Wai Lin

Background

A colonel in the Ministry of State Security of the People's Republic of China and a skilled martial artist, Wai Lin is sent, posing as a Xinhua News Agency reporter, to investigate stealth material missing from a People's Liberation Army base, a theft linked to media mogul Elliot Carver and his plan to provoke war between China and the United Kingdom. She discovers that Bond has been sent by MI6 on the same case. Each at first believes they have been ordered to kill the other, but a wary trust grows once Carver captures them both; Bond comes to respect her after she playfully but firmly turns down his advances.

Together they sneak aboard Carver's private ship, destroy it and disable a missile aimed at China, before finally giving in to their mutual attraction. Kin-Yan Szeto wrote that Yeoh brought the tough martial-arts heroine persona she had built in Hong Kong cinema, and Stephen Yiu-Wai Chu noted how heavily the film's promotion stressed her Chineseness.

Raymond Benson's novelisation gives her an entire chapter of backstory covering her training and her life in the Ministry, and in the 1999 video game of the film she is both playable, in the Saigon market mission, and a non-player character on the stealth boat in Hạ Long Bay, voiced by Larissa Murray. Sideshow Collectibles released a sixth-scale figure of her in 2001. Early scripts for Die Another Day brought her back to help Bond in Hong Kong, which would have made her only the second Bond girl to appear in two films after Sylvia Trench, but the idea was dropped and the Chinese agent Chang took her place.

She was well received: Entertainment Weekly ranked her the seventh-best Bond girl in 2010, calling her the first one you could take seriously, Life placed her eleventh, and Fandomania ranked her second.