THE BOOK (taken from book cover)

The dramatic events of the first half of the twentieth century in China – the revolution that turned the Chinese empire into a republic, the war with Japan, the Nationalists’ campaigns against the Red Army, and the ultimate triumph of the Chinese Communists Party – have been told in numerous books.

What is exceptional about Lynn Pan’s account is that she relates these events through a collage of interlocking historical portraits. Du Yuesheng, whose ascent to the summit of Shanghai’s organized crime traced that city’s own spectacular rise to riches; Wang Jingwei, who believed he was saving his country but was in fact selling it to the Japanese; General Dai Li, who ran wartime Asia’s most powerful secret police – these are among the swirl of people and incidents she brings vividly to life. At the same time, she disentangles the promiscuous relations and shifting alliances of the underworld of gangsters, the upperworld of warlords and bankers, and the sub-world of spies and secret agents in Shanghai. Such is her eye for detail and her grasp of the Chinese psyche that readers are lured on through this complex story as easily as if they were reading a thriller.

 THE AUTHOR

Lynn Pan is the author of Sons of the Yellow Emperor (winner of the 1992 Martin Luther King Memorial Prize), and editor of the acclaimed Encyclopedia of Chinese Overseas. Her other books include China’s Sorrow, The New Chinese Revolution, Tracing It Home and, most recently, Shanghai Style: Art and Design Between the Wars. She lives in Shanghai, the city of her birth.