Eyes and Ears is a collection of primary sources on covert human intelligence (HUMINT) in Cold War China. Michael Schoenhals is known, among other things, for his highly regarded monograph on the history of Chinese domestic security services and their secret agents (Spying for the People: Mao’s Secret Agents, 1949–1967, Cambridge University Press, 2013). Building on this earlier work, the book under review translates and introduces a wide range of sources that reveal the operations of socialist China’s state security apparatus in its own words. Studies of Chinese intelligence have long been hampered by the lack of primary sources, even more so than studies of other security agencies. Whereas the archives of security services in the West, and to some extent those of the Soviet Union, have been declassified, Chinese archives remain stubbornly inaccessible. To redress this dearth of sources, Schoenhals has assembled an impressive repertoire of materials from published documents, local archives, and, most importantly, discarded personal and archival files. Often described as “garbology,” the practice of identifying and collecting such grassroots files was also pioneered by Schoenhals and has since become an essential tool for historians of socialist China.
The book is composed of seven parts arranged in roughly chronological order. Each part (and each document) is accompanied by an introductory note and can be read independently. Part one consists of a single file, a first-hand account of how a secret agent was recruited by the Communist Party in 1947. The document demonstrates both the reach and competence of Communist HUMINT before 1949 and the diverse backgrounds of its agents, as the protagonist was a defected Nationalist Party security officer. Part two turns to the building of HUMINT capacity in the early 1950s. Although Soviet influence was present, much of the Chinese intelligence apparatus emerged as an indigenous system, built through trial and error. Part three then uncovers the “best practices” of covert intelligence work as summarized by Chinese intelligence officers themselves.
The two longest sections of the book, parts four and five, examine how secret agents worked and were managed on the ground. Part four demonstrates the omnipresence of underground informers – in a linen mill, among prostitutes and drug dealers, in the Muslim community, and on college campuses. These agents produced a vast amount of information, which was not always useful and therefore had to be screened, evaluated and analysed by their handlers. Drawing on the personal work files of one individual agent, Yang X, part five documents what happened when agents encountered difficulties, both professional (when the quality of his reports dropped) and personal (when Yang was implicated in the Anti-Rightist campaign and even when he struggled with childcare). In each case, his handlers diligently intervened to address the problem so that he could continue his surveillance work. Part six contains instructions from section chiefs, who were responsible for judging the quality of agent reports and recommending appropriate action. During the Cultural Revolution, HUMINT came under attack for allegedly harbouring ideologically suspicious figures and unjustly targeting the masses. In response, as part seven shows, the Chinese intelligence agency entered a mode of crisis management, seeking to tone down excessive criticism while preserving its basic functionalities.
In his introductory remarks, Schoenhals frequently compares the Chinese case with the history of intelligence agencies elsewhere, reminding readers that HUMINT in China was practised in ways broadly similar to in other parts of the world, rather than conforming to a constructed Cold War bifurcation between “Eastern” and “Western” intelligence. In this light, Eyes and Ears, with its captivating stories and informative commentaries, will be valuable for scholars of intelligence who wish to learn more about the Chinese case but do not read Chinese. It would also serve well in courses on the global or comparative history of intelligence services, the history of policing or the social history of the Cold War.
For a more specialized readership within the China field, however, the book would have benefitted from a more sustained and theoretically sophisticated discussion of the composition and nature of its materials. A common problem with socialist-era documents (or with any bureaucratic documents more generally) is that they often share a formalized language specific to the time and institutional context in which they were produced. It is therefore difficult, if not impossible, to determine whether certain expressions in an agent’s report derived from their own observations or from the prevailing rhetorical tropes of the time. Schoenhals is also the author of a classic study of formalized language in Chinese politics (Doing Things with Words in Chinese Politics: Five Studies Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, 1992). In the book under review, he suggests that these sources “could be from anywhere and … it is only by accident that they happen to come from ‘Communist China’” (xiii). Even if there was probably not “anything distinctively Chinese” (xiv) about how secret agents worked, there was certainly something distinctively Chinese about how they and their handlers wrote. Attending more closely to the linguistic and rhetorical conventions that made Chinese HUMINT not operationally exceptional but documentarily distinctive would allow the book to make a larger contribution beyond bringing these hard-to-find documents to English-speaking readers. In general, this is a rich collection of fascinating sources, one that can be read either in small chunks or as a coherent whole.
