Chapter 182 fall

In the spring of 1989, 43 years after Dai Li's plane crashed in the suburbs of Nanjing, hundreds of his former intelligence agents gathered in Taipei and established a "Thirty-seven Fellowship" (that is, March 17).In honor of their superiors, they declared that the purpose of the fraternity was to form an alliance "to combat counter-revolutionary forces."All members of the fraternity have security backgrounds, and they were summoned by Ye Xiangzhi, the former Taiwan intelligence director, and the leader of the latter was Qiao Jiacai, who was the chief inspector of General Dai.

Therefore, the image of Dai Li in his later years contained two diametrically opposed aspects.For the Communists in mainland China, he is completely a symbol of evil, the embodiment of the devil.And to at least some of the Nationalists in Taiwan, he has been a hero: the "Spy King" who may have saved China from its worst enemy.Perhaps Dai Li's complexity can be better expressed by not viewing Dai Li from these two extremes.Near the end of the book, though, a Chinese friend asks disinterestedly: "In the end, is he a bad guy or a good guy?" An indistinct heterogeneity like Dai Li cannot be summed up in such a simple way.At one time he was the symbol of fascist terror, the embodiment of the modern police state, the enforcer of strict Confucian ideals; An ambitious heir to them.Underneath all these images, Dai Li is largely a product of the complicated era he lived in. He was at the pinnacle of the political struggle between tradition and modernity.

Thinking of Dai Li's admiration for Zhuge Liang, the most central and ambiguous figure in the Han Dynasty, one cannot help but think of Kong Ming's reflection on his lifelong dedication to quelling the anti-Han rebellion in troubled times when he died in 234 AD. "Everything is up to the will of God." Seeing that the star in the Big Dipper was crumbling, Zhuge Liang sighed helplessly: "I want to do my best to restore the Central Plains and rejuvenate the Han Dynasty, but it is God's will." Kong Ming's magic power is irreparable at this moment He, with the fall of his star, the surrounding Wei soldiers kept clamoring, this crouching dragon died in the army tent. Six centuries later, the poet Du Fu wrote: "The long star fell into the front camp last night, and the obituary fell today." Zhuge Liang was 54 years old, and Dai Li was 49 years old when he died.