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Drawing upon sources as diverse as long-classified FBI records arid the Wellesley Magazine, Seagrave, a journalist who grew up on the China-Burma border, feverishly ransacks the past. He resurrects old Shanghai and recollects, in passing, such spicy background scenes as the sailors' prison in San Francisco, a "bin full of murderers, cutthroats, sodomists, and mutineers dredged from the leaky hulls that jammed the docks." He also does some riffs on Chinese secret societies, the erotic kinks of foot-bound "sing-song girls," and the power of opium in a culture in which at least one Chamber of Commerce used the drug as the official standard of exchange. To his appetite for low company Seagrave adds an urbane taste for incongruity, a penchant for Edwardian epigrams ("There is a time for fools to come forth, when only bandits can be kings") and a gift for painterly description: Taiwan is a realm of "cliff-lined seascapes and misty peaks that unrolled each dawn from the scroll of night."
But all the while, Seagrave is zestfully constructing an arresting case against his subjects. If the Soongs seemed larger than life, he argues, it was because they shrouded themselves in self-created legends. In fact, he insists, the family treated national funds as play dough, milking the opium market, pocketing American loans and hatching so many wartime scams that within five months of being installed at a rate of four to $1, the gold yuan had plunged to a rate of 1 million to $1. He further repeats the familiar charge that in 1934 the Generalissimo, hell-bent on settling scores with the Chinese Communists instead of fighting the Japanese enemy, followed the advice of a Nazi strategist, creating a scorched-earth policy and a famine that left a million Chinese dead.
Often, however, Seagrave's thesis tyrannizes his judgment, and his narrative tapestry reveals too insistent a design. Chiang's anti-Communist policy was in large part an act of self-defense. Had Mao's forces won in the '30s, Chiang and his colleagues would surely have been executed. Estimates of those killed in the famine vary widely, Seagrave acknowledges, but Chiang's pro-Communist antagonist Edgar Snow places it at a million, so a million it is. Seagrave's enemies' enemies are invariably his friends: thus Ching-ling, the family's black sheep, is portrayed as a "transcendent beauty" and the Red Army is found worthy of "authentic heroism." By contrast, "Chiang at his best was pathologically devious."
Below all, Seagrave's bright irreverence in portraying Sun Yat-sen as a character from opera bouffe and Chiang as an "ill-tempered bravo" almost contradicts the charges of Machiavellian villainy he wishes to press. The Soong Dynasty brings much pungent material to light; in the end, however, it works less well as an argument with history than as a crackling, made-for-TV story unraveled with fluency and flair. --By Pico Iyer