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Source: "Socialism Roots Out Crime," Beijing Review 2, no. 43, 27 October 1959, 21-23.
Transcribed by an HC, April 18, 2005
October 27, 1959
[Transcriber's introduction (April 18, 2005): The system of private ownership
of the means of production is not the root of all evil: there is also the
gender strand of oppression. However, the below article shows how Chinese
communists successfully dealt with bourgeois, anti-people gangsters who had
close ties with the Kuomintang. Even when it comes to the "bigshots,"
communists' methods of dealing with crime differ from those of the imperialists.
Much of what the pigs call "crime" conflicts with capitalist laws, but is
capitalism-caused. This understanding of crime has to be applied in each
country in light of its concrete conditions.]
by MA TSUN
There is no prostitution or gangsterism in New China. Thieving, swindling and crime in general are sharply on the downgrade. For those who knew the old China this may seem to be a bit of a miracle. And it is. Yet the change is natural. It is inevitable with the change from the old society to the new, socialist society.
In old China, semi-feudal and semi-colonial, a few rich exploiters at the top lived in luxury. Robbery was their way of life, and legalized crime their way of ruling. They had reduced the mass of the people to starvation level. Millions were unemployed, hungry and desperate. While the great ideals of revolution inspired the great masses of the people to advance despite bitter struggles and sacrifices to the future, the egoistic and hedonistic ideas of the ruling class exerted their corrupting influence down through society and enmeshed not a few of the desperate poor in crime. They blossomed evilly in the criminal underworld. There was a direct link between the governing groups and this underworld. The Kuomintang used the riff-raff of the nation as its agents in exploiting and oppressing the people. These criminal elements were relatively few in numbers and they were heartily hated by the mass of the people but thanks to the protection they enjoyed in high places they got away with murder. Crime was an integral part of the social system of old China, with its bureaucratic monopolies, its feudal landlords and warlords, and swarming agents and spies of the various imperialist powers.
Gangster organizations terrorized every city and town in old China. Rackets formed a state within a state, dominating various trades and localities. In Shanghai and Nanking the top men of the underworld took lessons from the advanced techniques of the U.S. heirs of Al Capone. They had their secretaries, lived like gentlemen and became VIPs of the Kuomintang and its government. Not a few got their start as police agents of the foreign concessions in the former treaty ports. When Chiang Kai-shek staged his bloody April 12 massacre of the workers in Shanghai in 1927 he enlisted the support of the so-called anti-Communist association run by the Shanghai gangsters.
With their own apparatus of terror and protected from the side of the "law," these men indulged in fantastic lives of crime. One special agent in a Shanghai woollen mill actually raped over a hundred women mill-hands. In Canton gangsters ran a regular slave traffic selling peasants into the Kuomintang armies. A Peking gangster bigshot with a taste for boxing used live men as his punching bags. Their enterprises ran the gamut of crime: murder, rape, robbery, swindling, drugs, gambling, houses of ill fame.
According to very incomplete statistics there were in Shanghai from 130 to 140 cases of robbery and kidnapping every month in the period immediately preceding its liberation. Tientsin had an estimated total of 800 robbers and 12,000 professional thieves on the eve of its liberation. Many of these were well organized into gangs tied in with local despots, the "big wheels" of crime, and the KMT police force. Not a few police officers and members of the criminal investigation departments were in fact creatures of the gangsters or themselves gang leaders. It was accepted practice for part of the proceeds from crime to be set aside to grease the palms of the police. In the rural areas it was a regular thing for bandits to be enrolled in the landlord-Kuomintang armed forces to suppress the revolutionary activities of the people.
The scourge of opium let loose in China by the British opium smugglers over a hundred years ago made deep inroads. In pre-liberation Shanghai alone over thirty [p. 22] establishments made narcotic drugs and over 30,000 people were engaged in making, selling and smuggling drugs. The KMT Bureau for Social Affairs in Canton calculated that in that city in May 1949, there were over 1,300 opium dens. Such dens were more plentiful than grain shops. Under the pretext of banning opium smoking, the Kuomintang reactionaries ordered all smokers to register and by "reorganizing" the existing dens monopolized the trade. In the upshot the opium control office actually took over the making and selling of opium and the number of dens grew.
Gambling houses and brothels flourished. In Shanghai and Tientsin gangster elements from the foreign imperialist countries opened night clubs, jai-alai joints, race courses and greyhound racing tracks for gambling and betting. There were 3,000 gambling houses in Canton alone with some 30,000 professional gamblers. Gambling joints and brothels provided the government with a regular part of its revenue. The 1947 Shanghai Yearbook calculates that more than a hundred thousand women practised prostitution there. These unfortunates were ruthlessly exploited by the gangsters who ran the brothels.
This is only a partial record of the web of crime fostered and protected by the Kuomintang chieftains. As everybody on the inside knew, the Nanking regime's much publicized "efforts" to wipe out crime were just so much eye-wash. The chief criminals were those who ran the government. They did not hesitate to seize on innocent victims to act as scapegoats for their crimes. If thieves and bandits were occasionally punished it was because of internecine gang wars or as a sop to public opinion designed to cover up the real criminals.
Liberation drove out the imperialists, and overthrew the feudal landlords and militarists and bureaucrat-capitalists with their chief aides. The social riff-raff of old China lost their backers. The masses of the people, led by the Communist Party, were at long last able to set the country in order. With not only the will, but the power, they quickly brought the criminal elements to heel.
After a decade of work they have built a new socialist China. The whole country prospers. The counter-revolutionaries have been uprooted in the main, and an astonishing decrease in civil crime has been effected. The number of serious criminal offences--murder, arson, robbery, rape, theft, swindling, etc.--in the country has steadily decreased. In 1958 the number of such crimes was 48.67 per cent less than in 1954. The downward curve has been ever sharper since the organization of the people's communes last year. During the first half of the 1959 in the two big cities of Peking and Shanghai and Hunan and Shensi Provinces, the number of criminal cases brought before courts of first instance dropped by 63.54 per cent compared to the corresponding period in 1958.
The start of this change came swiftly after liberation. During the first mass movement against the counter-revolutionaries launched in 1950 the people came down heavily against the local despots and gangsters, the feudal secret societies and racketeers who had been hand in glove with the KMT bureaucrats and agents. An immediate improvement in economic and social conditions permitted the innate social good sense and propriety of the people to reassert itself. The amount of petty, amateur crime sharply decreased. Organized crime cringed in the light of an aroused and increasingly organized public. Most of the kingpins of crime had of course been dealt with in the early days of liberation. Bit by bit the remaining ne'er-do-wells were ferreted out and handed over to justice for punishment by imprisonment and reform through labour and education. The healthy effect of this process quickly showed itself. One outstanding example is the "Great World," the once infamous "amusement" centre in Shanghai, where before liberation, the whole staff from the manager down, were toughs. Gangsters, pickpockets, prostitutes and swindlers of all kinds battened on the public there. All kinds of obscenity passed for "entertainment" in its booths and theatres. Now all this rubbish and crime has been cleared out. The "Great World" is today a recreational centre, a showpiece of the city, with excellent stage and film entertainment, side-shows, restaurants, club and reading rooms where a worker's family can spend a good cheap evening out.
The bandit gangs that had terrorized the villages under the KMT went out with their protectors or were broken up soon after liberation by the people aided by the P.L.A. With the simultaneous breaking up of the professional gangs of toughs in the cities, the number of robberies sharply declined throughout the country. Today robbery as a premeditated crime has been virtually eliminated. Before liberation piracy in the waters off Tangku near Tientsin was a menace to peaceful shipping. In the ten years since liberation not a single case of piracy has been reported there.
In the cities the professional thieves and swindlers who used to pass on their experience to their sons and younger thieves and criminals have ceased their "teaching" after being reformed. Furthermore, punishment and surveillance go hand in hand with social rehabilitation. Ex-criminals are given trades and there are plenty of opportunities for them to make a worthwhile living.
The old compulsions to steal or swindle are losing ground. The whole pressure of society and of education militates against crimes. Yoshui Lane and Shihhuiyao in Shanghai with their warrens of matshed houses used to be a hide-out and spawning ground for robbers and petty thieves. Today well-built sunlit buildings have replaced these hovels that once housed want and crime.
The opium dens and gambling houses of old China have gone and so has casual gambling. Opium is out, utterly. Rehabilitation centres provided free treatment for former addicts. One Chin Hsiang of Canton got the habit when he got a job at a KMT "anti-opium office." It took such a hold on him that he even sold his children to get the drug. Like thousands of others after liberation he was reformed, helped to quit the habit and given a real job.
Prostitution, that in old China too was one of the "oldest professions," began to go out with the liberation and is now ended. In the very first days of liberation the brothels were banned in one city after another. The criminals who ran them were punished and their inmates freed. Those who suffered from venereal diseases were treated free and cured. They were taught to read [p. 23] and write. Helped to understand the why and wherefore of their old life, they gave up their old habits and acquired various useful skills. Now they have taken regular industrial or other jobs and many have married and settled down. Sixty-three of the women workers at one printing and dying works in Peking were former prostitutes. Today over twenty of them have received the title of "advanced work" and more than a dozen have joined the Communist Youth League. One was awarded the title of "model worker of Peking" and became a "national advanced textile worker."
Not a few hardened criminals of the old society too have turned over a new leaf and made good after periods of labour reform and education. Kang Miao-ken of Shanghai once led a gang of over two hundred toughs. Now he is a skilled building worker with over twenty apprentices under him.
A socialist society aims essentially to wipe out exploitation and poverty, and to eliminate classes, the conditions that produce crime. The building of socialism therefore results in the progressive elimination of crime and the people work actively and directly to bring this about.
As Chairman Mao Tse-tung pointed out in his speech On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People , "to maintain law and order and safeguard the interests of the people, it is likewise necessary to exercise dictatorship over robbers, swindlers, murderers, arsonists, hooligans and other scoundrels who seriously disrupt social order." The people's democratic state power therefore exercises a strict dictatorial power over all the enemies of socialism, over all anti-social elements. Working in the interests of the people, it is also able to rely on the support of all the people in this task.
The thoroughgoing nature of the democratic reforms carried out in China, the successes achieved in suppressing the remnant counter-revolutionary elements, the advance of the country to socialism and the elimination of poverty and its consequences, and the mass participation of the people in the political struggle against anti-social elements--all this creates the conditions for the successful struggle against crime.
In these ten years the country has seen the victory of the revolution on the economic, political and ideological fronts, the virtual ending of the system of private ownership of the means of production and the system of capitalist exploitation which was the root of all evil. Socialist public ownership is expanding daily. Socialist ideas are winning the hearts of the people more and more and there is a growing disgust for the greedy acquisitive ideas of the bourgeoisie. The advance of industry and agriculture are raising living standards steadily. Mass unemployment has ended. There are many public welfare institutions to take care of the needy. All this has weakened the social and ideological roots of crime. And these factors have increased their influence greatly since the great leap and the emergence of the people's communes in 1958.
A further powerful factor in preventing crime is the Party's policy of combining punishment with leniency, and reform through labour with ideological education. Except for those few criminals who have by the heinous nature of their crimes merited the death penalty, all other apprehended criminals are dealt with according to circumstances and the degree of repentance they show. Petty offenders are generally not prosecuted but encouraged through education to mend their ways. Those who have served prison sentences are provided with jobs on release so that they can earn a proper living. Thus the number of evil-doers is progressively reduced.
It goes without saying that society, which is fully informed of the situation and wholeheartedly supports the government, co-operates closely with the organs of the state in the maintenance of social order and the reform of evil-doers. This reliance of the state on the masses means that the public is alert and able to keep an eye on criminal elements to prevent them from committing crimes and apprehend them promptly if they do.
This, of course, doesn't mean to say that the problem of crime has been solved completely. Outstanding successes have been achieved in dealing with the great social evils inherited from the old society, but some undesirable elements still exist. Even after the economic basis of capitalism is completely eliminated in China the ideological influence of the old exploiters, especially that of the bourgeoisie, will remain for some considerable period and corrupt those of weak will. Crime prevention is a long-term, difficult and complex task. But the establishment and strengthening of the socialist system is the guarantee that this task will be successfully carried out. Crime in China is on the wane. Year by year there will be less of it.