"Florey here turns out a zippy, fast-cut, dazzlingly-angled crime thriller that moves like lightning. A remarkable cast is top-lined by Anna May Wong and Philip Ahn, a rare example of Oriental leads in a non-Chan/Mr. Moto/Mr. Wong 'B' movie. Like so many other Robert Florey films...it makes maximum use of Paramount facilities in terms of cast and standing sets, and is broken up into so many shots, all of them flawlessly lit and composed, that it belies the stringent budget and shooting time allocated to it, and often has at least the superficial look of a Sternberg glossy. "One of the joys of the mid-'30s was to watch the G-Men aggressively combatting the illegal importation of the Yellow Peril, and such thrillers invariably began with a sequence showing the wholesale dumping of a cargo of hapless Orientals from the smugglers' plane. Such lightning establishing of plot and character served to stress the ruthlessness of the ganglords, and the general undesirability of being Oriental. Daughter of Shanghai is a film from this genre... With its Italian-looking gangsters, its Oriental victims and a razor-wielding Negro valet, it should prove a field day..." --W.K. Everson