SpymasterDai Li and the Chinese Secret Service
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. The book 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. It 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. The book illuminates a previously little-understood world as it discloses the details of Chinese secret service trade-craft.
When World War II ended Chiang Kai-shek seemed at the height of his power-the leader of Nationalist China, one of the victorious Allied Powers in 1945 and with the financial backing of the US. Yet less than four years later, he lost the China's civil war against the communists. Offering an insightful chronological treatment of the years 1944–1949, Parks Coble addresses why Chiang was unable to win the war and control hyperinflation. Using newly available archival sources, he reveals the critical weakness of Chiang's style of governing, the fundamental structural flaws in the Nationalist government, bitter personal rivalries and Chiang's personal lack of interest in finance. This major work of revisionist scholarship will engage all those interested in the shaping of twentieth-century history.
This chapter focuses on three exemplary pieces of stories by anonymous authors: The Plum Blossom Case, A Strand of Golden Hair and Three Times to Jiangnan. Analyses of different versions of these stories demonstrate that while there exists a stable core of what each story is about, differences as to length, language, style and individual scenes can be massive. These changes illustrate three characteristics of shouchaoben fiction: first, the creative leeway that secondary authors took with the stories; second, the relationship among the Text writ large and its variations; and third, if seen as ruptures in the Text, the variations may often be read as reflection of Cultural Revolution experiences.
Despite the ongoing debate on whether film noir is a distinct film genre and the questioning of genre determinants of noir films, it is now widely acknowledged among scholars that film noir and noir films should be understood beyond its original context of Hollywood. This chapter examines noir film’s local expression through the Shanghai heibang films. It questions why Shanghai, especially old Shanghai, is chosen by Chinese filmmakers as an imaginative space to examine China’s modernity and how genre conventions are adopted and adapted to shift Shanghai’s urban imagery from a sin city to a noir city since the 1990s.
This article investigates the events that unfolded during and after the visit of two Office of Strategic Service (OSS) agents to Lhasa in spring 1943. To date, not much is known about this first visit of American representatives to the state of Tibet, which happened at a time when the US and its allies’ strategic priority was the containment of Japanese influence in the China-Burma-India (CBI) Theater. Through an analysis of cables between the US government agencies in Washington and with embassies of allies in both Washington and Chongqing, this article reconstructs these events. More specifically, the complications that unfolded throughout the year 1943 can be traced back to the visit of Captain Ilia Tolstoy and Lieutenant Brooke Dolan to Lhasa in February.
The major findings of this analysis are: 1) Lhasa was actively endeavoring independence from China and sought to do so by establishing friendly relations with the US, prior to the end of WWII; 2) the involvement of the OSS in the Tibetan independence struggle, at the time against the advice of the State Department, foreshadows the CIA’s actions in Tibet in the 1950s; 3) the suboptimal communication between US government agencies, as well as the secretiveness among the Allied forces, most prominently the Chongqing Government.
This article examines the adoption of modern fingerprinting in early twentieth-century China through a case study of the Fingerprint Society, an association affiliated with the Ministry of Interior’s police academy that was active in 1920s Beijing. The members of this association viewed fingerprinting as both a technique that could be used to demonstrate China’s adoption of globally accepted standards of policing and justice and a body of academic knowledge that could form the basis for a would-be profession of fingerprinting experts. While the Fingerprint Society ultimately failed to accomplish its profession-building goals, its activities nonetheless shed light on an early moment in the history of new identification practices in China as well as on dynamics that have shaped the global history of fingerprinting as an area of modern expert knowledge located ambiguously between policing and science.
This article explores the actions taken to address the issue of covert Chinese activities in India during the Second World War identified by Force 136, the Far East incarnation of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), which resulted in the creation of the Chinese Intelligence Section (CIS) in early 1945. It considers this development within the wider context of security intelligence in relation to British India, which has been the subject of increased academic study in recent years as a result of the increased availability of relevant archival material. The need for CIS to be established draws attention to the parameters within which the various intelligence and security agencies operated, their attention focused primarily upon clearly identifiable threats to British rule, particularly nationalism and communism. The issue of covert Chinese activity in India did not fit easily within this framework; the manner in which SOE’s concerns were ultimately addressed illustrates how the prevailing colonial security mindset shaped the conceptual horizons of security intelligence activity.
In the past 20 years, criminal activities directed by Chinese, Hong Kongese, and/or Taiwanese have increasingly become a mainstream topic in criminology and criminal justice. Despite the fact that many books, reports, articles, and monographs on the Chinese, Hong Kongese, or Taiwanese organized crime enterprises (as well as gangs) have been published, a comprehensive conceptual framework which would assist criminologists and criminal justice professionals in examining the political, religious, social and other aspects of structured counter-cultural activities and major players in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and American Chinatowns seems not to have been proposed yet. The purpose of this paper is to advance a typology that would help academics and law enforcement agents to identify and evaluate the diversities of underworlds of China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and American Chinatowns. This taxonomy consists of three factors: organizational structure, participation in politics or revolutionary movements, and ideology. Each of these variables is further divided into complicated/loose, frequent/infrequent/, and distinctive/indistinctive levels. Based on such a categorization, the counter-cultural elements of China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan during the period of 1912 to 2004 are classified as CFD, LFD, CFI, LID, CID, CII, LFI, and LII types, as can be characterized respectively by Republican Revolution-involved Triads and tongs; ultra-nationalists; the Shanghai Green Gangs of the 1920s and 1930s; modern Green Gangs; organized Chinese refugee gangs; Chinese-controlled pirate groups; jiaotou brothers of Taiwan; and ordinary Chinese/Taiwanese street gangs.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.