Volume 51, Number 5 · March 25, 2004
Chiang's Monster
By Jonathan D. Spence
Spymaster: Dai Li andthe Chinese Secret Service
by Frederic Wakeman Jr.
University of California Press, 650 pp., $75.00
During the late 1930s and World War II, it was common to call Dai Li 'China's Himmler,' as if Chiang Kai-shek's secret police and intelligence chief during that period performed functions similar to the head of the Gestapo and the SS under Hitler. But as becomes clear after reading Frederic Wakeman's absorbing and intricately detailed study Spymaster, the apparent parallels between China and Germany quickly fade. Dai Li was not China's Himmler, any more than Chiang Kai-shek was China's Hitler. Rather, as Wakeman shows, both Chiang and Dai Li were intensely and indissolubly Chinese: their natures and their fates, like their successes and their failures, were drawn from profound Chinese roots.
Review, 4521 words
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