworld of 1920's Shanghai were on the edge of starvation - a foreign passport could be sold for a gigantic sum of money. But once the orders came down, they exercised discipline, and treated those materials like nuclear waste.I found it very interesting as a small but significant insight into Chinese psychology and sociology. How did China manage to exert this level of control over its people while other societies seem much more buckwild and chaotic?
Chiang was in tight with/propped up by organized crime in Shanghai, is why. The Green Gang had close links to him. It's not a Chinese character thing, it's a close connection between the government and the local crime bosses, I'm sure one can find parallels in Italy or in US urban centers in the mafia's heyday.
>>18482594read the chapters concerning China in this book. One of the best insights about the Chinese weltanschauung i've found. https://archive.org/details/traveldiaryofphi0000herm
>>18482623whoops, that's volume one. The second volume is the one with the chapters on China. https://archive.org/details/traveldiaryphilo007467mbp
>>18482594>How did China manage to exert this level of control over its people while other societies seem much more buckwild and chaotic?secret societies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tong_(organization)
