Dai Li

Dai Li in the 1940s

Dai Li , ( Chinese  戴笠 , Pinyin Dài Lì , W.-G. Tai Li ; * March 17, 1896 in Jiangshan , Zhejiang ; † March 17, 1946 near Nanjing ; original name Dai Chunfeng ( Chinese  戴 春風 , Pinyin Dài Chūnfēng , W.-G. Tai Chun-feng )) was the most feared man in China as head of the secret police of the Kuomintang government in the early 1940s.

Dai Li, whose father died when Dai Li was four years old, received a good education as a child, but his family could not raise funds for higher education. Dai joined the army as a student . However, he deserted and fled to Shanghai, where he made the acquaintance of Chiang Kai-shek , Du Yuesheng and Dai Jitao . From 1927 Dai Li attended the Whampoa Military Academy , to which his relations with Chiang had helped him, and after graduation became a wing adjutant . In 1928 he began military intelligence work. He was one of the co-organizers of the Shanghai massacre , in which many members and alleged members of the Communist Party were murdered. Four years later he led the fascist Blue Shirt Society for Chiang with up to 100,000 members , which he used to carry out terror or to commit political assassinations and murders. This earned him the nickname " Himmler of China". In 1938 he became director of the newly established Bureau of Investigations and Statistics, the secret police of the Kuomintang government. In 1942 Dai became the commander of the Sino-American Cooperative Organization , which was founded on the side of the Republic of China against Japan after the USA entered the war. In this function, Dai was in charge of a 50,000-strong guerrilla force that carried out reconnaissance work, sabotage or the evacuation of fallen fighter pilots behind the enemy lines. With the support of this American organization, Dai Li's agents infiltrated the Japanese occupation authorities and those Chinese organizations that opposed the Kuomintang rule, especially the Communist Party . Methods such as arbitrary arrest, secret kidnapping, torture and murder were used to threaten not only those who opposed the Kuomintang, but also bystanders.

Dai Li was killed in a plane crash near Nanjing on March 17, 1946. Rumors that Kang Sheng or the CIA were involved in the accident have not been confirmed or refuted.

literature

• Frederic Wakeman, Jr.: Spymaster. Dai Li and the Chinese secret service . University of California Press, Berkeley 2003, ISBN 0-520-23407-3 .
• 良 雄 (Liang Xiong): 戴笠 傳 (biography of Dai Li) . 傳記 文學 出版社, 臺北 1982.

Web links

Commons : Dai Li  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} James Z. Gao: Historical dictionary of modern China (1800-1949) . Scarecrow Press, Lanham 2009, ISBN 978-0-8108-4930-3 , pp. 88 .
2. ↑ Dieter Kuhn : The Republic of China from 1912 to 1937 - Draft for a political history of events . 3. Edition. Edition Forum, Heidelberg 2007, ISBN 3-927943-25-8 , p. 520-522 .
3. ↑ ^{a b c} Christopher R. Lew and Edwin Pak-wah Leung: Historical dictionary of the Chinese Civil War . 2nd Edition. Scarecrow Press, Lanham 2013, ISBN 978-0-8108-7874-7 , pp. 50-51 .

Note: This article places the family name before the person's first name. This is the usual order in Chinese. Dai is the family name here, Li is the first name.