Spymaster : Dai Li and the Chinese Secret Service.
Title:
Spymaster : Dai Li and the Chinese Secret Service.
Author:
Wakeman, Frederic, Jr.
ISBN:
9780520928763
Personal Author:
Edition:
1st ed.
Physical Description:
1 online resource (674 pages)
Contents:
acknowledgments -- preface -- abbreviations -- maps -- 1 Images of Dai Li -- 2 Living off the Land -- 3 Touben -- 4 The League of Ten -- 5 "Vigorous Practice": The Chiang Freemasonry -- 6 The Founding of the Lixingshe -- 7 The Lixingshe and the Blue Shirts -- 8 The Blue Shirts' "Fascism" -- 9 Ideological Rivalries: The Blue Shirts and the "CC" Clique -- 10 The Blue Shirts in the Provinces -- 11 The Shanghai Station, 1932-35 -- 12 Death Squads -- 13 Assassinations -- 14 Police Academies -- 15 Sleeping in Their Coffins -- 16 Skirts and Sashes -- 17 War and the Special Movement Corps -- 18 The Training Camps -- 19 Codes -- 20 Dai Li, Milton Miles, and the Foundation of SACO -- 21 SACO Training Camps -- 22 Spying -- 23 Dai Li's Wartime Smuggling Networks -- 24 Juntong in Wartime Chongqing -- 25 Falling Star -- Afterword: Daemons -- Appendix A: Organization of the General Unit of Special Training (later the Northwestern Youth Labor Camp) in Late 1939 -- Appendix B Organization of Juntong Headquarters, 1943-45 -- Appendix C: Terms of the Sino-American Special Technical Cooperation Agreement (Washington, D.C., April 1943) -- Appendix D: SACO Training Units -- notes -- bibliography.
Abstract:
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.
Local Note:
Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, 2017. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries.
Genre:
Electronic Access:
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