Some Aspects of Chinese

Crime

By
CONST. H. E. J. MEDLEY

*

Canadian-born, John Medley’s Service with the Shanghai Municipal Police
Force was Cut Short with the Japanese Attack on Pearl Harbour—He Subse-
quently Spent Twelve Months in a Japanese Prison Camp, Being Repatriated
to Canada in the Fall of 1948—-Now a Member of the British Columbia Police,
He Gives “The Shoulder Strap” Readers Some Interesting Sidelights on

“THE door opened noiselessly and
there appeared the evil face of a
Chinese. With hate glowering in his
eyes the Oriental advanced toward his
unsuspecting victim and drawing a
glittering knife from the folds of his
robe, plunged it into the man’s back.”

PEOPLE ADDICTED to dime thrillers
would be sadly disappointed if they didn’t
get a passage like that in a story of Oriental
intrigue. And since my return to this
country a lot of people have asked me if it’s
true that Chinese bad men sneak around
alleyways carrying knives. When I tell
them that the Chinese criminal is more
likely to be armed with a Mauser pistol
than a knife and keeps to the main roads,
they feel a little let down.

Crime in China, as in other countries,
has flourished for centuries and the Chinese
criminal is much like those of other
countries, varying his methods somewhat
to suit local and national customs.

OPPORTUNISTS!

Most Chinese criminals are opportunists;
that is, they don’t often stick to one par-
ticular form of crime such as housebreaking
or armed robbery. Chinese who today com-
mits a misdemeanour, if given the opportun-
ity commits an armed robbery tomorrow or
even joins a kidnapping gang. On many
occasions armed robbers have been arrested
and found in possession of a pistol they
knew nothing whatever about. For this
reason it is very difficult to tab the Chinese
crook by any modus operandi system. There
is to my knowledge only one type of
Chinese criminal who never varies his pro-
cedure and that is the pickpocket. Perhaps
this is due to the fact that the majority of
pickpockets are trained from childhood,
but more about this later.

As in other war-torn countries, crime in
China since the commencement of the Sino-
Japanese war has increased tremendously.

Countless thousands of workers have been
thrown out of employment through destruc-
tion of factories and have headed for such
havens of refuge as Shanghai and the other
larger cities which, before 1941, were not
occupied by the Japs. During 1937 when

FOURTEENTH EDITION

Chinese Crime.

Chinese troops were withdrawing from the
area around Shanghai, great numbers of
Chinese deserters—despite police and army
vigilance—escaped into the International
Settlement of Shanghai. Most of them were
armed with Mauser pistols.

With an influx of this type of refugee
the police were confronted with a serious
problem, particularly when these people
turned their hands to crime.

How to Get Rice!

In an article as brief as this I will not
attempt to describe every aspect of Chinese
underworld life but I think any description
might well start with the pisei (literally

Const. H. E. J. Medley

“low life”). This type of criminal is mostly
confined to the beggar element. They oper-
ate in gangs (men, women and children)
and commit mob thefts for meagre returns.
Piseis will congregate for instance in groups
of 40 or 50, most of them armed with razors
and sharp knives, in some spot where there
is no policeman in sight. Along comes a
wheelbarrow coolie with a load of rice in
sacks. Down they swarm on the unfortun-
ate and his barrow, and while the knife

wielders slash the sacks the others scoop up
the rice in cans er anything else that is
handy. At any sign of police intervention
they scatter in all directions. Strangely
enough these beggars do not keep the rice
for their own consumption but take it to a
receiver who pays them for what they turn
in. Of course these gangs do not restrict
their efforts to stealing rice, but will pick
on any person who is carrying any amount
of anything eatable. Another type of piset
crime is hat snatching. During the hot
summer months in Shanghai most public
conveyances have all windows open. And
more than one passenger is often sorry that
he didn’t take the precaution of removing
his hat before taking his seat, for these
beggars will even run alongside of a bus
or street car to snatch a passenger’s hat. Of
course they only get men’s headgear:
Chinese women do not wear hats. All these
stolen hats are taken to the taung tien
(pawnshop) where the thief cashes them
in for about 75 cents apiece. When he gets
pretty good at this, and similar forms of
petty thievery, the pisei often graduates to
more serious crime.

TRAINED PICKPOCKETS

As I said previously the only Chinese
criminal that I know of who confines his
efforts to one type of depredation is the
moh-de-zuh (the pickpocket). Here is one
of the most audacious criminals encountered
in China, perhaps because he is the most
skilled of the criminal class. Most of these
thieves are trained from childhood. Their
ranks are filled from the thousands of
juveniles (mostly war orphans) that wander
the streets, who are picked up by “kind
hearted” Chinese Fagins and put to school
—to learn how to pick pockets. In their
training period they are called auh-tsang-ts
(pupils). The sien-sang (teacher) takes
great pains with his pupils and the per-
centage of graduates is high. They are
given a strict schooling in every phase of
pocket-picking. One of them told me that
at one stage of the training he had to
demonstrate his ability to pick a penny with
his thumb and forefinger out of a basin of
scalding water without splashing the water!

After training, the auh-tsang-ts is given

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