Introduction
On 22 November 1963, in conversation with one of his vice-ministers of public security, Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong claimed that ‘Our public security work has always (lilai) been different from the Soviet Union's’.Footnote 1 How different and in what sense, Mao left unsaid, but many early foreign observers of the new socio-political order being built in the People's Republic would probably have agreed. The 30-year old American journalist Doak Barnett, who had left China for Hong Kong in 1950, wrote in 1953 about how ‘a nationwide system of police informers has been organized’, but added that ‘secret police organizations. . .do not appear to be as omnipresent as their counterparts in the Soviet Union’.Footnote 2 The German political scientist and Sinologist Jürgen Domes concluded in his 1972 analysis of the ‘era of Mao Zedong’ that a system of ‘political police’, or a secret security apparatus, ‘never achieved the strong position initially held by the GPU [State Political Directorate] and later by the NKVD [People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs] in the Stalinist Soviet Union’.Footnote 3
The present study picks up the theme of Sino-Soviet differences and similarities in ‘public security work’ by investigating the practice of operational agent recruitment in trade and industry in the People's Republic on the eve of the Korean War. The broader context is that of the state's monitoring of socioeconomic activities vital to the day-to-day functioning of any country, and safeguarding the production and distribution of goods and services on which the health, growth, and security of all nations depend. While there may have been much that was uniquely Maoist about the political and other campaigns conducted in China in and after 1950, agent recruitment in business enterprises, corporations, and factories was a sphere of operational work where little set the People's Republic of China apart from the Soviet Union. The actual recruitment process was strikingly similar to the Verbovka agenta discussed in Soviet textbooks, and only minor details distinguished the running of the recruited agents from Rukovodstvo agentom—the KGB term for the ‘guidance process whereby an operational officer ensures that an agent carries out his operational assignments’.Footnote 4
The problem with attempts to historically document operational activities is, not surprisingly, that independent researchers are still denied access to official archival records on the subject. If we were to attempt to write accounts of such activities by relying solely on what custodians of Chinese state archives make available to us, we would likely run the risk of becoming what a British intelligence historian has spoken of as ‘something close to official historians, albeit once removed’.Footnote 5 What that might entail in terms of a paucity of factual information is illustrated by the 460-page Draft History of the Chinese People's Public Security, the publication of which was approved ‘for official use only’ by the Ministry of Public Security. In it, operational agent work after 1949 remains a totally unexplored topic, as do surveillance, interception of postal communications, and technical operations.Footnote 6
In order to find a way around this problem—one that Sebastian Jobs and Alf Lüdtke have identified as the ‘problematic nature of archival governance’ which ‘evolves as a set of practices relying on and, at the same time, pre-configuring historical analysis’Footnote 7—this study draws primarily on sources collected in the course of countless ‘garbology’ excursions to Chinese urban flea markets and the back rooms of antiquarian book sellers. Here the enterprising historian is today able to pick up the most remarkable kinds of documents, including—as in the present case—those that may no longer be de jure classified, but which nonetheless are not released to researchers in state archives: progress reports on agent recruitment, a survey of the moods of recruited agents during the first weeks of the Korean War, speeches delivered at regional and national gatherings of operational officers, and much more. These documents do more than merely flesh out a history that state archives already tell: they permit sceptical, independent historians to probe clues to and explore traces of entire new (in the sense of hitherto obscured) ‘layers’ of the past.Footnote 8
Sabotage: a very real threat
When it finally came, victory came suddenly. On 30 December 1948, Mao Zedong had cabled Josef Stalin predicting that ‘now one can for the most part overthrow the power of the Guomindang in the course of three and a half years’.Footnote 9 Only nine months later, on 1 October 1949, Mao was standing on top of the Tiananmen in Beijing declaring that ‘now, the People's War of Liberation has been basically won, and the majority of the people in the country have been liberated’.Footnote 10 The collapse of the old order had unfolded with unanticipated speed.
But political victory and the cessation of major hostilities north of the Yangzi River was not yet tantamount to peace. In southwest China, for example, the situation remained tense and extremely volatile well into the second half of 1950: in the words of historian Jeremy Brown, discussing the province of Guizhou, ‘[it] was no honeymoon. It was civil war’.Footnote 11 In Northeast China, the big cities were by comparison calm, yet their economy and infrastructure remained under threat from Guomindang ‘stay-behind’ operatives and recently fielded saboteurs. An editorial in the People's Daily claimed in July 1950 that:
According to incomplete statistics from the industrial and mining sector in Shenyang, Anshan, Benxi, and Fushun, and from a small number of factories and mines in [the provinces of] Jilin, Liaodong, and Songjiang, no less than 253 fairly major attempts—some successful, others prevented—at counter-revolutionary sabotage took place between the beginning of last year and the end of March this year. The value of the property lost in nineteen of those cases has been valued at a total of 20.39 billion yuan. The losses caused by disruptions in production as a result of destroyed machinery and destroyed high-power electricity lines is even higher. So for example, the cost of a fifteen minute production stop at one factory in the Northeast as a result of high-power electricity lines being cut was estimated at 900 million yuan.Footnote 12
The transport sector was a particularly frequent sabotage target, as classified reports from the Ministry of Railways in Beijing revealed. According to incomplete statistics compiled in late 1950, China's overburdened railway network had witnessed 813 attempts at sabotage (412 of them successfully prevented) in the first eight months of 1950, resulting in numerous destroyed locomotives, railway carriages, and bridges.Footnote 13 Subsequent to China's entry into the Korean War in October 1950, the passage of troops and supplies suggested additional potential transport vulnerabilities to be exploited by saboteurs. So for example between November 1950 and May 1951, armed contingents of public security officers thwarted four attempts by ‘bandit operatives’ to blow up the Lanzhou iron bridge across the Yellow River.Footnote 14
Responses
The Central Ministry of Public Security, as it was then called, struggled to prevent acts of sabotage like these aided by the People's Liberation Army and by armed worker pickets.Footnote 15 But the ministry and its regional and lower-level counterparts were ominously resource-strapped. They faced a shortage of experienced officers on the ground, and at intermediate and higher levels of leadership as well. A National Public Security Personnel Work Conference convened by the Central Ministry of Public Security in the first days of June 1951 found that public security organs across China were operating at a mere two-thirds of their authorized personnel strength.Footnote 16
Everything was done to optimize the allocation of scarce available resources. A premium was put on information coordination, among affected agencies, without which the protection of industrial facilities, transportation, coal and oil (fuel) storage and transportation, electrical power systems, water supply, banking, and finance would simply be impossible. In due course, China's economic planners were able to assist the Central Ministry of Public Security with relevant data collection, but initially they did not have the logistical capacity to do so. Part of the answer to the question of where to focus resources was, under these conditions, resolved using different information. As a complement to, if not actually a substitute for, in-house lists of priority sites to secure first of all, public security organs used adversary intelligence requirements.
Whenever such requirements were obtained, they were in the first instance disseminated to those with an immediate ‘need to know’ and then reproduced in redacted form in operational serials. At the end of 1950, classified Protection Work Materials printed by the People's Liberation Army in the South-Central Military Region contained the text of a 7 March 1950 Intelligence Work Outline drafted by the Guomindang South China Security Bureau, espionage requirements given to Security Bureau operatives prior to entering communist-controlled territory, and a summary of plans and requirements drawn up by American intelligence in Hong Kong. On 15 January 1951, the Protection Department of the Political Department of the People's Liberation Army in the North China Military Region included the same documents in its classified Protection Work Construction, of which 1,400 copies were printed and distributed to the regiment level. The United States, the document from Hong Kong had revealed, was ‘primarily collecting strategic intelligence’ concerning ‘mineral deposits, natural resources, communication, transport, food supplies, naval and airborne activities’. The Guomindang requirements were tactical and dealt with everything from the movement of Chinese Communist Party leaders to the ‘operational status of airports in and around Shanghai: current length and capacity of runways, number of aircraft parked, number and rank of any Soviet air force personnel present, etc.’. In a concluding comment on the requirements, the Protection Department of the Political Department of the People's Liberation Army in the North China Military Region stressed how ‘they draw our attention to a number of points on which we need to focus when determining policy and priorities in secrecy and counter-espionage work’.Footnote 17
Once systematic inter-agency coordination between China's civilian and defence-related economic, intelligence, and public security sectors became routine, information from economic planners on priorities were combined with informed threat analyses and evolved into asset databases. Nothing is known in detail about how these databases were maintained, except that they were comprehensively managed and (in theory) regularly updated. Complaints about their actual neglect was voiced during rectification campaigns aimed at improving the quality of leadership and operational work.Footnote 18 Assessments of vulnerabilities and risks, proposals for developing and implementing plans and protective measures, and post-mortems of operations such as foiled sabotage attempts, were meant to be disseminated to public security officers in industrial, mining, capital construction, trade, and financial sectors. The agency tasked with all of this was the Central Ministry of Public Security 2nd Bureau, the national lead agency for the protection of vital infrastructure.
The Central Ministry of Public Security 2nd Bureau: Lead Agency for Economic Security
Prior to 1949, the Chinese Communist Party had left the task of ensuring the security of vital infrastructure in the hands of the same institutions that managed threats viewed as political and ideological challenges to the party.Footnote 19 But when the People's Republic of China was founded, the situation changed quite dramatically and such an arrangement was no longer deemed viable. At the national level, a separate dedicated structure (under the new Central Ministry of Public Security 2nd Bureau) was set up to serve, first of all, the need to protect facilities, services, and installations so critical that their degrading or destruction would have a debilitating impact on China's economic security. It became operational on 24 March 1950, after the 25th session of Zhou Enlai's Government Administration Council passed a ‘Decision to Institute Protection Work in State Financial and Economic Departments’.Footnote 20
The regulatory framework spelling out just how the protection of the infrastructure was henceforth to be organized was drawn up jointly by the Central Ministry of Public Security and the Central Financial Commission which oversaw and coordinated the work of the ministries for finance, industry, transport, agriculture, and forestry. Chen Yun, the commission chairman, was himself no stranger to security matters after having, for a period in the early 1930s, headed the Chinese Communist Party's equivalent of the Soviet Cheka, the Central Special Services Section (Zhongyang teke).Footnote 21 A draft set of ‘Regulations Governing the Organization and Work of Protection Organs in State Financial and Economic Departments’ was circulated in the wake of the 1st National Conference on Economic Protection Work in May 1950;Footnote 22 a final text containing a number of revisions affecting tasks and the exercise of Chinese Communist Party leadership was circulated six months later.Footnote 23
The 2nd Bureau oversaw the creation of a vast lattice work of security sections and dedicated officers in all major sectors of industry. Most security sections were small and quite basic, but the Central Ministry of Public Security and Central Financial Commission made special provisions for the exceptional circumstances that applied in vital state-run enterprises like the railways, Yumen oil fields, Jiangxi tungsten mines, and others. Attached to these were public security bureaus or sub-bureaus equal in administrative and nomenklatura terms to similarly designated entities in municipalities or counties.Footnote 24 This, in effect, was a green light for the introduction of covert surveillance and other operational resources to vital infrastructure protection, and on this point the Minister of Public Security, Luo Ruiqing, had reasoned as follows at the 1st National Conference on Economic Protection Work:
Cunning and experienced adversaries operate clandestinely below ground to sabotage us. After suffering a string of attacks, they have become even more covert and clandestine, and this, in turn, has forced us to keep our operational work (its organization and personnel included) extremely secret. We have had to create an independent apparatus, strictly separated from our public work in organizational terms. [Public and secret] work is to proceed in close concert by way of unified leadership at higher levels.Footnote 25
The ‘higher levels’ to which Luo referred were not just any superior bodies but very specifically Chinese Communist Party bodies (e.g. party committees) one level above that at which coordination was called for. On 27 September 1950, Mao Zedong himself commented very pointedly on the (revised text of the) documents produced by the conference by saying that ‘in protection work, it is imperative that particular stress be put on the Party's leadership role and that [this work] be subject to the actual direct leadership of Party committees, since anything else would be very dangerous’.Footnote 26
At the conference, Luo listed the tasks he expected the Central Ministry of Public Security 2nd Bureau and its lower-level equivalents to prioritize. The first was simply to raise awareness among all public security officers of the importance of infrastructure protection and counter-sabotage work. As the municipal head of economic security in Beijing put it while expanding on Luo's priorities in a post-conference report to his officers, ‘the target that adversary operatives are plotting to destroy is first and foremost economic construction’.Footnote 27 A second task put forth by Luo was very specific: ‘particular attention’ was to be paid to fostering operational officers and agent handlers.Footnote 28 In the summer of 1950, pilot programmes to do just that, and to recruit agents in vital sectors of the economy, were embarked upon in cities across northern and northeastern China. One of these cities was Yingkou, a former treaty port in Manchuria, first opened to international trade by the Qing authorities in 1858.
Yingkou: pilot programme for agent recruitment
Yingkou is located near the mouth of the Liao River in Northeast China and was in the early years of the People's Republic of China in administrative terms subordinate to Liaodong Province. That province, which ceased to exist in 1954, was in turn subordinate to a regional People's Government. In 1950, Yingkou municipality had a population of 110,000 people.Footnote 29 It hosted a strong Soviet presence.
After being instructed to do so by the Liaodong provincial Bureau of Public Security (gonganting), the Yingkou municipal Bureau of Public Security (gonganju) in July 1950 embarked on a programme to recruit agents in a number of key factories, mines, and enterprises. The genesis of this programme may be traced to a regional ‘vocational conference’ of public security officers held in the wake of the 1st National Conference on Economic Protection Work in Beijing. The regional meeting was addressed by one Li Zhao (who after rising steadily in the ranks would in 1958 become director of the Central Ministry of Public Security 2nd Bureau) who ‘transmitted the spirit’ of the Beijing conference. Wang Jinxiang, Northeast China's regional minister of public security, spoke specifically on agent work and insisted, cautiously, that training future case officers in all aspects of how to ‘run’ agents should now be given top priority. ‘At present’, Wang stressed,
in a situation where a majority of our cadres lack experience and knowledge of how to utilize [agents], one is not to make extensive use of them. First, the [public security] organs [at and] above the provincial and municipal levels should [only] make prioritized and purposeful use of them on an experimental basis. Their widespread use should be promoted gradually once experience has been gained.Footnote 30
In early September 1950, the Yingkou Bureau of Public Security had evidently gained sufficient experience in agent matters to justify sending a first progress report to the provincial Bureau. On 25 September, the Northeast Ministry of Public Security forwarded the report to senior officers in the region. Its recipients were told to use it as a tool ‘for reference’ when assessing the progress their own agent recruitment efforts were making. Two months later, the report—still classified Top Secret—became available to a slightly wider audience when it appeared in Public Security and Protection Work, a vocational serial produced by the Northeast Ministry of Public Security.Footnote 31
The first step taken by the Yingkou Bureau of Public Security, as it began its agent recruitment programme, was to identify a number of suitable public security officers and to dispatch them, under suitable covers, to the sites where recruitments were to be attempted. The first group consisted of three officers whose covers were chosen, in direct consultation with the local Communist Party leadership, with a view specifically towards facilitating their agent-related tasks. One public security officer was sent to the Yingkou Paper Mill where he assumed, as his cover, the position of Party general branch deputy party secretary; another officer was sent to the Oils & Fats Corporation where he would serve as personnel section head; and yet another officer was sent to work as an ordinary staff member in the personnel section of the Yingkou municipal Power Industry Bureau.Footnote 32 General permission to use covers like these had recently been granted at the very highest level and would have dispelled any concerns that lower-level party leaderships might have had as to their appropriateness. On 6 July 1950, the Central Ministry of Public Security had decreed (prompted specifically by the situation in Northeast China) that
to use the administrative, labour union, personnel, etc. sections as cover when carrying out protection work in factories and mines constitutes one of the forms that we employ as we develop our covert work and engage in covert struggle. Provided it benefits the eradication of the adversary, flexibility with respect to organizational form is permissible’.Footnote 33
For historians, decades after the event, to locate and interview individuals who actually served in ‘extraordinary’ capacities in the personnel sections of enterprises or institutions in the early years of the People's Republic of China is difficult. In the course of studying the consolidation of the new order in workplaces in Shanghai, Eddy U spoke in the late 1990s to numerous ageing informants, and his description of one of them does provide at least a superficial sense of what serving in just such a capacity may have been like:
On the surface, Chen Yongtong, the other young party member taught politics and acted as a political counsellor for students. A large part of his work, however, involved what was officially and euphemistically referred to as ‘personnel matters’. He kept in regular contact with the Public Security Bureau, assisted in its investigation of the background of the faculty, and studied his colleagues’ confessions and performance during political campaigns. Sometimes, he travelled to places outside of Shanghai to verify the backgrounds of his colleagues. A security liaison for the state, Chen was a powerful man on campus.Footnote 34
Unfortunately, since U's mission was to investigate rather different topics, the account does not clarify just how institutionalized the informant's ‘security liaison’ work had been.
Each Yingkou officer had received his assignment through the Economic Protection Section of the municipal Bureau of Public Security. This same section had also informed the head of security in the enterprise to which the operational officer was sent of his arrival and actual mission. The head of security was expected to keep this information to himself and discreetly ‘act in concert’ with the officer so as to facilitate the latter's mission.Footnote 35
Once the first three operational officers had had a chance to familiarize themselves with their new environments and engage in a preliminary assessment of what they were facing in terms of potential recruitment targets, they informed the municipal Economic Protection Section. Meanwhile, an additional two officers had been dispatched, one to the Yingkou Textile Plant, the other to the Northeast Regional Salt Bureau. Eventually, a meeting was held at the Economic Protection Section at which a preliminary overall plan on how to proceed was drawn up and discussed. In the wake of the meeting, accompanied by the head of security with whom he was cooperating, each operational officer was briefed separately on the overall plan and provided with an opportunity to give his input and propose how it might best be implemented in his locale.Footnote 36
Much of what was discussed at this initial stage dealt with profiling and other matters of a practical nature, for example, how to apply policy and general principles to the actual situation on the ground. General principles, as it were, called for the secret, planned, targeted, indirect, and weighted investigation of the current mindset, attitude, and behaviour of ‘registered reactionaries’ (dengfan renyuan) (in Northeast Ministry of Public Security usage a term referring to former members of ‘reactionary’ political parties and organizations who early on had registered themselves as such with the new authoritiesFootnote 37), technicians, and (holdover) staff. They also mandated an investigation of the same people's past, family background, social connections, attitude towards the Communist Party, and how likely the target of a recruitment effort was to already have (or be in a position to develop) contacts with the ‘adversary’. To obtain all this information meant creatively utilizing a number of different channels. The Yingkou progress report mentioned only in passing the local Communist Party, administration, the New Democratic Youth League, and labour union bodies in the factories and enterprises it concerned;Footnote 38 slightly more detail was provided in a similar contemporary document from the Economic Protection Section of the Shenyang municipal Bureau of Public Security. It made reference to:
(1) Perusal and study of the documentation already controlled by the security section and party, administrative, labour union, and Youth League bodies in the factory/enterprise in question;
(2) Conduct a search guided by previous incidents in the factory/enterprise in question;
(3) Research and profiling in collaboration with comrades who used to work in the [Chinese Communist Party] underground;
(4) Conduct a search informed by the normal working circumstances and facts known to the public security organs at all levels;
(5) Study of information of relevance provided by the broad masses of employees;
(6) Attempt to identify targets based on information reported by already existing agents.Footnote 39
In the end, the aim of the search was to narrow down the number of targets for recruitment to a manageable handful of strategically positioned individuals.Footnote 40
In Liaodong province, there was in 1950 some confusion as to who the ‘adversary’ (against whom agents were to be deployed) really was. In a directive issued on 16 July to municipal and county public security officers, the provincial Bureau of Public Security had claimed that as a distinct category, there was now no longer such a thing as ‘Guomindang operatives’, and the adversary that operational officers and their agents were to engage consisted of the operatives and secret agents of imperialism—the ‘US imperialists in particular’. When this assessment became known to the Northeast Ministry of Public Security, it was immediately rejected. On 22 August, in a letter addressed to the heads of the Liaodong Bureau of Public Security (reproduced in full in Public Security and Protection Work) the ministry pointed out that to focus one's agent work exclusively on finding and neutralizing operatives who worked directly for the United States was a tactical mistake. There were still plenty of Guomindang operatives around, posing threats of varying severity. In fact, almost the very opposite of what Liaodong argued was true, the ministry insisted: the primary ‘adversary’ which public security officers were to have in mind as they began recruiting agents in key factories, mines, and enterprises, were the ‘many Guomindang operatives with whom we are engaged in direct combat. In actuality, they are the American operatives. Therefore their elimination is also a strike against the American operatives’.Footnote 41
Considered from the start by the Yingkou operational officers was the reliability of the information obtained on suitable agent ‘material’. Guidelines called for source collation and corroboration: one central point to be considered was whether what emerged could be independently verified. Ultimately, the information was supposed to support the contention that a potential agent had been found in the individual X for n clear and concise reasons. When it did not, this meant if not outright rejection then at best consideration as a mere informal contact. In the Yingkou Paper Mill, one initial target for recruitment (a technician) was in the end rejected as unsuitable because ‘he stands out among the masses and they always have their eyes on him, hence he is likely to be of little use and would [at best] be able to serve as a common informant (ermu)’.Footnote 42 The final word in all cases of whether to go ahead with a recruitment or not was that of the municipal Bureau of Public Security. It was only after having been vetted and approved by the bureau that a recruitment plan could be put into operation.Footnote 43
What was also discussed at this stage was the kind of recruitment method to be employed. Although the Central Ministry of Public Security recognized a wider range of techniques, the circumstances on the ground in Yingkou narrowed the choice down to one of two options. The first was the ‘hard pitch’ that operational officers often defaulted on in the case of hostile targets: the coercive use of compromising material (babing) combined with political pressure. The second was the option politically preferable in the case of technicians, engineers, and staff not necessarily hostile to the Chinese Communist Party and deemed amenable to persuasion: dispensing as much as possible with the coercive element and seeking instead to genuinely convince the individual that it was in his or her personal interest to cooperate. How to actually proceed with such a strategy was determined on a case-by-case basis and meant taking into account the target's everyday habits, mentality, and character. The recruitment—in Yingkou referred to simply as the ‘breakthrough’ (tupo)—would only be attempted once a fairly close bond had been established and the likelihood of rejection was seen as small.Footnote 44
One kind of recruitment and agent running strategy that public security officers were cautioned against employing was the—presumably not uncommon—one that relied almost entirely on financial or other material rewards, while involving close to no political or ideological element of any kind. An officer in the port city of Lüda (Dalian), some 250 kilometres south of Yingkou by train, wrote critically of this strategy in the spring of 1950.Footnote 45 On the ground, he said, some officers were
of the mistaken opinion ‘there's nothing money can't buy’ and believe that as long as one is prepared to provide one's contacts with financial assistance, they will in the end always oblige. As a result, officers don't look carefully at—don't analyze or give much thought to—what kind of people they're fostering as their contacts. They don't plan for the long term: all they are is eager to achieve quick results here and now. They cannot be bothered with attentively and patiently training their contacts to a point where they become genuinely politically aware and cooperate with us as such when we strike back at renegades and eliminate adversary assets. . .In some cases, every time the contacts have done a little something for them, [these officers] promptly invite them to a movie or a meal in a restaurant. As a result, their contacts get into the habit of expecting just that, and when it fails to happen they complain, moan and groan, insist times are hard, say they haven't eaten yet, and demand means with which to conduct business. They may even start to make up stories and say that if we want to see achievements, we need to provide them with funds for social intercourse, disguises, and any number of things. Everything then revolves around money.Footnote 46
The one way in which operational officers were encouraged to use money as an element in their overall agent recruitment strategy was not by promising to provide more of it, but by implying that unless a target's cooperation was forthcoming, what little income he or she already had might possibly disappear. In the document from the Shenyang Economic Protection Section quoted earlier, it was noted that enterprise employees (those with few or no technical skills in particular) ‘fear nothing more than losing their job. Sometimes an entire family depends on his one income, and were he to lose his job, it would be a disaster. This is one factor that works in our favour when it comes to developing agents in factories and enterprises’.Footnote 47
During the initial phase of the programme, the Economic Protection Section of the Yingkou Bureau of Public Security assessed the overall ‘mood’ amongst the potential targets. Not surprisingly, a majority of ‘registered reactionaries’ turned out to be intimidated if not terrified by the situation in which they found themselves. They hesitated to initiate contact with the Communist Party, and were particularly afraid of having anything to do with the representatives of the security section in their workplaces. In their professional capacities, they often worked hard and sought at all costs to avoid committing mistakes or doing anything that might lead to their termination. The basic explanation for their behaviour and attitudes, the Yingkou Economic Protection Section concluded, had everything do with their fear of the hardships that unemployment would entail.Footnote 48 The same unsurprising conclusion was also reached by the Shenyang Economic Protection Section.Footnote 49
Some members of the category of beneficiaries of the old order did signal that they genuinely wanted to shift their political allegiance. In the words of the public security officers affected, they not only expressed professional commitment but sought in various ways to get close to ‘us’. This, for example, was the case with one ex-Guomindang member in the Northeast Regional Salt Bureau who had ‘realized the error of his past ways’ and who now worked hard and conscientiously. Without needing to be prodded, it was noted, ‘he volunteers information of a general nature to us’.Footnote 50
Again, there were of course also those who remained all along very hostile to the Chinese Communist Party and who were biding their time, waiting for a return to the political status quo ante. Quite a few believed that the war on the Korean peninsula would prove to be the start of World War III and—on the assumption that in such a war, the United States, with its nuclear arsenal, would emerge the winner—they saw no need to commit themselves to the new order. Their hostility did not, it was said, win them any friends among the ‘masses’ and they were, as individuals, increasingly isolated. One example was a former member of the Guomindang Central Statistics Bureau in the Yingkou Paper Mill. In the past, he had been able to gain lots of fringe benefits through his work for the Central Statistics Bureau, but now these were all gone. His attitude was that the regular salary he earned each month was such a paltry sum it got him nowhere, and he might as well cease working altogether. ‘The masses’, needless to say, shunned him.Footnote 51
Fear of what might happen if the war on the Korean peninsula spilled over into China was widespread. Rumours about World War III spread fast and far, and a survey that aimed at finding out how the attitudes and behaviour of agents already recruited were changing as a result of events in Korea found that many were wavering and that control and supervision needed to be strengthened as quickly as possible.Footnote 52
Among the technicians and engineers in Yingkou, it was possible in 1950 to distinguish between a couple of fairly distinct attitudes toward what the Economic Protection Section of the municipal Bureau of Public Security insisted on calling simply ‘us’. In this case, geographical origins played a role: the ‘southerners’ who had come to Northeast China recently were different from the natives and long-term residents. The technicians from the south were generally unwilling to become involved in politics. They sought to stay as far away as possible from the Communist Party and concentrated their energies entirely on professional matters. The Economic Protection Section argued that this was a direct result of their having lived and worked in the ‘white areas’ all their lives and furthermore been seriously ‘poisoned’ by reactionary education. The few technicians from southern China who did take the initiative to approach ‘us’ were often held in low esteem by the rest, who accused them of ‘playing politics’ (zou zhengzhi luxian). The technicians and engineers who were natives, on the other hand, were on the whole ready to work closely with the new authorities and did not have the same compulsions as the southerners. A technician in the Oils & Fats Corporation, for example, had previously worked for the British and believed himself to have been treated very unfairly by them. Hence he was now quite happy to serve under Chinese management, and tried his best to make a positive impression on ‘us’.Footnote 53
The profiling information collected on the targets was meant to be checked, double-checked, and cross-checked. If there was a major problem, initial plans to recruit an agent might be shelved. This happened in the case of an engineer in the Textile Plant who was known for certain to have been a member of the Central Statistics Bureau, but who had not stepped forward to become a ‘registered reactionary’. In fact, he had persistently failed to admit this part of his past when interrogated about it by the staff of his plant's personnel section. Apparently uncertain of how to deal with him, the undercover public security officer in his plant decided to abandon an initial plan to attempt the engineer's recruitment.Footnote 54
The Yingkou Bureau of Public Security progress report contained only a couple of brief descriptions of how actual agent recruitments had proceeded. The first description dealt with how ex-Guomindang members who, as it happened, had been positively disposed towards the Communist Party from the outset, had been recruited:
One of them, XXX in the No. 5 Textile Plant, had committed no major crimes, made quite a thorough confession at the time of his registration [with the authorities], was eager to make ideological progress, and had an active social life. In view of all of this, we chose to inspire and educate him ideologically, and then call on him to swear an oath to work for us. We succeeded in making a break-through, although it should be noted that [reactionary] party and organization elements easily panic ideologically when asked to swear an oath or sign a piece of paper (huaya). For example, [Wang] XX in the Paper Mill, after he had been called on to go through the routine of swearing an oath and signing a piece of paper (Wang's oath went ‘I swear to keep the execution of my work a secret and not engage in double-dealing or comply in public but oppose in private. . .’ etc.), he [suddenly] became very troubled and began to express doubts about us.Footnote 55
This particular description prompted a brief critical comment from the Liaodong provincial Bureau of Public Security on the Yingkou report. The comment asked for additional, equally concrete and much needed examples illustrating how the officers in Yingkou had succeeded in recruiting—as their report claimed in passing they had—hostile former members of ‘reactionary’ political parties and organizations through a ‘combination of outright pressure and political undermining’ (qiangpo yu zhengzhi wajie xiang jiehe).Footnote 56
A second description was intended to illustrate how the Yingkou officers had gone about recruiting agents from among the technicians in the same two factories:
The technician (from southern China) in the Paper Mill enjoys having a good time (dancing, making music, singing, playing ball, etc.), so we joined him in this and began building up a relationship (proceeding from being mere acquaintances to becoming friends). In due course, the relationship went from being exclusively private to involving politics as well, deepening gradually. Once we had achieved our break-through, we managed to realize our goal of having him work voluntarily for us. The technician XXX in the Textile Plant is someone who is loyal and honest, hesitates to seek the limelight, rarely has the eyes of the masses on him, has been around, and has an active social life. By studying technical matters and investigating glitches together with him, paying him due respect and treating him as our teacher, we managed to make friends with him privately, and in the end succeeded in having him volunteer to work for us. So for example, when we told him ‘We were hoping you might be able to help us in our work’, he responded without hesitation saying ‘How could I not? Of course I will help you’.Footnote 57
This description prompted the Liaodong provincial Bureau of Public Security to add a second marginal comment, this one a reassuring one giving the Yingkou officers better marks for the way they had recruited technicians than for how they had managed to handle the ‘registered reactionaries’.Footnote 58 On this point, their progress stood in contrast to that of their Economic Protection Section colleagues in Shenyang who by late September 1950 could credibly claim to have become expert at ‘turning’ hard-core reactionaries, but meanwhile had recruited so few technicians and engineers as agents that they had to, on this point, tell the Northeast Ministry of Public Security ‘we [still] have limited experience, and what we have we have not yet summarized, hence at this time there is nothing to report’.Footnote 59
By the start of September 1950, the operational officer in the Textile Plant had managed to recruit four agents. Two of these were members of political parties and organizations hostile to the Communist Party, a third a technician from southern China, and the fourth a native Manchurian technician. The officer in the Yingkou Paper Mill, meanwhile, had recruited seven agents: three members of political parties and organizations hostile to the Party, one technician from southern China, two technicians from Hebei province, and one member of the mill's administrative staff. In the Northeast Regional Salt Bureau and in the Yingkou municipal Power Industry Bureau, three and two agents respectively had been recruited from among the former members of political parties and organizations hostile to the Party. The operational officer in the Oils & Fats Corporation, finally, had managed to recruit as his agent one member of the Guomindang Three People's Principles Youth Corps. To their superiors, the officers explained that because of their own lack of experience, they felt unsure of the progress they were making. Running agents was a new and difficult task: initially, they cautioned, echoing Wang Jinxiang's words at the regional conference mentioned earlier, it was important not to expect too much to come out of it. Having only just recruited their agents, they were busy conducting simple source credibility assessments by asking, for example, the ‘registered reactionaries’ to provide low grade intelligence that was already known to the Economic Protection Section and see how and if they managed to do so. In the Salt Bureau, for example, one of the three agents recruited was tasked with providing information on what the ‘suspicious character’ X was doing in his spare time, after work. The agent, it was deemed, performed very well since everything he reported tallied very well with what his handler already knew from other sources.Footnote 60
The Yingkou pilot programme progress report was, for obvious reasons, devoted almost exclusively to agent recruitment and did not have much to say about agent debriefing, tasking, performance monitoring, tradecraft, and the like. The Liaodong Bureau of Public Security in its comment on the report took note of this and hinted at what future progress reports ought to focus on: ‘Of course, the methods referred to in the report from the Yingkou municipal bureau are still very incomplete, and there is still a need to further study the training and direction of agents, how to maintain contact with them, and how to make the best possible use of them’.Footnote 61
Conclusion
Did the investment in the operational recruitment of agents in cities like Yingkou pay off? One hint at how effectively the Central Ministry of Public Security (and, in the ‘first line of work’, the operational officers and their agents that the 2nd Bureau and its lower-level equivalents were able to field) managed to thwart attempted sabotage by one of its Cold War adversaries was given in 1961 by the then director of Chiang Kai-shek's Intelligence Bureau Ye Xiangzhi. In a speech behind closed doors lamenting the many ‘flaws and problems we run up against in our clandestine sabotage’, he complained bitterly about how the work meant to be carried out by his organization was ‘unable to point at any achievements’.Footnote 62 His admission clearly implies that the spectrum of operational work overseen by the Central Ministry of Public Security 2nd Bureau after 1949 proved effective. Needless to say, numerous other factors also contributed, including what Luo Ruiqing's political secretary called ‘the advantages of having secret work and mass work proceed in concert’.Footnote 63 But the recruitment and use of agents certainly deserves to be given its historical due in any account of Chinese Communist Party regime consolidation.
To what extent did the use of agents proceed to become more institutionalized and sophisticated in the years that followed? In the 1950s, its quality was uneven and its improvement impeded by policy reversals provoked by a perceived conflict on the implementation level between so-called ‘routine work’ (jingchang gongzuo) (for example, planning, source registration, technical support, tasking, and situation awareness) and the ‘surge’ tactics called for by Mao Zedong's politically mandated ‘mass movements’. The 2nd National Conference on Economic Protection Work, which met for a week in Beijing in mid May 1951, took stock of initial progress and noted that while capacity building overall had gone ‘from nonexistent to existent’, there were still major problems: ‘Operational work in particular has not yet been properly developed. There is still a considerable shortage of officers (baowei ganbu). Some protection units are not yet up to scratch’.Footnote 64 The pace of change in these respects would continue to be slow: 12 months after the conference, the Central Ministry of Public Security in its third-quarter work plan (ratified by the Chinese Communist Party Centre) for 1952 expressed continued serious concern about a shortage of officers and agents available for the protection of critical infrastructure.Footnote 65 Concrete remedies were proposed that took into account some of the experiences with recruitment described here.
One early high point as far as the 2nd Bureau's reliance on agents was concerned occurred in 1952. At the regional 7th Public Security Conference in the spring, the Northeast Ministry of Public Security leadership announced that in Northeast China ‘priority resources are to be invested in the struggle against the covert operatives and spies dispatched or left behind by the Americans, Chiang [Kai-shek], and [Syngman] Rhee’.Footnote 66 This theme was reiterated at the 3rd National Conference on Economic Protection Work, held in Beijing in August 1952. The conference adopted a resolution that addressed the question of how to proceed nationwide in those ‘important factories, mines, enterprises, and railways’ where the security situation was already fairly good and comparable to that in the Northeast. The resolution called for a ‘transformation’ involving ‘scaling back certain unnecessary open work of mass character while strengthening covert operational work, and moving from[2] a battle engaging mainly the. . . counter-revolutionary elements who are active on the surface, toward[2] a battle against concealed US and Chiang spies and operatives’.Footnote 67 Luo Ruiqing, when submitting the text of the resolution to the Party Centre for approval, called for ‘operational contingents of our economic protection departments to be reinforced, with the aim of concentrating our resources on actively attacking the hidden adversaries—in particular those hidden among our technical personnel—and to ensure, in this way, the safety of production’.Footnote 68 This idea was endorsed at the highest national level when the resolution was ratified by the Party Centre on 30 August 1952: its text called for nothing less than the extensive ‘cultivation of agents, in accordance with the principles of necessity and capability, in a steady, planned, targeted, bold, and all-out way’.Footnote 69
The policies backed by the Party leadership in 1952 would, however, come to be seen in a different light before the end of the decade. Evidently, there had always been rational differences of opinion about resource allocation, strategy, and tactics, and at the 9th National Public Security Conference—which met for eight weeks in the summer of 1958, at the height of the most radical phase of the Great Leap Forward—Wang Jinxiang singled out some of the policies for criticism. An originally cautious but firm supporter of the use of agents, Wang now noted how
in terms of where we directed our attacks, there was a period prior to and after the 3rd National Conference on Economic Protection Work during which we put undue stress on operational work and blindly pursued special cases involving US and Chiang operatives, while we neglected to stress, or stressed insufficiently, the adversaries who created incidents and engaged in a vast number of other kinds of active destructive acts’.Footnote 70
But even in 1958, when openly calling for the ‘scaling back certain unnecessary open work of mass character’ would have drawn severe criticism, what Wang (and Luo Ruiqing as well) actually said did not amount to an across-the-board criticism of the recruitment and operational use of agents, merely a reordering of the priority threats against which they were to be deployed.
When Mao Zedong spoke in 1963 of how public security work in the People's Republic of China had ‘always been different’ from what it was in the Soviet Union, he may well have had other things in mind than the routines and processes outlined in this study. But it is certainly worth noting that on Mao's Cultural Revolutionary watch only a few years later, the use of agents as an instrument of operational activity was denounced wholesale as an ‘OGPU revisionist line’.Footnote 71 Agent work was a reality on the ground for which Mao had become loath to assume ownership, and beginning in 1967, no small number of ‘domestic agents’ (guonei teqing) were ‘outed’ with devastating consequences.Footnote 72 In the eyes of their purist detractors, they never had been—nor could they ever be—part of ‘our’ public security work, a work now defined in opposition to the ‘sinister machinations’ of a cabal of ‘party persons in power taking the capitalist road’ who had sought to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat Mao's ‘revolutionary line’ ever since the day the People's Republic of China was founded.Footnote 73
Today, the covert recruitment and use of agents by Chinese public security (and, since 1983, state security) organs in response to espionage, sabotage, and ordinary crime is no longer tainted with ‘revisionist’ overtones. That part of history on which this study has attempted to lift the veil is one in which the post-Mao Communist Party takes silent pride. Like other forms of operational work, the use of agents has long since been revived in critical sectors of industry, trade, and—perhaps most significantly—energy. It is, for example, officially documented in the coal industry, where the 1990s saw great emphasis being put on ‘strengthening the covert struggle and strengthening intelligence and information work’. Operational officers are now expected to manage the ‘contractual engagement of intelligence and information assets’ (pinqing qingbao xinxiyuan) and ‘make “friends” on a grand scale’ (guangjiao ‘pengyou’).Footnote 74 Since post-Cold War realities like these are not yet history, however, they are best left to students of the present than to historians to investigate.
