[3] During the upheavals of the 19th century, including the Taiping Rebellion and the change in course of the Yellow River around 1855, the shipment of grain along the Grand Canal was severely disrupted and finally ended.
In northern part of Jiangsu Province (subei) in the 1870s, boatmen and salt smugglers began to organize into what was called the Anqing Daoyou (安清道友, literally "Friends of the Way of Tranquility and Purity"), which was the direct precursor to the Green Gang in the early 20th century.
[citation needed] The Green Gang was often hired by Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang to break up union meetings and labor strikes and was also involved in the Chinese Civil War.
Carrying the name of the Society for Common Progress,[9] it was — along with other criminal gangs — responsible for the White Terror massacre of approximately 5,000 pro-Communist strikers in Shanghai in April 1927, which was ordered by Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek.
[citation needed] Chiang Kai-shek's brother-in-law and financial minister T. V. Soong also partnered with the pro-Chiang Green Gang to pressure Shanghai banks to buy up national securities.
In the last two years of the Nanjing decade (1936-1937), the Green Gang continued to pressure big business to buy up national bonds, as a means of compensating for the lack of corporate tax imposed by the government.
[12] After the defeat of Chiang Kai-shek's regime on the mainland in 1949, the Green Gang left Shanghai and in the early 1950s opened heroin refineries in Hong Kong.