"Once a week I went on duty as night reporter. The duty entailed a visit to the Central Police Station at midnight to find out if there had been any crime worthy of recording. In the courtyard of the police station was a notice board on which the armed robberies of the day were listed. There were never less than sixty. We left them alone. They were so commonplace that we could have filled the entire paper with them. There was little variety in the teleprinter reports received at the police station and stuck on the press board: 'Three men speaking Kompo dialect, all armed with Mausers, entered No. 5 Chiaotung Lane, Sinza district, at 7.30 p.m. today, held up the occupants at gunpoint and escaped with money and valuables worth 500 dollars.' Strange it was that the Kompo area seemed to provide Shanghai with its rogues, its bad men. Every armed robber, it seemed, spoke Kompo dialect just as the best cooks conversed in Cantonese or the sailors in Ningpo dialect...

The risk of sudden death was omnipresent in Shanghai - as it was, indeed, everywhere else in China then. Violence was commonplace. There were more gangsters in Shanghai than Chicago ever saw in the heyday of Capone. It was common to see a rich Chinese in his private rickshaw being protected by an armed bodyguard, often a Russian, loping at the side of the two-wheeled vehicle pulled by its 'human horse'." ...

Chinese gangsters, too, inflicted their own reign of terror on a population constantly assailed by violence.

They were well-armed, ruthless desperadoes, whose contempt for life often involved them in suicidal gun-fights with the police street battles in which they fought to the end and, more often than not, in which they wreaked a heavy toll of the forces of law and order and of innocent citizens caught in the cross-fire.