Spymaster: Dai Li and the Chinese Secret Service - Hardcover

Frederic Wakeman Jr. is Haas Professor of Asian Studies in the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Shanghai Badlands: Wartime Terrorism and Urban Crime, 1937-1941 (1996), Policing Shanghai, 1927-1937 (California, 1995), and The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth-Century China (California, 1985), among others.

"A tour de force. Wakeman combines his vast knowledge of Chinese history, his own work on China's police, his skill as a storyteller, and his ten years of being entranced with Dai Li, Chiang Kaishek's Himmler, to bring to life one of China's most imaginative and horrible demons."—Ezra F. Vogel, author of One Step Ahead: Guangdong Under Reform

"Wakeman masterfully pieces together, in fascinating and extraordinary detail, the rise of Chiang Kai-shek’s top spymaster, Dai Li. Spymaster captures Dai’s persona, explains the extraordinary personal trust Chiang placed in him, and reveals how Dai wielded power from the end of the 1920s to his death in 1946. This comprehensive and meticulous volume brings us into the core structures of Chiang’s power and sheds light on many previously dark corners of the Republican body politic. It deeply enriches our knowledge not only of Dai Li and of the Chinese secret service but also of this entire period in Republican China"—Kenneth Lieberthal, author of Governing China: From Revolution Through Reform

"If Sherlock Holmes had been an historian, the result might have been Frederic Wakeman’s astonishing and enthralling story of Dai Li, longtime master of a vast secret world of political intrigue, police terror, drug smuggling, and predatory sex, but also America’s collaborator in WWII, whose fingerprints are all over decades of China’s twentieth-century history. Thanks to the mountain of evidence uncovered by Wakeman, Dai Li is no longer ‘the mystery man of Asia.’"—Stephen F. Cohen, author of Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communism Russia

"A tour de force. Wakeman combines his vast knowledge of Chinese history, his own work on China's police, his skill as a storyteller, and his ten years of being entranced with Dai Li, Chiang Kaishek's Himmler, to bring to life one of China's most imaginative and horrible demons." Ezra F. Vogel, author of One Step Ahead: Guangdong Under Reform

"Wakeman masterfully pieces together, in fascinating and extraordinary detail, the rise of Chiang Kai-shek s top spymaster, Dai Li. Spymaster captures Dai s persona, explains the extraordinary personal trust Chiang placed in him, and reveals how Dai wielded power from the end of the 1920s to his death in 1946. This comprehensive and meticulous volume brings us into the core structures of Chiang s power and sheds light on many previously dark corners of the Republican body politic. It deeply enriches our knowledge not only of Dai Li and of the Chinese secret service but also of this entire period in Republican China" Kenneth Lieberthal, author of Governing China: From Revolution Through Reform

"If Sherlock Holmes had been an historian, the result might have been Frederic Wakeman s astonishing and enthralling story of Dai Li, longtime master of a vast secret world of political intrigue, police terror, drug smuggling, and predatory sex, but also America s collaborator in WWII, whose fingerprints are all over decades of China s twentieth-century history. Thanks to the mountain of evidence uncovered by Wakeman, Dai Li is no longer the mystery man of Asia. " Stephen F. Cohen, author of Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communism Russia