A contact put me in touch with Dr. Ward, and I wrote and asked if he would help me. He suggested we meet. He was giving a speech in Paris at a conference on international terrorism, and I was in France at the time. So we met for dinner in the French capital. I think, during that meal, I must have passed some kind of invisible litmus test, because texts, phone calls and emails then began flooding out of Dick’s office in Chicago to the Chinese capital. And when I arrived on that first research trip in June 1997, the doors to the Chinese police—normally firmly closed to foreigners—were thrown wide open for me.

I was the first Western writer to get this kind of access, taken under the wing of the Beijing police and admitted into an arcane world of oriental policing, unusual in its embrace of both ancient and traditional Chinese methods, and the very latest international forensic and computing techniques. Over the next seven years, during frequent trips back and forth to China, I was given privileged insights into the workings of police departments in Beijing and Shanghai, allowed access to forensics and pathology facilities in both cities, visited police stations and holding cells, detectives’ offices and interrogation rooms. I rode in squad cars and ate in police canteens. And such was the influence of the Chinese police, that if I wanted access to anything not normally available to foreigners, they arranged it.

Interestingly, the branch of the Beijing Ministry of Public Security which hosted me, was the propaganda department. I quickly discovered that the Chinese interpretation of “propaganda” was a little different from ours in the West. This department of the Ministry was headed up by a top cop, Wu He Peng, and his job was to make movies and TV cop shows and publish crime fiction. He would, for example, have made the Chinese equivalent of Taggart, and the Chinese had been publishing the Sherlock Holmes stories and Agatha Christie, among others, all through the twentieth century.

Their philosophy was to show police and their investigations in a good light. Cops were always the good guys, and the baddies always got caught. That was the propaganda element of the job.

Wu He Peng had been appointed to this job as reward for catching four notorious criminals who had been robbing museums of priceless artefacts and smuggling them out of the country. One of the first things he did in his new job was make an eight-hour drama based on that investigation. He wrote it, produced it, and starred in it as himself, bringing him instant fame throughout China, where the average nightly television audience is 500 million.