Spymaster: Dai Li and the Chinese Secret Service

by Frederic E. Wakeman Jr.

The most feared man in China, Dai Li, was chief of Chiang Kai-shek's secret service during World War II. This sweeping biography of "China's Himmler," based on recently opened intelligence archives, traces Dai's rise from obscurity as a rural hooligan and Green Gang blood-brother to commander of the paramilitary units of the Blue Shirts and of the dreaded Military Statistics Bureau: the world's largest spy and counterespionage organization of its time.

In addition to exposing the inner workings of the secret police, whose death squads, kidnappings, torture, and omnipresent surveillance terrorized critics of the Nationalist regime, Dai Li's personal story opens a unique window on the clandestine history of China's Republican period. This study uncovers the origins of the Cold War in the interactions of Chinese and American special services operatives who cooperated with Dai Li in the resistance to the Japanese invasion in the 1930s and who laid the groundwork for an ongoing alliance against the Communists during the revolution that followed in the 1940s. Frederic Wakeman Jr. illustrates how the anti-Communist activities Dai Li led altered the balance of power within the Chinese Communist Party, setting the stage for Mao Zedong's rise to supremacy. He reveals a complex and remarkable personality that masked a dark presence in modern China―one that still pervades the secret services on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.

Wakeman masterfully illuminates a previously little-understood world as he discloses the details of Chinese secret service trade-craft. Anyone interested in the development of modern espionage will be intrigued by Spymaster, which spells out in detail the ways in which the Chinese used their own traditional methods, in addition to adapting foreign ways, to create a modern intelligence service.

Genres: China, History, Nonfiction, Biography

672 pages, Hardcover

First published May 4, 2003

About the author

Frederic Evans Wakeman, Jr. (Chinese: 魏斐德; pinyin: Wèi Fěidé) was a prominent American scholar of East Asian history and Professor of History at University of California, Berkeley.

His father was the novelist Frederic E. Wakeman, Sr. (publishing as "Frederic Wakeman")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederi...

Reviews

[Lynda · Rating 4 out of 5]

The topic interested me since this involves the man who ran the largest espionage organization in the world during CKS's era in China. However, I must say I got bogged down with a lot more detail than I wanted to and abandoned the book about mid-way. It is an esoteric topic but well worth the read for those who really want to delve deeper into the machinations of CKS's domestic organization that carried out terrorist activities against those who sided with either the Communists or the Japanese until the outbreak of WW2.

[Jonah Lo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not just a good biography of Dai Li, but a fantastic single-issue survey of elite Chinese politics in Shanghai and Nanjing during the Chiang era.

[汪先生 · Rating 4 out of 5]

2017-12-16 12:24:11
译者不行。囿于时代，作者已经用上了所有能找到且足够大量的资料来研究中国的间谍，以国民党秘密组织内的人的回忆录（放在今日在资料层面还可深入）为主，外加大量英文资料，勾勒出戴笠这个间谍王的形象，为了扩充这一主线，还进行了大量对比研究和细节研究，依旧是魏氏实证之风，花十几年读几百本书研究一个问题令人佩服，尽管史实有很多小错误，和翻译也有关系，最后北岛的青灯表达了此特别版对魏斐德的逝世纪念。