China from the beginning of the 20th Century

Fall of Imperial China (Transformation of Modern China Series)

History

Wakeman Jr., Frederic

Asia

Free Press

Prewar Shanghai: casinos, brothels, Green Gang racketeers, narcotics syndicates, gun-runners, underground Communist assassins, Comitern secret agents. Frederic Wakeman's masterful study of the most colorful and corrupt city in the world at the time provides a panoramic view of the confrontation and collaboration between the Nationalist secret police and the Shanghai underworld. In detailing the life and politics of China's largest urban center during the Guomindang era, Wakeman covers an array of topics: the puritanical social controls implemented by the police; the regional differences that surfaced among Shanghai's Chinese, the influence of imperialism and Western-trained officials. Parts of this book read like a spy novel, with secret police, torture, assassination; and power struggles among the French, International Settlement, and Japanese consular police within Shanghai. Chiang Kai-shek wanted to prove that the Chinese could rule Shanghai and the country by themselves, rather than be exploited and dominated by foreign powers. His efforts to reclaim the crime-ridden city failed, partly because of the outbreak of war with Japan in 1937, but also because the Nationalist police force was itself corrupted by the city. Wakeman's exhaustively researched study is a major contribution to the study of the Nationalist regime and to modern Chinese urban history. It also shows that twentieth-century China has not been characterized by discontinuity, because autocratic government―whether Nationalist or Communist―has prevailed.

Policing Shanghai, 1927-1937

Americas

University of California Press

Now available again, this pioneering work examines one of the most controversial periods in Chinese history: the relationship between the Chinese civil and military authorities and the British trading community in Guangdong province on the eve of the Taiping Rebellion, one the most calamitous events in Chinese history. Wakeman shows how prevailing rural discontent, urban riots, secret society activity, and the imbalance of class and clan affected the mechanisms of regional power and gentry control, demonstrating the progression of rebellion and the historical inevitability of revolution.

Strangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in South China, 1839-1861

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.

Spymaster: Dai Li and the Chinese Secret Service

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

In classical Chinese, The Great Enterprise means winning The Mandate of heaven to rule over China, the Central Kingdom. This first of a two-volume work on The Great Enterprise of the Manchus is the first scholarly narrative in any language relating their conquest of China during the seventeenth century. (This book was originally published as a boxed two-volume set. It is now available as separate volumes with a plain hardcover. The page numbering continues from the first volume to the second.)

The Great Enterprise, Volume 1: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth-Century China

In classical Chinese, The Great Enterprise means winning The Mandate of heaven to rule over China, the Central Kingdom. This second volume of a two-volume work on The Great Enterprise of the Manchus is the first scholarly narrative in any language relating their conquest of China during the seventeenth century. (This book was originally published as a boxed two-volume set. It is now available as separate volumes with plain hardcover. The page numbering continues from the first volume to the second.)

The Great Enterprise, Volume 2: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth-Century China

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1973.

History and Will: Philosophical Perspectives of Mao Tse-Tung's Thought (Center for Chinese Studies, UC Berkeley)

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Between August 1937 and December 1941, terrorist wars broke out between Nationalist secret agents and the assassins of the Japanese military authorities who occupied most of Shanghai, and a spate of assassinations, bombings, and machine gun raids took place under the very noses of authorities. The release of secret Chinese police files by the C.I.A. allow the inner workings of these terrorist groups, and their links to the Green Gang just before Pearl Harbor was bombed and World War II erupted, to be exposed for the first time.

The Shanghai Badlands: Wartime Terrorism and Urban Crime, 1937–1941 (Cambridge Studies in Chinese History, Literature and Institutions)

Cambridge University Press

Between August 1937 and December 1941, terrorist wars broke out between Nationalist secret agents and the assassins of the Japanese military authorities who occupied most of Shanghai, and a spate of assassinations, bombings, and machine gun raids took place under the very noses of authorities. The release of secret Chinese police files by the C.I.A. allow the inner workings of these terrorist groups, and their links to the Green Gang just before Pearl Harbor was bombed and World War II erupted, to be exposed for the first time.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Wakeman Jr., Frederic. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Wakeman Jr., Frederic

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Wakeman Jr., Frederic. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Fall of Imperial China (Transformation of Modern China Series)

Policing Shanghai, 1927-1937

Strangers at the Gate: Social Disorder in South China, 1839-1861

Spymaster: Dai Li and the Chinese Secret Service

The Great Enterprise, Volume 1: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth-Century China

The Great Enterprise, Volume 2: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth-Century China

History and Will: Philosophical Perspectives of Mao Tse-Tung's Thought (Center for Chinese Studies, UC Berkeley)

The Shanghai Badlands: Wartime Terrorism and Urban Crime, 1937–1941 (Cambridge Studies in Chinese History, Literature and Institutions)

The Shanghai Badlands: Wartime Terrorism and Urban Crime, 1937–1941 (Cambridge Studies in Chinese History, Literature and Institutions)