Chapter 65 police relations

In the beginning, in terms of detectives, Shanghai Station tried to use their personal relationship with the personnel of the Chinese Municipal Public Security Bureau to get help to carry out the mission of the Secret Service. In 1933, Wen Hongen, the police chief, and Lu Ying, his detective captain, were reluctant to cooperate with Dai Li.Therefore, Dai Li had to rely on Chen Zhiqiang, the team leader, to use his connections with the Youth Gang to build relationships with individual detectives of the Criminal Police Team.But as Chen's relationship with the officers grew, so did his ambitions.Within two years, Dai Li disbanded Chen's group, dispersed its members to other groups, transferred Chen out of Shanghai, and promoted him to the captain of the criminal investigation team of the Shaanxi Provincial Police Department.

By then, the Shanghai Municipal Public Security Bureau had a new director, Cai Tanjun, who was very willing to cooperate with Dai Li.Slowly, he also put Secret Service agents in some positions in the "Police Training Institute".Later, Dai Li inserted his special agent Chen Zhiping as the director of training in the Public Security Bureau, and assigned the other two special agents to the positions of instructors in the police academy.However, due to Lu Ying's hesitation, Dai Li could not directly control the detective department of the Public Security Bureau. Oddly enough, Dai Li and his agents had the good fortune to use the police force there successfully in the French Concession.This is mainly due to the fact that the French authorities relied heavily on gangsters in the Chinese area as spies in order to control the natives in the concessions.One of the key figures was the small leader of a gang named Fan Guangzhen. Like all the detectives there, he was a policeman and was later promoted to "Tanmu".As pointed out by the leader of the second group of secret agents: Fan's social relationship is very complicated.Not only because he was a gang member and became a detective, but he was still loyal to his French boss when he was working for the Nationalist intelligence department.Dai Li realized that Fan was more loyal to the French colonial authorities than to his secret service, but he clearly felt compelled to please both sides.If too much pressure is put on him, he may sacrifice his relationship with the Chinese to maintain his basic relationship with his foreign masters.As a result, Dai Li only used him as a last resort: occasionally asked Fan Guangzhen to use his extensive information network to search for underground organizations, or asked him to cover when Shanghai Station was kidnapping in the French Concession.

Because of Fan Guangzhen's unreliability, Dai Li felt the need to find trusted connections in the Chinese detective department within the French police.So Dai Li found Ruan Zhaohui, an old classmate of Huangpu, who used to work as a traffic officer at the headquarters of the Secret Service in Ji'e Lane, Nanjing.Dai Li gave Fan Guangzhen a bribe of 500 yuan, so that Ruan didn't get a job as a detective like other detectives.Once he got the position of Bao Tan, Ruan became Fan's superior in the Shanghai station agency, even though he was nominally Fan's assistant in the police department.This made it difficult for Fan, because he did not want to have direct contact with the second group, fearing that it would affect his status as a detective in the French police.After receiving orders from Nguyen (as would be appropriate), Van puts the newcomer on a relationship with the gang leader.As a result, the Shanghai Station monitored some progressives who had sought asylum in the French Concession.And later on, they were also able to use Detective Squad detectives to protect Secret Service agents who for some reason were vulnerable to arrest.

Neither the Shanghai Chinese Municipal Police nor the French Concession Police's respective detective teams were directly under Dai Li's jurisdiction.The Secret Service still lacks direct police powers in the Shanghai area.Therefore, if secret agents wanted to formally arrest and interrogate a suspect, the suspect would have to be illegally kidnapped and secretly escorted to Nanjing.It was not until 1935, when Chiang Kai-shek finally decided to hand over two important law-enforcement agencies—the gendarmerie and the traffic police—to the control of the military, that this weakness in the structure of Shanghai Station was changed.