Spies by Ernest Volkman John Wiley $190 SHANGHAI in 1927 was a city in ferment. Politics, business and society were a heady brew of the extreme, the violent and the exotic. Into this cauldron fell two men who were to spend the next 20 years in a deadly battle that would ultimately cost millions of lives.
K'ang Sheng, a close friend of Mao Zedong, was pitched against Tai Li, who was associated with Chiang Kai-shek. The business they were in was espionage and both would employ whatever means they could in order to gain the upper hand.
They feature in Spies, which is subtitled 'The Secret Agents Who Changed the Course of History'. The book has 45 chapters, each devoted to one or more practitioner of the art of espionage, whether as defector, mole, traitor or whatever. Among them are famous names such as Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, George Blake, Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt.
K'ang Sheng and Tai Li are here for the crucial role they played in the development of China this century and for the enthusiasm with which they undertook their respective roles.
The two first clashed in 1927 during the Communist uprising in Shanghai, where both vied for notoriety as the most ruthless. The special fate meted out by Tai Li to captured Communist revolutionaries was to toss them into the red hot boilers of steam locomotives.
In 1931, Chiang named Tai Li as the head of the Bureau of Information and Statistics, the Nationalists' intelligence agency.
Tai Li recruited more than 300,000 agents and blanketed China with a network of informants and agents directed to concentrate all their energies on exposing the Communists. He even created a string of brothels staffed with women trained to wheedle out secrets from their customers.