The fall of the Berlin Wall unleashed an archival revolution that produced a series of studies of the state security systems in the Soviet Union and in various East European states. Documents from hitherto inaccessible Communist Party and state security archives provided scholars with concrete evidence of the central role that state security played in maintaining communist rule by eliminating regime opponents and by rewarding those who were willing to cooperate with the authorities and to provide them with the multi-faceted information on incipient dissent that proved to be essential for sustaining communist regimes as they matured. Some of the most surprising findings to emerge from that research had to do with the ubiquity of informants, who had penetrated all social groups, professional associations and civil society organizations. Most problematic and hotly contested was evidence that leading members of the opposition in various East European countries may have collaborated with state security as informants.
Until Spying for the People, there was no book-length treatment of informants (ermu) in China. Michael Schoenhals's new study sheds light on this important but unknown aspect of Chinese politics by focusing on the first 18 years of the Mao period, from the establishment of the PRC in 1949 to the decision to discontinue temporarily the use of agents (guonei teqing) as an “OGPU revisionist line” in 1967. As the Ministry of State Security was not established until 1983, the book focuses on the agent work of the Central Ministry of Public Security and some of its regional offices.
The book is organized into seven substantive chapters that offer an overview of the institutional framework for public security work in the PRC; a taxonomy of agents; a discussion of the recruitment base; an analysis of operational profiling techniques; an overview of recruitment strategies; a synopsis of training and tradecraft; and a presentation of the key aspects of agent running and termination. The book concludes with a brief postscript that summarizes its main findings: “My firm conclusions? Only one: that widespread – but not necessarily efficient – use of agents was made by the competent governmental authorities in the urban People's Republic up to 1967 in counterintelligence and in compliance-oriented surveillance of status-offenders (that is to say, of ‘class enemies’)” (p. 234).
This book deserves special note for its source material. Michael Schoenhals is the preeminent practitioner of Sinological garbology (lajixue), the practice of buying discarded government documents in used bookstores and flea markets in China. As the research of a growing number of historians demonstrates, when used judiciously by well-trained social scientists, these types of documents can produce important insights about the early PRC. For some topics on which archives remain out of reach, these documents may constitute the key database for scholarly analysis. Michael Schoenhals's main source is one such document: Lectures on the Subject of Agent Work (Teqing gongzuo jiangyi), published in 1957 by the Public Security Academy. This compendium is supplemented by an impressive array of national-level, regional, and departmental public security and protection serials from the 1950s and 1960s. These documents deserve careful study by all scholars interested in the establishment of the public security system in the PRC.
The book is also noteworthy for making a contribution both to China studies and to the broader disciplines of political science and history. With regard to China studies, it reveals extremely interesting and heretofore unfamiliar details about the institutions involved in recruiting and running agents in the early PRC. There is no doubt that Michael Schoenhals's book will be treated as the foundational study by scholars who want to understand various aspects of agent work in the early PRC and by those who are interested in how Maoist legacies impact state security work during the reform period. The book raises a series of tantalizing questions, especially with regard to the extensiveness of agent penetration and the quality of the information provided by informants. These can be explored when the relevant archives are opened or when additional “garbology” sources become available. Beyond China studies, the monograph makes a contribution to political science and history. It allows scholars interested in state security systems in communist regimes to incorporate China into their analysis. The book is especially valuable for illuminating the uneasy relationship with the Soviet Union during the early Mao years, when China wanted to appear different and yet had borrowed so extensively from the KGB, both in terms of doctrine and in terms of operational practice, at least with regard to the recruitment and running of agents.
The book will be of interest to specialists on Chinese politics and history, as well as to those working on state security systems in communist countries. It is suitable for assignment in graduate seminars on PRC history and on Chinese politics under Mao.
