Expertly translated by Michael Schoenhals, Eyes and Ears is a collection of rare documents dealing with human intelligence assets in the Maoist era. Individually, the translations offer granular insight into the daily experiences of Chinese citizens during years of regime change, socialist transformation, and revolutionary campaigns. Together, they provide readers with a broad coverage of secret agent work, one of the most mysterious aspects of PRC governance. I encourage all historians of the PRC to consider how they might use Eyes and Ears in their classrooms.
To this reader, the book’s title recalls the “talons and teeth” of imperial China, particularly the runners who helped administer justice and collect taxes for imperial magistrates. Here “eyes and ears” refer to the secret agents who regularly informed on the comings and goings of suspect individuals. Due to the secrecy of their work, as well as the fact that many of them hailed from suspicious class backgrounds, the difficulty of studying the lives and management of undercover agents cannot be overstated. But, as readers of Schoenhals’s earlier scholarship already understand, he is one of the leading experts in rescuing rare documents as they move from state archives to landfills, a practice now commonly referred to as “garbology.”
The documents in Eyes and Ears cover the full scope of secret agent work during the Maoist era. Readers discover the practical issues that drove Chinese citizens to serve as confidential informants, as well as how they were recruited, managed, and terminated. Readers also see how PRC secret agent work evolved over time: at first only recruiting assets who hailed from “class enemy” ranks, the state quickly realized the importance of casting a wide net for potential informants, including party members.
In each of the introductions to the seven parts of the collection, Schoenhals connects PRC human intelligence practices to those prevalent in other Cold War nations. Internationally, as he posits, there was much overlap in intelligence work, and a document relating advice from a visiting KGB expert underscores this argument. But, despite the prominence of the Cold War in the book’s subtitle, most of the individual documents reveal little about international politics. Instead, readers are treated to a front-row seat for intimate accounts of daily life in Maoist China that provide much insight into the lives of secret agents and their colleagues, relatives, and neighbors. One persistent theme in the documents is the importance of finances. Agents repeatedly asked their handlers for better jobs, if not subsidies, to ensure their financial survival, which gives readers an understanding of the difficulties of urban life in Mao’s China.
While Schoenhals curated the documents in Eyes and Ears for student readers, it will be up to individual instructors to decide how to use this collection in their classrooms. Assigned as a whole, the book may be suitable for seminars focused on working with texts produced by agents of the PRC state. Individual documents, especially those that highlight grassroots experiences or the difficulties of using PRC sources, should find a wider range of applications. For example, Chapter 11 introduces readers to a problematic agent who was deeply troubled by her financial situation. While her casefile reveals much about the contours of urban life in Mao’s China, because she personally penned a firsthand account of her actions, student readers will also have to consider how to use a document produced for a very specific audience: her handlers working for the PRC state.
I also strongly recommend Chapter 13 for its revealing account of university life in Harbin during the first months of the Cultural Revolution. Faculty at an unnamed medical school initially focused on internal squabbles, particularly an alleged extramarital affair. They largely ignored the Cultural Revolution as a political campaign until “big character posters” denounced some faculty members as reactionaries. Soon, Red Guards at the university beat faculty in struggle meetings and locked them in dormitories. A young professor who reported on the thoughts and movements of his colleagues, meanwhile, feared he would be outed as a secret agent. The professor’s detailed coverage of politically charged conversations that he had with a boiler room worker while his colleagues defended themselves from students should inspire no shortage of classroom discussion.
In Eyes and Ears, Schoenhals has produced an extraordinarily valuable contribution to the field. My only quibbles with the book are minor. I would have asked the author to explicitly discuss how he found each source; while the golden days of garbology may be behind us, graduate students could learn a trick or two from his experiences sourcing valuable documents from flea markets and recyclers. And while each of the book’s parts includes an image of a document, I was curious to find out more about the physical objects themselves, and the material features of them that were lost when their texts were extracted for translation. Some of the contextual information located in the endnotes, finally, might have been more useful to student readers if it were provided as footnotes or in-text explanations. These minor issues, however, should not detract from the collection’s potential classroom value.
