[4] Born near Shanghai into a poor peasant family, Huang was a criminal from an early age, assisting her father in transporting and selling smuggled salt.

After the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, Huang was among the local gang leaders recruited by the National Revolutionary Army for guerrilla warfare purposes.

She later became an influential member of a women's organization founded by Soong Mei-ling, wife of the nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, and worked to take care of refugees in Taiwan.

While in captivity, Ashu told the authorities that Huang and her associate Shi Lianyuan (the salt merchant) had participated in the attack and had been significant in providing the weapons used.

She is recorded to have plundered, kidnapped and murdered traders and ordinary people and in one notable incident boarded a steamer and robbed the eight wealthy families onboard.

Huang had invented a fake persona as "Woman He-Zhang", claiming that she had a six-year-old child with her husband "Zhang Jinsheng" and was taking care of her old mother at her home, and that she had never known Lianyuan.

The newspaper Shen Bao published a report vilifying Huang on 3 August 1933, writing of her "extraordinary arm power" and that she was "abnormally atrocious".

[4] Due to the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) in that year, the National Revolutionary Army of the Republic of China recruited local armed gangs and groups throughout the country to employ them for guerrilla warfare purposes.

Huang, owing to her criminal past, did not formally join the army but organised a group of followers and allied herself with local military forces in the Shanghai area.

[9] Huang was captured by Japanese forces in Pudong in August 1938 and was the subject of a propaganda campaign to paint her as a traitor solely aligned with Japan.

In 1939, the Chinese government-aligned magazine Friends of the Wounded published an article praising Huang as a war heroine with impressive shooting skills and downplaying her criminal and suspect past.

[4][1] In 1940, Huang joined the army of Mao Sen, a major Chinese intelligence leader and commander who had recently escaped Japanese imprisonment.

Sen tasked Huang and Xie, who accompanied her, to establish underground networks to monitor Japanese activities and to attempt to detect hiding enemies.

Only a few months into this role, Huang revolted against the government, bringing many of the Pinghu Community Defense Corps and a large number of weapons with her into Lake Tai and resuming her career as a pirate.

Huang also invested in real estate, opened several shops, gave talks about her battles against the Japanese during the war, and was elected as a representative to the council of Pinghu County.

[3] Huang was once more recruited by the Chinese military in 1948, invited to join a bandit-suppression committee to help make battle preparations against Ding Xishan, a bandit-turned-commander for the communist forces.

When Soong Mei-ling, wife of the nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, created the Chinese Women's Anticommunist and Anti-Soviet-Union Association in 1950, she invited Huang to serve on the organization's committee.

As part of this, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) created a joint guerrilla warfare programme with the nationalists and began to recruit leaders in secret.

Huang was one of the first approached, being contacted in 1951, but she was advised by her friends and by some government officials not to join, perhaps out of suspicion of the CIA[3] and due to preferring to work directly with the nationalist forces.

[1] After Huang turned down the offer from the CIA, she largely shifted focus from maritime operations to being part of Soong Mei-ling's women's organization, though she is known to sporadically have partaken in further naval battles.

Since capable administrators were in short supply, she and her close followers often served as mediators in local disputes and overseers of goods and infrastructure, in addition to their roles in the women's organization.

Though she only received limited government support, Huang among other initiatives oversaw the foundation of an embroidery factory in Dapinglin so that the refugees could work for a living.

The Shaw Brothers swiftly sent representatives to apologize and were eventually forgiven by Huang after they donated 50,000 New Taiwan dollars to the "righteous compatriots of Dachen".

[3] There are few surviving non-Chinese records and documents chronicling Huang's exploits; in her 2017 book Pirate Women, the American writer Laura Sook Duncombe pondered various possible explanations for this, including that the relevant accounts may simply be destroyed or undiscovered, or perhaps that Huang could have been a composite figure of several women, the exaggerated account of a single woman or a wholly fabricated figure.

[13] Through examining contemporary newspapers and documents, the Chinese researcher Weiting Guo demonstrated the veracity of Huang's story in 2019 and brought attention to her life after the wars.