◆ ONE ◆

Chinese Communist Intelligence Organizations

Soviet agents in Shanghai helped organize fledgling Chinese Marxists even before the founding of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in July 1921. They schooled its leaders in clandestine methods—though not all were apt students. After the CCP was formed, Moscow used the Communist International (Comintern), their wholly controlled instrument, to orchestrate policy and even some operations. An often contentious secret relationship was born. After 1949 it became the Sino-Soviet “friendship,” lasting until 1960. This interpretation is no anticommunist trope: CCP-approved literature, published in China, presents many details.¹

The organs of CCP intelligence also had direct help from Russian advisors, an even more inconvenient truth given the assassinations and other violence associated with the OGPU (Unified State Political Directorate), NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), KGB (Committee for State Security), and their modern successors.² A significant number of Chinese intelligence officers, possibly hundreds, were trained in Russia—starting in 1926 with Chen Geng and Gu Shunzhang. In the 1930s Zhou Enlai loaned Chinese comrades to Soviet military intelligence (the GRU, or Main Intelligence Directorate). They were trained and deployed in networks that kept tabs on Japanese forces in China.³

However, the CCP’s espionage services should not be characterized as a tool of the Russians, especially after 1939 when Kang Sheng took formal control. With the approval of Mao Zedong, Kang and his deputy Li Kenong aggressively spied on the GRU station in Yan’an in 1940–44. Moreover, Mao approved the removal of Russian advisors from inside the CCP security services over a year before the Sino-Soviet split of 1960. Afterward, there is no evidence of other foreign advisors, only intelligence liaison, such as with the Americans between the Richard Nixon visit in 1972 and the end of the Cold War. The main subject: information about their common enemy, Russia.

Foreign influence notwithstanding, CCP intelligence organizations have consistently focused on contemporary problems and perceived threats: a nearly fatal lack of intelligence capability (1927), the need to reestablish clandestine networks in enemy-occupied cities (1934–39), an outmoded revolutionary organization retooled for the needs of a nation-state but interrupted by the Korean War (1949–53), an incomplete and fractured foreign intelligence structure needing consolidation as China sought its place in the world (1955), and an intelligence and counterintelligence community, shattered by the Cultural Revolution, facing renewed foreign espionage threats with the opening of China (1983). In 2016 China’s seven military regions were replaced by five theater commands, and military intelligence was reorganized. Analysts have wondered whether the other shoe would drop: another reorganization of civilian intelligence, the Ministry of State Security (MSS), and possibly of the national police, the Ministry of Public Security (MPS). Accelerated campaigns to combat corruption inside the party-state and to counter foreign spying heralded at least rearranged tasks for the MSS and the MPS, with the former renewing its focus on counterintelligence at home and foreign espionage abroad.

Our thesis about CCP intelligence organizations says that they regularly struggled to keep up with the times and reorganized their way forward, like the services of many other nations. This idea runs contrary to the Beijing-approved narrative found in books, television programs, and movies. The script for public consumption emphasizes the heroics of friends and the atrocities of enemies. At times it reads like an updated rendition of The Water Margin (水浒传, Shui hu zhuan), one of the four great classical novels of Chinese literature. The CCP-scripted drama of their “hidden battlefront” (隐蔽战线, Yinbi zhanxian) boosts the party’s legitimacy, showing that patriotic Chinese support the CCP no matter who is in charge or what deed is expected. It seems to tell today’s citizens that just as it was patriotic to be a communist before 1949, so it is today. This belief system underlines that mistakes will eventually be corrected, and loyalty to the party will be rewarded.

In this chapter, we seek to clarify how CCP intelligence organs developed, declined, and renewed, how they succeeded and failed. We hope to move closer to an understanding of how intelligence became a core business of the party and will remain so for the foreseeable future. To check the CCP’s official narrative, we sought validation with other sources from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and elsewhere.

1927: Central Military Department Special Operations Branch
(特务工作处, Zhongyang junwei teke), May–August 1927

After narrowly escaping the April 12 Nationalist coup d’état in Shanghai, Zhou Enlai set up the Special Operations Branch in Wuhan under the Central Military Department in late May 1927.⁴ Gu Shunzhang took charge of daily operations. The already extant Wuhan-based Special Operations Work Division (特务特务工作处, Tewu gongzuo chu), a VIP protection unit formed a year earlier, may have been folded into the new organ.⁵ The new Protection Section (保卫股, baowei gu), with sixty members, took over this vital function, and half of their number were soon packed off to Moscow for training. An Intelligence Section (情报股, qingbao gu) produced a daily report of all available information in Wuhan based on agent material. One of their sources was the chief of police in Wuhan.⁶

The Special Operations Section (特务股, Tewu gu), which probably started later than the others, was responsible for assassinations of enemies and turncoats (renegades: 叛徒, pantu). It eventually came to be called the Red Squad or, more frankly, the Red Terror Squad (红队; 红色恐怖 队, hong dui; hongse kongbu dui). In August 1927 these intelligence and protection organs under the Central Military Department were abolished as the Central Committee prepared to move back to Shanghai.⁷

1927–35: Special Services Section
(中央特别行动科, Zhongyang tebie xingdong ke, also known as 中央特别任务科 [abbreviated 中央特科 Zhongyang teke])

On November 14, 1927, the Central Committee directed Zhou Enlai to reorganize its subordinate departments and add a permanent urban intelligence organ.⁸ Zhou took the existing general branch (总务科, Zongwu ke), responsible for clandestine accommodations and meeting places, and began building additional sections for intelligence (情报, qingbao), operations (行动, xingdong), and radio communications (无线 电通讯, wuxiandian tongxun). The consolidated result was known as the Special Services Section (SSS).⁹ In Chinese it was commonly referred to as the Teke (特科), and this abbreviation is widely used today in publications and on the Internet.

The new organization protected the central leadership, assembled intelligence, assassinated and kidnapped enemies and turncoats, rescued imprisoned comrades, and maintained clandestine radio stations and ciphers.¹⁰ Gu Shunzhang led the SSS from 1927 to 1931.¹¹ The organization was based in Shanghai and had officers in Tianjin, Beiping (now Beijing), and the Hong Kong–Macau region.

The SSS faced a mortal crisis in April 1931 when its leader, Gu Shunzhang, was apprehended in Wuhan by the KMT. Under threat of torture, Gu quickly defected and began naming names and places used as hideouts. As a result, many communists were caught and executed, including CCP general secretary Xiang Zhongfa. However, SSS clandestine operatives inside the central government managed to sound an alarm in time for many communists to escape capture (see Li Kenong and the Three Heroes of the Dragon’s Lair). Their actions may have saved the CCP leadership and its urban assets from complete annihilation.¹²

In 1931–33 Chen Yun and Kang Sheng led the remnants of the urban networks in Shanghai, but the SSS gradually expired as aggressive KMT operations forced them into hiding or to evacuate, following the leadership to Red Army headquarters in Jiangxi. In the first six months of 1933, more than six hundred communists were detained in Shanghai, and fewer than five hundred members remained free. That January, SSS interim director Chen Yun departed the city for Jiangxi, and Pan Hannian (see chapter 3) left only four months later. By 1934 the CCP’s urban intelligence networks were “ninety percent destroyed.” In September 1935, near the end of the Red Army’s Long March, the CCP formally disbanded its young spy organization.¹³ Inside the Red Army at Ruijin, a successor was already in place: the Political Protection Bureau (PPB), led by Deng Fa. It absorbed SSS officers including Li Kenong,¹⁴ but the PPB was more focused on digging out internal enemies than on gathering intelligence.¹⁵ While there were key successes (see Mo Xiong, chapter 3), urban and rural intelligence network building would not again be seriously addressed until the formation of the Social Affairs Department in February 1939.

1931–39: Political Protection Bureau
(中央政治保卫局, Zhongyang zhengzhi baowei ju)

In the last few months of 1930, party leaders in Shanghai decided to bring security work and the purging counterrevolutionary committees under more centralized control after Mao Zedong’s Pyrrhic victory of purge and revenge known as the Futian incident. In roughly August 1931 the Central Political Protection Department (中央政治保卫处, Zhongyang zhengzhi baowei chu) was founded in Jiangxi with Deng Fa, fresh from underground work in Hong Kong, as its leader.¹⁶ The new organ was subordinate to the Red Army General Front Command. In November it was elevated to become the State PPB (国家政治保卫局, Guojia zhengzhi baowei ju) and given the responsibility to guard the party center. Li Kenong, Qian Zhuangfei, and other veterans of the SSS who had, like Deng Fa himself, recently fled the cities entered the PPB as division and section chiefs with responsibilities in the Red Army zones and in enemy areas.¹⁷ This may have been the point at which genuine enemy intelligence (敌情, di qing) work began in the state PPB, broadening its scope from rear area security. The SSS continued its work in Shanghai, but now there was another central body with security and intelligence functions.¹⁸ Their precise relationship requires further research.

In 1934 the state PPB included both civilian-focused units and one embedded in the Red Army. They appear to have been two sides of the same coin, led by Deng Fa and Li Kenong. The latter held positions in both.¹⁹ Some prominent examples show how the PPB and Red Army military intelligence had a “revolving door” aspect: Luo Ruiqing, a political officer who became First Corps PPB head under Lin Biao and went on to higher office;²⁰ Zhang Shunqing, the Third Corps PPB head under Peng Dehuai who also was an army political officer;²¹ and Wang Shoutao, who was director of the Political Department of the Ninth Corps when the Long March began and was a short-lived PPB director in 1935.²²

Given the background of Li Kenong and Qian Zhuangfei as SSS clandestine officers in KMT areas, one might suppose that they were assigned duties in Ruijin to control work behind enemy lines. However, CCP sources give few details of their daily work—mostly just noting their arrival and reassignment after having their identities revealed with the defection of Gu Shunzhang in April 1931. Sources agree that Li was head of the “implementation department” of the State PPB in Ruijin (国家政治保卫局执行 部, Guojia zhengzhi baowei ju, zhixing bu) but give little information about what he actually did there, other than arranging for passage of personnel in and out of White areas. Qian Zhuangfei was assigned to a military unit as a PPB cadre and as head of the Intelligence Bureau of the Central Military Commission (CMC). He either died in a KMT air raid during the Long March or was captured and killed.²³ Both men would have been subordinate to Deng Fa. However, Li Kenong might have outshined his boss: upon arrival in Bao’an in 1935, Deng was reassigned, at least on paper, to be the lead of the Grain Department.²⁴ Li Kenong was on the rise.

A national PPB was maintained under the command of Mao Zedong and Zhu De in Ruijin before and during the Long March (1934–35). When they reached the Bao’an and Yan’an areas, they also called this organization the Northwest PPB (西北政治保卫局, Xibei zhengzhi baowei ju). A party historian opined that they were the same.²⁵ Wang Shoudao was appointed its director on October 30, 1935, and Zhou Xing took over in February 1936.²⁶ Zhou Xing was one of the handlers of Edgar Snow when he visited Bao’an that year and briefed the American on sensitive matters such as the number of political prisoners under detention.²⁷

Though the PPB absorbed personnel from the Special Services Section (SSS) when it was disbanded in September 1935, the bureau was focused on protection of the leadership and “digging out” of perceived enemies (see Chanchu in the web-based glossary of terms).²⁸

1939–49: Social Affairs Department
(中共中央社会部, Zhonggong zhongyang shehui bu)

In November 1937 intelligence veteran Kang Sheng arrived in Yan’an from Moscow on a Soviet aircraft with Wang Ming and Chen Yun. By August 1938 Kang was in charge of the CCP’s existing security and intelligence assets: the PPB, the leadership guard force, and the shattered remnants of the recently abolished SSS.²⁹ Although direct evidence is lacking, Kang probably had Russian training in intelligence and security operations.³⁰ He may have carried instructions from Joseph Stalin to reorganize CCP intelligence after years of substantial casualties resulting from the 1930–31 Futian incident, the April 1931 defection of Gu Shunzhang, and the trials of the Long March (1934–35).

In 1939 the CCP held its safest base area to date and Mao Zedong was making strides toward consolidating party leadership, albeit under an ineffectual challenge from Wang Ming. But knowledge of the KMT enemy was lacking. The atmosphere was ripe for intelligence rebuilding and reorganization. On February 18, 1939, the Party Central Committee established the Shehui Bu, or Social Affairs Department (SAD), with Kang as its director. Over the next four years Kang spread SAD offices down to the local level in many communist-held areas; integrated intelligence, counterintelligence, and policing; systematized reporting and analysis; and established intelligence stations (情报站, qingbao zhan) in previously untouched regions. However, he is remembered today for using the SAD in 1942–44 to encourage bizarre mass struggles against innocents and imaginary enemies and carrying forth similar methods to help Mao Zedong wreak havoc two decades later during the Cultural Revolution.

The late Warren Kuo, a Taiwan historian who defected from the CCP South China Bureau in 1942 and eventually settled in Taiwan,³¹ listed these functions for the SAD, similar to the CCP’s less succinct founding announcement:³²

•  formulate CCP security policies and plans

•  provide guidance to subordinate SAD elements

•  direct security measures and purges within the party

•  provide security-related guidance to the military, party, and other groups on public security (police) and intelligence

•  assign cadres to perform espionage, enemy penetration, and other subversion outside the party

•  devise codes and ciphers.³³

The SAD was initially organized with a director, a deputy director, a secretary general, and subordinate sections: First Section, organization; Second Section, intelligence; Third Section, examination and trial; Fourth Section, analysis; a general services section; and a cadet training corps. After the short tenure of SAD deputy director Kong Yuan, Mao and Kang Sheng appointed Li Kenong (see chapter 2) and Pan Hannian as deputy directors in charge of espionage in the KMT-controlled regions and Japanese occupied zones—their respective areas of expertise.³⁴

Two prominent party historians have written that the SAD and the Central Intelligence Department (中央情报部, Zhongyang qingbao bu, founded in 1941), became “one organization, two name plates” (一个 机构两块牌子, yige jigou liang kuai paizi). Kang Sheng (SAD director, 1939–46) and his successor Li Kenong (1946–49) headed both the SAD and the Intelligence Department while in office.³⁵ The Intelligence Department appeared focused on coordination with the Red Army, including intelligence tasks performed by the Eighth Route Army Liaison Offices. Besides coordination, this arrangement may have kept the military out of the SAD’s business while promoting Kang’s rise toward becoming CCP intelligence primus inter pares. The 1943 creation of the publicly known CCP Central Enemy Area Work Commission (中央敌区工作委员会, Zhongyang diqu gongzuo weiyuanhui) may have been driven by a similar motivation.³⁶ Coming at the same time as the 1943 Salvation campaign, it placed Kang Sheng firmly in charge of all intelligence activity, special operations, and counterespionage, the last including the antispy, antitraitor work that Kang carried to the point of madness in 1943.

Before 1943 Kang and his deputies focused in part on organization building and training. For example, in 1940 Zhao Cangbi used “Soviet materials and his own extensive experience” to deliver training in gathering and disseminating intelligence (怎样收集和专递情报, zeyang shouji he zhuandi qingbao), classroom and practical exercises in different settings of surveillance and countersurveillance (侦查与反侦查, zhencha yu fan zhencha), methods of securely carrying concealed information, battlefield intelligence collection, an understanding of enemy intelligence acquisition, and digging out enemy agents.³⁷

Pan Hannian also ran systematic instruction after he returned to Yan’an and was reassigned to the SAD in early 1939. Needing people to revamp demolished urban networks in cities under Japanese occupation, Pan worked with Chen Yun to quietly survey the CCP party center’s schools and other units to find students suitable for intelligence operations.³⁸ Recruits included university students, soldiers, peasants, and workers. For example, Pan recruited a young couple, who he believed were psychologically suited for long-term clandestine work, for insertion into Chongqing, the Nationalist wartime capital. They knew the Sichuan dialect and culture and could therefore more easily build an intelligence network of local people. They survived against the odds owing to their skills and adaptability.³⁹ While the writings available on Pan Hannian reveal no evidence of Russian influence on his work, accounts of Pan’s “system” (潘汉年系统, Pan Hannian xitong) are reminiscent of contemporary Russian NKVD and GRU training for illegal agents—persons tutored before insertion to blend into the target society, passing themselves off as ordinary citizens.⁴⁰

Zhou Enlai revealed in January 1942 that the party had more than five thousand agents in Sichuan, Guizhou, and Yunnan (probably including underground operatives). A prominent example was KMT Lieutenant General Yan Baohang, a military strategist for Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek in Chongqing but secretly in charge of an SAD network.⁴¹ There was at least one overseas agent, Ji Chaoding, who worked in the United States with the communist party there for a period in the early 1940s. After 1945 Ji became a CCP agent inside the KMT finance ministry in Nanjing.⁴² After the revolution, in reference to the CCP’s agents, Chiang Kai-shek wrote: “There was no space that they did not enter” (无空不入, wu kong bu ru). Mao claimed that “during the liberation war, intelligence work was the most successful” for good reason: by 1947 CCP intelligence networks in Nanjing and Shanghai were reporting on KMT military order of battle, weaponry, and base locations, their strategic battle plans, and the texts of meetings between the generalissimo and his top generals.⁴³

Besides intelligence training and operations, “traitor weeding” (铲除汉奸, chanchu hanjian) to find and eliminate “enemy agents and Trotskyites within the Party” remained a priority, not only because Stalin, Mao, and Kang thought it vital, but because Japanese and KMT intelligence targeted Yan’an.⁴⁴ Of special concern: the rapid expansion of the CCP’s membership rolls with “petty bourgeois elements” from the cities after the July 1937 outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War. As pointed out by Michael Dutton, the CCP had a “string of 90 percent problems”: 90 percent growth in membership from 1937–40; 90 percent of the 770,000 new communists were of petty bourgeois origin; and 90 percent of existing cadres lacked formal training in party schools and schooling in Marxist principles.⁴⁵ Accordingly, Mao, Chen Yun, Liu Shaoqi, and Kang pushed for a “Rectification” (政风, Zhengfeng) movement in late 1941, which officially began the following February.⁴⁶ Unlike the now-condemned 1943 Salvation campaign, Rectification is still considered a positive event by the modern CCP.⁴⁷

Despite of the turbulence of Rectification (1942–44) and Salvation (1943), SAD intelligence operations continued. However, development of crucial insertion agents (“inner line,” 内线, neixian) stalled as cadres hesitated to volunteer for duty that was doubly dangerous, both from enemy detection and, if they survived, from suspicion of being too close to the enemy.⁴⁸

In mid-1943 the Soviet GRU liaison in Yan’an reported that the Salvation campaign, now thoroughly out of control, would target senior Chinese communists including Zhou Enlai and Bo Gu. Stalin responded in December 1943 with a telegram through his assistant Georgi Dimitrov. It directly criticized Kang Sheng’s extreme measures during Salvation and urged Mao to cease persecuting CCP members (see the Dimitrov telegram in the web-based glossary).⁴⁹ Mao eased his campaign in 1944, and a popular backlash ensued. Mao was forced to apologize in at least four meetings late that year for the use of torture by the SAD, with Kang Sheng seated onstage in silence. Post-Mao official history has systematically shifted blame away from the chairman to Kang, even though the idea that Kang could have pursued his program without Mao’s approval is ridiculous.⁵⁰

After the 1945 Seventh Party Congress and the sudden surrender of Japan that August, Li Kenong and Pan Hannian worked to revive clandestine networks as the CCP prepared to take on the KMT enemy.⁵¹ Mao gradually eased Kang out of power, sending him to Shandong province; Li Kenong officially took over the SAD on October 1, 1946, after the failure of the Marshall mission.⁵² The SAD shifted focus to military intelligence, building networks from KMT officials who, as the regime became weaker from corruption and incompetence, became available.

In spite of its successes under Li Kenong during the closing years of the Chinese Communist Revolution, and perhaps because of its association with Kang Sheng, Mao Zedong decided to abolish the SAD in mid-1949. Counterespionage personnel became part of the new Ministry of Public Security, while people useful in building a foreign intelligence program were retained under Li Kenong but placed into interim bodies, mostly under the military. Although permanent reorganization was needed to serve the needs of a new nation-state, it would wait for five years while the new People’s Republic endured the declining health of Mao’s trusted intelligence chief Li Kenong, a renewal of spy mania at home, and the ordeal of the Korean War.

The People’s Republic, 1949–Present: Ministry of Public Security
(公安部, Gong’an bu, 1949–Present)

The MPS is China’s national police agency with subordinate public security bureaus (PSBs, 公安局, Gong’an ju) in each province, county, and municipality, under which lie local police stations (公安派出所, Gong’an paichusuo). The ministry focuses on police work, but its mission statement includes antiterrorist operations, administering China’s vast household registration and national identification system, guiding community security commissions, conducting border security and immigration work, issuing passports and visas, protecting sensitive venues and facilities, managing public events, and supervising “public information networks.”⁵³

MPS missions today are partly reminiscent of its early days in 1949, when the CCP and its new government faced millions of hostile people at home and powerful enemies abroad. To shift from revolutionary conquest to administering and pacifying the entire nation, Mao Zedong decided to split the Social Affairs Department (SAD) into two government ministries, one for public security and the other for intelligence. The latter was stalled (see the Multi-Agency Interim Period), but in June Mao convinced a reluctant Luo Ruiqing to become the first MPS minister. Luo chose his deputies from among former associates in the army and the PPB.⁵⁴ The party abolished the SAD that August and shifted personnel en masse from parts of the SAD and the army to the MPS.⁵⁵

The MPS focused on enemies, from Beijing down to local police stations.⁵⁶ Luo spoke on November 1 about thousands of ex-Chinese Nationalists and enemy “special agents” (特务分子, tewu fenzi) across the nation. At the end of 1950, the ministry claimed to have “broken” (破获, pohuo) 2,070 spy cases, including plots to assassinate Mao and the mayors of Shanghai and Guangzhou.⁵⁷ Fears of a Nationalist counterattack were exacerbated when their Taiwan-based air force bombed Shanghai.⁵⁸ In April 1951 the MPS arrested an American, Hugh Francis Redmond, accusing him of spying for the United States. In November 1952 two CIA officers (see the Downey-Fecteau case) were captured when their aircraft was downed over China.⁵⁹

There was also a serious systemic issue: unreliable and incompetent local police from the previous regime. The CCP reorganized them into public security bureaus subordinate to the ministry and injected more reliable communist recruits as replacements. However, the low number of police relative to the general population was not increased.⁶⁰

To supplement their efforts, PSBs employed “mass line policing” and “surveillance and control” (管制, guanzhi) in which civilian volunteers helped to watch millions suspected of disloyalty in their workplaces. This saved the ministry from imprisoning them in the growing but overstretched MPS gulag.⁶¹ To find these enemies, the CCP and the MPS pursued the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries (1950–51), leading to 700,000 executions. Fearing a popular backlash, after 1953 the ministry shifted toward professional efforts to find actual hostile intelligence operatives, who were harder to dig out than ordinary people with suspicious backgrounds. These more serious counterintelligence cases were managed under MPS bureau chief Ling Yun, through “surveillance and control” by civilian party committees. When suspicions of clandestine contacts with foreign countries or Taiwan arose against senior or other notable communists (for example, Gao Gang, Rao Shushi, Yang Fan, Pan Hannian, and Sidney Rittenberg), MPS investigations were closely supervised by the party and followed institutional guidelines. However, intervention by Mao was the wild card. For instance, Mao’s belief that Pan Hannian was untrustworthy and Luo’s eagerness to obey the chairman’s orders overrode the lack of evidence showing genuine treachery.⁶² Yet unlike the Soviet NKVD and KGB under Stalin, the MPS was not given free rein to terrorize the party rank and file.⁶³ Mao and the Politburo held the reins.

The MPS drove programs that successfully made China a hard target for hostile intelligence agencies: mass surveillance and control through neighborhood committees, political campaigns that continually harassed real and imagined opponents, and the hukou household registration policy (居民户 口政策, hukou zhengce), which recorded each citizen’s home area, forbade their migration without permission, and recorded mere visits to other areas. In recent times the PRC has considered abolishing the hukou system, but even in 2018 it remained an obstacle for people who wished simply to take a job away from home.⁶⁴ Another carryover to today is that MPS and PSB officers, still fewer in number compared to police in other nations, total less than half per capita compared to police in the United States, highlighting the continued reliance on surveillance of society by grassroots CCP organizations and, increasingly, technical means.⁶⁵ Technology lately plays a major supporting role with web-based monitoring, highly accurate facial recognition, and associated technologies as the “world’s biggest camera surveillance network” is deployed beyond levels found in other nations.⁶⁶ The advanced surveillance apparatus being tested in Xinjiang is perhaps a harbinger of a future heretofore imagined only by science fiction.⁶⁷

The MPS hosted a small group of Soviet advisors beginning in late 1949 but did not rely on them except for selected technical guidance.⁶⁸ Due to Chinese irritations over “inappropriate, and at times even laughable” proposals from Russians who were unfamiliar with Chinese realities, the MPS decided in September 1958 to send home its Russian advisors a year before the Sino-Soviet split emerged into the open.⁶⁹ Only two years later, MPS internal documents referred to Soviets in China using the derogatory term special agents (特务, tewu).⁷⁰

Until 1966 the MPS and other security organs worked to improve interagency coordination and common standards. Successful U.S. and Taiwan agent insertions declined as bureaucratic control over the majority Han society increased, blunting the efforts of foreign adversaries. A notable exception occurred in October 1961, when CIA-supported Tibetan guerrillas ambushed a Chinese army convoy and recovered twenty-nine issues of a secret military journal, which they passed to the CIA.⁷¹

Xie Fuzhi became the second and longest-serving MPS minister (1959–72) when Luo Ruiqing was promoted to be PLA chief of staff. According to Michael Schoenhals, Xie was relatively ineffective and at first did not (or could not) appreciably change past policies. Then came the Cultural Revolution. In 1966–67 Xie purged the ranks at headquarters, brought in PLA officers, and ordered local PSBs to support the “revolutionary actions of the left.” Among the newcomers was PLA general Li Zhen, who became Xie’s vice minister. By 1968 MPS headquarters was reduced to 126 people, one-tenth of its previous strength. However, some provincial, municipal, and county PSBs stayed under local CCP control in defiance of the party’s left wing, and Xie complained that some local bureaus supported “conservatives,” though he managed to use Red Guards to purge others of “enemies within.”⁷²

Xie died of stomach cancer in March 1972 and was succeeded by General Li Zhen,⁷³ who supervised security when Richard Nixon visited China in February 1972; led the massive and controversial hunt for “May 16th” conspirators that year (which might have motivated many to wish him dead); conducted security for and surveillance of the growing number of foreign missions in Beijing, including the U.S. Liaison Office (USLO); and arranged logistics and security for the highly secret Tenth Party Congress in August 1973.⁷⁴ The month before, James Lilley arrived in Beijing as the openly declared CIA representative in the USLO. Lilley was closely watched during his tour but managed to scout out dead drop sites and encounter helpful Chinese without being declared persona non grata.⁷⁵

In 1972, before Li Zhen’s untimely demise, Mao began to send PLA officers in civilian ministries back to the army in the wake of the Lin Biao affair and the mounting problems of military control. This opened the ministry to its former workforce banished during the Cultural Revolution, which Li Zhen and his radical left vice minister, Shi Yizhe, may have opposed. Li’s suspicious death in October 1973 left the minister’s office empty and Shi ostensibly in charge.

Hua Guofeng (see chapter 2) led the investigation into Li’s death, ruled it a suicide, and became MPS minister in 1975. The Central Committee only approved this verdict in March 1977, after Mao’s September 1976 death and the overthrow of the radical left Gang of Four.⁷⁶

Meanwhile, the MPS was challenged by a spike in criminal cases, making clear that military control of policing had failed. From fewer than 200,000 cases in 1969 (24 crimes per 100,000), the caseload rose to more than half a million in 1973 (60 per 100,000), the most dramatic increase since the 1959–61 great famine. The steady ascent in crime continued into the early reform era, with another high point in 1981. As early as 1970, Zhou Enlai complained about the lack of professionally trained MPS officers. In 1972 he sensed an opportunity when Mao was allegedly shocked by reports that torture was going on in MPS establishments. Zhou continued to bring back old MPS cadres and reinstated Deng Xiaoping, in part to take charge of dealing with crime on China’s railway network (vital before the current era of more efficient highways and air travel).⁷⁷ The Beijing and Heilongjiang PSBs scored a major success in January 1974 when China expelled five Soviet diplomats for espionage and arrested Li Hongshu (李洪枢), said to be a longtime Soviet GRU agent. In April, Zhou Enlai underlined the point by warning all PSBs to be vigilant against Taiwan and foreign special agents and rely on mass organizations to enhance security.⁷⁸ Hua Guofeng accelerated the return of purged cadres upon becoming minister in 1975, steering policy away from class struggle.⁷⁹

A month after Mao’s September 1976 death, the Cultural Revolution was finished. Cadre returns to the MPS continued, and the ministry established an office to begin investigations into the activities of radical leftists. More MPS operations were devoted to “strike hard” campaigns against crime and spying and the “comprehensive management” of social order. Since police numbers remained low, this required the revival of local mass line security organs. Arrests soared. As Dutton points out, though crime was no longer politicized (condemning vice, graft, and violence as counterrevolutionary), police and the party began to criminalize political dissent, treating it as much of a crime “under the law” as assault, robbery, murder, and espionage. The category of “counterrevolutionary criminal” disappeared from the criminal code in 1997.⁸⁰

In a signal case showing that the Cultural Revolution was permanently reversed within the MPS and nationwide, former Shanghai PSB director Yang Fan, arrested in the early 1950s as an enemy agent, was formally cleared in December 1983 after his release from prison five years earlier and praised for his counterintelligence work in post-1949 Shanghai⁸¹ (see Luo Ruiqing, chapter 2, and Pan Hannian, chapter 3). But the state was not going soft on espionage: earlier that year, CCP general secretary Hu Yaobang announced that the authorities arrested two hundred Chinese citizens for spying on behalf of the Soviet Union in 1982.⁸²

However, the national leadership criticized the MPS for a surge in spy cases as China opened its doors to foreign investment, and the ministry lost its counterespionage mission to the new Ministry of State Security in July 1983.⁸³ While the MSS gained the counterspy portfolio, the MPS continued managing foreigners on Chinese soil and maintaining a baseline of surveillance against them (see chapter 7). The MPS identifies some foreign businesses and other entities as “sensitive units” (敏感单位, min’gan dan-wei) if they meet certain criteria, from a foreign semiconductor factory⁸⁴ to one of its own municipal public security sub-bureaus.⁸⁵ Freed from catching spies, the MPS focused on more ordinary criminal cases, even though they continued to consider “intelligence work” such as recruiting clandestine sources as a vital part of the “hidden struggle.”⁸⁶

But crime includes a wider range of activity in China than elsewhere. The MPS First Bureau includes the large and secretive 610 Office, founded June 10, 1999. Originally tasked to suppress the Falun Gong, it now works against “heretical religions” not officially approved by the state, such as underground Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist groups.⁸⁷

In recent times, the MPS has stressed the use of technology to enhance its efforts nationwide, inaugurating the 110 emergency number in 1996–97,⁸⁸ pushing out a DNA database to bureaus in 2000,⁸⁹ and placing a case management system down to the lowest level police stations later that decade, enabling officers to view cases not only under MPS purview but also some under that of the MSS.⁹⁰ Measures such as the Counterterrorism Law (2015) and the National Intelligence Law (2017) and improved management practices in general have made MPS, MSS, and PLA operations more efficient and coordinated in operations and intelligence.⁹¹

Depictions of the MPS are common on television and in films. The 2016 movie Operation Mekong (湄公河行动), a dramatic depiction of an MPS operation in the Golden Triangle border area after the 2011 murder of thirteen Chinese citizens, is one of the better examples.⁹²

1949–55: The Multi-Agency Interim Period

In August 1949 the CCP abolished its Intelligence Department (founded in 1941) and Social Affairs Department (1939–49), which together had been “one organ, two nameplates” under the Central Committee.⁹³ In their place, the new leaders of the People’s Republic planned government ministries instead of party departments for public security and intelligence. Policing and domestic counterintelligence were soon assigned to the new Ministry of Public Security (1949–present), but an equivalent intelligence body was not formed.⁹⁴

In October through December 1949 former SAD director Li Kenong assumed the overt title of vice foreign minister and took two other jobs that were not publicized: director of the Central Military Commission Intelligence Department (CMC–ID, 军委情报部, Junwei Qingbao bu)⁹⁵ and secretary (书记, Shuji) of the CCP Central Committee Intelligence Commission (CC–IC, 中央情报委员会, Zhongyang Qingbao Weiyuanhui).⁹⁶

That division of foreign intelligence duties has not yet been explained by Chinese sources. However, the party’s leadership formed the beginning of an intelligence community over the first five years of the People’s Republic, criticizing problems, making changes, and establishing intelligence tasking. An early intelligence work conference in April 1950 prioritized Taiwan, the United States, the United Kingdom, North Korea, and Japan as targets for agents dispatched abroad, and the CCP continued to follow its doctrine from earlier decades of using “single line” direction of agent networks (see Danxian in the web-based glossary). Zhou Enlai stressed a transition from “simple military intelligence” to military and political intelligence, economic intelligence, and technology acquisition.⁹⁷

In the first half of 1950 Li Kenong supervised a team of writers to draft the history of CCP intelligence from May 1927 to October 1, 1949—“A preliminary summary of 22 years of Chinese Communist intelligence work” (中共二十二年情报工作的初步总结; Zhonggong er shi er nian qingbao gongzuo de chubu zongjie). Perhaps more of an ideological guide than a historical review, it was never released publicly but has been described by party historians who use it as a reference. The Li Kenong study focused on 1937 to 1949, when Mao consolidated control of the party, and celebrated the importance of Marxism–Leninism–Mao Zedong thought in guiding CCP agencies. The official story indicates that CCP intelligence eschewed such Soviet and U.S. practices as honey traps, coercion and blackmail, paying off informants, and assassinating opponents.⁹⁸ But such claims are contradicted in particular by the Red Squad assassinations of 1928–34 and modern cases such as those of Bernard Boursicot and Paul Doumitt and the allegations against Katrina Leung.⁹⁹

The Korean War intervened in June 1950, focusing attention on the U.S.-led counterattack that brought United Nations (UN)/U.S. forces near China’s frontier. As already noted, the CMC–ID was formed under Li Kenong in December 1950 to improve intelligence work. But the organization lasted only until January 1953. Coincidentally, this period coincides with the long combat stalemate (July 1951–July 1953) in Korea, when a series of costly Chinese and UN offensives failed to yield significant gains to either side. That bloody period might have prompted reassessments of military intelligence operations. The CMC Liaison Department (CMC–LD, 军委联络部, Junwei lianluo bu), also supervised by Li, probably assumed foreign intelligence duties at this point.¹⁰⁰

Li Kenong was assisted by Luo Qingchang, Zou Dapeng, Ma Ciqing, and Feng Xuan.¹⁰¹ He must have delegated significant authority to them because of his simultaneous duties as a senior negotiator in Korea in 1951–53.

In March 1953 Li’s long struggle with heart disease became a more serious issue. On March 5, Mao Zedong instructed him to seek treatment, and the next day the Chinese learned that Stalin had died in Moscow.¹⁰² The Soviet leader had insisted that the Korean War should continue, but with his death China and the UN resumed the talks in Panmunjom, reaching a truce in July.¹⁰³

These developments, taken together with other more mundane issues such as how to fund foreign intelligence housed in the CMC (1954), may have delayed the eventual consolidation of foreign intelligence operations.¹⁰⁴ However, by early 1955 intelligence stakeholders in the party and army were ready for a change.

1955–83: Central Investigation Department
(中央调查部, Zhongyang Diaocha Bu)

In 1955 Li Kenong, no longer busy with international negotiations, was considered the top choice to lead a consolidated PRC intelligence agency. Party central office director Yang Shangkun (杨尚昆) met on February 23 with Luo Qingchang and others, who proposed that “political intelligence” (政情, zhengqing) be placed in one department under the Central Committee, as it had been before 1949—a departure from the earlier idea of forming a government intelligence ministry under the State Council. Li Kenong agreed and held a meeting on March 4 with premier Zhou Enlai, Luo Qingchang, and Su Yu (粟裕), head of the PLA General Staff Department. They decided to separate some foreign intelligence functions from the Central Military Commission¹⁰⁵ and establish the CCP Investigation Department under the party’s Central Committee, with Li as director, which Mao Zedong approved on April 8. CID personnel, many of whom came from the PLA General Staff Liaison Department (总参联络 部, Zongcan Lianluo Bu), left the military in the transfer, effective July 1. Li Kenong’s first deputies were Zou Dapeng and Feng Xuan, and his senior confidential assistants were Luo Qingchang, Mao Cheng, and Ma Ciqing. Li reported to Yang Shangkun, and major issues were delegated to Deng Xiaoping and Zhou Enlai in the Politburo.¹⁰⁶

Perhaps because it was located inside the party, the existence of the CID remained a well-kept secret.¹⁰⁷ Those in the know referred obliquely to the “Organ in the Western Garden” (中直西苑机关, Zhongzhi Xiyuan jiguan), referring to its location in northwestern Beijing. Under secure circumstances, its name in plain language was Diaocha bu or Zhongdiao bu (调查 部,中调部).¹⁰⁸

This is Beijing’s official and vetted history of the events, but reality seems messier.¹⁰⁹ It unfolded amid a renewed spy mania that also gripped the CCP in earlier periods (for example, see Kang Sheng, chapter 2, and Shencha ganbu and Qiangjiu Yundong in the online glossary). From 1950 to 1953, tens of thousands of people were arrested as counterrevolutionaries and thousands of others as “spies” (特务, tewu), though not without concern over a genuine threat (see the Downey-Fecteau case, chapter 5). The party’s overreaction was underlined by moves that party historians now call serious errors and by intervening events. Two former PSB municipal directors, Yang Fan in Shanghai and Chen Bo in Guangzhou, were falsely charged in 1954 with being enemy agents. Then came two even more stunning developments: the arrest of a hero of the “hidden battlefront,” Pan Hannian, on April 3, 1955, accused (like Yang Fan) of treason, and the Kashmir Princess bombing case: the April 11 destruction over the open ocean of Air India passenger flight 300 on which premier Zhou Enlai was originally booked, headed for the Bandung conference. The Chinese investigation showed that the aircraft was blown up in midair by a KMT time bomb planted in Hong Kong.¹¹⁰

Pressure to find more counterrevolutionaries followed, though this was perhaps as much a symptom of the times, and of the reign of Mao Zedong, as a reaction to contemporary events. The center suggested that staff in institutions be examined to “thoroughly clean out hidden counterrevolutionary elements” (彻底肃清暗藏的反革命分子, Chedi suqing ancang de fan geming fenzi).¹¹¹ More than 18 million people were investigated in the sufan (cleansing) campaign that followed, though ultimately only 257,551 were purged.¹¹² In the PRC intelligence community, eight hundred to one thousand people were demoted, transferred, or arrested, primarily because they had been associated with Pan Hannian, who ran CCP espionage networks in the Japanese-occupied zones of China during 1937–45.¹¹³ It was perhaps symptomatic of Mao’s previous and subsequent tendency to brand masses of people as guilty by association.

Li Kenong’s biographer claims that he was a lone dissenter on Pan’s arrest, writing a two-part report issued in May and July 1955—just as the CID was being established—summarizing Pan’s career and clearing him of treason.¹¹⁴ In September 1955 Chairman Mao ignored this evidence but continued to place trust in Li as CID director and personally promoted him to the rank of general (上将, shangjiang).¹¹⁵

Party historians do not comment on how these alarming developments affected the founding of the CID between March and July. It is not surprising that the details remain hidden from view, but it is notable that Li managed to keep organization building on track during this tumultuous period.

Early CID priorities were its enemies in Taipei and Washington, and for good reason: the CIA continued its work to infiltrate the mainland from Taiwan and the Nationalist-held islands near the mainland.¹¹⁶ In 1955 the CID set up municipal and provincial bureaus in Shanghai and Guangdong, areas troubled by KMT remnants.¹¹⁷ Further study is needed to define how the CID cooperated with MPS counterintelligence work through these bureaus, whether the CID exposed hostile foreign operations, and the extent to which the department worked inside China.

In 1955–69, the number of foreign countries willing to establish diplomatic relations with China doubled, from twenty-six to fifty.¹¹⁸ This “second upsurge in the establishment of diplomatic relations” after the 1955 Bandung conference meant more opportunities for the CID in posts overseas and prompted an internal debate: could covert operations be supplemented with overt ones without tipping off adversaries to China’s intelligence requirements? On one side was Xiong Xianghui, director of the CID’s Second Bureau and a veteran CCP intelligence covert operative from the Chinese civil war. He hinted that covert operations were stalled and argued that positive conditions, particularly in Europe, should allow operatives to pursue overt contacts for intelligence. Ma Ciqing argued that such contacts could be beneficial but posed security problems, while covert work remained essential. Zhou Enlai, who was the final arbiter, agreed with Ma: covert operations would remain the priority.¹¹⁹ Zhou’s choice may have set the direction for the CID for the rest of its existence: to remain unacknowledged, and even unspoken, outside of those within the party with a need to know.

Relations with Soviet intelligence after 1949 began well, with Russian advisors based inside the CID. But for unclear reasons Moscow withdrew its KGB officers from the CID and the MPS in September 1958, a year before the Sino-Soviet split and the departure from China of the main body of Russian advisors.¹²⁰

The CID conducted internal seminars and meetings to promote standardization and discuss problems. The December 1955 Second Political Intelligence Work Conference (第二次政治情报工作会议, Di er ci zhengzhi qingbao gongzuo huiyi) included the MPS, the CID, and the CCP Inspection Commission. Zhou addressed the meeting, stressing securing socialist construction and the people’s democratic dictatorship at home, and peace on China’s periphery¹²¹—predictable themes but indicative of a defensive stance, in contrast to the promotion of revolution a generation before by the Comintern in Moscow. Nonetheless, Chinese efforts to assist national liberation movements, notably in Southeast Asia, became more active in the 1950s and 1960s.¹²² The CID role in them requires further research in hitherto closed archives.

As had been true during the revolution ending in 1949, the CCP gave some intelligence officers cover jobs as journalists. Those posted abroad were commonly backstopped as Xinhua (New China News Agency) correspondents, allowing them to travel, ask questions, and cultivate contacts for plausible reasons. Xinhua offices with intelligence officers under cover during at least some of their tenure were established in Prague (1948), London and Cairo (1956), Paris (1957), and Japan (1964). The office in Hong Kong took on activities beyond intelligence and grew into the PRC’s unofficial consulate in the British colony,¹²³ and Xinhua also established such a presence in the Portuguese enclave of Macau.¹²⁴

Other CID work meetings (调查部工作会议, Diaocha bu gongzuo huiyi) followed. One in February-March 1959 included CID officers stationed overseas. Another on October 20, 1961, was the All China Intelligence Work Conference (全国情报工作会议, Quanguo qingbao gongzuo huiyi), which may have been a key interagency coordination session. Participants included the CID, the MPS, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, PLA intelligence (军情, junqing) the PLA General Political Department, the State Council Foreign Affairs Office, and the PRC Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission. Apparently, the CID had an expanding array of stakeholders and perhaps some rivals: the meeting also discussed “how to rectify intelligence work and the division of labor among the various systems” (如何整顿情报工作和各系统的分工, ruhe zhengdun qingbao gongzuohe ge xitong de fengong).¹²⁵

In October 1957 Li Kenong fainted, fell, and suffered a stroke, making Kong Yuan the acting director. Li made a brief recovery in 1961 but passed away in February 1962. Kong formally assumed leadership that November.¹²⁶

Yang Shangkun’s diary includes only scant detail of his supervision of intelligence operations but contains occasional tidbits. For example, from October 11 to December 10, 1962, he met with Kong Yuan and other senior CID officers on nine occasions, a comparatively high frequency probably associated with Kong’s assumption of formal leadership and early U.S. efforts to infiltrate Tibet. Kong’s promotion may have been celebrated at a dinner in the Diaoyutai state guesthouse on November 16, when, in Yang’s words, “CID invited a [Chinese] diplomat stationed overseas, and we almost got drunk!” (中调部请驻外使节，几乎喝醉了! Zhongdiao bu qing zhu wai shijie, jihu he zui le).¹²⁷

Besides being a CID deputy director, Luo Qingchang was deputy of the office of the Central Committee Taiwan Leading Small Group, and he worked in Zhou Enlai’s executive office with the lead on intelligence matters.¹²⁸ Luo’s obituary lauds his role in discovering a Nationalist Chinese plot to kill PRC president Liu Shaoqi during the state visit to Cambodia in April 1963 and for work to convince former KMT general Li Zongren to defect to the mainland from Switzerland in 1964.¹²⁹ These accounts of Luo’s life omit that he was also closely tied to Wang Dongxing, head of Mao’s bodyguards, and to radical polemicist, vicious operator, and intelligence veteran Kang Sheng, under whom Luo directly worked in Yan’an during the Anti-Japanese War. Both of these men became prominent Cultural Revolution beneficiaries who protected and utilized Luo Qingchang in the storm to follow. Inside the CID, officers came to call them the “trinity” (三位一体, san wei yi ti).

When the Cultural Revolution entered its chaotic period in August 1966, Mao removed political control of the CID from the embattled Deng Xiaoping, turning it over to Kang.¹³⁰ For the next seven months Kong Yuan and his deputy Tong Xiaopeng tried to insulate the CID from the frantic politics of the time and keep operations on track, but Red Guard factions soon formed within the department, just as they did in other organizations, apparently leading to leaks (see Classified Materials Theft, 1966–67, chapter 5).¹³¹ Unlike Chinese efforts to construct nuclear weapons and missiles, intelligence operations were not kept isolated from the ravages of Mao’s last revolution.

Luo Qingchang took over the CID in December 1966, deposing Kong Yuan.¹³² A month later, the radical Central Case Examination Group, headed by Jiang Qing, opened an investigation against Kong, who had undergone months of struggle with the CID’s Red Guard Rebel faction (造反派, zaofan pai). Kong and his deputies were forced into labor camps or worse, except for one—Luo Qingchang—who continued on post even during the military takeover of the department in April 1967, and later when the CID was absorbed by the PLA Second Department (Intelligence) on June 13, 1969.¹³³

Xiong Xianghui possibly headed 2PLA, and Luo may have become a deputy. As hostility between China and the Soviet Union reached its peak, Mao explored ending isolation from the West, leading to rapprochement with the United States. CID officers began returning to their overseas posts concurrent with the PRC’s admission to the UN in 1971. In March 1973, when the CID was formally reestablished as a Central Committee Department, Luo was back in charge.¹³⁴ Perhaps not coincidentally, this occurred at the same time as Mao agreed to Zhou Enlai’s proposal to restore Deng Xiaoping to political office (March 9), and discussions ensued (February–June) between Zhou Enlai and Henry Kissinger on opening diplomatic missions in Beijing and Washington, giving CCP intelligence organs new opportunities for overseas operations.¹³⁵

Zhou Enlai passed away on January 8, 1976. While terminally ill in hospital on December 20, 1975, Zhou summoned Luo Qingchang, whose rank was too low for a routine meeting, to his bedside. Zhou asked for news of old friends in Taiwan and requested that the CID transmit his wish that they “not forget to work in the people’s interests.” The Chinese accounts of this dramatic scene do not indicate whether it went beyond the symbolic.¹³⁶

After the September 1976 death of Mao, his successor Hua Guofeng revived the national open-source “intelligence/information” (qingbao) system and pursued other measures to evaluate and import foreign technology (see Hua’s entry, chapter 2).¹³⁷ Unfortunately for the new leader, he was blamed for an overambitious ten-year plan, unveiled in February–March 1978, that other senior leaders including Deng Xiaoping had agreed to pursue. Deng Xiaoping used its Maoist style to discredit Hua and began his own ascent toward the leadership in December.¹³⁸

Six months afterward, on July 7, 1979, Deng Xiaoping, now ranked as a vice premier but with significantly greater influence, made a speech at a work conference convened by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Deng suggested that the CID cease using diplomatic cover for its officers overseas—a suggestion Deng said had originated with Zhou Enlai in 1964. However, Luo Qingchang avoided formally promulgating Deng’s speech. Instead, he worked against it by expanding six regional units and sending additional officers to overseas diplomatic posts. During internal briefings, Luo urged cadres to ignore Deng’s policy direction, saying that it represented a return to “class struggle” and “anti-intelligenceism,” seemingly rhetorical charges. Although Luo presented the appearance of compliance beginning in August 1979, he avoided implementing change and retired in 1983, when Deng engineered a reorganization that forced him out of office.¹³⁹ The fact that it took Deng so long to get rid of Luo, a notorious Cultural Revolution beneficiary, and that Luo remains a respected figure even today speaks to his lingering influence, and perhaps that of the radical left.

Though Luo was an irritant to Deng, serious disappointments in the U.S.-China relationship may have more strongly influenced the intelligence reorganization of 1983. PRC leaders hoped for a period of consolidation and stability following the January 1979 diplomatic normalization with the United States, but problems followed that must have generated security concerns: the military debacle with Vietnam in February 1979, the enactment of the U.S.-Taiwan Relations Act in April that contained unexpected provisions for the island’s defense if attacked by China, and U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s defeat in November 1980 by Ronald Reagan, an avowed friend of the KMT government on Taiwan.¹⁴⁰

Counterintelligence concerns likely mounted. Chinese citizens with previously dormant consumer ambitions were becoming more vulnerable to cash incentives, at the same time as more foreigners began wandering the cities without official escort and foreign consulates multiplied on Chinese soil.¹⁴¹ Counterintelligence was under the purview of the MPS, but it was left to premier Zhao Ziyang, a liberal reformer in the CCP context, to express concerns about rising crime, “intolerable political and ideological apathy” by security personnel, and the need to “suppress counterrevolutionary activities.” This led to a crackdown on crime in the summer of 1983 and to campaigns against “bourgeois liberalization” and “spiritual pollution” later that year. Deng Xiaoping may have promised in 1978 to renounce class struggle, but struggle against enemies remained a part of the CCP playbook.¹⁴²

Continued spying competition came to characterize the U.S.-China relationship, in spite of other cooperation that developed. An internal party debate developed in early 1981 about the risks of Westernization and the dangers of relying on a foreign power, themes that echo even today under Xi Jinping with his antispy campaign (2014–present) and the Made in China 2025 initiative.¹⁴³

If Deng and Zhao perceived that the MPS was not up to catching spies as China opened to the outside world, this would help explain the creation of a new agency able to consolidate espionage abroad and counterespionage at home, the MSS, proposed by Zhao himself and approved by the National People’s Congress in July 1983.

1955–2015: Second Department of the PLA General Staff Department
(2PLA, 总参二局, Zongcan Er Ju)

2015–Present: Intelligence Bureau of the PLA Joint Staff Department (联合参谋情报局, Lianhe Canmou Qingbaoju)

For sixty years, 2PLA—also known as the Military Intelligence Department of the General Staff Department (GSD)—was the Chinese military’s primary intelligence organization. Both 2PLA and its companion, the GSD Third Department for technical reconnaissance, were successor organizations of the Central Revolutionary Military Commission’s Second Bureau and the Eighth Route Army’s intelligence organs.

2PLA reported to a GSD deputy commander who oversaw the portfolio that included intelligence and foreign affairs. This officer was the PLA’s chief diplomat, participating in a broad range of military-to-military exchanges, as well as its senior intelligence officer. In the latter role, the deputy chief was one of at least two PLA representatives typically present on externally oriented CCP leading small groups: Hong Kong and Macau Affairs, Taiwan Affairs, and Foreign Affairs. This officer also served as president of the China Institute for International Strategic Studies (CIISS, 中国 国际战略学会, Zhongguo guoji zhanlue xuehui) beginning in 1979 with its founder, Lieutenant General Wu Xiuquan.

According to various sources, 2PLA was composed of six or seven bureaus divided into three systems. The first managed 2PLA’s clandestine human intelligence operations. Most sources agree that the headquarters component was the First Bureau with five subordinate liaison bureaus in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenyang, and Tianjin. This system may also include offices in several other cities, based on descriptions released in Taiwanese prosecutions of espionage cases. No information, however, is available on whether such offices reported to the local liaison bureau or directly to 2PLA headquarters.

The second system managed scientific research and ran the technical side of 2PLA operations, including unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), technical sensors, and satellites. This system probably is the most readily identifiable part of 2PLA, because each major component, including its Second Bureau, had military unit cover designators that are occasionally referenced in public. These included the Aerospace Reconnaissance Bureau (航天侦察部), Beijing Remote Sensing Institute, and tactical UAVs. Most importantly, this bureau guides the operations of tactical reconnaissance and intelligence elements within the military regions.¹⁴⁴

The third system managed defense attachés overseas and overt human intelligence collection and conducted analysis of foreign affairs.¹⁴⁵ This system probably included the Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth bureaus.¹⁴⁶ One of them probably served as the desk for defense attaché offices in overseas diplomatic posts (colloquially known as the 武官处, wuguanchu), and the other three had responsibilities divided into three geographic areas of analytic coverage: Russia, former Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe; United States and Western Europe; and Asia.¹⁴⁷

In addition to its internal bureaus, 2PLA also oversaw two very different think tanks: CIISS and the China Foundation for International Strategic Studies (CFISS, 中国国际战略研究基金会, Zhongguo guoji zhanlue yanjiu jijinhui). According to its official description, CIISS serves the Chinese government and military beyond 2PLA. The think tank offers “consultancy and policy advice to and undertake research projects for relevant departments of the Chinese Government, the military and other institutions and enterprises and play the role as their think tank in the interests of national security, economic development, international security, and world peace and development.”¹⁴⁸ The staff of CIISS includes a mix of serving 2PLA officers drawn primarily from the defense attaché and analytic ranks, retired senior intelligence officers, and permanent research staff.¹⁴⁹ If CIISS is primarily a research institute, then CFISS is an exchange-related think tank that may have a more operational role for 2PLA. Former 2PLA officer Zhai Zhihai founded CFISS in 1989 before handing it over to Chen Zhiya (son of Chen Geng; see chapter 2) in the early 1990s. GSD deputy chief Xiong Guangkai directed CFISS’s most notable research into crisis management and decisionmaking to build the intellectual foundations for a revamped policy process modeled on the U.S. National Security Council. The project ultimately led nowhere, but CFISS continued working with foreign interlocutors into the late 2000s to explore related issues.¹⁵⁰

On November 26, 2015, Chinese president and CMC chairman Xi Jinping announced a major overhaul of the PLA. The reforms particularly relevant to 2PLA overhauled the first-level departments (such as the GSD) reporting to the CMC and created the Strategic Support Force (SSF, 战略支援部队, Zhanlue zhiyuan budui). The first reform renamed the GSD the Joint Staff Department (JSD). The principal shift was that the GSD would no longer serve as both the PLA’s general staff and the ground forces’ headquarters component. The latter was carved into a separate entity, and 2PLA itself was downgraded from a department to a bureau to become the JSD Intelligence Bureau. The second reform had more far-reaching effects, for it moved technical and tactical reconnaissance into the SSF along with the GSD’s Third Department.¹⁵¹ Although new data is not yet available on the JSD Intelligence Bureau, the basic features of 2PLA remain intact. There is still a JSD deputy chief who oversees intelligence and foreign affairs. CIISS was not touched, and no Chinese news reporting suggests the Intelligence Bureau has given up its role in managing defense attachés and analysis. To the contrary, Chinese interlocutors believe the bureau will continue to play an important role in informing China’s leadership.¹⁵²

1983–Present: Ministry of State Security
(国家安全部, Guojia anquan bu)

At the first session of the sixth National People’s Congress (NPC) on June 20, 1983, delegates approved premier Zhao Ziyang’s proposal for the establishment of a state security ministry “to protect the security of the state and strengthen China’s counterespionage work.” The next day, the NPC voted to appoint Ling Yun as the first minister.¹⁵³ The MSS held its inaugural meeting on July 1 to announce the formal establishment of the ministry. Central Political-Legal Commission chairman Chen Pixian delivered the opening speech to outline the goals of the new ministry: “Doing state security work well will effectively promote socialist modernization and the cause of realizing the unification of the motherland, opposing hegemonism, and defending world peace.”¹⁵⁴ Cloaked in Chen’s euphemistic language was the first public hint that the MSS would conduct foreign intelligence operations and covert action to influence events abroad in addition to taking over domestic counterespionage.

The creation of the MSS marked a clear departure from past CCP practices by placing intelligence and counterespionage completely outside the party and under the State Council (that is, the PRC government). In an earlier interview as a vice minister of public security, Ling Yun told Xinhua that “we are firmly against resolving ideological questions and the problem of dissidence by judicial or administrative means.” According to Ling, doing so was the kind of exploitation of intelligence and counterespionage only done by Kang Sheng and the leftist “Gang of Four.”¹⁵⁵ The chief intelligence organization may have shed its role as the ideological enforcer, but pure party loyalty remained vital.¹⁵⁶

Chen Pixian’s speech set forth five requirements for MSS personnel related to party loyalty: purging the influence of Kang Sheng, Xie Fuzhi, and the extreme left; adhering to Deng Xiaoping’s exhortation of “emancipating one’s mind, summing up experience, [and] actively conducting reforms”; “never neglecting either [party work or professional work]”; “maintaining a unanimous political position” behind CCP leadership; and adhering to party discipline.¹⁵⁷

The MSS generally appears to have adhered to the depoliticization of the service. This is not to say that the corruption has not impacted the organization. MSS elements, particularly at local levels, often have provided protection services for the business dealings of CCP officials or their well-connected friends.¹⁵⁸ However, the ministry rarely appears connected to any elite political maneuvering or purges. Since 1983 only the purges of Beijing party secretary Chen Xitong (1995) and Shanghai party secretary Chen Liangyu (2006) were rumored to involve the ministry.¹⁵⁹ In the wholesale purges after the fall of Bo Xilai and Zhou Yongkang, the Beijing State Security Bureau chief Fang Ke and Vice Minister Qiu Jin were ousted precisely because they exploited MSS resources to back particular leaders in their political struggles against each other.¹⁶⁰

Creating the MSS in 1983 was the easy part. The first two ministers, Ling Yun and Jia Chunwang, faced the challenge of turning a small ministry with only a handful of outlying provincial departments into a nationwide security apparatus. The expansion occurred in four waves. The original departments (or those created within the first year) appeared to be the municipal bureaus or provincial departments of state security for Beijing, Fujian, Guangdong, Guangxi, Heilongjiang, Jiangsu, Liaoning, and Shanghai. A second wave appeared shortly thereafter between 1985 and 1988, including Chongqing, Gansu, Hainan, Henan, Shaanxi, Tianjin, and Zhejiang. The third wave from 1990 to 1995 completed the expansion of the ministry across the country at provincial levels, bringing in Anhui, Hunan, Qinghai, and Sichuan provinces.¹⁶¹ The fourth wave of MSS expansion was vertical. The provincial-level departments either took over local public security bureaus or established subordinate municipal or county bureaus. For many local PSB officers, they were police one day and state security the next. When MSS minister Jia left in 1998 for the MPS, the MSS was a nationwide organization at every level.

From the national level to the local levels, the MSS and its subordinate departments and bureaus report to a system of leading small groups, coordinating offices, and commissions to guide security work while lessening the risk of politicization on behalf of CCP leaders. At present, the two most important of these are the Political-Legal Commission (政法委员会, Zhengfa weiyuanhui) and the Central State Security Commission (CSSC, 中央国家安全委员会, Zhongyang guojia anquan weiyuanhui). The Political-Legal Commission is chaired by a Politburo member, currently former public security minister Guo Shengkun, at the central level and a deputy party secretary at lower levels. The commissions oversee all state security, public security, prisons, and procuratorate (judicial) elements for their level. Xi Jinping announced the creation of the CSSC in the Third Plenary Session of the Eighteenth Party Congress in November 2013. The CSSC held its first meeting on April 15, 2014. The purpose of this new commission was twofold. First, it was intended to balance internal political power created by the expansion of the security services and their capabilities in the 2000s. Second, the commission orients the MSS and other security forces toward planning for and preempting threats to the party-state.¹⁶² At lower levels, provinces, counties, and municipalities have state security leading small groups (国家安全领导小组, guojia anquan lingdao xiaozu). The political-legal commissions and state security leading small groups overlap in personnel but not perfectly. And they combine with defense mobilization committees and 610 offices to create a kind of system of systems that oversees local security and intelligence work.

MSS headquarters is organized into numbered bureaus and spread across at least four compounds in Beijing. At present, the MSS is believed to possess at least eighteen bureaus. Unlike the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), where military unit cover designators offer a way to track units, MSS elements are not so readily identified. The following designations are ones in which we possess a modicum of confidence:¹⁶³

•  First Bureau: “secret line” operations by MSS officers not under covers associated with Chinese government organizations

•  Second Bureau: “open line” operations by MSS officers using diplomatic, journalistic, or other government-related covers

•  Third Bureau: unknown

•  Fourth Bureau: 台港澳局, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau Bureau

•  Fifth Bureau: 情报分析通报局, Report Analysis and Dissemination Bureau

•  Sixth Bureau: unknown

•  Seventh Bureau: 反间谍情报局, Counterespionage Intelligence Bureau, gathers information and develops intelligence on hostile intelligence services inside and outside China

•  Eighth Bureau: 反间谍侦察局, Counterespionage Investigation, runs investigations to detect and apprehend foreign spies in China

•  Ninth Bureau: 对内保防侦察局, Internal Protection and Reconnaissance Bureau, supervises and monitors foreign entities and reactionary organizations in China to prevent espionage

•  Tenth Bureau: 对外保防侦察局, Foreign Security and Reconnaissance Bureau, manages Chinese student organizations and other entities overseas and investigates the activities of reactionary organizations abroad

•  Eleventh Bureau: 中国现代国际关系研究所, China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, performs open-source research, translation, and analysis. Its analysts also meet regularly with foreign delegations and spend time abroad as visiting fellows.

•  Twelfth Bureau: 社会调查局, Social Affairs or Social Investigation Bureau, handles MSS contributions to the CCP’s united front work system

•  Thirteenth Bureau: Network Security and Exploitation (also known as the China Information Technology Evaluation Center [中国信 息安全测评中心, Zhongguo xinxi anquan ceping zhongxin]), may manage the research and development of other investigative equipment

•  Fourteenth Bureau: 技术侦察局, Technical Reconnaissance Bureau, conducts mail inspection and telecommunications inspection and control

•  Fifteenth Bureau: Taiwan operations linked to the broader Taiwan Affairs work system. Its public face is the Institute of Taiwan Studies at the China Academy of Social Sciences.

•  Sixteenth Bureau: unknown

•  Seventeenth Bureau: unknown

•  Eighteenth Bureau: U.S. Operations Bureau for conducting and managing clandestine intelligence operations against the United States.