NOTE ON SOURCES

Since publishing my first article on this subject over thirty-five years ago—a piece in Le Monde diplomatique about Deng Xiaoping’s establishment of the Guoanbu—I have written hundreds more such articles. With my co-author Rémi Kauffer, I published the first biography of Kang Sheng, the co-founder of the notorious special service set up in Shanghai in 1927 under the auspices of Zhou Enlai. Kang Sheng and the Chinese Secret Service has been translated into over a dozen languages.1 It was followed by hundreds of articles, further books—notably on organized crime in China and the Hong Kong triads—and finally this book, now in its fourth edition, which has been entirely revised and updated for its publication in English.

Over the years I have been able to observe at first hand the considerable evolution of access to information necessary for undertaking research in the region. This research has been enriched by dozens of interviews with both key players and analysts or observers, principally in Asia and Europe. I have interviewed men and women who are still active in intelligence, as well as those who are now retired, many of whom are quoted in this book. Some have chosen to remain anonymous, which does not of course prevent me from thanking them here.

Since the early 1990s, I have been reporting on China for Intelligence Online, a bimonthly newsletter based in Paris, for which I have written more than 700 articles, around a third of which are biographical pieces on PLA functionaries, China’s security services and intelligence organizations, its political influence structures, economic warfare and soft power. It has been a mammoth undertaking to identify, follow and analyze, using both online and traditional Chinese media, the reassignments and changes of personnel within the Gonganbu and Guoanbu services, the CCP, and all the organizations within the PLA.

But during this time, there has been a real transformation in the ease with which source material can be obtained. During the 1980s and 1990s, I used the China Directory, an administrative directory published in Tokyo by analysts connected to the Foreign Ministry, which helped me establish the nomenklatura. Researching in Hong Kong, a haven for China observers, was similarly invaluable. The Union Research Institute in Kowloon, recommended by David Bonavia of the Far Eastern Economic Review, was a mine of information, as was the work of a group of Jesuits, led by Father László Ladány, who later were to join the Jesuit priest Dominique Tyl in Taiwan. Similarly, in France, the Missions Etrangères newsletter, published by Father Léon Trivière, revealed his exceptional knowledge of CCP arcana. Dozens of magazines are published in Taiwan, in both Chinese and English, such as Inside China Mainland and academic journals like The China Quarterly. In the past it was difficult to get hold of PLA newspapers, whereas today much of the material can be found on the PLA’s own website (although the multiple examples of disinformation remain a serious concern).

Going back further in time, it is now possible to look through the CIA’s POLO archives, containing despatches from and fascinating analyses of the Cultural Revolution. For the period covering the 1920s and 1930s, I was able to comb through the archives of the French Concession in Shanghai (at the Quai d’Orsay in Paris) and of the Shanghai Special Branch (in London).

The 1990s saw the publication of the first memoirs by CCP leaders, including Yang Shangkun’s. I brought dozens of copies of the latter back from China when I was there in 2008 to research this book, ahead of the Olympic Games. Such books can often be purchased online.

Many well-researched books on the secret war of espionage have been published in recent years. Some rely on a document produced in the 1950s for internal purposes at the request of the head of the secret service, Kang Sheng’s deputy, Li Kenong. This kind of research has been made considerably easier by overviews of the available literature, such as that by the brilliant Chinese intelligence specialist Peter Mattis of the Jamestown Foundation.2

A personal anecdote: I was fourteen in 1966, and keen to understand what was happening in China during the Cultural Revolution. Was this the youth of China rising up against the old world? Or a war that had sprung up between factions, like the one I read about in one of my favourite novels, André Malraux’s Man’s Fate?

I started to teach myself a little basic Chinese. The following year I did a language exchange and went to live for a short time with a family in London. One day I went to the Chinese embassy in Portland Place, which was surrounded by huge numbers of police officers, to see if I could get hold of some documentation. I was fobbed off with propaganda magazines like China Reconstructs. A passing diplomat, sporting a Mao badge on his lapel, took pity on me and handed me his own Chinese copy of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book, which I have still. As a result of the breakdown of diplomatic relations between China and the UK, the ambassador in London had been called home and replaced by a chargé d’affaires called Xiong Xianghui. Might the book in my possession have belonged to him, or one of his colleagues?

Twenty years later, while researching my biography of Kang Sheng, I became convinced that this very Xiong was an important figure in the intelligence service. I had to wait another decade before I spotted Xiong’s autobiography in a Beijing bookshop. It was published by the CCP and entitled My Career in Intelligence and Diplomacy.3

Even today, I sometimes flick with a certain nostalgia through my own typed index cards, containing biographies of members of the Chinese special services, which I began collating at the end of the 1970s from books and interviews. Today regional newspapers and administrative documents are available online and for the French edition of this book I put together biographies of regional directors of the Guoanbu (to take a single example), using websites like China Vitae (which contains up-to-date biographies in English) and most of all Baidu Baike, a sort of Chinese Google through which it is possible to access many biographical details.

The book ends with the rebuilding of the secret services, such as the Guoanbu, at the initiative of Xi Jinping in 2015. The purge of the Guoanbu was notable for the arrest of its head of counterintelligence, Ma Jian, who was jailed for life in December 2018. He was accused of corruption, but his arrest was also, undoubtedly, linked to the struggle between his service and MI6, the CIA, and the French DGSE.  Ma Jian’s confession—a nice exercise in propaganda—was filmed and broadcast on YouTube. We have come a long way from the secrecy that marked the era of the 102-year-old spy Yao Zijian, who fought the “underground war” on Mao’s secret service.