On December 1, 1950, the Suzhou region of Jiangsu Province, shot a businessman who committed the most heinous crimes, the prototype of Hu Chuankui, the "straw bale commander" in the Shanghai opera "Ludang Tinder" and the Peking opera "Shajiabang". Hu Chuankui's prototype was named Hu Zhaohan, who had participated in the anti-Japanese contingent of the New Fourth Army in his early years, had also done things for the Kuomintang, surrendered to the Wang puppet government, and eventually fell into the grass, causing disasters in Suzhou and Shanghai for many years, killing countless people, and being arrested and shot by the people's government after liberation. This video takes you through The Ups and Downs of Hu Zhaohan's life and see how the bandits of the Republic of China period mobilized the public security systems in Jiangsu and Shanghai to arrest him. Before watching this video, please press and hold the Like button below the video, and highly recommend this video.
Sha Jiabang stills
Hu Zhaohan was born in 1906 in a poor family in Yueyang, Hunan Province, and began to work as a long-term worker to earn money to support his family at the age of 14, but the ambitious Hu Zhaohan was not willing to live at the bottom of society all his life, and worked hard to be admitted to the Yueyang Police Officer Training Class, and joined the National Revolutionary Army in 1926, mixed with the National Famous Party Army and police circles for several consecutive years, served as the squadron leader of the first district of Jiangsu Province, the captain of the Qingpu County Water Patrol, and later these places were divided into Shanghai. On the eve of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, Hu Zhaohan, who was bent on climbing up, finally became the chief of the police station in Qingpu County, Jiangsu Province.
Hu Zhaohan
However, after the fall of Shanghai after the Songhu Battle, Hu Zhaohan could not continue in Shanghai, and was forced to flee to the Taihu Lake area, and with the intention of finding a reliance, he found the Kuomintang Cheng Wanjun and served as an aide-de-camp in He Xiguang's six detachments. Soon Hu Zhaohan received orders from his superiors to gather the scattered soldiers north of Taiping Bridge in the central area of Yangcheng Lake in Wu County and expand the size of the nationalist army, and this squad also gave it a name, called the "People's Self-Defense Force."
During his tenure as an aide-de-camp, Hu Zhaohan made many achievements. He once destroyed the Japanese and pseudo-police station in Huangdi Town, Wu County, and captured not only all the personnel of the police station, but also all the weapons. In addition, Hu Zhaohan also led his troops to attack the Japanese, seized the Japanese stronghold at the North Bridge outside Suzhou, and robbed the Japanese of material trucks, perhaps because of the professional habit of serving as a policeman for many years, Hu Zhaohan arrested many bandits and thieves, made a name for himself in the Yangcheng Lake area, and won prestige.
In early 1938, He Xiguang asked Hu Zhaohan to help the local anti-Japanese guerrillas organize a team, and the leader of this team was a local, named Chen Weizhi, and Hu Zhaohan was his aide-de-camp. On the way to the Yangcheng Lake area of the six detachments, Hu Zhaohan colluded with his brothers who usually pulled together gangs and factions, framed the detachment leader Chen Weizhi as a traitor who surrendered to the Japanese, launched a mutiny, and immediately beat Chen Weizhi to death. And threaten the people in the team, who dare to resist with Chen Weiyi, and then order them to take sides, eliminate those who have different intentions with themselves, and turn the six detachments into their own private arms.
Hu Zhaohan took the team to Xiangcheng near Yangcheng Lake and sent someone to invite all the big people with heads and faces in the town to entertain them at the largest hotel in town. Hu Zhaohan put his gun on the table and told the people who came to the banquet that he had come here to resist Japan, and hoped that all of you present would have the money to contribute money and make a strong contribution to the anti-Japanese resistance, strive to fight away the Japanese devils at an early date, and warn everyone not to be traitors. At that time, Hu Zhaohan also specially arranged for people to stand guard at the door, and the people in the hotel heard Hu Zhaohan's awe-inspiring words of righteousness and actively donated money. Hu Zhaohan used these as a basis to constantly recruit troops and expand his power in Yangcheng Lake, and slowly became a hegemon in Yangcheng Lake, and was known as "Commander Hu".
Although the commander Hu Zhaohan had a leisurely stay at Yangcheng Lake, he completely offended Cheng Wanjun. It just so happened that Chen Yi, the leader of the New Fourth Army, sent six regiments under him and the local armed forces to form the "Jiangnan Anti-Japanese Volunteer Army", referred to as "Jiang Kang". On the way, many small guerrilla detachments were absorbed and came to the vicinity of Hu Zhaohan's area, and Ye Fei, deputy commander-in-chief of the "JiangKang," personally found Hu Zhaohan and publicized to him our party's anti-Japanese stand. Although Hu Zhaohan was dissatisfied, in order to protect himself, Hu Zhaohan still accepted the reorganization and became an "independent detachment of the Jiangnan Anti-Japanese Volunteer Army", and Hu Zhaohan was still the commander of the detachment.
In just four months, the eastward "Jiangkang" had grown to more than 5,000 people, but the Kuomintang discovered that the "Jiangkang" was the armed force of the New Fourth Army. The Kuomintang threatened to force the "Jiang Resistance" to retreat westward, and at the same time mobilized the "Loyal National Salvation Army" formed by Dai Kasa and Du Yuesheng to fight against the "Jiang Resistance", and the "Jiang Resistance" was forced to retreat to northern Jiangsu. When Hu Zhaohan retreated to Hongshan in Wuxi with his troops, he stayed in Hongshan under the pretext that he was ill and unable to move, and as soon as the large troops left, Hu Zhaohan led several of his cronies back to Yangcheng Lake.
After returning to Yangcheng Lake, Hu Zhaohan co-opted the local landlords and re-armed forty or fifty people to continue his days of claiming the throne. However, when the "Jiang Kang" retreated to northern Jiangsu, some wounded and sick remained here. Because there are not only underground party organizations and anti-Japanese democratic governments in this area, but also the Kuomintang regime and the enemy and puppet maintenance associations, the struggle between them is complex and sharp. Not only did the Japanese army increase traffic blockades and strengthen economic and military control, But Wang Jingwei's "Peace Salvation Army" also accepted the Japanese army's letter of appointment, acting as a lackey of the Japanese, leading people to sweep up and grab grain every day. The Kuomintang's "Loyal and Righteous National Salvation Army" colluded with the local big knife society in the fish and meat township, so the remaining wounded and sick people such as Xia Guang and Yang Haolu re-pulled up an anti-Japanese armed force, referred to as the "Xinjiang Resistance".
In order to strengthen the ranks of our army, Xia Guang and Yang Haolu jointly wrote a letter to Hu Zhaohan, hoping that he would stand on the correct stand and rejoin the organization of the "Jiang Resistance", but there was no reply to this letter. It turned out that Hu Zhaohan was afraid of offending the Communist Party and did not want to offend the Kuomintang, so he turned a blind eye to the co-optation between the two sides. After investigation, Xia Guang found that Hu Zhaohan often went to Chedu Village on the north bank of Yangcheng Lake to meet his sister-in-law, so he pulled the troops to Chedu Village to block Hu Zhaohan, and after a night of long talks, Hu Zhaohan became a member of the "Jiang Resistance".
However, in June 1940, Hu Zhaohan changed his position, under the banner of the Kuomintang 'loyal and righteous National Salvation Army,' echoed with the Kuomintang diehards, and even secretly colluded with the Japanese puppet regime to do nothing evil in the Yangcheng Lake area, arresting many underground workers, "Jiang Kang" fighters, and innocent people, torturing them inhumanely, and then brutally killing them. While fighting the Japanese army, the "Xinjiang Resistance" also clashed with Hu Zhaohan many times, dealing a fierce blow to his reactionary arrogance.
However, Hu Zhaohan's life after he defected to Wang Fei was not good, due to the deliberate suppression of the above, Hu Zhaohan soon became the commander of the light pole, he was also deliberately targeted, and finally wandered to the coal mountain area of Zhejiang. However, how could Hu Zhaohan, who was accustomed to the days of flaunting his martial prowess, be willing to go on, he drilled camps everywhere, and finally in 1944 he used Xu Baoguang, the commissioner of the Kuomintang Second World War Zone, and Changshu County's Changshu County Governor An Weinan to collect dozens of people and returned to the Yangcheng Lake area.
After returning to Yangcheng Lake, Hu Zhaohan continued to recruit troops in order to hoard capital, and let his subordinates forcibly expropriate the people's property in various names. This includes the horrific Yanggou Lou massacre. On April 17, 1944, his men came to report that the fishermen's fishing boats at the mouth of the Wuxi River were filled with rice with white flowers, and Hu Zhaohan was so surprised to hear this that he led the fishermen to Yanggou Lou. Knowing that the fishermen smuggled rice to support their families, Hu Zhaohan slandered the fishermen as bandits, dug a large pit, and buried all 33 fishermen alive.
During the eight years of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, Hu Zhaohan single-handedly became a bandit bully scolded by thousands of people in the Yangcheng Lake area. After the victory of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the Kuomintang Suzhou Garrison Headquarters confiscated and disposed of Hu Zhaohan, a bully, but released him after only three days of detention, and then Hu Zhaohan returned to Qingpu County as a police captain. Until November 1946, he led a group of minions to sabotage the underground organization of our party in Qingpu County, killed dozens of underground party members, was rewarded for his meritorious service in "suppressing the communists", and was promoted to the district chief of Yangcheng District in Wu County, and also served as the director of the office of the joint defense and suppression headquarters of Su, Kun, and Yu counties. With the Kuomintang as the backstage, Hu Zhaohan even more wantonly harmed CCP members and the underground masses.
After the Battle of the River Crossing in 1949, the People's Liberation Army liberated Nanjing, and Hu Zhaohan's backstage Kuomintang government fled in a panic. Hu Zhaohan, who had lost his dependence, took advantage of the chaos and fled to Shanghai, hoping to wait for a period of time before coming out again, but his men did not know how to restrain themselves and continued to do evil under the banner of Hu Zhaohan. They spread rumors among the masses, vainly attempted to disturb public order, obstructed the PEOPLE's Liberation Army's steps in recovering Nanjing, and even created several cases of human life, while continuing to bully the masses while robbing commercial houses, including the head case of the Suzhou Dingfeng Grain Bank, which had a great influence.
In order to consolidate the nascent regime, Jiangsu and Shanghai decided to jointly arrest Hu Zhaohan, a big bully full of evil, and the task of arrest was entrusted to the Xiangcheng Public Security Bureau. According to Xie Dewen, head of the Intelligence Unit of the Investigation Section of the Suzhou Special District Public Security Bureau, there were too many bandit leaders at that time, and the Public Security Bureau did not have a photo of Hu Zhaohan, did not know his appearance, height and accent, although several people were divided into several ways to arrest him, but everyone actually did not have a clue.
Bao Zhenjiasu, director of the Xiangcheng Public Security Bureau, and dozens of places where Hu Zhaohan and the bandits were in Contact did not find any trace of him, until Hu Zhaohan's son said that he had a little wife in Yangcheng Village, and Bao Zhenjia and others found clues to continue the investigation. Bao Zhen's family rushed to Hu Zhaohan's little wife overnight and forced hu Zhaohan to inquire about his whereabouts, but the little wife insisted that Hu Zhaohan had not appeared for nearly a year since he had sent him here 10 months ago, but she said that Hu Zhaohan had a very familiar friend in Pudong, Shanghai, and was the owner of a cloth shop.
The Bao Zhen family rushed to the owner of the cloth shop with Hu Zhaohan's little wife, and after repeated ideological work, the boss finally refused to reveal hu Zhaohan's whereabouts. It turned out that after the people's power was stationed, Hu Zhaohan fled to Hong Kong, and at that time he was alone and could not contact the Kuomintang organs. In March 1950, he went to Zhoushan to finally hook up with Ding Zhipan, chairman of the Kuomintang Jiangsu Province, who appointed him as the deputy commander of the "Second Column of the Anti-Communist Self-Defense And Salvation Army of the Second Administrative Office of Jiangsu Province". Then he returned to Hong Kong and wrote to the cloth shop owner informing him that he would arrive in Shanghai, and Hu Zhaohan had originally planned to secretly sneak back to Yangcheng Lake through Shanghai to make a comeback and continue to carry out reactionary armed sabotage.
The Suzhou Public Security Bureau sent a total of five people to cooperate with the Xiangcheng Public Security Bureau, but Hu Zhaohan was extremely cunning, and the public security personnel pounced twice before catching him. On the night of September 15, 1950, the Ministry of Public Security dispatched to arrest Hu Zhaohan, and public security personnel, guided by the owner of the cloth shop, went to the attic where Hu Zhaohan lived, where more than a dozen policemen were waiting with guns, and they also heard the bandits in the room who were in contact with Hu Zhaohan talking loudly. Bao Zhenjia, who was in charge of this operation, kicked open the door, and then the police quickly entered the room with guns to guard the corner, and some bandits with guns still wanted to resist stubbornly, and took the gun to knock off the overhead lamp, just at this moment, the reinforcements sent by the Shanghai Public Security Bureau arrived, and Bao Zhenjia's spirit was greatly encouraged, shouting: "Don't move, whoever moves will kill whom!"
All 28 bandits, including Hu Zhaohan, were arrested and brought to justice, and the Public Security Bureau published the news in the newspaper. On November 30, 1950, Hu Zhaohan was put on a public trial in the Dongge Grand Hall outside the Golden Gate in Suzhou, at which the people complained about the numerous evil deeds and atrocities he had committed over the years, and the people's court announced on the spot that Hu Zhaohan was sentenced to death.
On December 1, 1950, Hu Zhaohan was shot in Suzhou, a 44-year-old bandit who killed countless Party cadres and innocent people to end his criminal life.