Notable Spies of the Chinese Revolution and the Early PRC
In publications approved by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the people who did the dangerous work of spying on the party’s enemies during the Chinese revolution are called its “countless nameless heroes” 无数无名英雄, wu shu wu ming yingxiong). This is partly because so many died anonymous deaths and because of the difficulty of documenting their clandestine activities when records were often purposely not maintained. In party-approved literature, only a select few are described. This may indicate that there are more than a few black sheep and shameful traitors yet to be revealed. Nonetheless, these tales do not contradict accounts from KMT and Taiwan sources.
Many CCP intelligence officers and other operatives were persecuted after 1949 for doing their jobs in the revolution too well—that is, cultivating close contact with enemy agents and officials in order to obtain quality intelligence information. On the U.S. side during the same period, Americans such as David Barrett, commanding officer of the 1944 Dixie mission U.S. Army Observer Group, Yan’an, also suffered after the communist victory, one of those blamed during the 1950s Red Scare for “losing China.”1 The political fight in the United States over blame for the rise of communism was a disastrous ordeal for the victims. However, their situation was less harsh compared to the executions, imprisonments, and other hardships borne by the far greater number of communist undercover officers and agents such as Pan Hannian and Dong Jianwu, particularly during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76).
The blame for the CCP’s witch hunts against its own intelligence officers and the greater population rests with Mao Zedong more than any other person. His almost continual “white scare” lasted decades and helps illustrate the deep and seemingly endless suspicions of one of the most paranoid leaders in world history.
What follows are our modest first steps to examine the lives of the foot soldiers of China’s “secret war”; we hope that other scholars will be inspired to further explore this understudied area.
Adler, Solomon (艾德勒)
See Coe, Virginius Frank.
Cai Xiaogan (蔡孝亁, 1908–82)
A native of a rural area near Taichung, Taiwan, Cai Xiaogan matriculated at Shanghai University at the age of sixteen in 1924, where he became acquainted with CCP founders including Qu Qiubai and Ren Bishi. Already fluent in Japanese from his early education in Taiwan (then a Japanese colony), Cai’s language skills, knowledge of Taiwan, and academic prowess doubtless made him an attractive candidate for CCP recruitment. By 1926 he was back in Taiwan, an underground CCP operative organizing left-wing activities to educate fellow youth. In 1928 he helped organize the Communist Party of Taiwan.
The rapidly escalating Japanese threat on the Chinese mainland may have contributed to the CCP decision in 1934 to call Cai Xiaogan to the Red Army base in Ruijin, Jiangxi, where he was trained in army political work. The Long March began that October, and Cai survived the yearlong journey to China’s northwest—the only Taiwanese to do so. When the Anti-Japanese War began in 1937, Cai was employed to interrogate Japanese prisoners. As the war went on, Cai stayed in Yan’an; there is no information about how he fared during the infamous Rectification and Salvation campaigns of 1942–44, but in 1945 he attended the Seventh CCP Congress.
Cai’s star rose in the wake of Japan’s surrender. In August the CCP formed the Taiwan Provincial Work Committee (台湾省工作委员会, Taiwan sheng gongzuo weiyuanhui). In March 1946 the East China Bureau formally established the Taiwan committee as an operational entity to develop espionage and sabotage networks on the island in preparation for an eventual invasion. In July Cai and his team of six-plus people secretly deployed to Taiwan. They begin forming clandestine cells in Taipei, Keelung, Kaohsiung, and a number of rural and mountain districts.2
In early 1947 Cai’s network had about seventy operatives. History intervened on February 28 when the KMT arrested a woman merchant in Taipei, sparking a revolt fueled by local resentment against Taiwan’s new masters. In response, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek sent reinforcements that landed in Keelung and Taipei on March 9, beginning a brutal mopping up campaign that killed between 18,000 and 28,000 local people.3 This led to a recruiting bonanza for the CCP underground in Taiwan: two years later, Cai’s Taiwan Provincial Work Committee network had grown to 1,300 operatives.4
However, Cai’s good fortune was soon reversed. On August 14 the KMT Secrets Preservation Bureau arrested his cell in Keelung City. Over the next seven months they nabbed at least eighty others, including Cai himself.5 In March 1950 Cai defected and assisted in mopping up the remainder of his own comrades.6 CCP intelligence operations on Taiwan may not have fully recovered until increased economic integration with the mainland in the 1980s allowed more cross-straits exchanges and therefore opportunities to recruit Taiwanese people visiting, or living on, the mainland.
Coe, Virginius Frank (柯弗兰, 1907–80), and Adler, Solomon (艾德勒, 1909–94)
Frank Coe and Solomon Adler were former U.S. Treasury Department officials who lived in China beginning in 1958 and 1962, respectively, and who contributed to the English translation of Mao’s writings. However, their role as KGB assets in the United States during World War II, presumably trained in clandestine methods, poses unanswered questions about their activities for the CCP, before and after arrival in Beijing.
While working at Treasury during World War II, Coe and Adler were members of the Nathan Silvermaster group, a Soviet spy ring of at least eleven persons. At first controlled by Earl Browder of the U.S. Communist Party, they were placed under the direct control of the KGB in 1944 due to the increasingly critical nature of their reporting.7
Coe and Adler were hired into the Treasury Department by Harry Dexter White, a senior official there who cooperated with the Silvermaster group or was at least a “trusted individual” of Moscow.8 Ji Chaoding met Adler in the 1930s when he worked at the Library of Congress and also knew Coe, who became the department’s director of monetary research. In 1941 Adler was assigned to the U.S. Embassy, Chongqing, as Treasury attaché, where he supposedly continued to report to KGB via unknown means. Harry Dexter White helped place Ji into the Chinese Nationalist Ministry of Finance there, where he was an agent of influence controlled by Zhou Enlai. After Coe and Adler came under FBI scrutiny during the Joseph McCarthy era, Ji invited at least one of them, Adler, to China.9
After Coe moved to China in 1958 and Adler in 1962, they assisted with the translation of volume four of Mao’s works, more of a prestige job than one suited to their backgrounds. Coe may have been based in the CCP International Liaison Department and was responsible for reading and summarizing reports in the Western press and writing propaganda.10 Adler’s main assignment was in the Institute for the World Economy in the Chinese Academy of Sciences and as an advisor to the Ministry of Foreign Trade. Indicating strong trust by the CCP, by 1964 Coe and Adler were at “the top of the pagoda” in Beijing, tasked with passing along party policy to other foreigners in the Chinese capital. In August 1970 during one of the Cultural Revolution’s dreariest periods, they greeted Edgar Snow when he visited Beijing, though they may have suffered in its more manic period in 1966–68; Zhou Enlai personally apologized to Coe and Adler at a 1973 dinner for “the injustices they suffered over the years.”11 After writing a laudatory article in 1976 calling Mao the greatest Marxist of the modern era, Coe passed away three years later in Beijing. Adler survived until 1994, unhappy with the direction China took under Deng Xiaoping’s reforms.12
Their unique lives as assets serving first Moscow and then Beijing remain an unexplored topic with potential to further illuminate CCP influence operations and intelligence history.
Recruited into the Social Affairs Department because of her hometown connections in Hong Kong, Dong Hui later married Pan Hannian and suffered with him after his 1955 purge.
At the beginning of the Anti-Japanese War in 1937, Dong Hui was a college student in Beiping (now Beijing). Forced by the war to leave the city, she decided to relocate to Xi’an. After arriving, she enrolled in the Northwest United University (西北联合大学, Xibei Lianhe Daxue).
However, the rapidly unfolding events of 1937 moved the nineteenyear-old Dong to leave ordinary studies behind. She approached the CCP’s de facto embassy and intelligence station in Xi’an, the Eighth Route Army Liaison Office. There she was given an entry test for schools in the CCP’s Yan’an base area and probably assessed for suitability to adapt to the communist cause. Dong was admitted to the Yan’an Revolutionary School (革命学校, Geming Xuexiao) and began classes in November.
Like hundreds of other newly arrived youth at the time, Dong was quickly admitted (January 1938) to the CCP during its membership expansion that began at the start of the anti-Japanese struggle. In July 1938 she entered the Marxist-Leninist Institute (马列学院, Malie Xueyuan), where she became the classmate and roommate of Jiang Qing, the future spouse of Mao Zedong.13
When Dong graduated in mid-1939, the CCP assessed her background and noted connections to Hong Kong elite society—partly via her father, the general manager of the Dao Heng Bank. Dong was recruited into the SAD, posted to Hong Kong, and placed under the supervision of Pan Hannian.
While in Yan’an, Dong Hui criticized Jiang when the former Shanghai actress began to pursue Mao, so she suffered not only when Pan was arrested in 1955, but also during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) when Jiang Qing exacted revenge against perceived enemies.
Dong Jianwu (董健吾, 1891–1970)
Dong Jianwu was made famous in Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China as “Pastor Wang.” Known by this and other aliases, Dong began service with CCP intelligence in 1928, already equipped with the natural cover of an Episcopal minister. He was one of the few active communist agents who survived the high tide of arrests and executions in the cities from 1931 to 1936 and became an important liaison between the CCP and KMT during the Anti-Japanese War. Among other missions, in January 1936 he carried a message from Song Qingling to Mao and Zhou indicating the Nationalists were ready to negotiate an anti-Japanese united front, and he guided Snow to a rendezvous in Xi’an with Deng Fa, who took the American leftist journalist to his historic meetings with CCP leaders.
After the communist victory in 1949, questions arose about Dong’s relations with the KMT that have not been adequately addressed by CCP historians. Though he remained free, Dong came under suspicion of collaboration with the Nationalists and was unable to find gainful employment. Persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, Dong died in 1970 and was posthumously rehabilitated in 1978–79.14
Gong Changrong (龚昌荣, 1903–35)
It would not be surprising if a movie or television drama is made about Gong Changrong. Gong was born in rural Guangdong with the surname Li, but his poor peasant father sold him to an overseas Chinese named Gong, whose gave him that new surname. The movement of May 4, 1919, radicalized the teenager, and during the Canton–Hong Kong strike (June 1925–October 1926), Gong joined the CCP-organized pickets (纠察队, jiucha dui) in Guangzhou, their group trained and equipped for street fighting. In 1926 they were reorganized into a Red Guard (赤卫队, chiwei dui), and Gong became a member of their “dare to die” (敢死队, gan si dui) company. During the Guangzhou uprising of December 1927, Gong was assigned to guerrillas under Ye Jianying who briefly controlled the city. After that disastrous action, Deng Fa praised Gong for his bravery under fire and tally of enemy dead.15
In July 1930 Gong was transferred briefly to Hong Kong to take charge of the “Dog Beating Squad” under the municipal CCP committee. Within three months he had killed a number of turncoats and special operatives of the pro-KMT Guangdong warlord Chen Jitang whom the British allowed into the city to track down communists. Notably, Gong was also reportedly responsible for killing Hong Kong police sergeant Tse On (谢安, Xie An), a member of the Police Anti-Communist Squad, while Tse was attempting to gather intelligence at a meeting in the Nga Lok restaurant in Yaumatei.16
To maintain close relations with China’s small working class, the CCP leadership had chosen to stay in Shanghai, the country’s largest city. However, they lived a precarious underground existence, with increasing pressure from Nationalist authorities. The party decided that Gong could be usefully employed in Shanghai to perform protection work. He was instrumental in arranging movement and protection of the party leadership in the aftermath of the Gu Shunzhang defection of April 1931. In subsequent years the CCP gradually withdrew from the city, but the secret war continued. Gong led a number of assassinations of Nationalist security officials, including the killing of Huang Yonghua (黄永华) in July 1933, whom Gong personally shot while racing by on a bicycle.17
Though Gong’s heroics were a bright spot for the communist movement, the KMT was closing in on urban communists. His last big assignment came in November 1934: to execute Xi Guohua (翕国华), a defector from the Shanghai CCP bureau. Gong’s team of four operatives only wounded Xi on their first try, but they finished him off as he lay recovering in the Renji hospital of Jiaotong University.18
The capture of one of his close comrades led the Nationalists to the home of Gong and his spouse, who along with three other communists were arrested, offered the opportunity to defect, and tortured when they refused. After spending almost five months in what was probably a brutal confinement, Gong and his three comrades were executed in Nanjing by strangulation.19 Their capture and deaths marked the effective end of CCP intelligence operations in Shanghai until they were slowly revived after the 1934–35 Long March.
Ji Chaoding (冀朝鼎, Chi Ch’ao-ting, 1903–63)
Ji Chaoding may have been the first CCP member with espionage duties overseas, albeit before there was an intelligence organ, and likely was controlled by Zhou Enlai. He attended Qinghua (Tsinghua) University on a Boxer indemnity scholarship at the time of the May 4 movement of 1919 and was radicalized like many of his generation by China’s plight at the hands of Japan and the Western powers. According to a reference by his brother, Mao’s famous interpreter Ji Chaozhu, Chaoding met and befriended Zhou and joined the Chinese Communist Party “at its very beginnings.” The party was formally founded in July 1921, about nine months after Zhou left for France, so circumstances indicate they met in 1919 or 1920.
Ji was assigned to travel to the United States in 1923 or 1924. He secretly remained a Chinese communist after the 1927 Nationalist-Communist Chinese split while ostensibly becoming a loyal member of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), gathering intelligence against them under Zhou’s direction. While in the United States, Ji was associated with the American officials Solomon Adler and Frank Coe, who were implicated as Soviet spies in the Venona intercepts, worked to weaken U.S. support for the KMT, and were eventually exposed during the Red Scare of the 1950s. Coe moved to China in 1958 and Adler in 1962.20
In 1939 Ji returned to China and continued his secret work as an asset of Zhou Enlai’s network run out of the Eighth Route Army Liaison Office in the KMT’s wartime capital, Chongqing. Harry Dexter White, the same senior U.S. Treasury Department official who hired Adler and Coe, influenced the Chinese Nationalist Ministry of Finance to employ Ji Chaoding in a senior position.21 Ji managed to survive an investigation by the KMT counterespionage agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation and Statistics (中央调查统计局, Zhongyang diaocha tongji ju, abbreviation Zhongtong), and became the confidential secretary to KMT finance minister H. H. Kung. In January 1949 Ji may have assisted in negotiating the peaceful surrender of Beiping (Beijing) to the PLA, and he became a prominent economist in the new People’s Republic. Ji died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Beijing in 1963. Like Li Kenong, Ji was perhaps spared persecution during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76): in spite of his wife Luo Jingyi’s association with Kang Sheng, Ji’s long overseas service may have become the subject of suspicious accusations.22
Ke Lin (柯麟, 1901–99)
Dr. Ke Lin of Guangdong is credited with enabling a noted assassination in Shanghai in 1929 and for critical work in Macau from 1935 to 1951. He is the subject of a five-part CCTV documentary, presenting an idealized and informed but probably incomplete accounting of his twenty-three-year intelligence career ending in 1951.23
Just after becoming a medical doctor, Ke Lin joined the CCP in January 1926. He was assigned to the Fourth Revolutionary Army in 1927 and participated in the Guangzhou uprising that December, escaping to Shanghai after its defeat.24
By mid-1928, Ke Lin was directly reporting to Special Services Section intelligence section leader Chen Geng, who had him establish cover as a noncommunist physician at the Wuzhou clinic (五洲药房) under the pseudonym Ke Dawen (柯达文). After the August 24, 1929, capture of CCP rural organizer Peng Pai, Zhou Enlai determined that CCP member Bai Xin (白鑫) had defected and helped the KMT apprehend Peng. Though Bai quickly disappeared, the SSS determined that he was in Shanghai, so all hands were on the lookout for him. After a failed rescue attempt led by Gu Shunzhang, Peng and three other communists were executed on August 30.25
Only two days after Peng’s capture, Bai Xin entered Ke Lin’s Wuzhou Clinic by chance, seeking treatment for malaria. Dr. Ke recognized him, but Bai slipped away too quickly for capture. Chen Geng established a liaison point (lianluo dian) nearby in case Bai called again, since it appeared that he and his KMT handlers were too cautious to enter a major hospital for treatment. Two weeks later, Bai’s condition worsened and he telephoned Ke, requesting treatment at a hotel in the French Concession. Bai decided to trust Ke and allowed a follow-up house call at his sanctuary, the house of KMT intelligence officer Fan Zhengbo.26 With this knowledge, the SSS staked out Fan’s residence and assassinated Bai on November 11 as he departed to board a ship for Italy.27
In the wake of the operation, Ke Lin left, probably in haste, for south China, at one point settling in Xiamen. At this point, if not earlier, Ke was a classic illegal operative in the Russian tradition, living a carefully backstopped cover identity in a genuine vocation but spending significant time pursuing intelligence duties. Unlike another officer with natural cover, Dong Jianwu, Ke Lin was apparently never suspected as a communist spy. Though details about the next four years are scarce, he engaged in further SSS operations but had to flee Xiamen in 1934 when the KMT broke up the city’s communist networks. Upon arrival in Hong Kong, Dr. Ke established the South China Clinic (华南药房, Huanan yaofang). At this point, communist networks all over urban China had been compromised in large measure, and Ke may have been one of the few who were operational—not dead, hiding, or in prison. However, he did not stay still for long. In September 1935 Pan Hannian ordered Ke to move to Macau, establish another medical practice, and make contact with ex-Red Army general Ye Ting, whom Dr. Ke had known during the 1927 Guangzhou uprising. Ye was hiding in Macau with his family, and Ke’s mission was to renew their friendship and bring Ye back to the communist cause. Ke’s work took time: Ye Ting finally departed Macau in October 1937, months after the outbreak of the second Sino-Japanese War, to take command of the communist New Fourth Army.28
Ke Lin stayed in Macau and continued clandestine operations for sixteen more years. In 1942 he was a key link in the evacuation of leftist intellectuals from nearby Hong Kong. In 1950, at the request of Ye Jianying, Ke coordinated the diversion from a Macau warehouse of tons of aviation equipment belonging to two Chinese Nationalist firms. Most importantly, Ke cultivated and recruited Macau business figures such as Ho Yin and Ma Man-kei to the communist cause.29
With Japan’s surrender in August 1945, the KMT surrounded Macau, as had the Japanese before them, and placed operatives in factories and among guilds of herbalists, barbers, and hotel employees.30 In the midst of regular KMT bombings and shootings against Macau communists, Ke Lin and others such as Ho Yin appealed to the Portuguese for protection. The Portuguese, albeit from an increasingly weaker position, tolerated both KMT and CCP operations as long as they did not disturb public order.31
Ke Lin became an administrator in 1943 and later the director of Kiang Wu hospital (镜湖医院, Jinghu yiyuan), turning it into a center of CCP influence until the founding of China’s unofficial liaison, the Nam Kwong Company (南光公司, Nanguang gongsi), in August 1949—headed by Ke Ping (柯平, also known as Ke Zhengping, 柯正平), Ke Lin’s younger brother.32
With the CCP’s 1949 victory, Ke Lin publicly revealed his CCP membership, though his exploits as a CCP intelligence officer remained hidden until the 1980 neibu (内部, internal reference only) publication of Chen Geng in Shanghai. In 1951 Ke Lin left Macau for Guangzhou, where he became director of the Zhongshan Teaching Hospital (广州中山医学院, Guangzhou zhongshan yixueyuan). Suffering unspecified difficulties in the Cultural Revolution, Dr. Ke was sheltered in Beijing, returning to his Guangzhou post in 1980 at the age of seventy-nine. He retired four years later and passed away in 1991.33
Li Qiang (李强, 1905–96)
Born in Changshu, Jiangsu (江苏常熟; originally surnamed Zeng Peihong [曾培洪]), Li Qiang is praised today as a tough and highly intelligent individual. While a young man, he played a crucial role in the founding of CCP intelligence, including its Red Squads and the party’s clandestine radio communications. During the Anti-Japanese War (1937–45) and the civil war (1946–49) he was an official in the communists’ fledgling defense industry. After 1949, Li was admitted to the Chinese Academy of Sciences and held senior government positions, including as minister of foreign trade.
As a child, Li was inspired by the May 4, 1919, movement and was drawn to anti-imperialist and antifeudal ideas. In 1924 he joined the Chinese Nationalist Party but was attracted to talks by communist activists at Shanghai University. He participated in the May 30, 1925, movement and joined the Communist Youth League (CYL) and the CCP that same year, possibly at this time discarding his original name to become Li Qiang. Li became the secretary of the Pudong, Shanghai, CYL branch in early 1926, which grew rapidly in what was then a center for ship repairs.34
In February 1926 Luo Yinong (罗亦农), the head of the neighboring Jiangsu area CCP, was one of the party’s overseers of security work. He appointed Li as the head of the nascent CCP Changshu Special Branch (中共常熟特别支部), placing the young activist in charge of the coming armed uprising in his hometown. Meanwhile, Luo Yinong became head of the CCP’s Military Special Commission (军事特别委员会, Junshi tebie weiyuanhui) under the CCP Shanghai executive committee. A month later the special commission was taken over by Gu Shunzhang (顾顺章).35 These were antecedents of the security organs that followed, albeit narrowly focused on armed action and VIP protection.
For much of the rest of 1926 Li Qiang, who had some training in chemistry, oversaw the manufacture of bombs and grenades that were sent to communist uprisings in Jiangxi and that would be used locally in support of the Northern Expedition. With the April 12, 1927, anticommunist coup, Li Qiang secretly returned to Shanghai and connected with Gu Shunzhang’s clandestine organization, where he was put to work destroying documents, transferring personnel and records to safe locations, and building up stores of arms and ammunition.36
When the party headquarters temporarily evacuated to Wuhan in May, Li joined the short-lived Military Commission Special Operations Section (军委特务科, Junwei tewu ke) under Gu Shunzhang, becoming head of its Special Operations branch (特务股, tewu gu). In a 1981 interview, Li said that he performed “Red squads work” (assassinations of enemies and VIP protection).37 In November 1927 the party formed its first comprehensive intelligence and security organ, the Special Services Section (SSS). Li served in Shanghai as a clandestine operative performing various tasks, including visiting Chen Geng while he was laid up in a Shanghai hospital.38
In June 1928 the CCP Sixth Congress decided to set up long-distance wireless communications to link the party Central Committee with outposts in China and Moscow. Li Qiang was put in charge of this effort and named as leader of the SSS Fourth Section (Communications; 交通科, Jiaotong ke, later renamed 通讯科, Tongxun ke).39 He and his small staff also established connections with railway, bus, and shipping firms for handling couriers and other clandestine nonradio communications, and they set up channels for transporting people and funds.
The Nationalist central government kept strict controls on communications equipment and radio textbooks written in Chinese, but Li Qiang read and spoke enough English to use books and schematic diagrams in that language. He made friends with a group of foreign amateur radio operators in Shanghai. Following their example of building their own equipment, he used them to find essential parts. After months of patient work, Li put the CCP’s first clandestine radio on the air in 1929 at a house that still stands in Shanghai off of Yan’an West Road.40 Later that year and again in January 1930, Li traveled to Hong Kong to set up a second clandestine station. While there he met another CCP traveler in transit, Deng Xiaoping. Li took the opportunity to teach China’s future paramount leader how to encrypt messages and follow radio procedures.41
This account highlights the practical obstacles faced by CCP urban operatives of the time. The dangers were also many. During this period the CCP sent four students to the Soviet Union to study radio technology and arranged for another, Zhang Shenchuan (张沈川), to secretly enroll in a Shanghai radio school. Once Zhang was trained, Li set up clandestine classes in October 1930 at the Fu Li electric appliance factory in Shanghai. He taught radio theory, and Zhang trained students on how to set up and operate the equipment. However, that December foreign concession police, following up on a lead concerning suspicious activity, arrested five instructors and fifteen students. Li Qiang and the survivors split up and later resumed the training under more clandestine conditions.42
Perhaps Li Qiang’s most dramatic, albeit jinxed, operation was the attempted rescue of the CCP rural organizer and Politburo member Peng Pai, who was arrested on August 24, 1929, after being betrayed by a defecting communist, Bai Xin (百鑫). Gu Shunzhang and Chen Geng planned the operation with Li Qiang, who assembled a team of twenty men disguised as a movie crew. Various foul-ups and bad luck foiled the operation on August 28, and Zhou Enlai called off the rescue attempt.43 There were no more chances to effect an escape; Peng Pai and four others were executed at Shanghai’s Longhua prison on August 30.44
The disastrous defection of SSS chief Gu Shunzhang in April 1931 made it impossible for Li Qiang to remain in Shanghai. Like many others, he fled within the month.45 The Comintern took the opportunity to bring him to Moscow for further training in radio technology and communications, which he took in English with a class of other international communists.46 Li apparently stayed in Russia for seven years, only departing Moscow on December 12, 1937. His biographer notes that by the time he left, Li was one of the seven most prominent radio experts in the Soviet Union. This explains his later admission as a fellow of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, but his other activities outside of the study of radio remain unknown. Li was among the last of those from China studying wireless communications to depart Russia.47
Li’s activities are unclear between 1938 and 1940, but in 1941 he became chief of the CCP’s Military Industry Bureau (军工局, Jun gong ju), subordinate to the CCP Central Military Commission (CMC). He oversaw production of weaponry, ammunition and explosives, cotton, metals, coal, wood, and other products useful to the communist forces.48 He was concurrently the head of the Yan’an Academy of Natural Sciences (延安自 然科学院).
During the Chinese civil war (1946–49), Li continued in similar military industrial roles and expanded into his expertise on radio as the director of the CMC General Communications Administration and deputy director of the Central Broadcasting Management Section. At the request of Liu Shaoqi and Zhu De, he built and operated the CCP’s first shortwave broadcast station, the New China News Service Radio. After 1949 he joined the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications and expanded China’s ability to send short- and medium-wave broadcasts abroad. He also negotiated trade and communications agreements with the Russians in the early years of the PRC as a vice minister of foreign trade.49
Liu Ding (Liu Ting, 刘鼎, also known as Dai Liang, 戴良, 1902–86)
Liu Ding, “the dean of military ordnance industry and hero of the United Front,” was born Kan Sijun (阚思俊) to an intellectual household in Nanxi, Sichuan, on December 15, 1902. Liu became a major figure in weaponry research and manufacturing and was the deputy of the Second Ministry of Machine Building. Liu also played a part in CCP intelligence history and is remembered especially for his clandestine role in the Xi’an incident.50
Liu Ding went to Europe in 1924 on a work-study program and was recruited to the CCP in Germany by Zhu De, who later became marshal of the PLA. Liu went to Russia to study, teach, and translate at the Soviet Air Force Machinery School and the Moscow University of the East, where he graduated in 1928—one of the earliest CCP members to be trained outside of China in science and technology, focused on weaponry manufacture.51
Liu may also have had some intelligence training in Moscow,52 because the next year he was in Shanghai as the deputy of the intelligence branch of the Special Services Section under Chen Geng.53 In 1931 the Shanghai French Concession police captured a CCP courier but could not read his collection of top secret (绝密, juemi) documents. They asked Yang Dengying, posing as a rich, pro-Western businessman but really one of Chen and Liu’s agents, to find an expert to evaluate the captured material. Yang produced a disguised Liu Ding, who examined the papers and pronounced them to be worthless Marxist study texts. The French accepted this assessment and Liu spirited the documents away.54 In 1933 when the KMT and the colonial police in Shanghai were arresting more communists, Liu fled Shanghai for Fujian and Ruijin. He started a successful 35-millimeter mortar assembly line in Ruijin that stayed in production until the Long March began in October 1934.55
Liu Ding’s clandestine talents were again required after the CCP finished the Long March. In late 1935 the “Young Marshal” Zhang Xueliang and his Fengtian army held a position, under orders from the Nationalist army, on the southern flank of the CCP’s base area in Bao’an. In December, during a trip to Shanghai, Zhang secretly voiced his dissatisfaction with Chiang Kai-shek’s policy of first destroying the communists before confronting the Japanese invaders—the Young Marshal’s father Zhang Zuolin had fallen victim to a Japanese assassination plot four years earlier. Liu Ding learned of Zhang’s dismay through Song Qingling. After Liu reported this development to CCP headquarters in Bao’an, Liu and Li Kenong were dispatched to Xi’an in March 1936 to assess Zhang Xueliang’s intentions. When they met, Liu gave Zhang a good first impression—he was “an erudite man with whom one could talk”—charming Zhang into further negotiations and a closer relationship. After an initial agreement was struck (see the Xi’an incident), Liu was accepted by Zhang on his staff as CCP liaison. On December 11, 1936, Zhang gave Liu a few hours’ warning of his plan to kidnap the generalissimo the next day, and Liu immediately informed the Bao’an headquarters.56
In March 1941 Liu became chancellor of the newly founded Taihang Industrial School (太行工业学校), near Yan’an, the party’s first effort to regularize ordnance instruction and manufacture.57 Liu left that post in September 1943 due to the political turmoil of the Salvation (Qiangjiu) campaign.58 Accounts of this time do not reveal if Liu was one of its victims.
After the 1945 Seventh Party Congress, when those sanctioned during the Salvation movement were rehabilitated en masse, Liu Ding again returned to ordnance manufacturing, focused on artillery, grenade, and small arms production. In 1950 Liu and Xu Xiangqian negotiated with the Soviet Union for arms assistance to fight the Korean War, and Liu became a vice minister of heavy industry. In 1957 he was promoted to be the deputy minister of the Second Ministry of Machine Building—charged with narrowing the gap with foreign countries in precision machining, electronics, materials, and defense research.59
In the Cultural Revolution Liu Ding was purged along with Luo Ruiqing as a “big spy.” He survived seven years of torture and internal exile, and he was later praised for writing ten million words in technical papers and summaries while imprisoned.60
Perhaps because of his value to the military, Liu was rehabilitated earlier than most, in February 1978. In his twilight years, Liu consulted for the Ministry of Aviation Industry and the China Ordnance Society before passing away from an illness in mid-1986.61
Mo Xiong (莫雄, 1891–1980) and Xiang Yunian (项与年, 1894–1978)
Mo Xiong was a Nationalist general and clandestine agent of CCP intelligence for nineteen years, a rare survivor of the wholesale roundup of communist spies in the early 1930s. In October 1934 he and his controller Xiang Yunian warned the Red Army of an impending attack that might otherwise have crushed the communist movement in China.
Mo Xiong was born in Yingde county, Guangdong, famous for its black tea. Eschewing that industry, he began a military career at age seventeen and later joined the Nationalists. According to a Taiwan source he was a member of Tongmenghui (同盟会, 1905–12), the secret society formed by Sun Yat-sen to oppose the Qing Dynasty.62
In about 1921 Mo joined the Nationalist army, became an officer, and participated in the Northern Expedition (1926–27). As a KMT brigade commander in December 1927, he helped put down the CCP’s Guangzhou uprising. Mo ascended the ranks of the KMT army in his home province and held numerous posts including head of the Guangdong garrison command and commander of the Guangdong Fourth Army, where he was promoted to major general (少将, shaojiang).63 However, Mo had a secret.
In September 1934 Generalissimo Chiang called a meeting of his commanders at Lushan, where he unveiled his fifth “encirclement” campaign: 800,000 troops were to be deployed in a final attempt to surround and annihilate the CCP Red Army. The planning was so intricate that one set of documents weighed two kilograms. Unfortunately for the KMT, Mo Xiong was in attendance and had full access. His secret: Li Kenong of the SSS had recruited him in 1930.64
As soon as Chiang Kai-shek’s planning conference for the fifth encirclement campaign was dismissed, Mo Xiong handed over a selection of documents to his controller Xiang Yunian, a Fujianese and veteran of SSS operations in Shanghai. Xiang worked overnight with two others in the ring to summarize the plan and render it into secret writing (密写墨水, mixie moshui), which they hid in the margins of four student dictionaries.
Disguised as a teacher burdened with books, Xiang departed and headed for Red Army headquarters in Ruijin. But Nationalist army controls were strict at the frontier checkpoints facing the communists; Xiang could see that only itinerant local people were being allowed through, so he knocked out four of his front teeth with a stone, sullied his clothing, and made himself appear like a roughed-up beggar. Disguised thus, he approached a checkpoint. When challenged, Xiang told of being beaten and chased by dogs at a rich man’s house. It was enough for the Nationalist sentries to allow him through without a search that might have changed the course of modern Chinese history.
Xiang arrived in Ruijin at Red Army headquarters on October 7; Li Kenong and Zhou Enlai, whom he had previously known him from his SSS service in Shanghai, barely recognized him. Three days later, the Long March began. Xiang left with the Red Army but before the new year was dispatched to Hong Kong to help rebuild the CCP’s urban intelligence networks.65
Meanwhile, Mo Xiong stayed in the Nationalist Army until the evacuation of Guangzhou in 1949, when he finally went over to the communist side. He suffered from accusations of enemy collaboration in 1951 but apparently was cleared and served in posts in Guangdong until the Cultural Revolution.66 Career details of both Mo and Xiang are otherwise scant, and they require further study.
Nie Rongzhen (Nieh Jung-chen, 聂荣臻, 1899–1992)
Nie’s career led him into the center of the CCP military and the top of the PRC government. Born in Sichuan, he studied in Belgium and France and knew Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping. While in Belgium, he worked in an arsenal and munitions plant, on an automobile line, and in an electrical equipment factory, harbingers for his later duties in building China’s advanced defense systems. Nie joined the party in 1923, was trained in the Soviet Red Army Academy in 1924, and was a political officer under Zhou Enlai at the Huangpu Academy in 1925–26. Nie participated in the Guangzhou (Canton) uprising of December 1927 and made his way to the Red areas after a brief stint in the SSS during 1930–31. Nie participated in the Long March (1934–35) and supported Mao at the Zunyi conference.67
Foreign observers in the Yan’an period wrote that he was “the brains and driving force” behind the Jin-Cha-Ji border region government, and his leadership was promoted as a model in communist propaganda. In spite of these achievements, Nie may have come under attack by Kang Sheng during the Qiangjiu (Salvation) campaign in October 1943 as a “dogmatist” and supporter of Wang Ming. At one point soon afterward, Nie personally saved Mao’s life during an air attack and was key to the defense of Yan’an from the Nationalists after the 1945 surrender of Japan.68
As one of China’s most experienced military officers, Nie became acting chief of the PLA general staff just before the Korean War (1950–53). In July 1950, after the North Korean invasion but before Chinese involvement in October, he sent more than one hundred Chinese intelligence officers into the conflict to keep tabs on Pyongyang’s offensive. Nie became a marshal of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in 1955 and three years later was placed in charge of China’s nuclear weapons and missile programs, leading the National Defense Science and Technology Commission. Besides this work, the commission and its successor, the Commission of Science, Industry, and Technology for National Defense, became important in acquiring foreign technology. At the apex of his career, Nie was a vice premier.69
Nie’s SSS special operations work in 1930–31 was as intense as it was brief. He joined the Shanghai Red Squads in May 1930. Posing as “Mr. Li,” a journalist, Nie engaged in overnight operations to punish and kill opponents of the CCP underground. He instructed his wife, Zhang Ruihua (张瑞华), to abandon their residence if he did not return by dawn. On these sleepless nights, she nervously awaited a secret knock heralding his return, causing anxiety that she suffered from into her old age. When Nie’s boss, SSS director Gu Shunzhang, defected to the Nationalists in April 1931, Nie assisted Zhou Enlai to move cadres away from known hideouts and destroy secret documents.70 Afterward, he and Zhang fled to Jiangxi, where he resumed military duties.
Pan Hannian (P’an Han-nien, 潘汉年, 1906–77)
Pan Hannian is celebrated today as a highly successful intelligence leader and negotiator during the Chinese Communist revolution, but his name is synonymous with tragedy. For matters that were arguably professional errors and disagreements, Mao Zedong had Pan arrested for treason in 1955, leading eventually to his trial, life sentence, and death in prison. Eight hundred to one thousand intelligence cadres were affected in the wake of Pan’s arrest. A forthcoming biography in English of Pan Hannian will detail his life and times and will shed much light on CCP intelligence history and the nature of secret party deliberations.71
Pan Hannian was born into a declining household with ancestors who had passed the imperial examinations. His father was a teacher, and Pan was an academic achiever at an early age. As their home in Yixing, Jiangsu, was rustic and isolated, at age fifteen Pan was sent to Changzhou for further schooling. At age eighteen he briefly taught elementary school and enrolled in a program in Wuxi to study classical Chinese.72
In 1925, at age nineteen, Pan arrived in Shanghai, a young man of letters. He became an editor and publisher of magazines that opposed foreign imperialism and that year joined the CCP. Focused on literary and propaganda work, Pan published so many periodicals that he was nicknamed xiaokai (小开), the “young boss.” He kept this as an alias in later decades.73
As the Chinese Nationalist Party began their Northern Expedition to unite China and defeat local warlords, Pan joined the General Political Department of the National Revolutionary Army. Sent to Nanchang and Wuhan, he published the Revolutionary Army Daily (革命军日报, Geming jun ribao) in the first half of 1927. After the April 12 anticommunist coup that made mortal enemies of the Chinese Nationalist and Communist parties, the CCP sent Pan back to Shanghai to continue propaganda and cultural work, but now in the clandestine underground. He became an important part of the left literary movement that blossomed in 1929–30 and helped start the League of Left-Wing Writers in 1930, becoming an acquaintance of Lu Xun.74
In April 1931 the head of CCP intelligence, SSS director Gu Shunzhang, defected to the Nationalists. In a situation where so many had to flee Shanghai, Pan apparently was judged survivable and competent enough to head SSS intelligence collection operations.75 Modern accounts credit Pan with quickly recruiting replacement intelligence sources for those compromised by Gu and organizing the retaliatory murders of several KMT police and security officials and CCP defectors.76 However, it is likely that others such as Chen Yun and Kang Sheng also played major roles in these counterattacks.
Pan continued operations for about a year, but his position became increasingly less secure. When he departed Shanghai in early 1933, it may have been in the nick of time—a few months later, the KMT arrested his brother, who would be held until 1937. Pan made it to the Red Army base in Ruijin, Jiangxi, where he became the head of the Central Bureau Propaganda Department.77 He played a major role in negotiations with leaders of the Fujian rebellion in 1933. In October 1934, after CCP agent Mo Xiong acquired plans by the KMT army for a fifth encirclement campaign, Pan helped establish the modus vivendi with Guangdong warlord Chen Jitang that allowed the Red Army to escape and begin the Long March.78
After the Zunyi conference in January 1935, CCP general secretary Zhang Wentian sent Pan to Moscow to reestablish contact with the Comintern. Pan departed the march near the Guizhou-Yunnan border and traveled overland through Guangxi and Hunan. In the spring he reached Shanghai and contacted Song Qingling (Madame Sun Yat-sen), who connected him with others who supported the Red Army. Part of Pan’s mission was to assess whether any SSS networks remained in Shanghai, but he found that they were in disarray. In August, Chen Yun also arrived in Shanghai, and he and Pan departed by ship for Vladivostok—ordered to report directly to the Comintern and its CCP representatives, Wang Ming and Kang Sheng.79
In early 1936, when the Comintern learned of the warlord Zhang Xueliang’s desire to cooperate with the CCP against Japan (see the Xi’an incident), Pan opened preliminary negotiations with the Nationalist central government, concurrently with efforts by Li Kenong to reach a separate CCP agreement with Zhang. In May, Pan traveled to Hong Kong and Nanjing and reported to Mao Zedong in Bao’an that August. Pan also pursued negotiations with the KMT following the December 1936 Xi’an incident, which pushed the two sides closer to forming the Second CCP-KMT United Front, this time against Japan, in 1937.80
Following the February 1939 establishment of the CCP’s reorganized intelligence and security organ, the Social Affairs Department, Pan was appointed as one of two deputy directors and sent to Hong Kong. He developed an urban espionage network concentrated in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Macau that became known in the party’s innermost circles as the Pan Hannian system (潘汉年系统, Pan Hannian xitong), reporting directly to Central SAD headquarters in Yan’an. As in other CCP intelligence groups of the time (see Intelligence Stations and Eighth Route Army Liaison Offices), strict procedures governed recruitment and agent running, including central vetting of agents and operational plans, with stress on the principle of single line control (单线联系指导, danxian lianxi zhidao) to minimize compromise if any individual operative was captured.81
Between 1939 and 1943 Pan achieved successes in a number of operations. His networks identified, recruited, trained, and inserted agents into Japanese-occupied cities; ran an agent in the Hong Kong office of a Nationalist intelligence research institute;82 traded intelligence on Japan with the Hong Kong offices of the Northeast Anti-Japanese Army and the Soviet Far East Intelligence Bureau;83 conducted “private liaison” with Hu Egong, who worked in Hong Kong for the KMT finance minister H. H. Kung (Kong Xiangxi); confirmed an earlier report from Chongqing of German plans to invade Russia two days before the attack;84 reported months before Pearl Harbor that Japan intended to push into the South Pacific and Southeast Asia and not advance north toward the Soviet Union;85 and ran a clandestine agent who regularly visited the household of Li Shiqun, the deputy in the Chinese puppet secret police organization.86 In autumn 1942 Pan became the head of the CCP Central China Bureau Intelligence Department (中共中央华中局情报部, Zhonggong zhong-yang Huazhong ju qingbao bu), reporting to bureau chief Rao Shushi in addition to SAD director Kang Sheng.87
In spring 1943 Pan also managed to meet Li Shiqun himself and, fatefully, Wang Jingwei, head of the collaborationist regime.88 Pan chose not to report the unplanned Wang Jingwei meeting to his superiors, perhaps because that summer he was criticized as a “liberal” (自由主义者, ziyou zhuyi zhe) by his boss, Rao Shushi. This was in the midst of Kang Sheng’s Salvation campaign (Qiangjiu yundong), centered in the CCP’s wartime headquarters of Yan’an, which wildly sought enemies in every corner of the Chinese Communist movement.89 His decision had devastating consequences a decade later.
Pan travelled to Yan’an for the Seventh Party Congress (April-June 1945) and then returned to Hong Kong. He worked there for most of 1945–49, becoming a member of the CCP’s Hong Kong Bureau. The agents in Pan’s network recruited increasing numbers of Nationalist military and civilian officials as the fortunes of the Nationalist central government declined, regularly reporting on events inside the KMT via their clandestine radio in Shanghai.90 In 1948–49 Pan directed the exfiltration from Hong Kong to north and northeast China of more than three hundred prominent noncommunists, many of whom participated in the founding meetings of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and served in state and mass organizations after 1949. His network also played an important role in arranging the defection of KMT pilots with their aircraft from Nanjing and Canton as the communist victory approached.91
In the first two years of the People’s Republic, Pan was vice mayor of Shanghai, supervising security, intelligence, and united front work. He might have become the next mayor but was shifted to less sensitive duties after minister of public security Luo Ruiqing criticized Pan’s subordinate Yang Fan, the Shanghai Public Security Bureau (PSB) director, for allowing former enemy agents into Shanghai’s counterintelligence operations. However, Pan retained his rank after enduring criticism, and in 1954 his status still seemed secure as number three in Shanghai’s CCP hierarchy.
Pan’s shocking downfall came in April 1955 between two key party meetings in Beijing.92 Mao opened the CCP national conference on March 21 with a speech that focused in part on the supposed Gao Gang–Rao Shushi “anti-party conspiracy,” during which he mentioned Yang Fan as a coconspirator of Rao.93 Mao then distributed a document specifically discussing Yang Fan’s “mistakes” in public security work during 1949–51, when Yang was Pan’s subordinate.94
Pan was troubled not only by this development but also by the news that his former agent, Hu Junhe, had been detained and was under interrogation: Hu had witnessed Pan’s unreported 1943 meeting with the Japanese puppet government leader Wang Jingwei.95
A perfect storm of anguish hit Pan. According to his friend Xia Yan, when the congress ended on March 30, Pan sorrowfully said that there was a matter that he needed to clarify with Shanghai mayor Chen Yi. By coincidence, the next day, Rao Shushi was formally arrested. Pan, apparently hoping to be spared the harshest judgment of one who had stubbornly hidden the truth, confessed to Chen his unreported 1943 meeting in Shanghai with Wang Jingwei. The shocked mayor of Shanghai had Pan write a confession. The next day, Chen saw Mao Zedong at his Zhongnanhai residence and handed him the document. Mao’s reaction was immediate and devastating. He wrote into the margins, “This man can no longer be trusted” (此人从此不可信用, Ci ren congci bu ke xin-yong), and ordered Pan’s arrest.96
On the evening of April 3, while Pan was in his room at the Beijing Hotel, he received a telephone call asking him to report to the lobby. Minister of public security Luo Ruiqing was there to serve an arrest warrant and detain him.97
Though evidence was lacking, Mao became convinced Pan was guilty of sabotage and treason, simultaneously an agent of the Japanese, the KMT on Taiwan, and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. His suspicions may have been aggravated by the April 11 destruction by a KMT time bomb of the Kashmir Princess, an aircraft scheduled to carry Zhou Enlai, who changed his flight, to the Bandung conference.98 On April 12 Pan was formally charged with leading the “Pan-Yang Counterrevolutionary Clique.”99
As party officials were secretly informed of Pan’s arrest, they fell in line due to the chairman’s prestige and power. Only Li Kenong, who was Pan’s colleague under Kang Sheng during the Yan’an period, made a formal attempt to persuade the chairman that he had overreacted. At Zhou Enlai’s direction, Li assembled a report that was delivered to the Central Committee in two parts, on April 29 and July 29. Apparently to retain credibility, Li pointed out problems in Pan’s record, including the unreported Wang Jingwei audience in 1944 and Pan’s failure to make an agreed on clandestine meeting in Beiping (Beijing) late that year. But Li’s report also detailed evidence that Pan had otherwise been loyal: he informed the center of his recruited agents and contacts with the KMT, received agreement for operational decisions, provided high-grade intelligence, and had kept secret the details of the final assault on Shanghai in 1949, which he logically would have leaked to the KMT if he really was their man.100
Mao ignored the report but promoted Li Kenong and placed him in charge of the reorganized Central Investigation Department. In conjunction with a subsequent, wider movement beginning in July–August 1955 to weed out counterrevolutionaries (肃反运动, sufan yundong), between eight hundred and one thousand intelligence professionals associated with Pan were transferred, fired, or imprisoned.101 It was a tragic irony that underground and intelligence work by loyal communists, which led to close contact with enemies at great peril, had prompted accusations once victory was achieved.102 No one in the leadership, including Zhou, urged the chairman to reconsider.
In May 1962, three months after Li Kenong’s death, Mao approved the Ministry of Public Security’s (MPS) recommended findings that Pan was “a longtime hidden traitor within the party” who committed serious crimes. Pan was convicted and sentenced a year later.103 In March 1967 during the Cultural Revolution, Pan was sent to a Hunan labor camp. He died of liver cancer and medical neglect in 1977—still incarcerated in spite of the death of Mao the previous year. In 1982 Pan was posthumously cleared in the 1980s Rehabilitation of Intelligence Cadres, long delayed due to the sensitivity of publicly admitting past errors by Mao Zedong.104
Pan Jing’an (潘靜安, also known as Pan Zhu, 潘柱, 1916–2000)
A native of Panyu district near Guangzhou and a longtime resident of Hong Kong, Pan (no relation to Pan Hannian) joined the revolution in 1936 and in 1938 was inducted into the CCP. About a year later he joined the Hong Kong Eighth Route Army Liaison Office under Liao Chengzhi as an officer of the Social Affairs Department (SAD). When Hong Kong fell to the Japanese in 1942, Pan was a key part of the operation to evacuate cultural elites and democratic personages to the mainland. This work won the attention of Zhou Enlai, and Pan was awarded the title of “exemplary member” of the Communist Party.
From 1958 to 1982 Pan was the head of the CCP Central Investigation Department (CID) station in Hong Kong and therefore was in charge of Beijing’s espionage operations in the British Crown colony during most of the Cold War. In his cover job as deputy auditor of the Bank of China in Hong Kong, Pan could easily move in various social circles to benefit his intelligence duties.
When Pan returned to the mainland in 1982 at age sixty-six, he lived in Beijing and held sufficiently high party rank to become a delegate to the fifth through eighth sessions of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. During this time he was named the vice chair of the conference historical materials committee. It is unclear if Pan worked full or part time in the CID and Ministry of State Security (MSS) headquarters in the 1980s, but due to his age he may have been retired or semiretired.105
Song Qingling
(Soong Ch’ing-ling, 宋庆龄, Madame Sun Yat-sen, 1890–1981)
The widow of Sun Yat-sen and sister of Madame Chiang Kai-shek, Song Qingling was an enthusiastic noncommunist supporter of the CCP. She lent great legitimacy to the People’s Republic after 1949 and remains a major figure in both popular imagination and twentieth-century Chinese political history. Less appreciated is Song’s role in intelligence, underground work, and influence operations.
Song’s marriage in 1915 to the father of modern China, Sun Yat-sen, brought her to instant national prominence that lasted beyond his death in March 1925. She became a leader of the KMT left in Wuhan and a voice for equality of the sexes, saying in 1926 that “even though Chinese women have undergone two thousand years of oppression, they cannot stay out of the revolution.”106 After the April 12, 1927, Nationalist coup against the CCP, hostile Nationalist troops approached Wuhan.107 In July Song and those close to her, including the left KMT’s foreign minister Eugene Chen (陈友仁, Chen Youren), fled to Shanghai. Their Soviet advisor, Mikhail Borodin, left overland for Siberia and Moscow.
Song Qingling stayed less than a month in Shanghai, where she was placed under heavy if inept British and French surveillance at her residence in the French Concession (now a museum).108 Before Borodin left Wuhan, he urged Song to head for Moscow and demonstrate a break with Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the KMT and the April coup. Taking his advice, Song wrote an essay accusing Chiang of betraying Sun Yat-sen’s revolution. It was published on August 22, 1927, in the Shanghai Shenbao newspaper and was later reprinted in The Nation magazine in the United States.
The morning Song Qingling’s essay appeared in Shanghai, she had already sailed on a Russian ship for Vladivostok in a plan organized with her friend and secretary Rayna Prohme, an American communist. Song’s departure was part of a larger Russian operation to evacuate communists and leftists valuable to Moscow. Their freighter also carried seventy students, a dozen Russian military and other advisors, Eugene Chen, and the wife of Borodin.109 They reached Vladivostok a week later and continued by train to Moscow.110
Symbolizing the often personal struggles behind the Nationalist-Communist split, Qingling’s sister, Meiling, married the CCP’s deadly enemy, Chiang Kai-shek, on December 1.111
Song Qingling received a hero’s welcome in Moscow, where she participated in ceremonies marking the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. Reflecting Song’s value in Soviet eyes and her future in the People’s Republic, she was befriended by Mikhail Kalinin, a prominent albeit powerless member of the Soviet Politburo. She stayed there for two years.112
Perhaps the novelty of life in Moscow wore thin, or Song and the Russians might have agreed that she should return to China. When Chiang Kai-shek invited Song to Nanjing for the interment ceremony of her late husband, she did not hesitate. To make clear that she was not endorsing the KMT or Chiang’s leadership, Song made statements indicating that she would not participate in any Nationalist Party work.113
Indeed, Song became an implacable, brave, and outspoken opponent of Chiang. Though the generalissimo regularly ordered the assassination of political opponents, he did not allow harm to come to her, fearing public condemnation if not personal retribution from Song’s siblings. Song Qingling remained free to travel (including to Germany and Moscow in 1930) and to speak, write, and march in public protests, though Chiang occasionally considered ways to intimidate her.114
In 1931 Song lobbied Chiang Kai-shek and world opinion itself for the release of the “Noulens couple,” Comintern agents captured in Shanghai by the KMT, whose names were Jakob Rudnik and Tatiana Moissenko. After their conviction, Song and Agnes Smedley took care of the couple’s son, who like his parents eventually repatriated to the Soviet Union.115 In 1933, with Lu Xun, Song formed the Chinese League for the Protection of Human Rights in response to KMT assassinations. That March, in the name of the league, Song successfully lobbied for the release of the CCP underground leader Liao Chengzhi.116 Considering that rescuing CCP members from jail was an important mission of the SSS, these operations may represent early examples of Song Qingling’s employment as a CCP intelligence asset.
Other anecdotes highlight Song’s occasional value to intelligence operations, in spite of how closely she was watched by the Nationalist security services. In December 1935 Marshal Zhang Xueliang (see the Xi’an incident), responsible for bottling up the CCP from his base in Xi’an, was in Shanghai; he told a friend of Song Qingling that he was open to talks with the CCP. Song notified Liu Ding, a veteran CCP intelligence operative staying in town. As a result, the CCP initiated talks that led to Chiang’s kidnapping a year later.117
In January 1936 the veteran SSS operative Dong Jianwu visited Song in her apartment to obtain documents that she had acquired from an unnamed source. In that meeting Song provided Dong with identification documents that would allow him to pose as an official of the KMT finance ministry—perhaps not coincidentally, her brother, T. V. Soong, and then her brother-in-law, H. H. Kung, held the finance ministry portfolio during this period. Shortly afterward, Song helped to identify Edgar Snow and George Hatem as sympathetic to the communist cause, resulting in an invitation to the CCP’s headquarters at Bao’an.118 Later that year, Dong Jianwu assumed the guise of Pastor Wang to meet Snow and Hatem in Xi’an and passed them to Deng Fa for clandestine transit to the CCP’s nearby headquarters.119
The Xi’an incident and the outbreak of the Anti-Japanese War (1937–45) altered the lives of many Chinese, including Song Qingling. With Shanghai threatened by the Japanese, she moved to Hong Kong. In June 1938 Song helped found the China Defense League (保卫中国同盟, Baowei zhongguo tongmeng), a KMT-CCP joint effort to raise funds from abroad for the war effort. The outbreak of the Pacific War in December 1941 immediately threatened Hong Kong, so Song flew to Chongqing and established herself in the Nationalist wartime capital.120 While there, Song established “close liaison” (亲密的联系, qinmi de lianxi) with Zhou Enlai and others in the CCP’s de facto embassy.121
When Mao became the chairman of the Central People’s Government in 1949, he chose as his chief deputies Liu Shaoqi, Zhu De, and Song Qingling.122 This may not have indicated actual power for Sun Yat-sen’s widow, but it did show her commitment to the new government—which she maintained in spite of the punishing political campaigns, executions, and humanitarian disasters that followed.
In the last years of her life, Song remained a noncommunist, though she was finally allowed to join the CCP on May 15, 1981, exactly two weeks before her death.123 During the Nixon visit in February 1972, Song extolled Mao Zedong as a liberator of China’s women.124 If nothing else, her endorsement was an echo of Song’s previous carefully crafted appeals to noncommunist audiences. Lauding the chairman as a feminist seems ironic given what is now known about his sexual exploitation of some of the women around him. Yet Song’s single-minded devotion to the CCP and her less than understood role as a clandestine operative, when matched with her charity work, make her presence on the Chinese stage singular and worth further study.
Tsang, John Chao-ko
Wang Shijian (also known as Zhao Yaobin, 王石坚, 赵耀斌, 1911–?)
In 1947 the Chinese Nationalist government captured veteran CCP intelligence operative Wang Shijian and turned him to their side. In the midst of the numerous intelligence victories against the Nationalist enemy, it was a major setback. Wang went on to become a senior intelligence official on Taiwan until his death in the 1960s.
Wang Shijian, of Shandong, is one of several Benedict Arnold–like figures in the CCP intelligence pantheon. In contrast to Gu Shunzhang, Wang stuck with the KMT and survived to become one of their senior intelligence officials. Like the American revolutionary commander turned traitor, Wang distinguished himself early in the conflict. After capture and sentencing by the Nationalists in 1933, he participated in an underground party organization inside Suzhou military prison. When their group was discovered in 1935, he and other comrades were transferred to Nanjing for trial. However, Zhou Enlai negotiated the release of Wang and others two years later as a condition for joining with the Nationalists in the Second United Front (1937–45) to resist Japan.125
In 1940 Kang Sheng sent Wang to KMT-held Xi’an to replace Luo Qingchang as head of the regional intelligence network. Wang was directly subordinate to the CCP Intelligence Department in Yan’an and ran a network of agents that provided information on Nationalist forces. The network ranged from Beiping (Beijing) to Shenyang and from Xi’an to Lanzhou.126
In September 1947 Wang was “captured and turned” (see Beibu panbian toudi), providing the KMT with names of more than one hundred Communist Party members and dozens of secret party addresses used in north, east, and west China. An uncertain number of networks in these regions were blown, and five communists were killed, a major setback amidst other CCP advances during the Chinese civil war. The final communist victory came two years later in October 1949.127
Wang retreated to Taiwan with the Nationalist government and stayed in the intelligence field, becoming head of the Mainland Bandit Intelligence Research Institute (大陆匪情研究所, Dalu fei qing Yanjiu suo). He passed away in the 1960s in Taiwan.128
Wang Xirong (王锡荣, 1917–2011)
One of the CCP’s “countless nameless heroes” (无数无名英雄, wu shu wu ming yingxiong), Wang Xirong secretly couriered messages, firearms, and other materials between Weihai city, in Shandong, and the nearby countryside in the last three years of the Anti-Japanese War (1937–45). Her story of survival and courage became the basis for a popular film in 1978.129 She was the occasional subject of newspaper write-ups about heroes of the revolution until her death at age ninety-four.130
Like many peasant women in traditional times, Wang originally had no formal name—she was simply called Gengzi (庚子), after the day of her birth, until 1946 when she took it upon herself to choose three characters she liked. During the war Wang was subordinate to the CCP Underground and Eighth Route Army intelligence, not the Social Affairs Department, which had less influence at that time in Shandong than the Eighth Route Army.131
Though she did not consider herself a spy, Wang was taught to observe and report, memorize and relay alerts, and disguise for transporting items such as pistols, written messages, and collections of documents. Among her favorite methods was wrapping an object in multiple layers of waterresistant cloth placed in the bottom of a large jar of thick and fragrant soy paste, carried on her back. She avoided hiding anything on her person.132
Wang knew her superiors in the Weihai liaison station (联络站, lianluozhan) network only by pseudonyms. She was approached for the job because her home lay along the courier line between more than twenty liaison points (联络点, lianluodian) organized under Weihai station. The station chief lived in the countryside at Yangting village, where Wang’s mother resided, about thirty kilometers southwest of the city: there he commanded operations in the more dangerous urban center. Eighth Route Army cadres visited Wang’s home with messages for the underground in Weihai. The liaison points along her route were mostly small shops. Wang’s favorites were shoe stores, because people would come and go and not necessarily buy anything. Fruit shops were also used.133
Wang’s new husband of the time became upset with the spectacle of numbers of men coming and going from her home. As her courier activities were secret, neighbors were allowed to believe the worst, socially speaking. Wang Xirong’s husband left her before the end of the war, and she remarried a decade later.134
In her last years Wang lived a private life in a cramped apartment in downtown Dalian, attended to by her children and grandchildren. Ironically, the entrance to her building faced Ling Yun Street (凌云街), named for the first minister of state security.
Xiang Yunian (项与年, 1894–1978)
See Mo Xiong.
Ying Ruocheng (Ying Juo-ch’eng, 英若成, 1929–2003)
An actor known for films such as The Last Emperor (1987) and Little Buddha (1993), Ying was also a PRC vice minister of culture from 1986 to 1990. In his memoir Voices Carry, Ying wrote that he was recruited in 1952 to become a clandestine agent reporting on attitudes and activities of his foreign contacts in Beijing.135 As a prominent person in the arts from an intellectual family, Ying was approached not by a public security officer of ordinary rank but by Beijing mayor Peng Zhen—who was also a member of the CCP Politburo. Michael Schoenhals observed that this approach was consistent with a policy to “respect the status, position, and dignity of the agent.” The reporting relationship went on for years. Ying’s family received food not ordinarily available to other urban Chinese in order to host foreigners in his residence—during a time, as his son observed, when “it was outrageous to have foreigners come to your home.”136
The son, Ying Da, also became an actor and director. In 2009 he starred as an overweight intelligence officer of the Japanese puppet regime of Wang Jingwei in The Message (风声, Fengsheng) an espionage film set in 1942, directed by Feng Xiaogang (冯小刚).
Zeng Zhaoke (曾昭科; also known as John Tsang, Cantonese:
Tsang Chao-ko, Tsang Chiu-fo, 1923–2014)
John Tsang was the most senior ethnic Chinese officer in the Hong Kong police force and was a noted marksman when he was arrested on October 3, 1961, accused of leading a Chinese communist espionage ring. The press dubbed him “Hong Kong’s first spy” because none had been publicly named before then.
Zeng (Tsang) was born in Guangzhou of Manchu parentage. He attended primary school in Hong Kong and university in Japan, where he was exposed to Marxist writings, and he may have been recruited into the CCP at that time. In 1947 Zeng arrived in Hong Kong and began working for the police.137
British and Chinese sources have few details of the work done by Zeng’s ring. However, his organization may have been the source of important intelligence, including the nature of the colony’s defenses and internal security and matters such as the findings by British authorities concerning the 1955 bombing carried out by Taiwan agents in Hong Kong, targeting Zhou Enlai (see the Kashmir Princess Bombing).138 Research has not uncovered their names or positions, but fourteen “foreign nationals” were arrested at the same time as Zeng, and four of these were expelled with him to China.139
Zeng’s access was notably broad. He was a rising star in the Hong Kong police force and according to one Chinese media report was the senior CCP agent in Hong Kong. At one point a bodyguard for the Hong Kong governor, he became the deputy commandant of the police training school at Aberdeen in 1960, the post he held when arrested a year later.140
On October 1, 1961, a CCP intelligence courier entering Hong Kong from Macau was discovered carrying microfilm and a large amount of cash after an off-duty Hong Kong police detective observed him transferring a wad of $100 banknotes from one pocket to the other. Under interrogation, the courier revealed his affiliation with mainland Chinese authorities and his destination: the home of a woman later determined to be Zeng’s mother.141
Police arrested Zeng on October 6 and interrogated him for more than fifty days. Instead of placing him on trial, Hong Kong authorities deported the ex-policeman to China on November 30. Due to his fluency in Japanese and English and academic training in Japan and Britain, Zeng became a professor of English at Jinan University in Guangzhou, where he worked before and after the Cultural Revolution. In his later years, Zeng was head of the English department at the university and a member of the Guangdong Provincial People’s Congress.142 According to one Chinese media report lauding Zeng’s accomplishments, he also “assumed remote personal command of the Hong Kong and Macau intelligence networks” after arriving in Guangzhou,143 though it remains unstated how long he held such duties and where he spent most of his work day.
In the 1980s Zeng was one of the few official Chinese contacts in Guangzhou with whom foreign diplomats could freely associate, possessing an imprimatur to hang out with foreigners that was not unusual for Chinese intelligence figures at that time. An urbane, tall, and smiling man in his sixties of notable vitality, Zeng cut a swath through the foreign community with a personality “much different from the dour functionaries we usually met,” according to a diplomat based there at the time. Zeng had great command of detail and was frank in his opinions. At one point, when asked about the influx of new members of the National People’s Congress (NPC) who were not the workers, peasants, and soldiers of the Mao era, Zeng opined, in his British-accented English: “Do you think we want to be ruled by a bunch of peasants?”144
Zeng’s funeral honors in 2014 included indications that he had worked for the party before the 1949 communist victory and a wreath from CCP head Xi Jinping.145 If Zeng was already an underground or intelligence operative when he arrived in Hong Kong in 1947, the party may have instructed him to obtain employment that included useful access to secrets, such as with the police.
In the absence of details about Zeng’s specific activities, one can consider why the British decided to deport him rather than place him on trial. The Zeng affair in October-November 1961 came in the midst of China’s great famine. In November 1960 China began supplying Hong Kong with much-needed fresh water, and in July 1961 Chinese authorities began to allow easier access to Hong Kong by mainland refugees fleeing famine.146 The circumstances may have allowed the Chinese side to pressure the British at a time when they were considering what to do with “Hong Kong’s first spy.”
Zhang Luping (张露萍, 1921–45)
Born in Beiping (Beijing) in 1921 as Yu Weina (余微娜), Zhang’s parentage nonetheless made her a girl “from” Chongqing, and she was probably raised speaking Sichuanese as well as Mandarin.
Since the Nationalist wartime capital was in Chongqing, Zhang’s origins may have held an appeal that contributed to her recruitment for training at age sixteen. Then known by another name, Li Lin (黎琳), she joined the CCP a year later in October 1938 while in Yan’an attending the Anti-Japanese Military and Political University (抗日军政大学, Kangri junzheng daxue).
In November 1939 the SAD sent her to Chongqing as a secret operative to lead the KMT Military Statistics Bureau Telecommunications Office Secret Party Small Group (国民党军统局电讯处秘密党小组, Guomindang juntong ju dianxun chu mimi dang xiaozu). In more plain language, this was a seven-person spy ring inside the Nationalist signal intelligence center. Members included a KMT lieutenant colonel, Feng Chuanqing, who commanded an around-the-clock operation with hundreds of radio intercept positions and perhaps a thousand operators and analysts. The spy ring did not last long, though; its members were apprehended in late 1940 and executed in July 1945. Zhang shouted slogans and swore at her captors as she was being executed.147