Chapter 152 Chapter 23 Dai Li’s Smuggling Network During the War

During the war, China was logically divided into the Kuomintang-controlled area and the enemy-occupied area, interspersed with the routes of smugglers, and they connected the two areas with each other through the transfer market of bandits.Jieshou town, located on the border of Henan and Anhui provinces, is one such illegal market. "Here is the border, but people don't feel they are living under the guns of the enemy. It is full of people who can earn and earn: the kind of profiteers you can only find in a country at war. You meet there Everyone seemed to be either a merchant or an agent of some kind. People came from the coastal areas, crossed the Yellow River and the Yangtze River from the inland provinces. This town was unbelievably prosperous.” So Dai Li made a special trip to Jieshou because he Want to carve up the large "income" that General Tang Enbo seized from the smuggling trade.It is said that Dai Li suggested to General Tang after visiting there that it would be more beneficial to spend less time on trade and more on military objectives.

In other areas, such as cotton-producing areas, textile raw materials were exchanged for finished goods from occupied areas, such as radio tubes and other necessities.In addition, a large number of smuggling activities in eastern Hebei mainly revolve around the drug trade.Dalian, which became a smuggling center after the Northeast fell into the hands of the Japanese, also combined drug business with other smuggling activities, and sent ships to land along the coast of North China from time to time. While the situation varies from region to region, the smuggling network is national.Just as Jieshou connected Anhui and Henan, so Yichang, at the mouth of the Three Gorges, connected Sichuan and Hunan and their downstream provinces, enabling those provinces to supply the former with medicines, cotton thread, and dyes that were not available upstream.The same is true of the ports in the upstream region, such as Wanxian and Badong, through which salt, tung oil, bristles, and herbs from the upstream region were transported downstream to exchange cotton yarn, cloth, sewing materials, and household hardware.

Jiangxi is a particularly important place of origin because, in addition to being rich in rare minerals (tungsten, antimony, tin, manganese, molybdenum, and silver), it also produces a large amount of rice and other crops (tea, ramie fiber, and rapeseed oil) , and extravagant ceramics from the former imperial kilns in Jingdezhen, which had been occupied by the Japanese.Zhejiang coastal cities such as Ningbo and Wenzhou, in addition to serving as transshipment ports for Jiangxi materials, also transport a large amount of transportation materials (such as motor vehicles, trucks, tires, tools and gasoline) to the inland; and the materials that are not too large are transported by trucks From the northeast along the Beijing-Suizhou Railway, it is transported to central China through Baotou, Lanzhou and Shaanxi.