I first sized him up there, but I found out that he was a ruthless
man, but personally, with him and me living in the same room
much of the time with an interpreter, because he didn’t
understand—or I didn’t understand his brand of Chinese,
I found out that he was a very kind person and I liked him. He
might have been a skunk and all those things—he might have
been a witch or all of the things that they accused him of being,
and an assassin, a poisoner, a saboteur of the first water, but
I found out he was a great man in the Generalissimo’s field of
vision and he liked him. He was the only man that was allowed
in the Generalissimo’s bedroom armed at any time of day or
night, and that showed a great deal of trust in China, if you
know what that means. Anyone else that came even in
Generalissimo’s Headquarters parked his gun at the entrance
when he went in, but not Dai Li.
ADMIRAL MILTON MILES, Talk Before the Conference
of the New York State Association of Police Chiefs,
Schenectady, New York, July 24, 1957
ONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS / xi PREFACE / xiii ABBREVIATIONS / xvii MAPS / xix
1. Images of Dai Li / 1
2. Living off the Land / 12
3. Touben / 24
4. The League of Ten / 36
5. “Vigorous Practice”: The Chiang Freemasonry / 46
6. The Founding of the Lixingshe / 55
7. The Lixingshe and the Blue Shirts / 66
8. The Blue Shirts’ “Fascism” / 85
9. Ideological Rivalries: The Blue Shirts and the “CC” Clique / 98
10. The Blue Shirts in the Provinces / 110
11. The Shanghai Station, 1932-35 / 132
12. Death Squads / 157
13. Assassinations / 168
14. Police Academies / 187
15. Sleeping in Their Coffins / 206
16. Skirts and Sashes / 221
17. War and the Special Movement Corps / 237
18. The Training Camps / 250
19. Codes 000 / 272
20. Dai Li, Milton Miles, and the Foundation of SACO / 285
21. SACO Training Camps / 294
22. Spying / 308
23. Dai Li’s Wartime Smuggling Networks / 320
24. Juntong in Wartime Chongqing / 330
25. Falling Star / 347
Afterword: Daemons / 367
APPENDIX A. ORGANIZATION OF THE GENERAL UNIT
OF SPECIAL TRAINING / 369
APPENDIX B. ORGANIZATION OF JUNTONG HEADQUARTERS / 37
APPENDIX C. TERMS OF THE SINO-AMERICAN SPECIAL
TECHNICAL COOPERATION AGREEMENT / 377
APPENDIX D. SACO TRAINING UNITS / 379
NOTES / 385
BIBLIOGRAPHY / 539
GLOSSARY-INDEX / 579
ILLUSTRATIONS
1. Dai Li’s hometown Baoan / 13
2. Baoan street scene / 15
3. Dai Li, his brother Dai Yunlin, and his son Dai Cangyi / 17
4. Lan Yuexi, Dai Li’s mother / 17
5. Dai Li as a young man / 18
6. Nationalist general Hu Zongnan / 21
7. Mao Renfeng, deputy director of Juntong and later director of the Bureau to Preserve Secrets / 25
8. Chiang Kai-shek’s villa outside Nanjing / 56
9. Chinese Boy Scouts / 76
10. Chen Lifu, founder of the Central Statistics Bureau / 90
11. Dai Li and children at party, Christmas 1944 / 222
12. Dai Li’s Bao’an mansion / 229
13. Song Ziwen (T. V. Soong), Chiang Kai-shek’s brother-in-law and minister of foreign affairs / 231
14. Du Yuesheng, leader of the Green Gang / 238
15. Xiao Bo, deputy Chinese military attaché and Dai Li’s agent
in Washington, D.C. / 276
16. Wartime Chongqing / 279
17. Rear Admiral Milton Miles at the end of WWII / 286
18. Nationalist Chinese commando / 298
19. Students at Unit Nine learn what to do at the scene of a crime from ex-G-man Lt. Cdr. Caputo / 300
20. One of Dai Li’s prisons at Bai mansion in Happy Valley / 306
21. Pan Hannian’s underground CCP headquarters in Shanghai /
22. Zhou Fohai, president of the puppet government’s
Executive Yuan / 315
23. Fragment of a letter from General Dai Li to General William Donovan, director, Office of Strategic Services / 317
24. Kong Xiangxi (H. H. Kung), minister of finance / 326
25. Zheng Jiemin, Dai Li’s successor as director of Juntong / 359
NOWLEDGMENTS
Support for the research that resulted in this book was provided by the Cen¬ter for Chinese Studies, the Committee on Research, the Institute of East Asian Studies, and the Walter and Elise Haas Chair endowment at Berkeley, by the Committee on Scholarly Communication with the People’s Repub¬lic of China, by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and by the United States Information Agency.
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the many archivists, li¬brarians, and scholars who helped me gain access to materials at the Ban¬croft Library (Berkeley), the BeijingNationalLibrary, the Beijing University Library, the British Library, the Bureau of Investigation Archives (Taiwan), the Cambridge University Library, the Center for Chinese Studies Library (Berkeley), the East Asian Library (Columbia), the East Asiatic Library (Berkeley), the Government Documents Library (Berkeley), the Harvard- Yenching Institute, the Hoover Institution and Archives, the Library of Con¬gress, the Military Reference Division of the U.S. National Archives, the Modern History Research Institute Library of the Chinese Academy of So¬cial Sciences, the New York Public Library, the Public Record Office, the Second National Archives (Nanjing), the Shanghai Academy of Social Sci¬ences, the Shanghai Municipal Archives, the Shanghai Municipal Library, the Washington Naval Yard, the Wason Collection (Cornell), and the Yale University Library. Especially helpful in this regard were Cai Shaoqing, An¬nie K. Chang, C. P. Chen, the late Ch’en Li-fu, Ch’iu Jung-hua, Chou Han- ch’in, Feng Shoucai, Suzanne Gold, Han Weizhi, Hu Sheng, Huang Meizhen, Richard C. Kagan, the late Li Zongyi, Lin Bih-jaw, Ma Changlin, Ni Mengxiong, Andrea Sevetson, Shi Meiding, Sun Jiang, Wang Dehua, Wang Qingcheng, the late Martin Wilbur, Wu Tiqian, Xu Youfang, Zhang Zhongli, Zheng Zu’an, Zhu Hong, and Zhu Qingzuo.
Research assistance was provided by a number of present and former Chinese history graduate students at Berkeley. These include Douglas Fix, David Fraser, Blaine Gaustad, Kenneth Koerner, Kevin Landdeck, Seung- joon Lee, Jen-ling Liu, Kong Dan Oh, Joshua Rosenzweig, Shang Quan, Douglas Stiffler, Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Timothy Weston, John Williams, Xu Guomin, and Yu Maochun. Two other young scholars, Ding Lan and Linda L. Su, were also very helpful. Joshua Rosenzweig was immensely effective in the last stages of copyediting, and I cannot thank him enough for his disci¬plined sedulousness in tracing texts and running down documents.
I owe a great debt to my two professional research assistants: Susan Stone, who helped compile the earliest chapters of this book, and Elinor Levine, who provided invaluable assistance throughout with tables, charts, appendices, miscellaneous research, collation, and final compilation of the manuscript.
My colleague Wen-hsin Yeh first introduced me to primary materials on Dai Li and discovered the trove of letters from August Vollmer’s Chinese criminology students in the Bancroft Library. Further scholarly sugges¬tions were provided by Sherman Cochran, Sue Farquhar, Bryna Goodman, Thomas Grunfeld, David Kahn, Brian Martin, Marcia Ristaino, Bernard Wasserstein, and Wu Xiaoming. Members of the Berkeley East Asia Semi¬nar, supported by the Wang Family Foundation, also contributed to the revision of the book, especially to the section on wartime codes. I am par¬ticularly grateful to my father, Frederic Wakeman Sr., and to Professors Christian Henriot, Kenneth Pomerantz, Irwin Scheiner, and Hans van de Ven for their close and careful reading of the manuscript. Above all, I wish to thank Dr. Liang He for her generous intellectual and emotional encour¬agement. Her rendering of the volume in Chinese went far beyond a simple translation. It led her through many of the original sources anew and com¬pelled her more than once to meaningfully challenge my interpretation of the events that follow.
REFACE
Dai Li was a student who, after all, never actually graduated from the Sixth Cavalry Class of the Whampoa Academy.1 Even though he did not know how to ride a horse very well, he was still extremely fond of horses. His own face looked like a horse’s face, especially because he had a nose infection and was constantly dripping mucous, so that his sniffling strongly resembled the way in which a horse is constantly snorting. Each day he had to use a tremendous number of handkerchiefs just to keep his nose wiped clean. He strongly be¬lieved in the saying: “If a person’s face resembles an animal, then it is the face of a very important and noble [person].” If other people spoke in front of him, comparing him to a horse, he did not take this amiss. In fact, to the con¬trary, he was extremely pleased. Later, the alias that he used was Ma Xingjian [Horse Constant-and-Regular]. Consequently, he regarded himself as a horse. He often said that he was willing for the rest of his life to offer his labor like a hound or horse [quan ma zhi lao] to Chiang Kai-shek. He was cheerfully will¬ing to act as a hound or horse for one of the most evil tyrants in Chinese his¬tory, and took great pride in this. SHEN ZUI, “The Dai Li I Knew” 2
This is a book about an extraordinary secret policeman, a sinister specter of the shadows whose life embodied the tension in twentieth-century China between mercurial feudal personalism and steadfast revolutionary dis¬cipline. At once both a self-conscious knight errant and a modern organi¬zational genius, Dai Li sought to create a new subjectivity within himself by fashioning a heroic personality fit to dominate the Byzantine world of Republican political intrigue. His subjectivity was not merely instrumental. Rather, it was one among a number of novel professional identities— banker, journalist, lawyer, housewife, officer, actress, doctor—adopted by China’s new elites after the monarchy fell in 1911. These fresh identities reflected many of the continuities and discontinuities in the making of
modern China: the attempt of the state to substitute itself for the family, the spread of vocational education after the old examination system broke down, and the rise of new social actors to replace the scholar-officials whose fortunes fell with the demise of imperial Confucianism.
Dai Li came from one such couche: the backwater “middle county” elites who as young men left the sparse shade of their ancestral villages to set out for the lush cities of the coast in search of wealth and power.3 This new stra¬tum of adolescent Soldiers of Orange, social orphans so to speak, had no road map at hand. But they were fueled by personal ambition and driven by a sense of national mission that somehow had a place for their own fretting desires. Yet where many lacked the energy to carry out that mission, Dai Li was able to overcome the disjuncture between a village realm of face-to-face relationships and a more universal arena of professional imperatives and impersonal expertise.
Behind the former was the buttress of hierarchy, a state of mind that suf¬fused Dai Li’s paternalism toward his secret service minions.4 Paradoxically augmenting the impersonality of the latter were Dai’s extended personal networks: from his hometown in Jiangshan county downriver to the provin¬cial capital and on to Shanghai, Canton, and ultimately Nanjing; from river junks to steamships and eventually aircraft; from spying as the cottage in¬dustry of the heroes of “rivers and lakes” to espionage as an advanced industry of highly trained agents and electronic eavesdroppers; and from Chinese gangsters and mercenary allies to British special operatives and American OSS case officers.
This extension reflected in part a new division between rural and urban China, especially in the warfare of the period. Dai Li found his initial foot¬ing as a secret service chief in China’s urban settings, which were perfect environments for the kidnappings, tortures, and assassinations his men inflicted during the White Terror of the 1920s and early 1930s. At that time, warlord conflict focused on railroads, rivers, and cities. But with the War of Resistance, the battlefield, “dispersed in terms of space and time,” shifted from the cities to the countryside.5 Dai Li’s urban opponents left the back alleys of Shanghai to concentrate on new means of strife in the hinter¬land: popular mobilization, economic warfare, infiltration, subversion, and propaganda.
Dai Lai welcomed the change, though it took all of his will and cunning to hold the line against the rural strategy’s Communist practitioners. As a brilliant leader, moreover, he had the capacity to contain contradictions; and once again, he overcame the disjuncture both by force of personality in wresting control of the Nationalists’ rural brigades from his military rivals and by making logistical plans to contest the civil war about to come at the time of his death in 1946.
Dai Li’s reliance upon his personalistic leadership style had several short-comings. For one, it frequently drew him into internecine squabbles with Nationalist rivals that dissipated his energy. Second, it focused his discipli¬nary attention on an exaggerated military style that suited Chiang Kai-shek and that helped alleviate his own sense of inferiority around seasoned mil¬itary commanders who had the battlefield experience he lacked. Third, it prevented him from delegating responsibility to his deputies and entrusting information to paper—the “files” common to all truly modern intelligence organizations—rather than to his phenomenal memory. And, fourth, it kept him from appreciating the more theatrical, if slovenly, political man¬ner of his master’s arch enemy, Mao Zedong.
Yet, in the end, it was Dai Li’s indomitable will and habile acumen that counted more than political contingency or bureaucratic necessity in buoy¬ing him to the crest of China’s political currents during those revolution¬ary times. Social processes and economic developments will always be the source of important secular change, but politics are not merely epiphe- nomenal. Pious populism notwithstanding, the personalities of dramati¬cally powerful men and women remain the vital substance of history as we know it.
REVIATIONS
AGFRTS Air and Ground Forces Resources and Technical Staff
CBI China-Burma-India
CCP Chinese Communist Party
CCSS Chinese Culture Study Society
CEC Central Executive Committee
CIC Commander-in-Chief
CID Criminal Investigation Department
CSB Central Statistics Bureau
CYSS Chinese Youth Strength Society
FAIG Foreign Affairs Investigation Group
GMD Guomindang
GPU Gosudarstvennoe Politicheskoe Upravlenie
JCS Joint Chiefs of Staff
LPA Loyal and Patriotic Army
MAC Military Affairs Commission
NEP New Economic Program
OGPU Ob’edinennoe Gosudarstvennoe Politicheskoe Upravlenie
ONI Office of Naval Intelligence
OSTR Office of Special Technological Research
PID Political Indoctrination Department
PIO Political Indoctrination Officer
PRC People’s Republic of China
RACA Revolutionary Army Comrades Association
RYCA Revolution Youth Comrades Association
SACSEA South Asia, China, Southeast Asia
SCRC Society of Chinese Revolutionary Comrades
SIS Secret Intelligence Service
SMP Shanghai Municipal Police
SSD Special Services Department
Taipingmen Gate
British Consulate
East Chang’an Gate
N
0
1 Mile
zhanyua'n Road
0
1 Kilometer
Nanjing Station
Sun Yat-sen’s
Ming mausoleum tombs . ■
Zhonghuamen Gate._j|
3三涔15「平
Japanese Consulate 为 rNanjing University^ ：「一£Lane
Xuanwu
Lake
Zhongshanmen
Gate
y^Sanpailou St.
\\一A C一(Central Office^ U.S. Consulateo o of Guomindangj^ )1 " 上匕斑Dingjiaqiao 0
National Government , i三II 17 ◎琳注
liao St.
Whampoa Road
Goatskin Lane
Caodu Lane
Jiangdong Gate
Map 1. Nanjing, 1943
/L-Jl -^.hongshan St 用『痣1 A Airport^ II 7A\
Four Lane/
Guanghuamen Gate
Pootoo Road
(Badlands)
H
Route Joseph Frélupt
0
0.5 mile
0
0.5
Columbia Road
Hongqiao Road
H U X I
1 kilometer
SION
C O N C
Map 2. Shanghai, 1944
Map 3. Southern China
Chapter 1
Images of Dai Li
I rose, and the Hatchet Man bowed, while Ling performed the customary elaborate introduction. He was dressed in the blue-black high-collared uniform of the Party, perhaps forty, gimlet-eyed, and of medium stature; he wore his unruly hair cut for¬eign style and parted at the side. He carried himself with the air of one who has power and uses it intelligently and ruthlessly. That he was the most feared man in China I could well believe.
HERBERT YARDLEY, The Chinese Black Chamber, 33
THE HIMMLER OF CHINA
One foreign journalist later recalled Dai Li as a faceless fellow, always shrouded in the shadows of the room while others were openly holding forth. Yet Dai Li made a strong if motley impression upon the few Western¬ers who met him during his apogee during the Pacific War.1 It was said of him that “no figure in World War II is more black, seen from one side; more white viewed from the other.” 2 Virtually all were struck by the acuity of his gaze. “Dai Li is of medium height and well built, rugged looking and strong, with a crisp military manner. He has well-defined features, sharp eyes with a direct glance, and a firm, determined mouth,” said an OSS agent working behind enemy lines under Dai Li’s guidance.3 “He was a handsome, slender man with tiny beautiful hands,” wrote an American military officer born of parents who were missionaries in China. “He walked as if he had a ramrod for a spine. He had a strong, long stride like the exaggerated stride of the hero in a Chinese theater. He had a sharp, appraising eye which seemed to take in a man’s features and his character for future reference.”4
To most foreigners in China during the 1940s, Dai Li was a legendary figure, widely thought to be “not the Admiral Canaris of China, but the Heinrich Himmler.” 5 Oliver Caldwell writes that “Dai Li impressed [one] as brilliant, imaginative, ruthless, and unscrupulous. He was the Himmler of Nationalist China. He was the enemy of almost every ideal of American de¬mocracy. He tried to unify China under Chiang by enforcing iron control. He was cold, crafty, and brutal.” 6 The Nazi S.S. chief’s label was not easy to shed, and Westerners who otherwise called him “T. L.” for short often re¬ferred to Dai Li as “China’s Himmler.” 7 Within U.S. government intelli¬gence circles at that time, most officers believed “that General Dai Li was well known as an assassin; that he was the head of a Gestapo-like organiza¬tion which was known, in Shanghai at least, as the ‘Blue Shirts’; that he ran his own concentration camp for political enemies; that he didn’t like for¬eigners, and that few of them had ever met him.”8
Dai Li himself knew of this sobriquet, and on more than one occasion he sought to persuade his American friends that he stood for democracy. On April 3, 1945, Chiang Kai-shek reviewed the “crack troops” of the Sino- American Cooperative Organization’s (SACO) Unit Nine, which was located in “Happy Valley” (Geleshan), outside Chongqing. That evening a splendid banquet was served, washed down with two hundred catties of rare rice wine that Dai Li had brought from his home in Zhejiang. The Happy Valley band had learned “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “Dixie,” and after the Americans in the crowd had clapped and cheered for these songs, the entertainers were preparing to perform a Chinese opera. Dai Li suddenly interrupted the gathering and insisted upon trying to persuade his American friends not to believe bad things about him. He asserted in a rambling speech trans¬lated by his official interpreter, Eddie Liu, that “he was not a Himmler,” but rather just “the Generalissimo’s Dai Li and nothing more.”9
THE GENERALISSIMO’S DAI LI
Of all Dai Li’s qualities, perhaps the single most salient trait was his willing¬ness to serve his leader.10 The very name he chose for himself, which liter¬ally means “to wear a rain hat” and which figuratively signifies “to be a ser¬vant,” underscores his notion of servitude—he was almost animal-like in his dogged devotedness to his master, Chiang Kai-shek—and yet the name also suggests feudal notions of reciprocal honor.11 Dai Li explained the name to others saying, “There is an old poem that goes: The lord rides in a cart and we wear rain hats [jun cheng che, wo dai li]. One day when we meet he gets down from his cart and bows. The lord carries an umbrella and we are astride horses. One day when we meet we get down before our lord.” 12
Shen Zui, who was both Shanghai station chief and general affairs direc¬tor for Dai Li, stressed his own master’s caninelike fidelity to Chiang Kai- shek, whose “claws and teeth” he was happy to be.13 The phrase used for this by Dai Li himself—quan ma zhi lao (the labor of a hound or horse)—seem- ingly betrayed a willingness to receive the most subhuman treatment from his lord and leader.14 Yet, as a feudal notion based upon the ideal of mutual respect between ruler and minister, the expression also evinced a paradox¬ical nobility of purpose. The very term itself, “hound or horse,” was taken from the archetypal meeting between Liu Bei and Zhuge Liang (“the sleep¬ing dragon”) described for generations of Chinese in the historical novel Three Kingdoms (Sanguo yanyi).
During 207-208 E Liu Bei (Xuande), descendant of the falling Han rulers, paid three calls upon Zhuge Liang (Kongming) in his country house after the latter, a twenty-seven-year-old nobleman, had been recommended to Liu Bei by his master strategist, the Daoist Shan Fu, as “the one man in the empire who can plot the interactions of the heavens and the earth.” 15 When Liu Bei finally met Zhuge Liang on his third visit, he told him:
The house of Han teeters on ruin. Unscrupulous subjects have stolen the mandate of rule. Failing to recognize my limitations, I have tried to promote the great principle of true allegiance throughout the empire; but my super¬ficial knowledge and inadequate methods have so far kept me from achieving anything. If you, master, would relieve my ignorance and keep our cause alive, the blessing would be truly ten-thousandfold.16
Zhuge Liang politely disclaimed his talents, but, pressed by Liu Bei, he pro¬posed a brilliant strategy of establishing a base in the Riverlands (Ba and Shu, modern Sichuan) westward behind the gorges, from whence he could eventually emerge to conquer the northern heartland and revive the house of Han. Liu Bei again implored Zhuge Liang to serve, and when the strate¬gist humbly refused to accept, the Han dynast began to weep. “If you remain here,” he cried, “what of the living souls of this land?” Zhuge Liang was moved by Liu Bei’s sincerity and said, “If you will have me, then, General, I shall serve you like a hound or horse.” 17
To Zhuge Liang, Liu Bei’s own entreaty verified his own choice of liege. And to Dai Li, steeped in the lore of the Three Kingdoms and an ardent ad¬mirer of “the sleeping dragon,” Chiang Kai-shek’s request to serve as his se¬cret service chief must have confirmed a similar sense of fealty. But to Shen Zui, being the Generalissimo’s “hound and horse” implied a form of self¬abasement on Dai Li’s part that was in turn inflicted upon his own subordi¬nates, inverting that which was noble in human nature and suggesting a willingness to carry out tasks of bestial cruelty against his master’s enemies.18
Dai Li prided himself on “receiving and holding up the will of the Leader, embodying and empathizing with the devoted thoughts of the Leader” (bingcheng lingxiu yizhi, tinian lingxiu kuxin); and that conceit, in his opponents’ eyes, meant fanatically heeding Chiang Kai-shek’s belief that “If there are Communists there can be no me, if there is me there can be no Communists” (You gong wu wo, you wo wu gong). 19 Like all servants of despotism, Dai Li was paradoxically weak and strong.20 Dai Li was power¬ful because he was a member of Chiang’s inner circle. Yet his abasement to Chiang—his subservience to the Leader—was ultimately a sign of personal weakness.21
Dai Li is the completely trusted subordinate—and guardian—of the Gener-alissimo, subject only to his orders.22 He does the inside investigation jobs for the Generalissimo; is in charge of the Generalissimo’s bodyguard. Dai, with his far-flung organization, is said to be the medium through which much unofficial “business” is done, both in China and abroad; and he is efficient. (Chou En-lai, the Communist liaison officer in Chungking, has stated that Dai Li controls military communications, financial affairs, and foreign affairs through his secret police organization.) . . . His secret police organization is at times used to counter-balance the party police under the “CC” clique, an illustration of one of the fundamental tenets of the Generalissimo’s policy in controlling the KMT, that is, the equilibrium of forces by means of checks and balances.23 He is the personification of the latter-day repressive tendencies of the KMT.24
As the personification of Chiang’s dictatorship, Dai Li also embodied one of the most powerful organizations in the Nationalist government, the Military Investigation and Statistics Bureau ( Juntong).25
JUNTONG
The American military attaché described the Juntong (or MSB) in 1943:
This organization does not appear on any official list of Chinese government offices, but it is nevertheless one of the most powerful and important organs in China. It is highly placed in the organization of the high command of the Chinese army. Its director, Mr. (General) Dai Li, probably wields more power and authority than any other member of the National Military Council. This bureau is, in effect, the Chinese Secret Service and according to reliable re¬ports, employs the services of more than 20,000 men and women. One of its principal functions is the combatting of communist activities. But all kinds of espionage and intelligence work are carried out under its direction. Many of its activities overlap those of the intelligence section of the Board of Military Operations and the deputy director of this section is directly connected with the bureau. The bureau also controls the activities of the Chinese agents in Shanghai and elsewhere outside of free China. Dai Li is one of Chiang Kai- shek’s old Whampoa Military Academy cadets and is usually addressed as “General,” but as far as is known, he has no official military rank. Well in¬formed quarters state that he exercises more power than any other man in China today with the exception of the Generalissimo himself. He is said to be the only person that Chiang Kai-shek will receive at any time, any place.26
It was almost impossible, therefore, to separate Dai Li’s personal influence as head of one of the most powerful secret police forces in China from his propinquity to Chiang Kai-shek.27 In popular imagery, at least, he repre¬sented the dictator’s nether side; he was, as Shen Zui once said, the Gen¬eralissimo’s dagger, and in the public’s eye Chiang’s “butcher” (guizishou). 28 Indeed, the only independence that Dai Li could perhaps enjoy stemmed in the end from the terror that his own person could arouse, but that fear in turn almost always depended upon his closeness to Chiang—plus popu¬lar conviction in the ubiquitousness of his eyes, ears, teeth, and claws.29
The power of Dai Li, like that of all secret police chiefs, to coerce counted on the people believing that his agents were everywhere.30 Claims were made in China and abroad that “the BIS [or MSB] is well known as China’s secret police and is generally believed to be larger in terms of operatives and more far flung in terms of geography than any other spy net in the world.” 31 In 1946, U.S. Army Intelligence sources estimated that Dai Li had 180,000 plainclothes agents—of whom 40,000 worked full-time for him.32 His uniformed or military operatives included: a guerrilla army of 70,000; Chinese commando columns of 20,000; the Loyal and Patriotic Army, thought by the American navy to consist of 15,291 soldiers; and organized China Coast pirates numbering 40,000. These added up to a total of more than 325,000 actual or potential agents working for the secret police chief.33
According to an article that referred to Dai Li as “China’s Master Spy,” his agents operated wherever Chinese were to be found: Indochina, Bali, Bor¬neo, Formosa, Siam, Malaya, the South Pacific islands, Ceylon, Burma, and India.
Dai Li’s agents were not only geographically but also strategically just about everywhere during the late war.34 They were inside the walled city part of Ma¬nila sending out weather reports right up to MacArthur’s landing. They made up all the police forces of Nanking, Hankow, and all the other conquered cities of China. The Japanese, finding them cooperative, let them run things, igno¬rant that the police in all the cities of China are Dai Li men. They had a sep¬arate puppet air corps within the Japanese air force under secret orders to turn their bombers over to the Dai Li organization in the city of Sian on Sep¬tember 15. And in Japan itself during the whole war there were Dai Li agents in the imperial palace in Tokyo.35
American readers—both public and secret—were regaled with exam¬ples of Dai Li’s omnipresent network of agents.36 An OSS captain was re¬ported to have returned to his quarters west of Fuzhou to find his Chinese interpreter talking with two dark-gowned strangers who left the moment he returned to his room. The interpreter, quaking with fright, explained that the two men were just about to kill him because he had returned to the captain’s room to find them going through his things. He begged the cap¬tain to protect him, and when the captain protested at this nonsense, the man began to shake again and said, “No, not nonsense. Those men of Boss.” “And so I sat up,” the OSS man recalled, “with a damn tommy-gun across my knee all night because those two callers were ‘of Boss.’” 37
Another American intelligence officer on a secret mission behind Japa¬nese lines came to a tiny hamlet and put up at the local village inn. He and the innkeeper became friendly over local wine, and the American brashly suggested that they go and search all the guests’ bags. After all, wasn’t that what the owner’s “Boss” expected him to do? Later, after they had drunkenly gone through the inn’s rooms, the American said that he had initially thought that the hamlet was too small to have a resident secret police agent. “How small no matter,” supposedly said the innkeeper. “Every place in China have agent of Boss.”38
Of course, having agents in every hamlet and village was not alone enough to earn Dai Li the fear he enjoyed spreading. Part of his image in foreign and Chinese eyes was related to his reputation for cruelty.39 An American observed that “many Chinese whisper that he punishes traitors by the locomotive firebox treatment and that he operates concentration camps for political and other prisoners.” 40 Some Chinese, like Chiang Kai- shek’s rival Li Zongren, were impressed by Dai Li “as an intelligent and re¬served man,” but they were also struck by the “cruelty . . . ever present in his smiling face.” 41 Though occasionally a shambling figure in his own organi¬zation, he was said to be ruthless if his own code was crossed.42 Critics of Dai Li thus described him to foreigners as being responsible for the death or imprisonment of scores of liberal college professors and other progressives and as personifying “the Fascist element in China.”43
“MYSTERY MAN OF ASIA”
Yet cruelty alone was not the key to Dai Li’s aura of fear and dread. Although he eventually came to enjoy the act of torture, he was not clinically sadistic. Nor did he enjoy taking life himself, though he was quite capable of doing so. Usually he was at a slight remove from the assassinations he casually or¬dered his henchmen to execute. He no doubt derived a twisted pleasure from the power to inflict death upon those whom he touched at a distance, but this was the ineluctable satisfaction of an enigmatic nemesis: a figure of death at once remote and yet so nearby. Thus, Dai Li’s ability to remain aloof and enigmatic helped make him unpredictable and therefore all the more dangerous in people’s eyes.
This aura is perfectly evoked by the characterization of Xu Pengfei in the novel Red Crag, which is about the MSB (or its successor the Baomiju [Bu¬reau to Preserve Secrets]) during the Civil War. Xu, the leader of the Chong¬qing secret service, is described walking through his ominous headquarters:
His progress through the building was marked by a sudden silence. With ex-pressions varying from respect to obsequiousness, his subordinates watched him pass. His vanity was flattered, and he allowed himself a momentary thin-lipped smile. He must never let anyone guess what was going on in his mind. He deliberately slowed down and walked past the uneasy glances of his un¬derlings with an expressionless face.44
Much of his inscrutable quality had to do with his amazing ability to pass un-noticed, to remain anonymous, in part because of his reluctance to be pho- tographed.45 As “one of the most secretive figures in modern Chinese his¬tory” (Zhongguo jindai lishi zhong zui shenmi renwu zhiyi), Dai Li was especially fancied by American journalists because he fit so well their image of him as a latter-day Fu Manchu.46
Dai Li has been called the most mysterious personality to come out of the war. The number of Chinese who know what he looks like is usually stated in re¬verse. Close to 450 million, it is said, have never seen him nor any likeness of him. He makes no public appearances, never grants press interviews, and al¬most never allows himself to be photographed.47
And there was no question that he constantly sought to conceal his whereabouts.48 During the Second World War in Chongqing, when he was living alone—except for his guards 49 and his white-haired servant, Jia Jin- nan, who bought, cooked, and tasted his food, even when Dai Li dined out50—the secret police chief moved back and forth randomly between three separate residences: a mansion at No. 151 Zengjia yuan, a small West¬ern house at No. 3 Shangqingsi kangzhuang, and another mansion at Shen- xian dong. Just outside Chongqing he maintained a mansion at Yangjia- shan, a house at Songlinpo, and a temporary guesthouse behind the main auditorium at SACO headquarters in Happy Valley. He also had secret resi¬dences in Xi’an, Lanzhou, Chengdu, Guiyang, and Hengyang; and after the war was over he acquired yet more clandestine safe houses (where he always kept one or two cars on hand) in Shanghai, Nanjing, Hankou, Tianjin, Qing¬dao, Beiping, Zhengzhou, Fuzhou, Xiamen, and Suzhou.51
Dai Li’s exact whereabouts are almost never known. He has houses and hide-outs all over China and his routes and destinations are always concealed.52 “He never let anyone know from minute to minute where he was going,” an American who had traveled with him once told me, “and before he started out anywhere, he would always issue rumors. The rumors said he was going to X, then he always went to Y.” In cities, his men always telephone someone that he is on the way, knowing the wires will be tapped; meanwhile, Dai Li is headed somewhere else. Because of wiretapping, he forbids his office to make ap-pointments for him over the telephone. Americans in Chungking have found that appointments must be requested in a sealed envelope and that the an¬swer is given in similar form.53
He even somehow managed to conceal himself in one’s very presence. The journalist Israel Epstein recalled a meeting held for Epstein by the GMD before he went off to Yan’an to visit the Communists. The meeting was hosted by He Yingqin, thought by Americans to be Chiang’s most trusted general, and also present were Wang Pengsheng, the Guomindang’s expert on Japanese intelligence, and Hollington Tong (Dong Xianguang). Only af¬ter the meeting was over did Epstein remember that there had been present in the back of the room a fourth man who had nearly escaped notice.
Swarthy and in need of a shave, that person—who seemed to Epstein a bit toadlike, though not particularly sinister—was, of course, Dai Li.54
The impression of swarthiness struck others as well, including his future deputy, “Mary” Miles.55
In appearance Dai Li seems to many Americans less Chinese than Latin. He is short, heavy built, and swarthy. “He looks a little like Batista,” some say. He al-ways dressed simply during the war: usually in black riding boots, plain blue uniform, and incongruous European felt hat. The most striking item of his ap-pearance is his hands. “They are weird and lovely,” an American once told me. “They are no bigger than my three fingers. You see Dai Li sitting at his desk, in his long, silk Chinese gown, with that sly smile on his face, and then sud¬denly come these tiny Dresden China doll hands. If you thought him a sadist before, he seems now even more sinister.” 56
One senses both that there was something awkward and misshapen about his appearance, and that Dai Li took a certain pride in that distinctness. His drab and monotonous clothing style—what the Chinese call dan- diao—would have reinforced this, as well as contributed to his deliberate anonymity.57
Though he entertained on a lavish scale — especially in Chongqing, where his banquets in the Horse House and Tiger House mansions were famed among Americans for the fine silver, excellent coffee, and exquisite Napoleon cognac—he lived quite simply.58 During his years in Nanjing, for example, he was known to pay no special attention to his personal living conditions. His house at No. 53 Ji’e xiang had rush mats instead of carpets, and the two-story house he rented near Fenglin qiao in the French Con¬cession in Shanghai was plain and unassuming, just as was the small Stude¬baker sedan he owned in those days.59 Consequently, even though he was thought by some observers, especially during wartime, to have amassed a considerable private fortune, others thought him fundamentally disinter¬ested in money except as tender in his transactions with others, including his own agents.
Dai Li’s wealth is quite generally believed to be great, but again no one knows. He claims to work for the government of Chiang Kai-shek for no salary, which makes the source of his private income a deeper mystery. Some say it was de-rived from clandestine trading with the enemy. American Air Force pilots used to say it came from opium. They claimed they flew mercury from Chengtu in the west to the northern provinces, exchanged it for opium, and returned [it] to Dai Li. But, as others point out, Chiang Kai-shek is death on anything or anyone connected with opium, and Dai Li’s loyalty to Chiang and all his prin¬ciples has never been questioned.60
Bishop Megan noted that as head of the Smuggling Prevention Service (which was then only nominally under the Ministry of Finance), Dai Li would have been in an excellent position to know about (and profit from) illegal trading and smuggling. Yet Megan, whose information about con¬temporary Chinese events was particularly reliable, did not think that Dai himself engaged in any of these activities.61
THE MONKEY-KING
Another aspect of Dai Li’s power, which was also related to his passion for secrecy and anonymity, was his supposed impregnability. The Collier’s mag¬azine article that seeded his legend in the United States spoke time and again of Dai’s miraculous escapes from captivity, from assassins’ bombs, and from capture by the Japanese: “the idea of invulnerability is fast attaching it¬self to his personal legend.” 62 Another American writer described how, “in his usual vanishing act fashion,” Dai Li escaped being captured by 150 en¬emy plainclothes agents, and how—despite reports of his death in an air¬plane accident—he was probably still cheating death unscathed.63
For all of his solitude and secrecy, Dai Li had a wide circle of acquain¬tances, and even friends, from many different sectors of society. Mostly these were people who could be of use to him, ranging from old-guard party members to important army officers, bankers, overseas merchants, Shang¬hai gangsters, and Sichuanese secret society chiefs.64 The prominent former editor of Su bao and Jiayin zhoukan (Tiger Weekly), Zhang Shizhao (who was also a friend of the gangster Du Yuesheng, as well as of Mao Zedong, to whom he lent money when the two were students), was a good friend, who even wrote one of the encomiums at Dai Li’s funeral in 1946.65
Several associates, interestingly enough, were clerics, both Buddhist and Catholic.66 Among the latter, Dai Li included as his friends the Chinese cardinal Tian Gengxin, the French bishop of Chongqing, and the Chinese Catholic priest Yu Bin.67 The last of these may have represented a point of professional contact, for it was through Yu Bin that Dai Li was able to set up an intelligence-gathering operation in a local Catholic service unit in Henan in the Shaan-Gan Border Zone, under the control of the North¬western Station of the Military Affairs Commission.68 But the larger circle of friends, especially after Dai Li achieved a certain fame, came to include national figures. Dai eventually formed connections with the football star Li Huitang, with the matinee queen Chen Yunshang, with the head of the Nanjing Jiuguo ribao (National Salvation Daily) Gong Debo, and with the Beijing opera performer Yan Huizhu.69
Among all of these members of Shanghai cafe society, the most notori¬ous friend of Dai Li was the playboy Tang Shengming, who often accompa¬nied the secret police chief on trips to bordellos and casinos.70 Of Dai Li’s romantic life in Shanghai—and this was part of his image as well—Tang once said: “Dai Li is a strange fellow who simply cannot keep away from
women’s charms.” 71 Perhaps that was why Tang Shengming made sure that his wife, Xu Lai, introduced Dai Li to the movie star Hu Die (Butterfly Wu), who became the secret service chief’s mistress during the Pacific War.72
From some of these friends, and particularly from those who wrote ha-giographies published on Taiwan after the appearance of Admiral Miles’s memoirs about SACO, a different set of images emerged. A spate of books glorifying Dai Li appeared, including biographies by Qiao Jiacai, Mao Zhongxin, Liu Peichu, and Zheng Xiuyuan.73 For Zhang Jungu, who has made a career on Taiwan writing about Water Margin sorts of heroes during the modern period and who compiled a biography of Dai Li based upon secondary sources and interviews with former MSB officers, the secret ser¬vice chief was an ardent patriot, fervently loyal to his supreme leader and with a temperament like “a blazing fire.” Thorough and meticulous, Dai Li ruthlessly discerned subversive details as fine as a hair; yet he treated friends and subordinates with generosity, kindness, and leniency.74
One of Dai Li’s close associates during the late 1930s described the se¬cret police chief to Zhang Jungu in this way:
Dai Li was both cool-headed and passionate. His unhappy childhood and ex-tensive travel experience put him in contact with a broad spectrum of society. He studied diligently and was well read in the Chinese classics. He combined the spirit of a Confucian scholar and a knight-errant [ru xia jingshen]. His sub-ordinates approached him in awe and reverence. Those whom he had pun¬ished never harbored any resentment against him. There have been no com¬plaints even to this day, twenty-two years after his death.75
All of Dai Li’s former aides stressed their chief’s powerful memory (“he had the content of all the files that he needed to consult deeply imprinted on his mind”) and his high level of energy.76 He was able, people said, to go for several days and nights without sleep while appearing not to tire at all. And even when exhausted, Dai Li could read a situation or person instantly, and then devise ways to manipulate the moment to his best advantage. His sub¬ordinates therefore believed that it was pointless to try to hoodwink the se¬cret police chief under any circumstances because Dai would invariably see through the deception at once.77 Moreover, his curt and staccato leadership style, coupled with an attentive largesse, repeatedly confirmed his decisive¬ness, his centrality, his mastery.78
Nationalist general Hu Zongnan summed up Dai Li’s character in these words: “This fellow Yunong [which was Dai Li’s yizi] thought of himself as a Monkey-King, and felt that he could snatch the moon from the sky, that there was no point of difficulty that he could not pass through. His greatest strength was his knowledge of human feelings and worldly affairs. His great¬est weakness was his waywardness, his impatience, and his inability to keep a secret.” 79
But even so cautiously flexed a depiction failed to bridge the fissure be¬tween Dai Li’s heroic image in the eyes of his Nationalist supporters (many of whom believed that had he not died in a plane crash on March 17, 1946, there would have been no CCP victory in the Civil War), and his reputation among his bitter enemies, the Communists.80 We have already glimpsed in Red Crag some of the later PRC portraits of Dai Li and his MSB/BPS lieu¬tenants as pitiless and relentless sadists. At the time of Dai’s death, left-wing journalists already were quick to accuse Dai of assassinating outstanding political liberals such as the leaders of the Human Rights League, of rap¬ing or torturing numerous hapless women, and of slaughtering the best and brightest of the nation’s youth opposed to Chiang Kai-shek’s brutal dictatorship.81
The purposeful opposition between these portrayals of Dai Li was fun-damental, though it decidedly wavers when we remind ourselves that “the secret world is a morbid one, seductive to men and women unsure of their own identities and reassured by the shelter of secrecy . . . [which] puts them apart from the practical world of rational cause and result. It may also en¬courage them to think themselves empowered to act outside the limits to which others are held, since they know what others do not know.” 82
That exceptionality may well explain Dai Li’s nebulous complexion, but such clandestine ambiguity should not relieve us of the obligation to un¬derstand Dai as representing at least a partial aspect of the mind of modern China. This effort is not meant to be a pretentious task, especially if we take General Dai’s political thinking and practice to be but one refraction of the mentality of that era, when one Chinese revolution had felled the empire and another was about to spawn. These political spasms gave birth to a cul¬ture of violence engendered by the cruel practices of the underworld and fostered by the revolutionary imaginations of convulsions yet to come. In all these warped regards, Dai Li was only one of the harsher reflections of his distorted times.
Chapter 2
Living off the Land
If a young person wants to make something of himself, then he wants to be like Chen Yingshi or Xu Xilin and do something flamboyant and impetuous. I have received a secondary school education, served both as a militiaman and as a soldier, and now I’ve come to Shanghai to live off the land [daliu].
DAI LI, speaking to Dai Jitao in Shanghai, probably in 19211
THE DAIS OF JIANGSHAN
The Dai family of Jiangshan district, which straddles the headwaters of the Xin’an River on the southwestern periphery of Zhejiang at the convergence of the Jiangxi and Fujian borders, was supposedly descended from Dai Sheng of the Western Han (206 E -24 E ).2 According to contempo¬rary local historians of Jiangshan, however, the lineage’s earliest known an¬cestor was Dai Andao of the Jin (265-419 C.E.). His numerous progeny were scattered across Jiangsu, Anhui, and Zhejiang provinces. During the calamitous Yuan-Ming transition of the fourteenth century, the Xiuning branch of the family, originally headed by Secretary-Compiler (mishu xiu- zhuan) Dai Ande, moved to Longyou county in Zhejiang. The patriarch of this affiliate was Dai Tianxiong, and it was his ninth-generation grandson ( jiushisun), Dai Jinghong, who eventually led the family to Longjing in the Xianxia Peak area of Jiangshan.3
In the historical record, southwestern Zhejiang’s Xianxia Pass was com¬monly known as the “strategic gateway to the Southeast” (dongnan suo yue).4 The mountains there have traditionally been regarded by military special¬ists as a natural barrier, piling one upon the other in high peaks, rolling back upon themselves like dragons and tigers.5 Longjing village, just below the pass and the dark green mountains to the south, then and now was char¬acterized by fertile fields and wonderfully variegated landscapes enclosed north and east by lesser mountain ranges and individual peaks.6
Dai Li’s paternal great-grandfather, Dai Qiming (1776 -1865; zi [style name], Riming), helped elevate the poor peasant family to higher status during the local struggles against Taiping rebels when he earned the brevet rank of wude zuo qishe.7 Like many lineages that rode to rural wealth and power on the back of the Qing counterinsurgency, the Dais became local
Figure 1. Dai Li’s hometown Baoan. Photograph by Frederic Wakeman.
landlords and usurers, a “comfortable family” (xiao kang zhi jia) moving to Baoan cun (village) about twenty kilometers from the peak of the Xianxia mountain range after a fortune-teller assured Dai Qiming that “whoever obtains this land will be prosperous.” 8
It was there, in Baoan, that Dai Qiming settled with his wife and three sons, Zhenkui, Shunwang, and Dayou. Dai Shunwang (1813-73; zi，Juncai), the number two son, was to become Dai Li’s grandfather. Like his father, Dai Shunwang was granted a brevet of the fifth rank for Qing service. He turned the position to good advantage as he established various enterprises in Baoan while making enough money on the side as a moneylender to ac¬cumulate more than 200 mu (20 acres) of good valley farmland, along with rights to grow tea, gather firewood, and mine for lead on top of the hillsides nearby. At the time of Dai Shunwang’s death, most of this valuable estate was left to his son Dai Shifu, a wastrel who was then serving as a police runner in the prefectural offices at Quzhou, where the tributaries of the Xin’an River came together to flow on downstream to Hangzhou Bay, two hundred kilometers to the northeast.9
An inveterate gambler and whoremonger, Dai Shifu had squandered most of the family’s resources by the time his own two sons—Chunfeng and Chunbang—were born, and when he died in 1920 only twenty of the orig¬inal two hundred mu of land were left. Throughout the last years of his life the other seven members of the family had to depend upon the labors of Madame Dai, originally from the notable Lan lineage of Jiangshan dis¬trict, who took in sewing to support her children.10 Madame Dai, who was literate, unflinchingly assumed the responsibility of educating her two sons, and especially the eldest, who was born on May 28, 1897, and whose name in the clan genealogy was given as “Chunfeng” or “Spring Wind.” 11 Dai Chunfeng’s (zi, Zipei) original hao (assumed name) was Fangzhou, and he adopted the xueming (school name) of Zhilan and Zhenglan when he en¬tered higher elementary school at the age of fourteen sui. He later changed his name when, as a thirty-year-old, he entered the sixth cavalry class of the Whampoa Academy.12 It is by this name Dai Li, then, that we will identify him hereafter.13
MADAME DAI
Dai Li’s mother originally enrolled her son in the local village school at the age of seven sui. 14 His teacher, Mao Fengyi, saw him through the “Four Books” by the age of nine, and the following year Dai began to learn com- position.15 By the time he was eleven, his mother’s encouragement and tute¬lage had both gotten him into the local primary school and earned her his faithful obedience and filial devotion.16
The pattern was a familiar one, of course: the virtually fatherless boy urged on by a strong-willed mother. Madame Dai, coming from an accom¬plished mountain lineage in the high hill country of Zhejiang, which had certainly produced its share of bandits, must have had a tough core of her own underneath the genteel surface she tried hard to preserve in this down-at-the-heels family. She certainly worked unstintingly to put her son through school, and she must have constantly reminded him of the need to be different from his father, a weak figure dominated by the superiors he had to deal with as a yamen runner. Later, when Dai Li was a fearful figure in his own right, many people remarked on his devotion to his mother, who lived to be more than eighty years old.17
The frequently mentioned symbol of that filial devotion was the villa he built for her just below Xianxia Pass. Madame Dai’s townhouse had already been turned into an elaborate mansion by the War of Resistance. Today it is Baoan’s “cultural” palace and still contains some of the rococo furniture, elaborate stairwells, and fancy mirrors once used for decoration. Her new country villa, ambiguously called the Shuai xing zhai (either the Studio for Following One’s Nature or the Studio for One of a Rash Temperament), was built on a hilltop guarded by a special squad of Dai Li’s men who were in touch with MSB headquarters by means of a private radio transmitter. Ma¬dame Dai’s own retainers (zhuangding) were immune from arrest, and Com¬munist sources later claimed that she had used them as vigilantes to further
Figure 2. Baoan street scene. Photograph by Frederic Wakeman.
her activities as a pettifogger and tax farmer (baolan). The villa meanwhile looked out over a beautiful pond onto an additional lodge called the Pavil¬ion of Heavenly Rain (Tian yu ting).18
Dai frequently told his own assistants that they should model themselves after his mother, who was capable in so many different ways of taking care of her affairs while holding her son to heel. Later, whenever Dai Li’s vicious temper got out of control and he began abusing his batman or other mili¬tary personnel from the MSB acting as his servants, his mother had merely to speak up quietly but firmly, and he would instantly quiet himself and curb his anger. Only she, it seemed, could leash him altogether, and he in turn was the apple of her eye. After his airplane crashed in 1946, no one dared inform her that he was dead. Instead, they told Madame Dai that her son had left the country for America to negotiate on behalf of Chiang Kai- shek.19 If she guessed otherwise she never let on, even when Dai Li’s former assistants, led by Mao Renfeng, organized a celebration for her eightieth birthday in 1948. She passed away the following year.20
SEX AND GAMBLING
Perhaps Dai Li could do no harm in his mother’s eyes, but from a very early age he turned out to be a “tough and impetuous” (biaohan) lad who was re¬
spected but not always well liked by his peers.21 Although he was good at putting on disguises and feigning charm, he was also seen, even while a teenage student in primary school, as a troublemaker who was addicted to sex and gambling.22 But he was also a natural leader.23 After leaving home in 1909 to move into the county-run Wenxi Higher Elementary School, Dai Li became, at the age of sixteen sui, leader and organizer of the school’s Youth’s Association (Qingnian hui), which advocated personal hygiene and “progressiveness” ( jinbu) and opposed opium smoking and foot binding.24 Dai also turned out to have a prodigious memory, and when he graduated from Wenxi Elementary in 1913, he was first in his class.25
The following year, Dai Li got married. His bride was a young woman named Mao Xiucong, whose father, Mao Yingsheng, was a rural landowner in Fenglin zhen (town) two or three kilometers down the road toward the county seat. The marriage was evidently half-hearted; at least, it failed to tether Dai Li’s unbridled temperament.26 By all accounts he continued to consort with baser elements, drinking and gambling until he came to the at¬tention of the local police.27
In the fall of 1914 Dai Li passed the entrance examinations for Zhejiang Provincial Number One Middle School, where he spent three months.28 As bright as ever, he earned the respect of his teachers and the loyalty of his classmates, but he was caught pilfering and expelled in 1916, one year af¬ter his son, Zangyi, was born.29 After a stint working in a bean curd shop in Hangzhou, he returned to his home in the mountains at the age of twenty and rejoined his family.30
However, Jiangshan was no more hospitable to him than Hangzhou. Dai Li’s fondness for gambling got him into even greater trouble. Skillful at cards, he had over the years learned the secrets of palming and marking decks, and he apparently resorted to cheating quite often. At that time the police in the district were cracking down on gambling by arresting offend¬ers caught in broad daylight. To avoid having to pay a fine, most of the county’s inveterate gamblers would meet at night in a deserted clearing across the river from Xiakou.31 Dai Li himself would often cross the river us¬ing an overhead rice pulley to keep dry. One night he was caught cheating once too often and he ended up being badly beaten about the face (this was probably the cause of the missing teeth that Miles later attributed to Com-munists’ fists).32 Fearing for his life, Dai Li managed to get together travel money after selling some stolen fans, and he made his way back to Hang¬zhou, where he enlisted as a volunteer in the First Division of the Zhejiang Army under the command of Pan Guogang, with headquarters based in Ningbo.33
Dai Li continued to gamble after his enlistment in what turned out to be an utterly inadequate military training program.34 At night, after lights out, he would climb over the fence and play cards with liumang (loafers, gang-
Figure 3. Dai Li, his brother Dai Yunlin, and his son Dai Cangyi. Record Group 038, Naval Group China. National Archives Trust, Washington, D.C. Figure 4. Lan Yuexi, Dai Li’s mother. Record Group 038, Naval Group China. National Archives Trust, Washington, D.C.
sters) and guanggun (thugs, hoodlums) outside the camp. Whether by cheat¬ing or not, Dai managed to make quite a bit of money at cards, and he used these profits to entertain his soldier friends (he was always the one to have a bit of liquor on hand, melon seeds in his pocket, a snack within reach) and to form connections with ruffians who eventually introduced him to mem¬bers of the Green Gang (Qingbang). 35
When his nocturnal activities earned him punishment from his military commanders, Dai Li deserted from the army. During 1918 he lived from hand to mouth in Ningbo until his mother arrived, determined to take him back to Jiangshan and enroll him in a respectable civilian school.36 It must have been at her urging, then, that he—the liaogui, or son of a family fallen in status—sat for the entrance examinations to Quzhou Normal School and passed second on the list in 1919.37 But even with an expense-paid educa¬tion assured, Dai Li had no wish to be an elementary school teacher and he found himself drifting up and down the Qiantang River, ranging from Quzhou and Jinhua upriver to Hangzhou and Ningbo downstream.38
Eventually, in 1921, Dai used his Green Gang connections to leave Hang¬zhou for Shanghai, where his Hangzhou secret society “teacher” (shifu) gave him an introduction to the Qingbang patriarch Huang Jinrong, then the
Figure 5. Dai Li as a young man. Record
Group 038, Naval Group China. National
Archives Trust, Washington, D.C.
most powerful gangster in the city.39 Through these ties, Dai Li became a close friend of such infamous Shanghai liumang and “hatchet men” (da- shou) of the era as Liu Zhilu, Zhang Xiaolin, Wang Xiaolai, Xiang Haiqian, Zhang Zilian, Tian Desheng, Feng Shizhu, Tang Shaowu, Shi Xiaoxian, and Fan Shaozeng.40
To these assorted gangsters Dai Li was merely another hanger-on, work¬ing as a private bodyguard or casino attendant, often simply out of a job, looking for some cash on the side or a “patron” (kaoshan) to back his ca- reer.41 Always, however, he managed to keep up appearances, even if of a raffish sort. “Living off the land” (daliu) in Hangzhou, for instance, meant keeping his single set of summer clothes clean by finding a deserted spot along West Lake where he could slip off his jacket and trousers to wash and then dry them on a sunny rock while he powdered his canvas shoes till they looked white as new.42
SHANGHAI SOJOURN
In Shanghai Dai Li tried to maintain a comparable facade. Laundering the same suit of clothing every night so that it dried while he slept, Dai man¬aged to pass himself off as being much better situated than he really was. In actuality, he was freeloading off his cousin (biaodi), Zhang Guanfu, who was then, in 1920, working as a clerk at the Commercial Press and who had rented a small garret in a house at Xiaobeimen for himself and his wife.43 Dai Li slept on the floor beside the couple’s bed, and this aroused great ten¬sion between his cousin’s wife, Wang Qiulian, and Dai.44 In fact, Mrs. Zhang thwarted Dai Li’s efforts to get a job at the Commercial Press through his cousin, and once she actually barred the door against him.45
Her opposition notwithstanding, Zhang Guanfu followed Dai Li into in¬telligence work, becoming a member of his Liaison Group (Lianluozu) in 1931, and then in 1937 accepting an appointment as a lieutenant general in charge of the management section of the Su-Zhe xingdong weiyuanhui (Action Committee of Jiangsu and Zhejiang) as well as assistant director of the Accounting Office of MSB.46 Though this brought its own rewards, Mrs. Zhang still despised Dai Li.47 She had known the secret police chief as a biesan (tramp), and in her eyes he would always remain a monkey dressed up as a king. In these later banquet years, when the shoe was on the other foot, Dai contemptuously referred to Madame Zhang as a “yellow-faced old woman” (huanglianpo) who had lost her youthful luster. At the same time, he tried to bedevil her life by prodding his cousin Zhang Guanfu to take up a concubine, which would have forced his wife to share the same roof with a pretty young xiaolaopo (second wife).48
According to one account, Dai Li lived with his cousin and his wife on and off through 1923. While his cousin went off to work at the Commercial Press, Dai Li would frequent the Shiliupu section of Shanghai, near the Xiao- dongmen, where he acquired a minor reputation among the liumang of the area. Shiliupu was a tough marketing neighborhood that had spawned the racketeer Du Yuesheng, and one version of the famous gangster’s life has Du recognizing in the much younger Dai Li a genuine “talent” (rencai). The most authoritative source for the relationship between the Green Gang chief and the future head of Chiang’s secret service was Wan Molin, who originally served Du Yuesheng as a confidential secretary and then later joined Dai Li’s Juntong. Wan reported that in 1928, when Dai Li was thirty- one years old and already working as an intelligence agent for Hu Jing’an, he decided that his future success depended upon cultivating allies within Shanghai’s underworld.49
Dai Li consequently called upon Yang Hu, then chief of the police section of the Shanghai Garrison Command, who told him directly, “If you want to do intelligence work in Shanghai, then there is one friend with whom you must certainly be in touch.” The friend was, of course, Du Yuesheng.50
The day that Commander Yang brought Dai Li for a visit [to Du Yuesheng], Mr. Dai wore a neat and tidy western suit His hair was combed flat and
slick. His eyes were wide and brilliant, and he spoke as befitted the occasion. Even though it had only been a short time since he left the military academy, and he was only about thirty years old, he was able to speak with fervor and as-surance in front of Mr. Du and Commander Yang. Moreover, after a few words of succinct amenities, he put forward his request to Mr. Du and Mr. Du was able without any hesitation whatsoever to answer, “All right. If there is a situ¬ation later, then you can give me a phone call. If I’m not here, you can con¬vey it through Wan Molin.”51
All three men subsequently swore brotherhood, and Dai Li (who was eight or nine years junior both to Yang and to Du) thereafter addressed the gang¬ster as “third older brother.” 52 However, as soon as Dai Li’s blood cousin, Zhang Guanfu, got wind of the relationship he was so frightened that he or¬dered Dai Li out of his house lest he jeopardize the family’s safety through his connections with the underworld.53
During these years of “living off the land,” Dai Li frequently returned to the mountains of Jiangshan.54 In 1922, he managed to wangle an appoint¬ment as the Xianxia district Commissioner of Educational Affairs, presum¬ably because he had attended the provincial normal school. And two years later, when he was twenty-eight, he organized and led a militia unit (tuan- bingdui) in the village of Baoan. Although the self-defense forces partici¬pated in the Zhejiang-Jiangsu war, protecting Baoan against Sun Chuan- fang’s ally Meng Zhaoyue, they were mainly engaged in “clearing the countryside” (qing xiang), with Dai Li serving as one of the major enforcers (dashou).55 Dai Li’s small militia force was ruthlessly efficient when it came to fighting local bandits; Dai often volunteered to ferret out enemies of the militia—which was organized by the landlords—in the heavy undergrowth of the hillsides, personally clambering over the brambles and brush, even on the darkest and stormiest of nights. There was no question about his courage and stamina, not to speak of ferocity and savagery. But in the end the Baoan militia failed to defeat any of General Meng’s forces, and Dai Li decided to leave Jiangshan again to seek his fortune in the outside world.56
HU ZONGNAN
On one of his visits to Hangzhou Dai Li had the good fortune to get to know Hu Zongnan, who would later turn out to be a crucial ally for him among the Nationalist generals who had graduated from the Whampoa Military Academy (see fig. 6).57 According to Dai Li—who cast the story in a narra¬tive mode reminiscent of the meetings of sworn brothers described in the San guo yanyi or Shui hu zhuan— one day Dai Li was doing his wash on the banks of West Lake by the side of the entrance to the Linyin Buddhist tem- ple.58 He had left his one suit, made out of gray army fabric, out on the rocks in the sun while he stayed in the water to conceal his nakedness. A group of schoolchildren came by, accompanied by their teacher, a young male. Some of the students saw the clothes and shoes and went over to pick them up. Dai Li spotted them from the water and shouted at them to leave his clothes
Figure 6. Nationalist general Hu Zongnan. Remembrances to General Hu Tsung-nan on his Centennial Birthday. Taipei: Military History and Translation Bureau, Ministry of National Defense, 1996, p. 13.
alone. The schoolteacher realized that Dai had no swimsuit on and ordered his pupils to lay the clothes back on the shore to dry. Although no words were exchanged by the two men, they smiled at each other over the bather’s predicament.59
Later, after the schoolboys and their teacher had gone on, Dai Li recov¬ered his suit. At the first chance, he paid a call on the local primary school to thank the teacher, who then went by the name of Shounan, for his thoughtfulness. The teacher was Hu Zongnan, who would soon go on to en¬ter the Whampoa Academy and become one of the “disciples of the son of heaven” (tianzi mensheng) as Chiang Kai-shek’s favorite. Now, long before Hu had become the “King of the Northwest” and Dai the chief of Chiang’s se¬cret police, the two men found that they shared many similarities, not the least of which was their overweening ambition. Was this not a characteristic of many other young Chinese of the period, trained in normal schools where Chinese language, literature, and history were emphasized instead of the English and mathematics required for elite westernized universities like Beida or Qinghua? 60
Educated to be elementary school teachers, Hu and Dai both felt, with that peculiarly unselfconscious conceit of the lumpen-intellectual, that they were born to enjoy a great and important destiny. Full of the traditional lit¬eratus’s sense of cultural self-importance, each man believed, at one level or another, in the doctrine enunciated by Gu Yanwu that pifu you ze (every man has a share of responsibility for the fate of his country). Consumed with a sense of their own importance and driven byan ambition that seemed to know no bounds, they were like another rural schoolteacher, Mao Ze¬dong, in that they presumptuously “took the under-heaven as their own governing task” (yi tianxia wei jiren).
Not yet sophisticated enough to recognize ordinary, normal constraints on their ambitions—the kinds of limits that many of the more westernized youths quickly let hamper and restrain their political desires in big-city uni- versities—Hu Zongnan and Dai Li saw the same limitless dreams for power and prestige in each other that they recognized in themselves. This com¬bination in them of the conceit of the petty intellectual together with the blocked ambition of their relatively low status must have fired powerful dreams of accomplishment.61 And being less firmly attached to the role of the pen-wielding and study-bound intellectual, they were far readier to turn to other modes of personal expression such as revolutionary organization or military training than higher-status intellectuals such as college profes¬sors might have been. It was little wonder that they soon became such fast friends, finding so much they shared in common.62
Dai Li’s second great opportunity—heaven-sent according to his own account—was the chance to meet Chiang Kai-shek in Shanghai. The exact time of the meeting is not altogether clear, but it was probably in 1921, when Chiang and a group of his friends that included Dai Jitao and Chen Guofu were running the Shanghai Stock and Commodity Exchange to raise funds for Sun Yat-sen.63
Dai Li somehow came to know all of them then, and was thought by the revolutionaries to be a xiao biesan, or “little tramp.” When they needed er¬rands run, Dai was sent on his way; when they wanted hot water poured for tea, Dai was called into the room. Dai Jitao soon learned that he and this eager-to-please hanger-on bore the same surname, and he began to ask the young man about his plans in life. For his part, Dai Li realized that these were not ordinary journalists or businessmen. Since there was a constant coming and going of guanggun who appeared to be couriers from the Rev¬olutionary Party, he assumed that they were agents of Sun Yat-sen down in Guangdong. But he dared not speak of this, and at first he simply answered Dai Jitao’s questions by saying that “as long as I have food to eat, everything will be all right.” Eventually he did tell Dai Jitao how his desire to “do some¬thing flamboyant and impetuous” had brought him to Shanghai “to live off the land,” and the older man’s attitude toward the “little tramp” began to change. When Chiang Kai-shek noticed how well Dai Jitao was treating Dai Li, and how the younger man had begun calling the older Dai “uncle” (shu- shu), he too began to entrust him with greater responsibilities. It would be some time before Dai Li became a trusted agent of the Generalissimo, but the beginnings of that relationship can be traced back to the days when the secret service chief “lived off the land” on the streets of Shanghai.64
Not only that; although Dai Li did not like to hear others talk about his experiences during that time of his life (and whoever did so was likely to suf¬fer grave consequences), he enjoyed telling tales of his own about the days he lived entirely by his wits. Laughing and joking loudly about the things that he had to do to get by, Dai Li would refer to that period as a time of “molding” (taoye), just the way a piece of porcelain is shaped or metal cast. His only regret was that during that time he had not realized sooner how quickly Chiang Kai-shek would rise, and therefore tarried a little bit too long before throwing his lot in with the future Nationalist leader.65
Chapter 3
Touben
During the year the xiaozhang [chancellor] was in Guangdong beginning his rise to power, the Shanghai newspapers used to have big red banner headlines that said: “Is Chiang Kai-shek Going To Be Like A Dragon?” Unfortunately, I was in Shang¬hai, living off the land, and had no chance to witness this in person. So, after look¬ing at the newspaper, even though there was some doubt in my mind, there was also a little bit of belief. And once I thought that my connections with higher-ups were insufficient, and the chances were that this wouldn’t be a very strong point for me. But even though I mulled things over this way, I never had the courage to go and touben [seek help or refuge from him as though he were a relative]. I al¬ways thought I should watch the way the wind was blowing and then think about it again. In this fashion I kept waiting and waiting, all the way until the spring of 1926 when I finally went south and threw my lot in. If it had been a half-year earlier that I had gone to touben, wouldn’t I also have been one of the elder broth¬ers [laodage] of the earlier classes of the Military Academy? Just recently, when our department [chu] was being expanded and reorganized into the MSB and they began looking at the seniority and qualifications of those eligible for bureau chief and deputy bureau chief, the fact that I had only been in the sixth class at Wham¬poa not only disqualified me for bureau chief; it also wasn’t enough to qualify me for deputy bureau chief. Don’t you think that was bad luck? On the other hand, though, if I hadn’t touben and entered Whampoa, there wouldn’t be anything to talk about at all.
DAI LI, speaking to Wen Qiang in April 19381
WHAMPOA
According to one version of the story, Dai Li’s entry into the ranks of the Guomindang revolutionaries came about quite by happenstance thanks to Dai’s acquaintance with Mao Renfeng, who later became one of his top agents (see fig. 7).2 Mao was virtually a fellow townsman, hailing from Wu- cun xiang in Jiangshan county. He was also a tongnian of Dai Li, being only seven months younger; and the two of them had been classmates at both Wenxi Higher Elementary School and Zhejiang Provincial First Normal. Mao, however, after teaching at Jiahu Higher Elementary School, attended Fudan University, and from there went on in 1925 to enroll in the fourth class at Whampoa Military Academy, from which he graduated to serve as a secretary in the Whampoa Cadets’ Army. In the spring of 1926, Mao’s father
Figure 7. Mao Renfeng, deputy direc¬tor of Juntong and later director of the Bureau to Preserve Secrets. Chung-Mei he tsuo suo chih [Annals of the Sino- American Cooperative Organization]. N.p. [Taipei]: Kuo-fang pu ch’ing pao chủ, 1970.
passed away and he returned to Jiangshan to attend the funeral. At that time Dai Li was also in Jiangshan, and according to this version of the matter, the two of them met by chance at the hostel in the county seat where both were staying. After exchanging pleasantries, the two men began filling each other in on their recent activities, and it was in this way that Dai Li learned about the opportunities afforded by attendance at the Whampoa Military Acad¬emy. Mao Renfeng supposedly encouraged Dai to apply, and subsequently helped him gain admission.3
A second account of Dai’s entry into Whampoa has the man, now thirty years old, getting a letter of introduction from the former boss of the Shang¬hai rackets, Huang Jinrong, to Chiang Kai-shek.4 According to this version, Dai Li took the letter with him to Guangzhou, where he used it to gain ad¬mission to the entrance examination for the military academy. After pass¬ing the entrance test he was admitted to boot camp for three months of training (ru wu xunlian), and then he was assigned to the cavalry section of the sixth class at the Whampoa Academy.5
The third explanation for Dai Li’s entering Whampoa is by far the most interesting and compelling. Supposedly, when Dai came to Guangzhou in 1926 to see Chiang Kai-shek—perhaps armed with Huang Jinrong’s let- ter—he first went to Guangdong University (later Zhongshan University) to see its president, Dai Jitao.6 Dai remembered his “little tramp” (xiao biesan)— it is said—and reintroduced him to Chiang Kai-shek, who was quite happy to hear that Dai Li wanted to serve him as “the kind of follower who can crow like a chicken and steal like a dog” (ji ming gou dao zhi tu). 7 And even though Dai Li had already managed to get admitted to the fifth class at Whampoa, now that he had been received by Chiang Kai-shek, he announced his at¬tention to give up going to the academy in order to remain as a servant at his new master’s side.8
According to later accounts by Dai Li to Hu Zongnan, Chiang Kai-shek initially intended to use Dai as a batman (qinwubing). Dai Li, however, wanted to become indispensable to his leader in another way.9 As the gen¬eral’s hound and horse, he therefore became a kind of human sponge, soak¬ing up any information he came across that he thought might be of interest to Chiang. Every few days he wrote up the intelligence in a kind of digest or list that he left on Chiang Kai-shek’s desk.10
At first, the chancellor (xiaozhang) simply threw the reports into the wastebasket without reading them. Dai Li would patiently retrieve the digests, iron them out, and put them back on Chiang’s desk. Gradually, certain items of information came to attract the leader’s attention, and Chiang—it is said—eventually realized that accepting Dai’s proffered ser¬vices was in his own best interest.11 He thereupon “took [Dai] by the ear and told him exactly what he wanted him to do” (er ti mian ming), which was to become one of his confidential agents planted secretly as a sixth class cav¬alry cadet in the Whampoa Military Academy’s student ranks.12
One of Chiang Kai-shek’s major concerns about the Whampoa Military Academy was the ideological purity of its cadets.13 The curriculum, to begin with, was meant to provide a moral and political sense of direction to youths, often of rural middle-income backgrounds, who were disillusioned and dis¬contented; it was designed to form “a foundation for an indoctrinated, dis¬ciplined officer cadre.” 14 In his own lectures there in 1925, Chiang had told the cadets that the chief Chinese weakness was the absence of dedicated loy¬alty to a group, and that decentralization and disorganization had been a characteristic of the Chinese people since the Song period.15
But the chancellor did not have a very coherent or complex ideological cure for this illness. Political instruction at the academy, partly owing to the assignment of propaganda cadres to other positions in the various expedi¬tionary forces of the GMD, was lacking; and because of the separation be¬tween military command and ideological indoctrination, training unit com¬manders did not develop a sophisticated understanding of party ideology. Chiang himself had told the graduates of the first class in 1924 that party representatives in army units should restrict themselves to problems of management; they were not supposed to judge commanders according to ideology. For Chiang, what was most important was being “a man”: under¬standing discipline, obeying barracks and camp-life rules, maintaining a sense of purpose, and putting one’s daily routines “in good order.” 16
Stressing field command rather than intendancy (logistics and admin- istration), Chiang Kai-shek sought to win loyalty to himself, and for the most part he certainly managed to do so. His negligence of intendancy—in which he was never trained—was a fatal weakness for him and his armies later on.17 “The resulting deficiency apparently blinded him to the realiza¬tion of the importance of a well-organized, expertly staffed intendancy system to the overall functioning of a modern army. As with most other Chinese commanders of his day, his forte lay in the command of combat troops.” 18 For, as the “old man” (lao touzi) —which is what members of the Whampoa group called him—Chiang held a unique position in the acad¬emy, being both a popular lecturer and a battlefield commander who man¬aged to create strong intellectual and emotional ties with the majority of the young cadets there.19
Chiang’s strongest group ties were to the tianzi mensheng (disciples of the son of heaven) of the first class of Whampoa, and especially to those among them like Hu Zongnan who were natives of Zhejiang.20 Hu himself had had great difficulty entering Whampoa because of his short stature (he had to get a special exemption from Liao Zhongkai to take the entrance examina¬tions), but once in, he did very well: by the eve of the Northern Expedition he had been raised to battalion commander (yingzhang). 21
His friend Dai Li, meanwhile, was ostensibly studying hard to become a cavalry officer. Once he entered Whampoa, Dai’s personal behavior seemed to undergo an abrupt about-face. Gone was the bon vivant comrade con¬stantly leading his classmates into one distraction after another. Instead, Dai Li had become much quieter and more observant, a listener rather than a speaker, an ambitious gatherer of information more intent upon maintain¬ing connections with his superiors than upon feting his peers.22 In fact, ac¬cording to the reminiscences of his equestrian instructor, Xu Zhenya, Dai was spending an inordinate amount of time away from the academy hob¬nobbing with important political leaders upriver in Canton.
That student was harder to curb than a spirited horse. When he was studying to be a cavalryman, he would fish for three days and dry his net for two. When¬ever he felt like it, he asked for leave to go on up [the river to Canton]. When it was time for him to study, he would write letters. Everybody was very suspi¬cious of him. Why was he writing so many letters? Only afterwards did they know that he was going up to the very top, reaching up to heaven as far as the xiaozhang. Those letters were written to be sent to the xiaozhang. He was a man well on his way [laitouda]. Who would dare to provoke him? 23
The letters that he supposedly prepared for Chiang Kai-shekwere responses to two commands that the general was said to have given him: first, to re¬port upon the state of thinking of his fellow students, and especially on the thoughts of those carrying out Communist and left-wing activities among the Union of Revolutionary Military Youth (Geming junren qingnian lian- hehui); and, second, to maintain surveillance over the officials and com¬manders of the school so as to be able to report circumstances of their per¬sonal lives, including whether or not they were being corrupted.24 The re¬ports at that time were sent or delivered to Hu Jing’an, who in addition to being Chiang’s secretary was also in charge of political work for the fresh¬man class at Whampoa, as well as being a gugan (backbone cadre) for the Society to Study Sun Wen’s Ideology (Sun Wen zhuyi xuehui).25
APPRENTICE AGENT
Although Dai Li effectively served as one of Hu Jing’an’s agents, he later claimed that it was not long before he was reporting directly to the com¬mander in chief himself.26 On March 18-19, 1926, suspicious movements of the gunboat Zhongshan, which had been anchored off army headquar¬ters at Whampoa and then was moved to Guangzhou by its Communist commander, led Chiang Kai-shek to think that a left-wing coup was being planned and that he was going to be seized and taken aboard the vessel. His suspicions were amplified by intelligence reports from Hu Zongnan, Hu Jing’an, and Dai Li about the activities of Communist members of the GMD, including Zhou Enlai.27On the basis of these reports, as well as conversa¬tions with Guangzhou’s police chief Wu Tiecheng and other key advisers, Chiang moved swiftly on the morning of March 20 to have the gunboat seized, its commander (who was also chief of the Naval Bureau) arrested, and the guards protecting the Russian advisers and the headquarters of the Communist-dominated Hong Kong-Canton strike committee disarmed, while declaring martial law and rounding up more than fifty political work¬ers of the Second Division.28
Once Chiang’s main rival, Wang Jingwei, had left Canton for Europe, the commander in chief apologized to the Soviet advisers, said that the gunboat incident did not involve the central Communist organization, and tendered his resignation—which of course was not accepted. However, although he did say in one speech to the Communist political workers withdrawn from the army that he was not completely convinced there had been a plot to kid¬nap him, he steadfastly maintained after April 1927 that the Zhongshan af¬fair had been a Communist conspiracy. His insistence upon this may have been based upon some of the reports that Dai Li had given him, and this would have enhanced Dai’s position even more in his eyes.29
THE PURGE AT WHAMPOA
By April of 1927 Dai Li found himself assigned to the First Platoon of the National Revolutionary Army’s Cavalry Battalion, under the command of Shen Zhenya. The platoon was bivouacked at Whampoa, where the white terror begun three days earlier in Shanghai by Chiang Kai-shek’s agents and officers reached the cadets on April 15. That morning the students got up as usual, washed their faces, and proceeded to the athletic field for their morning exercises. When they reached the exercise area they realized that the hills and roads all around them were filled with armed troops. The stu¬dents had no weapons of their own, their guns having been collected ear¬lier, and a tremor of alarm spread through their ranks. The cadets’ tuan- zhang (regimental commander), Li Yafen, broke the silence by announcing that henceforth Guomindang and Communist students were to be sepa¬rated and taught distinctly different curricula. All Communist students, he said, were to stand up at once. Then he pointed to the machine guns on the nearby hills. With the exception of one Hubei student who had been suf¬fering from mental problems, no one stood up to identify himself, and all that one could hear was the sound of the cadets’ breathing. Finally the cadet commander said that the students had already been together in the same units for several months, and therefore everybody knew what the other fel¬lows’ political views were. Members of individual units were therefore sup¬posed to point out the Communists in their midst right away. This caused a tremendous uproar, but the orders were repeated, and gradually the Com-munist students were isolated while the rest of the students were taken back to their dormitories. Once the other students were gone the Communists were placed under arrest and taken off to Nanshitou concentration camp ( jizhong ying). 30
Other student brigades had roughly the same experience that morning. A member of the Third Brigade remembered that their commander had warned the cadets when they refused to stir after the Communists had been told to stand, that “if you don’t stand up, then we will call out your name and you will have to stand up anyway. It would be far better if you did this vol¬untarily. You have nothing to worry about.” 31 The number of cadets who were then identified and arrested as Communists varied from brigade to brigade. In the Third Student Brigade, only eight people stood up to be identified as Communists, and the other students supposedly admired their bravery as they were handed over to military police and thrown in the jail at Hudiegang. More than 150 were arrested in the Second Brigade, however, and at least 200 were seized in the First Brigade.32 That same night most of the suspected Communists were taken out to Fish-Pearl Fort (Yuzhu paotai) at the Bogue and executed.33
According to the lore that Dai Li later cultivated, some of these slain ca¬dets were among the seventy-five Communist students that he turned over to his commander in chief, an act that supposedly won him Chiang Kai- shek’s everlasting favor.34 Yet even though there was talk in later years that he had joined a Special Investigation Group (Michazu) that Chiang set up in April 1927 under Hu Jing’an to hunt down leftists during the purge,
Dai Li was equally prized for his intelligence work during the Northern Expedition.35
MILITARY INTELLIGENCE WORK
The Northern Expedition began on July 1, 1926, and by his own account Dai Li, like many other Whampoa cadets, left the academy after the April 15, 1927, purge, and on Chiang Kai-shek’s orders joined the National Revolu¬tionary Army during its march up the eastern route through Fujian and Zhejiang.36 Because there were not enough horses to outfit the entire cav¬alry unit, part of Dai Li’s group went north by chartered ship to Shanghai where it split into two wings, one garrisoned in Xuzhou and the other in Suzhou.37 Dai Li accompanied the latter. However, Dai’s job, unlike that of most of the others assigned to the cavalry, was not to fight on horseback but rather to spy on and subvert the enemy.38 He was notably successful once he reached the Jiang-Zhe area where he had “lived off the land” in earlier days, and a steady stream of reports written in invisible ink was sent back to be read by Chiang himself.39
However, these familiar haunts also reminded Dai Li of his former life as a grifter, and he soon succumbed to his chronic vices. When he and several fellow officers were sent into Shanghai to buy gifts for Chiang Kai-shek, who had just returned from the front during the summer of 1927, Dai Li ab¬sconded with the funds and went on a spree in the city’s casinos and broth¬els. Forced to scrounge off of his cousin, who gave him money for his return train ticket, Dai Li reported back to his commanders in Suzhou after two weeks AWOL and was thrown in the stockade. Once released, he again stole money from his comrades and only managed to escape a beating by fleeing to Nanjing. There he presented himself to Hu Jing’an, who was—at the end of July 1927—in the process of setting up Chiang’s Michazu (Special Inves¬tigation Group). Offering to serve as a babysitter for the new intelligence chief’s children, Dai Li managed to convince Hu Jing’an that he had been forced to desert his unit because his fellow officers blamed him for helping Hu conduct his purge of Whampoa cadets. Hu Jing’an subsequently rec-ommended Dai Li for a regular position in the short-lived Special Investi¬gation Group.40
As the Michazu began to fall apart in the late summer of 1927, Dai Li found himself once again “living off the land” in Shanghai, sleeping at his cousin Zhang’s house while looking for whatever opportunities he could find.41 Unexpectedly, these included the chance to do “hound and horse la¬bor” for his former chief, Chiang Kai-shek.42
That August 13, Chiang Kai-shek had resigned his position as comman¬der in chief after the Northern Expedition had faltered in the Huai River area and the government had begun to have difficulty raising funds in Shanghai.43 After spending some time in his hometown of Xikou, Chiang passed through Shanghai in September 1927, preparing to leave for strate¬gic exile in Japan. When Dai Li learned that his former chief was staying in the French Concession, he presented himself at the gate to Chiang’s resi¬dence, volunteering to act as his bodyguard.44 Shortly after that, on Sep¬tember 28, Chiang left for Japan where he both persuaded Madame Soong to allow him to marry her daughter and conferred with Prime Minister Tanaka Giichi, who agreed to help him fight the Communists but who urged him to consolidate his position south of the Yangzi and leave the north to others, including Zhang Zuolin and his edgy Japanese advisers.45
In the meantime, Chiang’s major military rival, Tang Shengzhi, was be¬ing forced by other army generals into exile in Japan, and Wang Jingwei— after trying unsuccessfully to convene the Fourth Plenum of the Central Ex¬ecutive Committee in Canton—had agreed to meet Chiang Kai-shek in Shanghai to discuss the possibility of a reconciliation. Wang Jingwei’s po¬sition had been strengthened in Canton by the coup to “protect the party and save the nation” (hu dang jiu guo) on November 17, when Li Jishen was driven out of the city and Zhang Fakui set up a government with Chen Gongbo and other Wang supporters.46 But his position was weakened na¬tionally because of the scorn with which Wang was regarded by party elders like Hu Hanmin and Wu Zhihui for his treachery. Naturally, Chiang Kai- shek’s position was correspondingly strengthened, and it was in his house in the French Concession that talks were held among Guomindang leaders in late November. Though the conference did not come to much of a conclusion by the time it adjourned on December 10, 1927, Wang Jingwei was obliged to invite Chiang Kai-shek to resume his post as commander in chief. Just as soon as the conference was adjourned, the Canton Commune erupted on December 11. Wang Jingwei subsequently lost his base in Guangdong and Chiang Kai-shek began to rebuild his own military coali¬tion, returning to Nanjing on January 4, 1928, and accepting his former po¬sition as supreme commander of the National government five days later.47
After Chiang Kai-shek became commander in chief once again, with T. V. Soong as minister of finance, it was obvious that he intended to use this new opportunity to purge the Guomindang of his enemies whenever possible and to reorganize some of the provincial committees. On February 2, 1928, with the Communists and Wang Jingwei’s supporters excluded, the Fourth Plenum of the Second Central Executive Committee of the GMD was con¬vened in Nanjing to receive Chiang Kai-shek’s proposals to replace the ide¬ology of class struggle with a spirit of national reconciliation and mutual cooperation, to base all propaganda on Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s Plan for National Reconstruction (which was composed before Sun had been influenced by the Communists), to reregister all party members after their local committees were dissolved, and to abolish the various departments (peasants, women, workers, youth, merchants, and so on) that had been in charge of mobiliz¬ing a mass movement for the United Front during the Northern Expedition. Only three departments were to be formed in the new GMD: organization, propaganda, and party training. A Military Affairs Commission (Jun wei) was to be placed directly under Chiang Kai-shek’s chairmanship, and within the army there was to be a reorganization of the Political Training Depart¬ment, which was now headed by Dai Li’s old sponsor and friend, Dai Jitao.48
“SEEKING SHELTER”
That same winter Dai Li—who never actually finished his coursework at Whampoa and hence was not formally an academy graduate—moved to Nanjing, where he was barely able to come up with enough money for his digs near the Taiping Bridge quarter in the capital. It was around this time that he got the job that most emphasize as the key to his rise from obscurity. Although no one seems to be sure how he acquired the post, he began work¬ing with Hu Zongnan, who was now commander of the Second Brigade of the First Division after the Northern Expedition forces were reorganized early in 1928.49
“Seeking shelter” (touben) under his old friend from Hangzhou days, Dai Li began serving as a petty officer (weihuguan) under Hu, who recommended him for a job in the Nanjing office of the Whampoa Alumni Association Investigation Department (Huangpu tongxuehui biye xuesheng diaocha chu). The Whampoa Alumni Association was heir to the Sun Yat-sen Study Society, which had enrolled three hundred members within the Whampoa Academy on the eve of the Northern Expedition in June 1926. Formed when the Study Society dissolved during the military activities of 1926-27, the Alumni Association was under the titular leadership of Chiang Kai-shek. After Chiang broke with the left wing of the United Front, only anti-Com¬munist elements remained within its ranks.50
The Whampoa Alumni Association Investigation Department formed the nucleus of what later became the Central Military Schools Alumni In¬vestigation Department (Zhongyang ge junshi xuexiao biyesheng diaocha chu), after the former was dissolved in 1930.51 This organization was the security unit for Chiang Kai-shek’s military training system, which eventu¬ally included the Central Military Academy (Zhongyang lujun junguan xuexiao), the Airforce Academy (Kongjun xuexiao), the Artillery Academy (Paobing xuexiao), the Cavalry Academy (Qibing xuexiao), the Army En¬gineers Academy (Gongbing xuexiao), the Light and Heavy Infantry Acad¬emy (Qingzhong bing xuexiao), the Naval Academy (Haijun xuexiao), and the Central Police Academy (Zhongyang jingguan xuexiao), along with ad hoc “training classes” (xunlianban) to form officers and create cadres.52 By 1935 there would be more than one hundred of the latter units, and it was obviously necessary from the beginning for Chiang’s own peace of mind to keep track of the graduates of these units under the pretext of registering and investigating their credentials.53
Working in the Whampoa Alumni Association Investigation Department (which later became a front for the Society of Chinese Revolutionary Com- rades—a key element of the Blue Shirts), Dai Li naturally came into con¬tact with a number of unemployed Whampoa graduates who were perfectly ready to join him in forming the nucleus of a special intelligence-gathering apparatus whenever moneys could be found to fund its activities. It was also while working in the Investigation Department that Dai Li managed to get Hu Jing’an, now the deputy head ( fuguan) of the Commander-in-Chief’s Retinue (Suicong), to introduce him to Chiang Kai-shek as a candidate for the position of senior captain (shiwei) in the bodyguards—a post he eagerly accepted.54 Using his network of unemployed Whampoa graduates, Dai Li began to gather information about people suspected of illicit political ac¬tivities. Often he did this in a deliberately provocative way, circulating slan¬ders about Chiang and encouraging his respondents to criticize the way the commander in chief was handling the government. At first he had no for¬mal way to forward these reports to his chief; in a fashion that echoes Dai Li’s reported efforts to get an intelligence digest onto Chiang’s desk or into Chiang’s car, he simply used his position as guard at the gates of Chiang Kai- shek’s headquarters (silingbu) to hand over slips of paper with these con¬fidences every time the leader drove through. According to one account, Chiang became more and more reliant on his new captain for such infor¬mation, and soon the automobile came to stop at the gate every time the commander in chief saw Dai Li standing there, faithfully awaiting him.55
Another version of the events, which is slightly more demeaning to Dai, has the future secret service chief serving in the Retinue as a kind of errand boy “doing legwork” (paotui) for General Chiang. Mao Qingxiang, who was then Chiang’s confidential secretary ( jiyao mishu), later remembered that Dai Li would deliver reports once every three days to the doorway at the back of the Security Section’s (Jingwei) mess hall, where they were handed over either to the chef or to the duty officer. Dai Li did not dare ask what the reaction to these reports was, and Mao Qingxiang initially did not even deliver them to the commander in chief.56 After a while, however, Mao no¬ticed that there were some especially interesting items that deserved atten¬tion, and he began to forward the reports to Chiang Kai-shek for a look. Chiang in turn appreciated the richness of the information and while or¬dering that Dai Li be made a member of Hu Jing’an’s Intelligence Group (Qingbao xiaozu) within the Retinue, Chiang also began paying Dai a sep¬arate monthly stipend of three thousand yuan to cover his “activities ex¬penses” (huodong fei). With this additional money Dai Li was able to hire even more agents, and gradually he began to gather around him what was to become known as the League of Ten (Shiren tuan): a special services (tewu) unit consisting of himself and nine other young officers and former military cadets.57
It has been suggested that Chiang Kai-shek turned to Dai Li primarily be¬cause he was losing confidence in Hu Jing’an, who had a cruel and vicious temperament that was difficult to restrain.58 Years later, when Dai had be¬come Chiang’s most powerful spymaster, the Military Statistics Bureau held a banquet for higher level cadres to which Hu Jing’an did not receive an in¬vitation. Hu crashed the party anyway, noisomely driving away most of the guests when he cursed and shouted:
Dai Li, that son of a bitch! He turns his face away without any feelings what-soever [for the relationships he has cultivated]. If it had not been for the help extended pulling him up that year in Guangdong, introducing him to the big chiefs of the Sun Wen zhuyi weiyuanhui like Yang Yinzhi, He Zhonghan, and Pan Youqiang, getting them together to meet and talk, then who would have known who the hell he was? I gave him the name list completely unselfishly. Otherwise, how would he have known how to find the materials that allowed him to praise his own merits and seek reward? 59
Hu Jing’an’s vile temper may well have been one reason he lost favor in the Generalissimo’s eyes, but Chiang was also simultaneously developing a strong confidence in Dai’s abilities to counter his domestic rivals.60
In 1930, for example, Chiang Kai-shek found himself facing a united front formed by the Reorganizationists in the south and the warlords in the north, where Yan Xishan had “come off the fence and was astride the tiger.” 61 On February 10 of that year, Yan sent a cable to Chiang, urging him to retire, followed by other wires accusing him of corruption and incompe¬tence. During the succeeding month all of Nanjing’s organs in the provinces that Yan controlled were seized by his men, and in early April—after his Shanxi army occupied Beiping—Yan Xishan declared himself commander in chief of the anti-Chiang forces with Feng Yuxiang acting as vice-com- mander.62
While Feng and Chiang Kai-shek’s main armies fought a war of attrition in Henan, Yan sent an army of fast cavalry under Sun Lianzhong to outflank Chiang’s headquarters at the Yejigang railway station.63 Sun would probably have enveloped Chiang Kai-shek and his staff officers had it not been for military intelligence from Dai Li, who got his chief to move his men to a safer place at the last minute.64
Useful as he was to Chiang on the battlefield during the War of the Great Plains, Dai Li would never have acquired the secret power he finally wielded had it not been for the personal proximity Chiang allowed him.65 He was competent and capable, to be sure, but it was Dai’s trustworthiness and re¬liability that Chiang valued above all else.66 Referring to him by his pet name of “rain hat” (yunong), Chiang once said of Dai Li, “Just let rain hat take a hand and I can relax” (wo jiu fangxinle).67
By this Chiang may have meant more than he intended to say, for Dai Li seemed to unwind his master in a different way, bringing on a kind of loos¬ening in Chiang Kai-shek. It is interesting to note that other officials who met with Chiang Kai-shek had to be terribly careful about their attire. Even a speck of dust on the white gloves of a general could lead to his dismissal, or at least to a reprimand from his commander in chief. Yet Dai Li was some¬how exempted from this kind of finickiness. To be sure, he was able to re¬spond instantly to his chief’s somewhat obsessive expectations whenever he needed to do so, reflecting Chiang Kai-shek’s moods perfectly. If, for example, Chiang Kai-shek were to praise Confucius and Mencius in his presence, then Dai Li would immediately start speaking of Confucian mor¬ality (renyi daode) as though in mimicry. But in personal manner he was of¬ten rumpled, badly dressed, poorly shaven, even slightly slovenly, and one gets the impression that Dai’s careless and neglected quality somehow worked into another side of Chiang Kai-shek—perhaps an inner and re¬laxed realm—that other attendants like Cao Shengfen were never per¬mitted to see.68
Given this closeness to the leader, Dai Li was able to overcome the de¬ficiencies in his record that worried him when he complained to Wen Qiang about his poor luck for having joined Chiang Kai-shek so late. The decision to touben, after all, compensated for his weak public position vis-à-vis party elders and the Whampoa elite. In 1939, when Dai Li was named by Chiang Kai-shekhead of the Security Group ( Jingweizu) of the GMD Central Train¬ing Regiment (Guomindang zhongyang xunlian tuan), the Generalissimo discovered that his protégé had not only failed to graduate from Whampoa; he was also not even an official member of the Nationalist Party. Little mat¬ter: with a few strokes of the commander in chief’s brush the order was drawn up making Dai Li a formal graduate of the sixth class of the Wham¬poa Military Academy, and at the same time “rain hat” was also recom¬mended for Guomindang membership by the leader of the party himself, who became Dai Li’s personal guarantor. By then, of course, Dai Li was mas¬ter and commander of his own secret domain.69
Chapter 4
The League of Ten
It was certainly no accident that Dai Li, starting out as a member of the entourage of bodyguards, ended up becoming China’s “Himmler” under Chiang Kai-shek’s dictatorship. This was the end result of historical conditions determined by a semi- feudal and semicolonial society. Having already inherited the mantle of the eunuchs’ tyrannical eastern and western depots and bodyguard office under the Chinese feu¬dal system, he also copied the ferocious practices of the Brown Shirts party, the in¬strument of Hitler’s fascist dictatorship.
ZHANG WEIHAN, “Dai Li yu ‘Juntong ju,’” 131
CHIANG KAI-SHEK’S PRIVATE ESPIONAGE APPARATUS
According to Wen Qiang’s account of his life, Dai Li’s rise in the intelligence services of the National Revolutionary Army reflected his overall compe¬tence as a conventional military agent.1 Nominally serving under the com¬mand of Hu Zongnan (Second Brigade, First Army Division), Dai Li actu¬ally became head of a special communications and intelligence unit that was set up on January 4, 1928, at the instruction of Chiang Kai-shek. This unit, which was simply called the Liaison Group (Lianluozu), was later de¬scribed in the official biography of Dai Li compiled by Taibei’s Intelligence Bureau as being the “embryo” of all subsequent party and state military intelligence organizations. The Liaison Group was “established” (sheli) by Chiang’s own Command Headquarters (Zongsilingbu), and it was the com¬mander in chief himself who directly appointed Dai Li Staff Liaison Officer (Lianluo canmou) and who put him in charge of the ten officers who were later to become core members of the Bureau of Investigation and Statistics (BIS) after it was founded within the Military Affairs Commission.2
Dai’s most important mission during his assignment as a liaison officer was the order early in 1930 by Chiang Kai-shek to try to assassinate (ci) Tang Shengzhi. The Hunanese militarist had driven Feng Yuxiang from Henan for the National government in November 1929 but had then gone on the following month to accept an appointment from Wang Jingwei as comman¬der in chief of the Fourth Route of the Party Protection and National Sal¬vation Army, pledging to oppose the military dictatorship of Chiang and his followers.3 Chiang consequently dispatched his top secret agent to both gather intelligence on Tang Shengzhi’s military plans and lay plans for his elimination. Dai Li reportedly moved down into Henan via the Tong Pass, stopping off in Luoyang and then gathering information along the Beijing- Hankou Railroad on his way to Zhengzhou, where General Tang was garrisoned.4
Hearing of Dai’s presence in the area, Tang Shengzhi offered a cash re¬ward for his capture. When Dai Li reached the Zhengzhou railway station, he was spotted by Tang’s military policemen, who seized him. The com¬mander of the military police, however, was Zhou Weilong, a member of the fourth class at Whampoa, who probably knew Dai Li at the academy, and who was very impressed by the spy’s coolness and courage.5 After Dai Li pleaded with Zhou Weilong to “support the chancellor [Chiang Kai-shek] to occupy the Under-Heaven” (yonghu xiaozhang zuo tianxia), Zhou swore brotherhood with Dai Li and hid him away in the military police compound for several days until the furor over him died down and he was able to head south on the Beijing-Hankou highway dressed in one of Tang Shengzhi’s military police uniforms.6
Between 1928 and 1931 the only formal secret police apparatus that Chiang Kai-shek officially authorized was the new Special Investigation Group (Michazu) of the Central Headquarters of the reorganized Guo- mindang.7 Chiang’s informal agents were many, for his method of control¬ling the various kinds of secret organizations that grew up under his aegis after 1927 was simply to let the special services fight among themselves for funds and authority, acting as a check the one upon the other.8 In this case, however, a semiformal group was established to deal with Communists and to control anti-Chiang elements within the Guomindang by using funds secretly provided under the “special expenses” (tebie fei) allocation in the budget of the Central Party Office (Zhongyang dangbu).9 The head of the Michazu—orwhatwas also known as the “jointorgan”—was Chen Lifu, who also directed the Confidential Section of the National Military Council and served as secretary general of the National Reconstruction Commission. Ac¬cording to Boorman the Investigation Group, which was assigned the re¬sponsibility of purging Communists or persons suspected of Communist sympathies, was divided into three sections, and Dai Li was given charge of Section Two, which was assigned the task of maintaining surveillance over military personnel.10
Just as at the time of the party purge in April 1927, Dai Li’s official duties within the private espionage apparatus of the commander in chief did not entirely encompass his private responsibilities. By 1930, it seems, he had al¬ready begun to formalize his personal apparat in Section Two through the famous League of Ten who continued to constitute the nucleus of his se¬cret service. Like the “tent friends” (muyou) of Ming and Qing officials, these Whampoa graduates were initially on Dai Li’s private payroll. In fact, they would not be formally enrolled as government officers until the 1932 reor¬ganization of Chiang’s secret agents.11
The formal title of the League of Ten was the Investigation and Com-munications Small Group (Diaocha tongxun xiaozu), and from the ac¬counts of its spartan working style—which was intense and severe—there was little time for the kinds of venal indulgences that characterized the MSB in later years when the organization had grown several hundredfold. Work¬ing in the heat of summer in Nanjing, one of the muggiest cities in China during that season, Dai Li would often go for three days and nights at a time in the League of Ten’s headquarters at 53 Chicken Goose Lane ( Ji’e xiang) without stopping to sleep or eat a regular meal, washing down youtiao (deep- fried dough sticks) and other snack food with cups of hot water.12
Although nominally united under Chen Lifu’s direction, the various departments of the Michazu were in competition with one other. While Dai Li and his League of Ten operated out of their offices in Chicken Goose Lane, a rival group—thought to represent the interests of Chen Lifu’s “CC” clique — conducted anti-Communist investigations among civilian mem¬bers of the party from quarters on Zhanyuan Road.13 This group, loosely styled Section One of the Michazu, was commanded by Xu Enzeng, and it too was funded by the Central Party Office’s secret budget.14
Meanwhile, yet another secret police apparatus was being formed in the three provinces under the jurisdiction of the Headquarters for the Exter¬mination of Bandits (Jiaofei zongbu) at Nanchang, Jiangxi. Chiang Kai- shek had initially authorized the creation of the Espionage Section (Diebao ke) in 1931. The following year, Deng Wenyi, one of Chiang’s secretaries in the Military Affairs Commission, submitted a plan to the commander in chief that called for the establishment of investigation sections (Diaocha ke) in the mobile garrisons to preserve the peace (Baoan xingying) in all three provinces in the anti-Communist suppression areas, with a central headquarters attached to the Nanchang Mobile Garrison command.15
DENG WENYI
Deng Wenyi, then twenty-nine years old, was the grandson of a cloth ped¬dler and the son of the owner of a sundries and candy store in Liling, Hu¬nan. In elementary school, Deng had fallen deeply under the influence of his principal, a graduate of the Baoding Military Academy named Wang Yingzhao, who plunged his students into the knight-errant tradition of swordsmen novels and bandit epics. Two evenings a week Mr. Wang lectured to his students on the stories of Water Margin, describing and analyzing the personalities, characteristics, martial skills, social backgrounds, and righ¬teous deeds of the “men of the green wood.” Thus, Deng and his classmates gradually adopted as their paragons the heroes of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Seven Knight-Errants and Five Righteous Men, Seven Swordsmen and Thirteen Knight-Errants, Xue Rengui Conquers the East, Xue Dingshan Pacifies the West, The Biography of Yue Fei, and Ban Chao Pacifies Central Asia. 16
Deng, the shopkeeper’s son, thus grew up filled with the romantic resolve of so many Chinese adolescents steeped in martial fiction—a resolve he shared with other modern youxia (knights-errant) like Mao Zedong to help the weak through sage and courageous deeds, to save the people and the nation by being an anonymous hero, and to remain an honest and true junzi (gentleman) by rejecting money and women without regret and by endur¬ing hardship and travail without complaint. His resolve was strengthened by the financial strain of secondary school when, in his third and fourth years, his family had trouble paying his room and board. Twice Deng had to make the long sixty-li trek back home on foot to beg his parents for money to cover his fees. But, for all his tears and weeping, Deng’s mother was in the end only able to come up with one yuan, and Deng had to learn how to make enough money by gambling to keep himself in school. This only in-creased his admiration for the “men of the green woods” and strengthened his respect for those fictional sworn brothers who righteously “robbed the rich to relieve the poor.” 17 Inspired by their example, Deng refused to get married, and on the eve of finishing secondary school he “joined the revo¬lution” by enrolling in Cheng Qian’s military academy in Guangzhou. Once at the school, he learned of the Whampoa program and sat for its entrance examination successfully.18
Deng belonged to a group of Whampoa students—which included Xiao Qianyu and Zhang Zhen (later head of Chiang’s military police)—who were sent to study in the Soviet Union.19 They formed part of a contingent of three hundred Chinese recruited to attend classes in Moscow at the aviation and army academies or at Sun Yat-sen University, which had been set up in 1925 under the Eastern Department of the Comintern for the purpose of training Chinese agents. About 150 of them had been recruited in Guang¬zhou by the Guomindang, with the Whampoa Academy and other specified military units selecting candidates by competitive examination.20
Deng Wenyi himself had been a leading student member—“one of the big chiefs” along with He Zhonghan, Yang Yinzhi, Feng Ti, and Zeng Kuo- qing—of the Sun Yat-sen Study Society, founded in the Whampoa Academy in 1924-25 to combat the pro-Communist Federation of Young Soldiers.21 After his application to go to Moscow was accepted by the central GMD headquarters in Guangzhou, Deng was sent to Sun Yat-sen University. As a student leader, he became the target of Communist efforts to convert him to their cause, and apparently his superiors grew convinced of his loyalty to the Comintern in spite of the fact that he was a member of the National¬ist Party branch committee and continued to meet in secret with other Whampoa cadets under He Zhonghan’s fiercely anti-Communist guidance to keep the spirit of the Sun Yat-sen Study Society alive.22 After less than three months at the Communist university Deng Wenyi had been elected a member of the student commune committee (gongshe weiyuanhui), was made chairman of the hygiene soviet (weisheng suoweiai), and held responsi¬bility for coaching the women’s rifle team (shejidui). He was also eventually appointed class monitor (banzhang) as well as chief of his own student cell (xiaozuzhang). When the Comintern began putting together a special con¬tingent in the spring of 1927 to return to China under M. N. Roy’s leader¬ship, Deng Wenyi—by then a fanatic anti-Communist fiercely devoted to Chiang Kai-shek—was one of the forty students from Sun Yat-sen Univer¬sity selected to go.23 But once the steamship from Vladivostok reached Guangzhou and Deng walked ashore, he severed his relations with the group and reaffirmed his commitment to Chiang Kai-shek’s wing of the Na¬tionalist Party.24
Later that year, moving north to join the revolutionary armies already battling among themselves, Deng had begun to organize counterespio¬nage operations on his own by mobilizing his circle of Whampoa cadets to gather anti-Communist intelligence and to study the practices of the Cheka (Chrezvychainaya Komissiya, or Extraordinary Commission) and of the GPU (Gosudarstvennoe Politicheskoe Upravlenie, or State Political Admin¬istration) as detailed in books and manuals acquired in the USSR.25 During 1927-28 Deng Wenyi proposed that special Intelligence Divisions (Jiandie gu) be set up in the Peace Preservation Departments (Baoan chu) of each provincial headquarters in order to carry out anti-Communist military ac¬tivities, gather intelligence, investigate possible Communist Party activities within military units and garrisons, maintain surveillance over each brigade commander, and conduct special services activities among the civilian pop- ulation.26 Chiang Kai-shek eventually approved the plan, and by the late spring of 1932 an action group had been established under Deng Wenyi’s control at Jintang Lane in Nanchang proper.27 Shortly after that, early in 1933, Deng Wenyi recommended to Chiang that they appoint a Planning Committee (Sheji weiyuanhui) in the Nanchang garrison, composed of a number of people who had gotten master’s and doctoral degrees in Ger¬many, Japan, and the United States, to help draw up plans for campaigns to carry out “the political extermination of Communism” (zhengzhi jiaogong) and “the cultural extermination of Communism” (wenhua jiaogong). A num¬ber of these intellectuals were connected with the Renaissance Society, which was an offshoot of Chiang’s Blue Shirts.28
Deng Wenyi’s Investigation Section was quite apart from the Michazu: it was a provincial network as opposed to the two sections operating indepen¬dently of each other in the national capital at Nanjing. It also had official status, being attached to the mobile garrison headquarters in each of the three provinces. The Michazu remained an informal, unofficially funded operation until the “January 28th Incident” in 1932, when Japanese ma¬rines battled with the Chinese Nineteenth Route Army over Shanghai’s northern district for three months running, devastating Zhabei in the pro- cess.29 Forced by public opinion to send reinforcements to the Nineteenth Route Army, whose commander Cai Tingkai was suddenly a national hero and international celebrity, Chiang Kai-shek ordered the Eighty-Seventh and Eighty-Eighth armies (shi) under Wang Jingjiu and Yu Jishi to form a New Fifth Army ( jun) under the dean of the Central Military Academy, Zhang Zhizhong.30
THE SPECIAL SERVICES DEPARTMENT
However, when the Eighty-Eighth Army reached Kunshan and engaged the Japanese along the front lines at Nanxiang, the Chinese force was utterly routed. It was, in fact, Dai Li himself who brought the news to Chiang Kai- shek that when the Eighty-Eighth regrouped after the battle at Changshu, the entire army and officers came to less than four thousand men. The com¬mander in chief was dismayed. Not only was his intelligence about the Jap¬anese forces faulty; his sense of and control over the Whampoa officers who had staffed these armies was deficient. In order to get a better grip on the situation, then, Chiang Kai-shek commanded Dai Li to strengthen his in¬formal secret service organization by establishing a Special Services De¬partment (Tewuchu) in the quarters at Chicken Goose Lane.31
The new department, however, was not yet an official government or¬gan; rather, it was an “iron and blood brigade” (tiexie dui) associated with the Blue Shirts and administratively located within the Renaissance Society, which provided its funds.32 Its mission was to infiltrate garrison, police, and military police forces while developing an expertise in espionage and sabo- tage.33 Yet none of these duties was legitimately assigned. Although Chiang Kai-shek ruled that all personnel matters should come under his own direct supervision, Chiang himself had just stepped down as chairman of the Na¬tional government, which was put in the hands of the well-respected figure¬head, Lin Sen, so that Dai Li’s secret service did not even have putative executive authority. Nevertheless, Dai Li now enjoyed the use of a formal secretariat, a regular source of funds, and the expansion of the original League of Ten to a group of more than a hundred agents.34
And the new Special Services Department (SSD) did indeed expand, es¬pecially since Dai Li now seemed to enjoy Chiang Kai-shek’s full confidence. This was the time, for example, when Shen Zui joined the organization, be¬coming head of the Shanghai communications branch and learning how to instruct the recruits who came after him in “operations craft” (xingdong shu), including kidnapping and assassination techniques.35 Yet even though the
number of agents multiplied, extending Dai Li’s network into military gar¬risons and police forces in a preliminary but portentous way, the SSD re¬mained hampered, fettered by the fact that it possessed no legal powers of its own to arrest and detain suspects.36
On March 18, 1932, the Second Plenum of the Fourth Central Executive Committee of the Guomindang met in Luoyang and appointed Chiang Kai- shek chairman of the Military Affairs Commission (Junshi weiyuanhui weiyuanzhang). Both to give Dai Li the official authority he needed and to prevent the growing rivalry between the “CC” clique and the Wham¬poa group from dissipating the strength of his own intelligence apparatus, Chiang Kai-shek decided to use his new authority to create a regular bu¬reaucratic unit under the MAC that would pull all of these informal and se¬cret investigative sections together. In late March, shortly after Puyi was in¬stalled as the puppet regent of the Manchukuo puppet government, Chiang convened a meeting of his high-level military affairs advisers who with him resolved to organize an “intelligence net” (qingbao wang) “in order to resist foreign aggression and to pacify the country.” 37 The result was the forma¬tion on April 1, 1932—a day thereafter celebrated by the Nationalist mili¬tary intelligence services as the anniversary of the Juntong apparatus—of “an intelligence organ for military affairs” ( junshi qingbao jigou).38
According to the hagiography published by the Taiwan Ministry of De¬fense in 1966, before Chiang Kai-shek publicly announced the founding of this “organ,” he met privately with Dai Li at Sun Yat-sen’s tomb outside Nan- jing.39 After the Chairman told Dai of his new assignment in this apparatus, Dai Li demurred, protesting that his seniority was too low for such a posi¬tion, not to speak of his lack of proper sincerity. Chiang assured him that “as long as you have the resolution [juexin], you don’t have to worry about the rest of it.” Dai Li—the official nianpu (chronological biography) tells us— thereupon agreed to shoulder the enormous burden his leader was thrust¬ing upon him, saying, “From this day on, your student must dedicate his life to sacrifice and struggle for the revolution. IfI amdefeated, then I will plead for the leader to discipline me. If I succeed or even in the end get killed by our enemies, I will have no regrets.” The nianpu concludes, “Lord Chiang held him in high esteem for his courage” ( Jiang gong zhuang zhi).40
THE BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION AND STATISTICS
In fact, Dai Li’s expanded League of Ten—the original Lianluozu—was now brought under a regular bureaucratic unit when, in the spring and summer of 1932, Chiang ordered the institution of a Bureau of Investiga¬tion and Statistics (Diaocha tongji ju, or BIS) within the MAC and under the direction of Chen Lifu and his deputy, Chen Zhuo, chief of the Nanjing po- lice.41 Three chu (departments) were established. The first was what had originally been the Investigation Section of the Central Party Office (Zhong- yang dangbu), namely, Section One of the former Michazu, run by Xu En- zeng out of the Zhanyuan Road secret service section.42 This by then had become the Party Affairs Investigation Department (Dangwu diaocha chu), and it would later turn into the Central Statistics Bureau (Zhongtong ju, or CSB), which was Chen Lifu’s counterpart to Dai Li’s Military Statistics Bureau ( Juntong ju, or MSB).43 The second department was Dai Li’s SSD, located at Chicken Goose Lane and now given responsibility for surveil¬lance and investigation of the military. Dai, who was promoted to the rank of major general (shaojiang),44 acted as the paterfamilias ( jiazhang) of the second department, as though it were his own household, while his SSD agents addressed him as the “old man” or “boss” (laoban) of the organiza- tion.45 The third, which was first headed by Ding Mocun and then later by Jin Bin, supervised the Bureau of Postal and Telegraphic Inspection (Youdian jiancha ju), and was later amalgamated with this department as the Special Inspection Department (Tejianchu). Its offices were located on Jiangxi Road.46
The BIS supposedly coordinated the work of these three departments. Actually only Xu Enzeng and Dai Li sent contingents of their own men to work at BIS headquarters, which was located at the Feiyuan (Non-Garden) off Lane 4, by Nanjing’s Xihua Gate.47 The real work of the bureau was car¬ried out in the departments themselves, which barely cooperated with one another. Chiang Kai-shek was consequently obliged to maintain his private control over the organization by naming his own personal agents Zheng Jiemin and Xu Renji as deputy department chief and controller of the BIS.48 Zheng Jiemin, a Cantonese adventurer who had owned a coffee shop in Sin¬gapore before joining the second class at Whampoa, was also leader of the BIS’s Investigation Section (Shencha kezhang).49 And while Tang Zong was made secretary (shuji), Qiu Kaiji—a member of the Yunnanese gentry who loathed warlords—served as head of the field agents in the BIS’s Enforce¬ment Section (Zhixing ke).50
Those members of the original League of Ten who were able to accept Dai’s increasingly paternalistic and authoritarian leadership simply stayed on in Department Two of the BIS, while those members of the original brotherhood who were restive with these new arrangements moved on to other positions in the secret state that Chiang was in the process of build¬ing: Huang Yong become deputy leader of the Investigation Section (Diao- cha ke); Liang Ganqiao was put in charge of training for the Renaissance Society; and Yu Sadu became a member of the party’s North China Propa¬ganda Brigade (Huabei xuanchuan dui).51
The SSD now had a specified investigative mission, and it could use the authority of the Military Affairs Commission to expand its activities on the principle that “the secret exerts leadership over the public, while the pub- lic is used as a cover to protect the secret” (mimi lingdao gongkai, gongkai yanhu mimi). 52 But it required an institutional channel for expansion, a pre¬existing unit that already had established bona fide connections with law enforcement organizations under either military or civilian authorities. This was to be found in the Cheka-inspired Investigation Section originally set up in Nanchang by Deng Wenyi, who came under attack in 1933 and 1934 for his mishandling of the Xu Peigen affair.53
Xu Peigen was the air force commander in charge of the central govern¬ment’s airfields at Nanchang. A venal man, Xu had been embezzling mili¬tary funds for years when the time came in 1932 to make up his deficits for government auditors. Unable to balance his books, Xu resorted to destroy¬ing them, setting a fire in the Nanchang airport that took with it both ledg¬ers and military airplanes. After Xu was dismissed, Chiang Kai-shek called for Deng Wenyi’s Investigation Section to conduct a proper inquiry into the matter. Deng dillydallied, infuriating Chiang, who turned the assignment over to Dai Li and Xu Weibin in October 1932. Their investigation placed the blame for the fire and the subsequent cover-up directly on Deng Wenyi himself, who was dismissed in 1933 from his post as section leader (kezhang) and who completely lost control over the Investigation Section in all three jiaofei zones. Dai Li picked up the pieces.54 Thereafter, and until the begin¬ning of the War of Resistance with Japan, Dai Li would be addressed as Sec¬tion Leader Dai (Dai kezhang) by the commander in chief, using the title relinquished by Deng Wenyi.55
This was a decisive opportunity as far as Dai Li was concerned. First of all, the number of agents at his disposal increased impressively, from 145 to 1,722 in a number of new provincial intelligence units.56 At the same time, Dai acquired most or all of Deng Wenyi’s “backbone cadres”: Zhang Yifu (Zhang Yanfo), Li Guochen, YuanJibin, Zhou Shengfu, Wang Xinheng, and Xie Ligong (Xie Shaoshan).57 Second, the new units under his administra¬tion included standing intelligence offices that extended into all of the pro¬vinces under the Nanchang garrison’s control. The Xuzhou Investigation Section for the traveling garrison there, the same office for Wuhan, and the Investigative Divisions (Diaocha gu) of the Peace Preservation Departments (Baoan chu) of every locale in China’s central provinces were now at least nominally under his control.58 Third, under the aegis of the Investigation Section, the SSD began to use its new authority as an arm of the Military Af¬fairs Commission by sending agents out to infiltrate the Investigation and Apprehension Departments (Zhenji chu) of various garrison command headquarters and to try to take over the detective squads of public security bureaus in cities under the control of the Nationalist government.59 “From then on, Dai Li’s special services organization penetrated directly into the Guomindang’s military organs and local public security organs, acquiring a public cover.” 60
Finally, as part of his appointment as head of the intelligence or espi¬onage divisions within each public security organ or police station, Dai Li was also given special authority to train backbone cadres (gugan) for special services work. For Chiang Kai-shek in 1934 also named Dai Li his special deputy (tepaiyuan) to the Zhejiang Provincial Police Academy where, as we shall see, he was quickly able to seize control over that organization’s per¬sonnel and training classes.61
This was the first public transmogrification of Chiang Kai-shek’s intelli¬gence apparatus into a fairly widespread legal network of control. Hereafter his private security agency was endowed with official authority. Yet its inner workings remained, to a certain extent, the personal domain of the leader himself. This was not only because of the intimacy necessarily created by the secret mission of the enterprise, which demanded a close and confidential relationship between Chiang and his secret policemen. It was also the out¬growth of a kind of freemasonry growing up within the official structures of government—a freemasonry that defined itself in the fascist and Falangist terminology of the period as a militant order devoted to the glorification of the person of the Leader—to use the authoritarian religious capitalization of the 1930s.62 Thus, if we are to understand the inner workings of the Chi¬nese republican regime, then we must not only direct our attention to the public transformations of Chiang’s bureaucratic control system. We must also attend to the hidden history of his ideological freemasonry by explor¬ing the Blue Shirts themselves.63
Chapter 5
“Vigorous Practice”
The Chiang Freemasonry
The Master said: “To be fond of learning is to be near to knowledge. To practice with vigor [lixing] is to be near to magnanimity [ren]. To possess the feeling of shame is to be near to energy [yong].”
The Doctrine of the Mean 1
THE LIXINGSHE
The Society for Vigorous Practice, or Lixingshe, was so secret that hardly any outsider knew of its existence between 1932 and 1937. It was perpetu¬ally confused with its front groups, whose members were thought by the public to be Blue Shirts (Lanyi), and its activities were often inextricably connected with covert propaganda and intelligence work conducted by Chiang Kai-shek’s special services.2 Yet the Society for Vigorous Practice was the single most important political formation within what the public called the Whampoa clique, and its members constituted a military freema¬sonry that admired fascism and that pledged itself to carry out Sun Yat-sen’s Three People’s Principles under the guidance of its supreme leader, Chiang Kai-shek.3
Although the society’s presence was concealed for more than forty years, during its heyday the Lixingshe controlled an elaborate organizational structure of more than 500,000 members, and it clandestinely orchestrated public mobilizations involving millions more, ranging from the New Life Movement and the Chinese Boy Scouts to university military training programs and high school summer camps. Now, thanks mainly to mem¬oirs published on Taiwan during the last two decades, the importance of the Lixingshe can be recognized and its political role in the years of con¬flict between the Manchurian and Marco Polo Bridge incidents fully acknowledged.
The Society for Vigorous Practice was created as a direct result of the po¬litical crisis that erupted during the summer and fall of 1931 and that even¬tually forced Chiang Kai-shek to surrender his government posts and go into temporary retirement in Zhejiang.4 After the collapse of Feng Yuxiang, Wang Jingwei, and Yan Xishan’s “enlarged conference movement” in 1930, the National Government decided to meet some of the defeated rebels’ de¬mands by convoking a national assembly to adopt a provisional constitution. Hu Hanmin—adhering stubbornly to Sun Yat-sen’s notion that a single¬party dictatorship was an essential part of the process of political tutelage— refused,as president of the LegislativeYuan,to support this proposal,which had the support of the newly elected zongtong (president of the National Government), Chiang Kai-shek. Announcing his opposition, Hu resigned his presidency on February 28, 1931. Chiang promptly ordered him placed under house arrest, and shortly after this shocking démarche had him taken to Tangshan near Nanjing.5
The elders of the Guomindang were outraged by Chiang’s illegal action.6 On April 30, four senior members of the Central Supervisory Committee of the Guomindang—Lin Sen, Gu Yingfen, Xiao Focheng, and Deng Zeru— impeached the new president of the National Government. Four weeks later, these and other opponents of Chiang’s arbitrary authoritarianism— eminences such as Wang Jingwei, Sun Fo, Tang Shaoyi, Eugene Chen, and Li Zongren—met in Canton under the protection of the “king of the South,” Chen Jitang. There, on May 28, 1931, they announced the forma¬tion of a national government of their own.7 During the next three months, when the Yangzi valley was devastated by severe floods, the country was po¬litically cut in two and civil war between north and south seemed immi- nent.8 Chiang Kai-shek himself believed that he and his cause were in grave jeopardy.9 His closest followers—men such as Teng Jie and He Zhonghan— could only agree.10
Teng Jie, who was eventually to become the first secretary-general of the Lixingshe, was an experienced student agitator. Son of a landlord from Funing in Jiangsu, Teng Jie had been the student body president at an American Protestant vocational school in Nantong when the May Thirtieth Movement broke out in 1925.11 Like many students at missionary schools, Teng’s classmates were among the most strongly opposed to Western cul¬tural imperialism, and when a delegation of students from other schools ar¬rived to chuanlian (establish ties), Teng Jie found his own leadership being challenged by radicals wanting to attack the school’s administration. Even¬tually he decided that the American institution had to be dissolved and he chaired the meeting that summer that led to the students’ unanimous with¬drawal from the school. After making sure that his fellow students could get admitted to other schools, Teng Jie left Nantong at the age of eighteen and joined the sociology department at Shanghai University.12
In the fall of 1925 Shanghai University was the main recruiting center in the lower Yangzi region for the Whampoa Military Academy. The Commu¬nists were quite influential at the university, with Liu Shaoqi acting as a stu¬dent leader and Shi Cuntong serving as the chairman of the sociology de¬partment. Teng Jie was already a keen admirer of Sun Yat-sen, whose Three People’s Principles he had studied in Nantong, and he joined the National¬ist Party shortly after his arrival in Shanghai, even though department chair¬man Shi Cuntong in class compared Marxism and the Sanminzhuyi (Three People’s Principles) to the detriment of the latter. Disgusted by what he took to be the cowardice and insincerity of the Communist students, who ap¬peared to him to only pretend to be cooperative members of the United Front, Teng Jie was convinced that the less clandestine Nationalists were at a disadvantage when it came to organizing students, and he carried that conviction along with him when he was secretly recruited for the Whampoa Academy and left Shanghai for military training in the south.13
After his studies in Guangdong at the Whampoa Academy and a military stint in central China during the Northern Expedition, Teng Jie went to Ja¬pan to study. This was part of a plan developed by Chiang Kai-shek in 1928, after his first retirement from office, to send Whampoa graduates syste¬matically to Japan for further training. Five students were handpicked by Chiang himself from each of the first six Whampoa classes. Another thirty were selected a year later so that during the summer of 1931 there were more than sixty of the xiaozhang’s former Whampoa pupils enrolled in Japan’s Imperial Army College and a variety of other schools including the Shikan Gakko (Japan's West Point, where Chiang had studied), Waseda, the Artillery School, and the Cavalry School.14 Teng Jie was sent to Meiji Uni¬versity, where the school authorities had set up a Department of Political Economy exclusively for Chinese students.15 After two years of frugal study, mainly spent reading in the Ueno Library, Teng Jie returned to China in late July 1931, just when tensions along the Sino-Korean border over the Wanbaoshan incident made an outright war between Japan and China seem likely.16
Before returning to China Teng Jie had hoped that the prospect of war with Japan would unite the country. Instead, he found the nation frag¬mented, and politics just as corrupt and self-interested as when he had left.17 If the people were to be mobilized, then some new form of organiza¬tion would have to be devised to create a genuinely strong political party ca¬pable of attracting mass support. Remembering the success of the Commu¬nists in clandestinely dominating student groups during the May Thirtieth Movement, Teng Jie drafted a plan to use Whampoa graduates as backbone cadres to build up a top-secret organization. This new association would unite elite military and civilian youth according to the principle of “demo¬cratic centralism [minzhu jiquan] to build up a strong organization with a united will, with iron discipline, with a clear division of responsibility, and with the ability to act with alacrity.” 18
Plan in hand, Teng Jie went to see his friend Zeng Kuoqing, who was as¬signed to the military division of Party Center in Nanjing.19 Zeng was en¬thusiastic about the idea, and as a first step toward its implementation in¬vited nine friends to dinner.20 All of the guests were graduates of Whampoa, and the two Hunanese who came—Feng Ti and Deng Wenyi—were mem¬bers of the first class.21 Their identity as Hunanese was by no means in- significant.22 Strongly conscious of the military tradition of their fellow provincials, including the great nineteenth-century regional viceroys Zeng Guofan and Zuo Zongtang, Whampoa cadets from Hunan felt that they had special cause to take a leading role in the salvation of the nation.23 Feng Ti and Deng Wenyi thus helped secure unanimous approval for the proposal and they all agreed to have a second dinner, each guest bringing another person. By the third time they met there were more than forty people pres¬ent, including He Zhonghan, the officer in charge of propaganda for the anti-Communist extermination campaign in Nanchang.24
HE ZHONGHAN
He Zhonghan, the leader of the Hunanese clique within the inner Wham¬poa circle, was born in 1898 in Yueyang, near Changsha.25 His family lived in “comfortable” (xiaokang) circumstances, and He was educated in his rural home by a private tutor who took him through the Four Books and the Five Classics by the time he was twelve sui.26 During the next two years he began reading the philosophers and historians, reciting the Zuo Commentary with his mentor during the day, and teaching himself The Comprehensive Mirror in the Aid of Government at night. During his fourteenth year his tutor had him read all of Liang Qichao’s collected works and discovered that his pupil was able to raise questions that he could not answer. Consequently, in 1913 He Zhonghan was enrolled in one of the new-style elementary schools in the district and began to study “modern learning” imported from the West.27 In 1915 He Zhonghan transferred to a special secondary school for Hunan provincials in Wuchang, where he was noted for his skill at composition; his essays on the iniquities of the old society were often displayed on the school bulletin board.28 From 1917 to 1919 he worked as a student reporter for a news agency at Wuchang, and during the May Fourth Movement he was elected a student leader. In the winter of 1920 Dong Biwu and Chen Tan- qiu organized a Marxist study group in Wuhan, and He Zhonghan became a student member.29 The following spring he went to Shanghai with fellow Hunanese Marxists to study Russian at the special school Chen Duxiu had established, and in September 1921 he was elected a delegate to the Con¬gress of the Toilers of the East. Later that year he traveled to Moscow with Zhang Guotao to attend the congress.30 On that occasion He remained in Russia for seven months, but he did not join the Chinese Communist Party. He returned to China the following year impressed by the “progressive” ( jinbu) quality of the Soviet political system but dismayed by the “harshness” (ku) of life in Russia on the eve of Lenin’s New Economic Program; and he concluded that the Communist strategy of revolution was not suitable for his own country.31
Shortly after his return He Zhonghan accepted a post in a Wuchang secondary school, and, like a fellow teacher from the same area—Mao Ze- dong—threw himself into the turmoil of Hunanese politics, becoming a re¬porter for the People’s News Agency (Renmin tongxun she) in Wuhan. In 1923 the agency was closed down and He Zhonghan went to Changsha to establish the Commoner’s News Agency (Pingmin tongxun she).32 This en¬terprise coincided with the ouster of the military governor Zhao Hengti from Changsha by Tan Yankai, and He Zhonghan consequently was able to publish revolutionary propaganda in his bulletins. One of his tracts was about the murdered labor leaders Huang Ai and Pang Renquan, and it was highly critical of Zhao Hengti.33
After Zhao Hengti recovered control of Changsha, the warlord ordered his arrest, and He nearly died in prison before two members of the provin¬cial assembly mediated his release and he went back to Yueyang. His father asked him to stay at home and teach, but He Zhonghan felt that political obligations came first and left for Nanjing, planning to enroll at Southeast¬ern University. Instead, in the spring of 1924, he learned that the revolu¬tionaries in Guangzhou were recruiting students for the Whampoa Military Academy and he left for Shanghai to sit for the preliminary entrance ex¬aminations there. Eventually, after nearly being disqualified for the final ex¬amination, He Zhonghan entered Whampoa in May 1924 as a member of its first class.34
At Whampoa it was He Zhonghan who first objected to comments di¬rected against Sun Yat-sen that appeared in a publication of the Young Sol¬diers’ Association, founded by Soviet adviser Borodin and the Communists; and who together with Miao Bin founded the Sun Yat-sen Study Society on December 29, 1925.35 Early in 1926, He Zhonghan paid a second visit to the Soviet Union, where he went through the regular training course at the Frunze Military Academy in Moscow. His experiences in the Soviet Union, coming on the heels of his active leadership of the Sun Yat-sen Study Soci¬ety, further confirmed his anti-Communist belief that socialism lacked “hu¬maneness” (rendao). When he and Xiao Zanyu returned from Russia in Jan¬uary 1928, Chiang Kai-shek assigned him to command the cadets’ unit at the military training center at Hangzhou.36 After an additional stint in the GMD headquarters for Nanjing municipality, He and Xiao received per-mission from Chiang Kai-shek to go to Japan, where He became Teng Jie’s roommate, living with him for more than a year in 1929 and 1930. During that period He published two books criticizing Wang Jingwei and the Reor- ganizationists. In February 1931 He Zhonghan was ordered back to China
to take over the office in charge of political propaganda in military head¬quarters at Nanchang.37
His attendance at Teng Jie’s third dinner meeting was fortuitous: He Zhonghan just happened to have come from Nanchang to the capital at that time, which was shortly after the Manchurian Railway Incident in the north¬east on September 18, 1931. Boycotts and demonstrations were erupting throughout the country as thousands of students descended upon Nanjing to demand that the National Government and the separatists in Guangdong unite together to resist the aggressors. On October 14 Chiang Kai-shek re¬leased Hu Hanmin and agreed to hold peace talks in Shanghai to bring the two sides together. However, the student protests continued. By early De¬cember, Beiping’s university classrooms would be empty, Nanjing would be under martial law, and fifteen thousand students would be demonstrating in the streets of Shanghai.38
Against this backdrop Teng Jie’s appeal to He Zhonghan to support their effort to establish a “preparations department” (choubeichu) fell on ready ears. As a senior figure in the Whampoa Nationalist student movement and now an officer with major responsibilities in the campaign against the Com¬munists, He Zhonghan realized that his support would be vital to their suc¬cess at establishing a clandestine network of “men of will” among the cadets. Yet even in the midst of this national crisis, He Zhonghan was chary. He knew full well that Chiang Kai-shek had often voiced his disapproval of the Whampoa cadets’ forming political cliques, saying that “these Whampoa cadets lack political experience and cannot effectively engage in political activities.” 39
He Zhonghan also was afraid that the xiaozhang might misinterpret ac¬tivities taking place behind his back, but Teng Jie assured him that he in¬tended to report the entire matter to Chiang Kai-shek once the “prepara¬tory work” was complete. Consequently, He gave his own approval to the scheme and suggested that Teng Jie be appointed secretary and his wife, Chen Qikun, assistant secretary. Deng Wenyi contributed three hundred yuan from his bookstore for expenses, and three rooms on the second floor of a wooden building on Erlangmiao Street near the Kangji Hospital in Nanjing were rented. Kang Ze, who was a twenty-eight-year-old bachelor from a Sichuanese peasant family so poor that his fiancée’s family canceled their engagement, moved into a downstairs room to provide a cover, and the choubeichu set to work.40
Teng Jie’s choubeichu was launched, then, as part of a broadly shared quest for an organizational solution to the nation’s peril.41 In a certain sense, the situation was similar to the May Thirtieth Movement six years earlier. As the crisis with Japan deepened, the nation’s students and intellectuals were gripped with patriotic fervor.42 Just as they rushed to organize groups and
alliances to mobilize public opinion, echoing the revival of she (clubs) and hui (societies) after the First Sino-Japanese War or the creation of student federations after the Japanese diplomatic victory at Versailles in 1919, so did Chiang Kai-shek’s disciples seek to meet the crisis by sponsoring the for¬mation of tutelary associations.43
RIGHT-WING MOBILIZATION
The parallel between Chiang in 1931-33 and Kang Youwei or Liang Qichao in 1895-98 was not exact, of course, because the disciples of the former were graduates of the government’s military academy and not degree¬holding literati. Also, the mobilization of youthful fervor was undeniably influenced by the contemporary rise of fascist movements in Italy and Ger- many.44 Liu Jianqun, who later took credit for recommending the forma¬tion of the Blue Shirts Society in a pamphlet distributed to a plenary session of the Central Executive Committee of the Guomindang in October 1931, wrote that “the Guomindang should follow the example of the organiza¬tion of Mussolini’s Black Shirts in Italy, completely obeying the orders of the Leader and creating members who will use blue shirts as the symbol of their will.” 45
Even though outsiders, and especially the Japanese, were quick to cast these mobilizing efforts in a foreign fascist light, there were strong nativist tones to such convocations.46 In the eyes of Teng Jie and He Zhonghan their mobilization effort was probably most akin to the reformers’ movement at the turn of the century insofar as it manifested the notion that patriotic leaders could arouse popular support by organizing leagues of youthful zhishi (scholars or knights of resolve, “men of will”) to succor the nation, whether they be the civilian students targeted by the “CC” clique or the mil¬itary cadres led by former Whampoa Academy cadets.47
The latter already had an organizational focal point in the Whampoa Alumni Association (Huangpu tongxue hui), which carried on the anti¬Communist tradition of the by-now disbanded Sun Yat-sen Study Society.48 In addition to assigning jobs ( fenpei) to its members, the alumni association encouraged the formation of clubs like the Society to Establish the Will (Lizhishe), with its headquarters in a building constructed in the Qing pal¬ace style on Whampoa Road in Nanjing. Clubs like this, which had a name that instantly recalled the action-oriented teaching of the sixteenth-century philosopher Wang Yangming, were both modern and traditionalistic. They smacked vaguely of Western or Japanese ultranationalist youth groups while also drawing upon the late imperial tradition of scholar-gentry academies and associations.49
The traditionalistic tone of the choubeichu was manifested in the group’s name, Society for Vigorous Practice. The term lixing—literally “strength act”—was taken from the Doctrine of the Mean. Following He Zhongan’s sug¬gestion, the full title of the organization was the Society for the Vigorous Practice of the Three People’s Principles (Sanminzhuyi Lixingshe). The “preparatory work” that its proposers carried on during the next five months consisted mainly of meeting in the second-story offices of the chou- beichu to write drafts of the rules and principles of this secret group, all of the members of which were Whampoa cadets of classes one through six in their twenties and thirties, born during the last years of the Qing and mainly educated in classical learning before attending modern schools during the early years of the new Republic.50 According to Deng Wenyi’s son, they came from all over China, but the majority were from the Yangzi region, and es¬pecially “from provincial grass roots and small towns,” which “very much re¬tained the qualities—the strengths and the weaknesses—of traditional Chinese society. These youths personally experienced that society, so they possessed the intention to conserve [baocun] its strength, but they also knew the weakness of the society as well and so were eager to reform [gaige] it.” 51
As Whampoa graduates, these cadets had been trained to be highly con¬scious of sustained efficiency in common action and of daily volition in per¬sonal life; they accepted the necessity of obedience and hierarchical disci- pline.52 They were also young men who had experienced education abroad. Among the founders of the Society for Vigorous Practice, all but Gui Yong- qing, who was trained in Germany, were educated in Japan or the Soviet Union.53 In fact, as a result of Japanese police persecution there was a ma¬jor influx of former Whampoa students from Japan after the Manchurian Incident, which they publicly protested at the time.54 Many of them joined the Anti-Japanese National Salvation Association of Returned Students from Japan (Liu-Ri xuesheng kang-Ri jiuguo hui), formed by Gong Debo and others under the leadership of He Zhonghan’s friend and classmate, Xiao Zanyu.55 Gong Debo’s newspaper, Jiuguo ribao (National Salvation Daily), printed editorial after editorial calling for the Chinese to “resist the Japanese and root out traitors” (Kang Ri chu jian), and although Gong him¬self took no part in the activities of the Lixingshe, many members of the “preparations department” used the newspaper as a cover for their own work, pretending to be its editors or reporters. Obviously, a major impulse of these youthful disciples of Chiang Kai-shek was to pursue actively a mili¬tant defense against Japan—a policy that was at that very moment coming to be disavowed by Chiang, who was growing increasingly convinced of the importance of appeasing Japan in order to buy time to exterminate the Communists.56
This policy ran directly counter to the mood of the country, and espe¬cially of the nation’s students,who continued to agitate for resistance against the Japanese. In Shanghai, students from Fudan University called for a ma¬jor demonstration on December 8, 1931. On that day the students held a general assembly, bringing together representatives from all of the univer¬sities of Shanghai and two delegates from Nanjing and Beiping. At the end of the meeting the two outside delegates were attacked by a gang of about a dozen local Guomindang members, while plainclothesmen from the Public Safety Bureau looked on passively. The Beijing delegate was abducted and taken off in a car. Recognizing some of the party toughs, the students re¬assembled in front of the city hall on December 9 to demand that their Bei¬jing comrade be liberated and that the GMD thugs be punished. The mu¬nicipal government tried to defend itself by declaring a curfew, but in the end it failed to mollify the protesters, who gutted GMD headquarters, forc¬ing Mayor Zhang Qun—a known Chiang Kai-shek partisan—to resign.57 Eight days later, and partly as a result of this student pressure, Chiang Kai- shek resigned as well as chairman of the national government and returned to his home in Fenghua.58
Although Chiang may have spoken to his closest followers about the im-portance of devising a solution to the national crisis, he was still being kept in the dark about the plans to form the Lixingshe.59 The members of the choubeichu wanted to wait until they had completed their preparation work before seeking his permission to found the organization.60 However, when Teng Jie learned that there was a danger of the news being leaked to their former Whampoa chancellor (xiaozhang), he decided to send a personal message to Chiang’s secretary, Deng Wenyi, who was with him at Fenghua, asking that Deng report the project to Chiang immediately. The Generalis¬simo’s response — conditioned by the conviction that he had to mobilize support for his policy of internal pacification—was quite positive. There were a number of proposals before him now to form societies or associa¬tions to “save the country,” and he evidently believed that the Lixingshe plan was the most promising one at hand “to cope with the domestic and in-ternational crisis.” 61
Meanwhile, a peculiarly strong bond was being formed between Chiang and the young Whampoa graduate-to-be, Dai Li, who came to pay his re¬spects to the future Generalissimo and walked away stunned by his leader’s charisma. At that time Chiang and the military leadership of the National¬ist Party were offering all dropped-out Whampoa students the chance to go back to complete their studies. Dai Li was an “ungraduated” officer of the academy’s sixth class in cavalry. Given the opportunity to return for a regu¬lar officer’s commission, Dai Li hesitated. He felt that his future was with Chiang, come what may, and therefore decided to accept the titular role of “meiyou biye de Huangpu liuqisheng,” that is, a Whampoa nongraduate of the sixth class, in order to stay at Chiang’s side and provide him with the intel¬ligence he needed to defeat his enemies. This was an extremely important decision for Dai Li. It signaled his utter commitment to Chiang along with his willingness to subordinate himself to the leader.62
Chapter 6
The Founding of the Lixingshe
Before we resist foreign enemies, we must pacify domestically, which means first of all that we must unite domestically. Then we can mobilize the entire country in material production and education, so as to acquire the capability to resist the Japa¬nese in a protected way. Only after that can we engage in comprehensive resistance. Only at that point will we be confident that we can secure a final victory. We cannot afford to lose this war. Only after we have won the war will we have an opportunity to begin to construct our ideal nation based upon the Three People’s Principles.
CHIANG KAI-SHEK, to the Lixingshe founders1
PREPARATIONS
During his brief exile, Chiang Kai-shek prepared to recover his official posts while he worked out a compromise with Wang Jingwei. On January 17, 1932, Chiang announced that he was going to resume command of the govern¬ment, and four days later he returned to Nanjing. On February 29 the Mil¬itaryAffairs Commission ( Junshi weiyuanhui) was reestablished, and a week later, on March 6, Chiang was appointed its chairman. During these critical two months the Lixingshe was transformed from a plan on paper into a top¬secret organization of three hundred devoted Chiang loyalists who would eventually constitute the nucleus of a new national political force of more than half a million followers, identified by the public as members of front groups like the Renaissance Society (Fuxingshe).2
The transformation of the Lixingshe into a major political force began when Chiang Kai-shek summoned the three principal leaders of the “prepa¬rations department for protecting the party and saving the nation” (hudang jiuguo choubeichu) to attend a meeting in his office on January 22, 1932, the day after he returned to Nanjing.3 Before going in to see their xiaozhang the three men—Kang Ze, Teng Jie, and He Zhonghan—met with Secretary Deng Wenyi in the anteroom. The four of them decided that when they walked into Chiang’s presence they would for the first time greet him not as “chancellor” but by an entirely new title: “Leader.” As planned, when they finally were ushered in and the door closed behind them, the men hailed Chiang Kai-shek as lingxiu. 4 Then they formally presented a detailed report of their plan for the Lixingshe. Deng Wenyi took notes.5
Figure 8. Chiang Kai-shek’s villa outside Nanjing. Photograph by Frederic Wakeman.
Chiang Kai-shek made no comment at first about the new form of ad¬dress. Instead, he listened to the report intently. But after they were through, he said, “Why don’t you continue addressing me as the xiaozhang? You un¬derstand what the current situation requires. This plan is very appropriate. However, you are all very young and inexperienced and I am afraid that you may fail. Let me lead [lingdao] you.” His subsequent suggestion, which they of course heeded, was that he summon all of the members of the choubeichu to his suburban residence, the Lingyuan Villa (Lingyuan bieshu; see fig. 8), on the grounds of the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum in the hills outside the city, for a “discussion meeting” (tanhuahui). 6 The meeting was scheduled for an evening in the last week of February.7 As for the title of “Leader,” or lingxiu, Chiang was thus addressed by his closest followers ever after.8
In the meantime, if Dai Li’s self-serving recollection fourteen years later is to be trusted, Chiang Kai-shek proceeded—before his first Lingyuan Villa meeting with the preparations department cadres—to make covert pro¬visions for the establishment of a Special Services Department (Tewuchu) within the nascent Lixingshe.9 According to Dai Li’s own account, the secret meeting between him and the Generalissimo to establish the Tewuchu was held in the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum Park at 8 P.M. on February 26, 1932. At that time, in Dai Li’s words, “I received and accepted the Leader’s order to set up the Special Services Department.” 10 Dai Li went on to say that a cer¬tain comrade whom he refused to identify had come to him the next day to say that he, and not Dai Li, had been given control of the personnel and finances of this new department by Chiang Kai-shek. But when Dai Li pro¬tested by tendering his resignation to the Generalissimo, Chiang Kai-shek assured him that total administrative control was his.11 Dai Li was subse¬quently named head of the Special Services Department when it was for¬mally established within the Renaissance Society in late March, and Zheng Jiemin was appointed his deputy.12
THE LINGYUAN VILLA MEETINGS
The first of the February choubeichu meetings took place at seven o’clock in the evening. A total of twenty-five men showed up at Chiang’s detached bungalow in the pine woods just below and to the right of the mausoleum and about one li from the Hongwu Emperor’s tomb.13 In addition to Teng Jie, they were: He Zhonghan, Pan Youqiang, Feng Ti, Sun Changjun, Du Xinru, Gui Yongqing, Deng Wenyi, and Xiao Zanyu of the first class of Whampoa; Ge Wuqi and Cai Jinjun of the second class; Zhou Fu, Kang Ze, Han Wenhuan, Li Yimin, Huang Zhongxiang, Qiu Kaiji, and Luo Derong of the third class; Lou Shaokai of the fourth class; Gan Guoxun, Peng Mengji, and Yi Deming of the fifth class; and Dai Li, Liu Chengzhi, and Chen Qi of the sixth class. Three other members of the preparations department— Hu Zongnan and Zeng Guoqing of the first class and Ye Wei of the fourth class—were absent because of engagements elsewhere.14
The men gathered in a large rectangular room scattered with couches and wooden chairs. Chiang Kai-shek sat in a round rattan chair against the wall at the west end of the room behind a medium-size desk. Deng Wenyi was seated on a small couch to the Leader’s right at a coffee table, prepared to take minutes. After Teng Jie presented a roster, including the names of the three unable to attend, Chiang Kai-shek lifted his eyes and fixed his gaze on every individual in turn. After a pause he said, “Our party and our nation are now in a situation of extraordinary disaster [weinan], so I have es¬pecially invited you to come and chat, in order to get your individual views. Therefore I deliberately will not adopt formal meeting procedures. My em¬phasis is on hearing each one of you express your own ideas. I put no limi¬tations on the time you may take.”15
Although Chiang did not stipulate the agenda or the order of speakers, the usual practice of Whampoa alumni gatherings was to have those of the earliest class and highest seniority speak first. Consequently, He Zhonghan, the eldest of the first class, led off, followed by Sun Changjun, Pan Youqiang, Gui Yongqing, Du Xinru, Feng Ti, and Xiao Zanyu.16 Each spoke for twenty to thirty minutes. During the discussion there were no guards posted out¬side, which was extremely unusual. Dai Li, who was armed, would get up now and then to check outside the room and move around the building. He appeared alert, diligent, and composed. According to Gan Guoxun’s recol¬lection, Chiang Kai-shek listened attentively, from time to time using a blue pencil to take notes. Occasionally, he would not hear clearly and quietly ask a question or two, as if he were trying to avoid interrupting the speakers. He seemed calm and patient, which was totally different from his usual stern and commanding attitude toward them, and he appeared to invite com¬ments, letting each presentation run its course.17
The speeches lasted from 7 P.M. to 11 P.M. Gui Yongqing took the long¬est; he had just returned from Germany by way of the USSR, through Kal- gan (Zhangjiakou) and Beiping to Nanjing. He reported on the reactions in Europe and north China to the Manchurian and January 28th incidents. At 11 P.M. Chiang stood up and said that those who had not had a chance to speak would have an opportunity the next evening at the same time and place. Then he left with Deng Wenyi. The others rode back to Nanjing in the vehicles that brought them. On the trip home very few people spoke, but everyone had an “inspired” (xingfen) look.18
At 6 P.M. the next day, the group assembled outside the choubeichu on Erlangmiao Street and set off in automobiles for Chiang’s villa. Dai Li and Teng Jie were in the first car, and when they reached the bungalow they carefully inspected around the building and inside the meeting room. Af¬ter Chiang Kai-shek arrived with Deng Wenyi the meeting was called to or¬der and the speeches recommenced. Deng Wenyi was the first person to talk that evening, followed by Wan Wuqi, Cai Jingjun, Zhou Fu, Kang Ze, Li Yi- min, and Tang Wenguan. There was a brief interruption by Gui Yongqing, who wished to recommend one of He Yingqin’s protégés to the group. Then Qiu Kaiji took his turn and the speeches resumed until 11 P.M., when they adjourned for a second time.19
On the third night, Lou Shaokai was the first to speak, followed by Gan Guoxun, Peng Mengxi, Yi Demin, and Dai Li. According to Gan Guoxun’s recollection:
Dai Li worked very hard during those three nights. Everyone else, except when the time came to talk, could sit quietly and rest. He was the only person responsible for security. He did not get a single moment’s break. He sat down for two minutes before it was his turn to talk. That was the only break that he took. He was already past the age of thirty, with heavy eyebrows, big eyes, square mouth. He was wearing a gray-and-white dotted Sun Yat-sen suit. He stood in the middle of the room to express his opinion. He was succinct and forceful. After he finished, he modestly asked the Leader and all his elder brothers (laodage) to give him guidance (zhijiao).
After Dai Li, Liu Chengzhi and Chen Qi spoke, and then it was finally the turn of the secretary of the choubeichu, Teng Jie. Teng should have spoken after Lou Shaokai, but as “the initiator and responsible party from begin¬ning to end,” he waited until the others had finished in order to conclude Chiang’s disciples’ remarks.20
By then it was near midnight. Teng Jie, who was neatly dressed and wear¬ing eyeglasses, stood in the center of the room and spoke with a ringing voice. He announced that, in his view, they must strengthen their organiza¬tion, recover their revolutionary spirit under the guidance of the Leader, eliminate internal dissidents, and resist the Japanese, “striving for victory with all their strength” (sili qiusheng). He firmly believed that “if we manage to get a handle on the situation, we will survive.” According to Teng Jie, his¬tory had already proved them invincible. In Guangdong with only a few thousand men they had been able to enlist allies and eliminate enemies more than ten times their size. They had felt no fear of the British imperi¬alists in Hong Kong who supplied their enemies with enormous amounts of ammunition and money, nor of the Communists in their midst who were puppets of the Russians. Regardless, they had unified Guangdong and com¬pleted the Northern Expedition. Now, with a military mass of 300,000 men occupying the core zone of several provinces, how could they not form al¬liances or activate friendly forces to exterminate the Communists and to re¬sist the Japanese imperialists? Expressing the strongest confidence in their cause, Teng Jie declared that they would certainly be able to carry out the unfinished tasks of the Chairman (Zongli), Sun Yat-sen, by completing the revolution and building the nation, so that even the spirits of the mountains and rivers were aroused. This was the only way to comfort the souls of Sun Yat-sen and the revolutionary martyrs and meet the hopes of the people of the entire nation.21
Behind Teng Jie’s bold and sweeping rhetoric, which invoked the spirits of the land and the souls of the revolutionary dead, lay a simple message: the Chinese, under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek, could simultane¬ously crush their internal enemies, the Communists, and repel the external aggressors, the Japanese. But this was not a message that Chiang Kai-shek was prepared to heed. Already the domestic political situation was changing in his favor, and he was about to become chairman of the Military Affairs Commission while Wang Jingwei was named head of the Executive Yuan. From that dominant position, Chiang thought that he would be able to turn
all of his resources upon exterminating the Communists, though this meant momentarily conceding to the Japanese. The slogan “Rangwai bi xian annei,” “If you want to repel foreign aggression, then you must first pacify the inte¬rior,” was fast becoming a policy. And in Chiang’s eyes, the success of coun¬terinsurgency depended entirely upon securing the total consent of his closest followers to implement annei (pacification of the interior).22
Responding to Teng Jie’s ebullient address, Chiang Kai-shek chose first to stress the overwhelming danger that the Japanese posed to their nation. He spoke simply, without bombast or flourish:
The Japanese militarists have spent fifty years preparing for the invasion of China. Their army, air force, and navy are all modernized. Once conflict broke out on the battlefield our officers and soldiers in the front lines were almost unable to raise their head to take aim and shoot. All they could do was to strike back and sacrifice themselves. After they had suffered enormous casualties, they retreated and pulled back. Once our back is against the wall and we can find no more soldiers for the battlefield, then all that we will be able to do is to sign an unconditional surrender. And once the surrender is signed, then the country is lost and the race is exterminated.23
Chiang Kai-shek went on to say that during their 268 years of rule the Manchus had carried out multiple massacres of Yangzhou and Jiading, con¬ducted numerous literary inquisitions, and enacted all kinds of harsh laws to mistreat the Han people. But Japan’s rule of Korea and Taiwan over the past fifty years had been even crueler than the Manchu reign. Unfortu¬nately, since Sun Yat-sen’s death, “The responsibility of revolution has fallen upon my shoulders. Given my knowledge of ourselves and of our enemies, I must not act irresponsibly to disappoint our Chairman and our martyrs, our country and our people.” 24
Chiang insisted that the Japanese, with their modernized armies, could do practically anything they wanted, while the Chinese were utterly defense¬less. Consequently, the millions of Chinese who opposed his policy of with¬drawal and praised the heroes of the Nineteenth Route Army for their sui¬cidal defense of Shanghai were indulging themselves in individualistic heroic posturing. Although what China needed now were “anonymous he¬roes” (wuming yingxiong) to carry out “solid work, tough work, quick work, hard work” (shigan, yinggan, kuaigan, kugan), not a single one of these mil¬lions was volunteering to go to the front lines.25
Chiang Kai-shek told his disciples that he did, indeed, have a 300,000- man army. If his only goal were to be a popular “national hero” (minzu ying- xiong), without regard for the greater historical consequences of the crisis, then that ambition was surely not beyond his reach. But his individual honor was nothing compared to the success of the revolution and the safety of the people. To sacrifice the nation to his personal reputation would be-
tray the souls of the Chairman and the revolutionary martyrs, and pass dis¬aster on to posterity. “All I can do is to sustain humiliation and carry the heavy burden [of public opprobrium],” Chiang declared.
I will not lightly speak of laying down our lives before we have come to the last critical moment [guantou]. We will never give up peace until we totally despair of continuing. We must gain time for preparation. And what I mean by the last critical moment, or a time when all hope for peace is completely gone, is the time when the enemy attacks without any consideration of consequences, in¬tending to force us to sign an unconditional surrender and extinguish our country.26
With these words Chiang Kai-shek appeared to have completely won over his audience. Deeply touched by his sincerity, the Whampoa men all rose to their feet to show they accepted their lesson respectfully. By then it was 1 A.M. and Chiang told them to meet him again the following morning at eight at the offices of the Lizhishe on Whampoa Road in Nanjing.27
KEJU—EXAMINATION SELECTION
At eight o’clock on the morning of February 28 the men assembled outside the entrance to the Lizhishe.28 Kang Ze, Hu Zongnan, and about ten others had to be absent.29 Once again, there were no guards and Dai Li alone was in charge of security. After meeting the men at the gate, Dai Li escorted them into a rectangular classroom at the eastern end of the building. On the wall that faced them hung a portrait of Sun Yat-sen bracketed by a cou¬plet: “Revolution has yet to succeed. Comrades must still exert themselves” (Geming shang wei chenggong, tongzhi reng xu nuli). Underneath, in front of a blackboard, sat a rattan chair behind a writing desk. Around the desk, ar¬ranged in a U shape, were rows of smaller desks with double drawers and wooden benches. Like pupils in class, the Whampoa alumni lined up and sat down in order of seniority. Then Chiang Kai-shek, wearing a blue schol¬ar’s gown and accompanied by Deng Wenyi, came in to greet them.30
On this occasion Teng Jie was very much the class monitor, shouting “arise” when Chiang came in, and then reporting who was present before Chiang Kai-shek ordered them to sit down. Glancing through the name list, Chiang wrote in white chalk on the board: “Knowing is hard and doing is easy; the philosophy of principle and nature” (zhi nan xing yi, li xing zhexue). Then, he commenced to lecture, referring at times to the Theories of Sun Yat- sen (Sun Wen xueshuo) and other volumes on the desk. The lecture, which was on Sun Yat-sen’s variant of Wang Yangming’s “the unity of knowledge and action” (zhi xing he yi), went on for more than an hour.31
After the lecture was over, Teng Jie passed around paper and each of the former cadets wrote down his choices for the leadership of the new or- ganization. The ballots were collected and sealed into an envelope by Teng, who passed them on to Chiang. The lingxiu then assigned two examination themes: “A discussion of Bismarck’s policy of iron and blood” (Lun Bisemai de tiexie zhengce) and “An essay on the significance of a cooperative society” (Shishu hezuo she de yiyi). 32 He instructed each person to choose one of the two and compose an essay in classical or vernacular Chinese of whatever length he wished. The paper was due the next morning at eight.33
The following morning, February 29, they returned to the classroom and turned in their essays to Teng Jie.34 On the hour Chiang Kai-shek came in, wearing the same blue gown, accompanied by Deng Wenyi. Teng Jie pre¬sented the twenty-odd essays to Chiang, who sat down at the desk, put on his spectacles, and commenced reading, writing comments, and assigning grades. One paper, Yi Deming’s, he found wanting.35 The rest Chiang gave to Teng Jie to hand back while he—Chiang—told his former students to think about his comments and the scores they had received. On the basis of these, their verbal presentation in the evening meetings, their appearance, their Whampoa class, their past experience, and the number of votes they had received in the election Chiang Kai-shek would assign each man a po¬sition in the new organization.36
The lingxiu and his disciples then walked over to the Lizhishe audito¬rium, which was dominated by another large photograph of Sun Yat-sen. Holding hands, they formed a circle with the lingxiu. Chiang said, “This organization is going to be named the Sanminzhuyi Lixingshe.” Then each man pulled out a written oath that they had been told to prepare earlier and stood at attention, facing the Chairman’s portrait.37 Raising their right hands, they pledged:
I swear in all my sincerity to practice the Three People’s Principles with vigor, to recover revolutionary spirit, to revive the Chinese race, to sacrifice all per¬sonal interest, to obey orders, to adhere strictly to secrecy, and to complete the task of revolution and of building the country.38 If I breach my oath, I am will¬ing to accept the most severe punishment. I pledge this sincerely.39
Each stamped his right thumbprint on the oath, which was chopped with Chiang Kai-shek’s seal. The paper texts were then collected by Teng Jie and solemnly burned, just as one would burn paper money to the spirits. Hold¬ing hands again, they were addressed one last time by Chiang Kai-shek. “I will do my best to lead you,” he said. “From now on all of you must ex¬ert yourselves even harder than before to unite in society, to strive, and to struggle. We will not stop until we achieve our goal. I wish you success.” The Sanminzhuyi Lixingshe was thereby—in a ceremony that eclectically drew upon the cultural trappings of the sworn brigand brotherhood and the literati’s Confucian examination system—formally established.40
CORE AND PERIPHERY
This small freemasonry of Chiang Kai-shek loyalists within the right-wing movements and secret service organizations of the Nationalists was from the start hopelessly confused with its front groups or “satellite” (waiwei) or¬ganizations: the Revolutionary Army Comrades Association (Geming jun- ren tongzhi hui), the Revolutionary Youth Comrades Association (Geming qingnian tongzhi hui), the Renaissance Society (Fuxingshe), and the noto¬rious Blue Shirts Society (Lanyishe). The last of these never really existed as a formal Lixingshe instrument as such but was identified with it in official documents, taking on an existence of its own.41
This confusion was caused in part by the effort to keep the existence of the Lixingshe a secret.42
The secretiveness of the Lixingshe can be viewed from three angles: in terms of personnel, in terms of organization, and in terms of activities. The secrecy in these three areas was closely interconnected. In terms of personnel, no one should disclose their identity in the organization to anyone else, not even to one’s own family members, or else one would be disciplined. Comrades who are not involved in the same area of functional assignments should avoid con¬tact, so as to avoid the chance of revealing one’s identity. The names of high- level cadres within the organization may not be known to all comrades.43
Concealed by its front groups, the Lixingshe appeared to the public as the Blue Shirts (Lanyi), fascist-seeming fanatics and terrorist thugs whose for¬mal organization was the Renaissance Society.44 In truth, the Lixingshe retained a separate identity, acting through the more widely known Fu- xingshe, just as it tried to operate secretly within the propaganda, police, and special services to further the cause of Chiang Kai-shek and the Three People’s Principles.45
The confusion of the Lixingshe with its front groups was also due to the proliferation of other “core organizations” (hexin zuzhi) and “satellite orga-nizations” (waiwei zuzhi) during this period of national crisis. In 1933, for in¬stance, the “CC” clique founded, with Chiang Kai-shek’s encouragement, a Blue and White Squad (Qing bai tuan), which six months later merged with its own front group, the Society of Faithful Comrades of the Guomindang (Guomindang zhongshi tongzhi hui).46 And by 1937, after all, there were three different organizations that claimed the name “Renaissance” (Fuxing): the Whampoa group’s Fuxingshe, the “CC” clique’s Minzu fuxing da tong- meng (National Renaissance Confederation), and the Wang Jingwei group’s Minzu fuxing hui (National Renaissance Association).47 Even within the so- called Whampoa clique’s ranks, among Renaissance Society members, there was a welter of individuals who wished to be given credit for being closest to Chiang Kai-shek by claiming that their own particular organization was the genuine vanguard of Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary heirs.48
Actual members of the Lixingshe exaggerated their own claims in this re¬gard, especially when it came to explaining the relationship between their organization and Dai Li’s secret service. If the Lixingshe can be seen as nest¬ing within its front groups, then the Special Services Department consti¬tuted a special embryo of its own, much to the displeasure of some of the founders of the Society for Vigorous Practice. From the very beginning of the Lixingshe, which existed as an organization for six years until it was dis¬solved in the summer of 1938, the SSD stood apart.49 As early as the late summer of 1932 Dai Li had already earned his autonomy by providing more efficient and manageable espionage and surveillance services than his fel¬low Lixingshe members could offer to the lingxiu.50
SHOCK TROOPS
Dai Li’s independence angered Lixingshe activists, who later praised the se¬cret police chief, but who also insisted upon their own critical importance as the shock troops of the Nationalist Party.
Although the loyalty and dedication of Dai Yunong, and also his contribution to the nation, are admired by everybody and known by everyone, he was but one of a cohort of crack troops [qibing] that facilitated the four major move¬ments of the Lixingshe.51 He was one of the effective forces contributing to all aspects of construction under the guidance of the Three People’s Principles, via the overall organization of the Lixingshe—a force that was utterly loyal to the Leader. That is, he contributed to the Nationalist Party’s ability to enforce its policies from the center all the way down to local organizations. However, one thing needs to be clearly distinguished here: scouting and ambush forces [qi] versus main shock troops [zheng]. We must discriminate between the prin¬cipal [zhu] and the secondary [ke], so that we can show how the Lixingshe guided the national revolutionary movement into its third high tide [sandu jinru gaochao], and so that there is no confusion about identifying this as a se¬cret service organization [tewu zuzhi].52
And the fact remained that the Lixingshe, after all, played an extremely im¬portant role in organizing propaganda activities for Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist Party.
One might even characterize the appearance of the Lixingshe in terms of the redirection of an entire generation of Whampoa-trained propagan¬dists who had momentarily lost their importance after the Northern Expe¬dition was over and the anti-Communist extermination campaigns had not yet gotten into full swing. Displaced by former “Beiyang bureaucrats” who had migrated south like carpetbaggers to take over the Nationalist civil ser¬vice, Chiang’s former pupils had to stake out a new claim on the nation’s po- litical resources by creating a movement of their own to mobilize popular opinion behind Chiang and his civil war effort.
In that respect the accomplishment of the Lixingshe’s founders was re-markable, even when we discount the fulsome praise of its defenders:
Within this short period of six years, the Lixingshe managed to gain control over the entire society of China, and the influence of its members reached overseas Chinese communities in Asia, Europe, and America. At the time of its founding, there were about two dozen people that attended the ceremony. Toward the end of this six-year period, its membership reached 100,000, in¬cluding members of the Revolutionary Army Comrades Association for the military, the Revolutionary Youth Comrades Association for students, and the Renaissance Society for society at large.53
Nevertheless, the Society for Vigorous Practice remained hidden from pub¬lic view, eventually mistaken for the Blue Shirts and gradually displaced by the Special Services Department that brought Dai Li much greater histori¬cal fame.
Chapter 7
The Lixingshe and the Blue Shirts
The foundation of this association has now been laid. People call us Blue Shirts or terrorists. That is nothing. The important problem to be solved is how to create a new revolutionary atmosphere so as to lead the revolutionary masses In China
today definite action must be taken for temporary relief as well as for a fundamental cure. However, what we need now is a fundamental cure. Our present problem is not the Japanese. Our problem is not the invasion of our northeastern provinces and Rehe. If we can maintain the status quo, it will be enough for the present time. As a revolutionary government, the loss of a little territory does not mean much. The important problem is that of national existence. To save China from destruction we must revive our national spirit Zhong [loyalty], xiaoshun [filial piety],
dexing [virtue], ai [love], he [harmony], and ping [peace] should be our central guiding principles for the achievement of li [propriety], yi [righteousness], lian [purity], and chi [sense of shame], which comprise the national spirit of China. The success of the Japanese fascists and the Italian fascists is due to this. If we want our revolution [to be] a success, we must create a party dictatorship.
SECRET SPEECH ATTRIBUTED TO CHIANG KAI-SHEK, spring 19321
FRONT GROUPS
On March 1, 1932, the day after they swore to form the Lixingshe, the founders of the Society for Vigorous Practice (SVP) held a “cadres meeting” (ganbu huiyi) in the offices on Whampoa Road.2 The purpose of the gather¬ing was to organize a directorate and form front groups. He Zhonghan oc¬cupied the chair, and Deng Wenyi read out Chiang Kai-shek’s list of the society’s staff officers (ganshi). Their commission or executive committee (ganshihui) would constitute the executive directorate of the organization.3 The society’s director and secretary general (changwu ganshi jian shuji) dur¬ing the first year of its existence was Teng Jie.4 He was to be succeeded in the second year by He Zhonghan, and in the third by Liu Jianqun.5 Alongside the secretariat were four departments: general affairs, headed by Li Yimin; 6 organization, under Xiao Zanyu; 7 propaganda, directed by Kang Ze;8 and special services, commanded first by Gui Yongqing, and then by Dai Li.9
In January 1933, when the delegates to the Lixingshe from its various front groups grew too numerous, an additional Control Commission (Jian- chahui) was created. It supervised the branch offices’ performance, meted out discipline, scrutinized budgets, and presided over the oath taking of new members. Its inspectors ( jiancha) answered to the Staff Officers Com¬mission, but they were granted the authority to imprison and execute male¬factors within the organization, and their secret reports were forwarded di¬rectly to the Lixingshe secretariat.10
Following the principles of secrecy they had all pledged to uphold, the cadres decided to organize two front groups.11 The first was the Revolu¬tionary Army Comrades Association (Geming junren tongzhi hui), with Pan Youqiang as the standing staff officer and secretary-general.12 The RACA was an instant success, expanding rapidly. Perhaps because many attributed its popularity to Hu Zongnan’s sponsorship, the RACA was viewed as an arm of the Zhejiang clique (which included Dai Li) within the military.13 Consequently, the RACA was relatively short-lived. After the Lixingshe es¬tablished a delegates’ congress (dahui) in the spring of 1933, Chiang Kai- shek ordered the Revolutionary Army Comrades Association abolished, on the grounds that it might disrupt the regular chain of command in the army.14 However, he did authorize the formation of a Military Affairs De¬partment (Junshichu) within the headquarters of the Lixingshe, appoint¬ing Du Xinru its chief.15
The second front group lasted as long as the Lixingshe itself, constitut¬ing an “inner layer” (neiceng) called the Revolutionary Youth Comrades As¬sociation (Geming qingnian tongzhi hui).16 Ge Wuqi was the standing staff officer and secretary-general, with Gan Guoxun in charge of organization, Kang Ze responsible for propaganda, and Liu Chengzhi directing general affairs.17 The RYCA was the Lixingshe’s primary cover group: its name was used to recruit followers, and it was under its aegis that many of the “special services” (tewu) activities of the SVP were implemented in other organiza¬tions and offices. Most of the members were Whampoa graduates or mid¬level cadres from other right-wing organizations. There was in addition a contingent of higher-level intellectuals, including university professors and mid-level bureaucrats such as party secretaries, section chiefs (kezhang), department chiefs (chuzhang), bureau chiefs ( juzhang), and provincial de¬partment chiefs (tingzhang). All of the “backbone cadres” (gugan) or secretar¬ies (shuji) of this “inner layer” organization were either Lixingshe members or, as the organization expanded through branch offices (zhihui), central level cadres (zhongyangji ganbu). 18 The headquarters of the RYCA was located in the Investigation Department (Diaochachu) of the Alumni Information Bureau in the Central Military School’s Mingwalang compound in Nanjing.19
The “democratic centralism” of the RYCA—which at one time had about twenty thousand members—was reinforced by its budgetary practices.20 Ex¬penses at each level of the RYCA were paid for by the level above. The cen¬tral budget was supplemented by membership fees, but its main source was a special section of the Military Affairs Commission budget that Chiang Kai- shek himself had to approve. At each of these levels, the local office of the RYCA was ostensibly the Investigation Bureau’s Information Department (Tongxunchu) for Central Military Academy Alumni under the Military Af¬fairs Commission (Junshi weiyuanhui zhongyang ge junshi xuexiao biye- sheng hui), which was also associated with the Whampoa Alumni Associa¬tion. All provincial and municipal branches carried the placard of the Tongxunchu on their door and employed its authority to issue identification cards used by people working in the office. Secretaries and group heads, however, were able to use military titles such as canmou (staff officer) to fa¬cilitate their public activities. Each branch office also had its own special cover name (daiming). The alias, once chosen, had to be approved by the provincial office or the central office, and the daiming was used thereafter in all communications. Higher-level organizations addressed lower-level branches as “younger brother” (di), in return being called “elder brother” (xiong). 21
Together “elder” and “younger” branches, “core” and “inner layer” groups, came together to control several crucial indoctrination programs for officers and officials going through the Nationalist military and civil training system. Members of the Lixingshe and the RYCA took part in the political training of cadres in the infantry, artillery, engineering, and quar¬termaster corps; and they were deeply involved in seminars for district ad¬ministration personnel run by the Ministry of the Interior, and in summer training programs held at Lushan for higher-ranking party and political military personnel.22 Lixingshe members also commanded the Chief Bri¬gade for the Higher Education of Army Officers (Junguan gaodeng jiaoyu zongdui), which conducted a six-month training course for six hundred graduates of the first six classes of the Central Military Academy in 1932.23
Members of the Lixingshe and the RYCA further dominated the leader¬ship of the Training Class for Army Officers Attached to the Military Acad¬emy ( Junxiao fushe junguan xunlianban). The four brigades of this train¬ing unit were put together in August 1932 with more than 1,700 officers between the ranks of lieutenant and colonel who were detached from their regular units for a year. The flavor of their allegiance was partly captured in their class anthem, “Song of the Leader” (“Lingxiu ge”):
China is indeed great!
Each generation has its worthy and able men.
Though there have always been disorder and upheaval We’ve always been able to recover [fuxing].
Today Chiang Kai-shek is our savior [jiuxing].
We march forward together with him.
Fuxing! Fuxing! 24
The brigades’ graduates, who had three German officers as their advisers, mostly returned to their original posts, though a small number were re¬tained in the Military Academy as members of the Chief Brigade for Mili¬tary Instruction (Jiaodao zongdui).25
THE FUXINGSHE
The most important additional group created by the Lixingshe was the Re¬naissance Society (Fuxingshe). This “third-tier satellite organization” (di sanji waiwei zuzhi) was added to the SVP-RYCA structure in July 1932, when Ren Juewu was serving as the secretary-general of the Revolutionary Youth Comrades Association. After a particularly hot and humid meeting in the association offices, which were then located in Ren’s residence at Number 4 Sanyili, Nanjing, a group of the staff officers clambered up to the roof of the building to cool off. Enjoying the breeze, Ren Juewu casually suggested forming yet another front group, saying “These days quite a few young people have applied to join our Geming qingnian tongzhi hui. We must not ignore them. But if we want to preserve secrecy and also screen the charac¬ter of the applicants, then how about using the name ‘Renaissance Society’ [Fuxingshe] as a third-tier group to absorb them into the organization?” 26 The staff officers formally put Ren Juewu’s suggestion on the agenda for the next Lixingshe meeting, which endorsed the proposal and submitted it to Chiang Kai-shek. He approved the recommendation, and the Fuxingshe promptly sprang into existence.27
The Renaissance Society became well known, according to Gan,
because it had no cadres, no organization, no offices, and no funding from the central level all the way down to branch and local organizations. All of its affairs, in fact, were taken care of by the Revolutionary Youth Comrades As-sociation. Also, recruitment on this level was not very strict. So the Renais¬sance Society flourished. That is why this national revival movement [minzu fuxing yundong] acquired such fame.28
Membership in the satellite organizations was automatic for those who be¬longed to the Lixingshe. However, the reverse was not true, and member¬ship was tightly controlled the closer one got to the core. As a relatively dis¬tant satellite, the Renaissance Society was correspondingly easy to join, once one had been recommended by older or former members of the group. The application form was simple, and initiations usually were conducted in groups of ten before portraits of Chiang Kai-shek. On some occasions in Nanjing, where Chiang Kai-she accepted the oaths in person, three to six hundred people participated in the swearing-in ceremonies.29
If Renaissance Society members were nominated for the RYCA, on the other hand, they had to be endorsed by a general meeting of that group, and then be screened by the Lixingshe before their names were passed on to the supreme Leader for his approval.30 The same procedure worked for the next level up: “A member of the RYCA [wanting to join the SVP] had to pass through a Lixingshe general meeting and then be presented to the Leader for approval, and only after getting his approval would he take his oath and become a member of the Lixingshe.” 31
The Renaissance Society did not have the authority to make official ap-pointments, but its higher-level cadres did use the administrative cover of deputy (weiyuan) in the Political Indoctrination Department (Zhengxun chu).32 The Renaissance Society was dominated internally by a Staff Officers Committee (Ganshihui),33 but power was wielded by its secretary-general (shujizhang), who was appointed directly by the chairman (huizhang), Chiang Kai-shek.34 Under the secretary-general, who was Teng Jie initially, there were groups (zu) or departments (chu) for organization, propaganda, and training led respectively by Zhou Fu, Kang Ze, and Gui Yongqing.35 The Special Services Department, of course, was put in Dai Li’s hands. This same structure was replicated at the provincial and municipal levels, with the fun¬damental grassroots unit being the small group, or cell (xiaozu), which usu¬ally held weekly meetings.36
General meetings were hardly ever convoked, except for those rare oc¬casions when district (qu) and branch (fen) associations assembled. All deci¬sions came from the top down, and there was nothing resembling a congress or representative caucus.37 The content of the weekly cell meeting was dic¬tated by the higher-level organization’s written instructions. Usually, the meetings were about internal and international political events, important propaganda points, activities of the local group, and investigation activities toward suspected Communist elements and “CC” clique members. After each meeting, the head of the cell was supposed to write a report that was sent up to the next level. Intelligence reports went directly to the central or¬ganization, bypassing the branch committees.38
Each level of the Renaissance Society, from central headquarters to branch offices, was supposedly attached to parallel organs at an identical level in the RYCA. The one nestled within the other, and the “responsible person” ( fuzeren) in the RYCA was also the “responsible person” in the Re¬naissance Society.39 However, there were efforts to draw a visible distinction between membership in each group. RYCA members addressed each other as “best friends” (zhiyou), while Renaissance Society members were only sup¬posed to exchange greetings as “good friends” (haoyou). Both Fuxingshe and RYCA members who received more than two hundred yuan a month were supposed to tithe to the organization (a duty that almost never was carried out), but while the former could only be dismissed for a Renaissance Soci¬ety infraction, RYCA members could be placed under house arrest and even in some cases executed for infringing the association’s rules.40 In practice, membership often overlapped, and the distinction between cells in the Geming qingnian tongzhi hui and cells in the Fuxingshe often became con- fused.41 “The Revolutionary Youth Comrades Association and the Renais¬sance Society, except for the distinction between inner and outer layers, ac¬tually was one single thing,” explained one former provincial secretary of both groups. “Thus it is quite possible to use the term ‘Fuxingshe’ to rep¬resent these two organizations together.” 42
Taken as a whole then, the freemasonry consisted of three tiers, with the Lixingshe at the “core” (hexin) encircled by two front groups.43 All three constituted parallel hierarchies, extending downward like columns from the capital to the provinces via bureaucratic offices and occupational asso- ciations.44 At the peak of its activities, this entire three-ringed structure con¬sisted of more than 500,000 members, with those in the outer circles sup¬posedly not knowing about the existence of the inner ones until they were tapped for membership.45 The innermost core always remained the Lixing- she, whose name was sometimes shortened to the Lishe or Power Society, and its eighty or ninety activists continued to be predominantly Whampoa graduates.46 A few civilians were also invited to join—such as Counselor Liu Wendao, who had been the Chinese diplomatic minister to Italy and had good contacts with the Fascists there.47
If it was possible for members of the RYCA and the Renaissance Society to refer to their own separate “inner layer” and “satellite organization” to¬gether as the Fuxingshe, then it is little wonder that the public at large identified the entire structure collectively as the Renaissance Society. In ad¬dition, however, the Renaissance Society was lumped together indiscrimi¬nately with the ubiquitous and amorphous Blue Shirts (Lanyi). This con¬fusion arose when one of the “outsiders” recommended to Chiang Kai- shek for membership in the original Lixingshe freemasonry tried to claim personal credit for the foundation of a separate Lanyishe, or Blue Shirts Society.
During the second “preparations department” meeting held in late Feb¬ruary 1932at Chiang Kai-shek’s bungalow, the regular sequence of speeches according to seniority had been interrupted by Gui Yongqing after Han Wenhuan spoke. Qiu Kaiji was next in line, but before he started, Gui Yong- qing, who had spoken at such length the night before about his trip across Europe and Asia, surprised everyone by raising his hand. He said he wanted to recommend a “talent” (rencai) to the lingxiu in the presence of them all. His nominee was He Yingqin’s secretary-general Liu Jianqun, who—like General He, former minister of war, member of the Special Affairs Com¬mittee of the Central Political Council, and Chiang Kai-shek’s closest mili¬tary supporter—hailed from Guizhou.48
LIU JIANQUN
To these former Whampoa cadets Liu Jianqun was an outsider.49 Although many among them knew and respected him, he had never attended the academy, and as a civilian he only held a rank equivalent to major general. Nevertheless, Gui said, “He is a party loyalist and a patriot, and he has con¬crete proposals about protecting the party and saving the country [hudang jiuguo]. We must get him and make use of him.” At this Chiang Kai-shek nodded and responded, “Please ask him to come to the military academy tomorrow morning at eight for a chat.”50
The introduction of Liu Jianqun into their proceedings completely en¬tangled the founders of the Lixingshe with what became known to the pub¬lic as the notorious Blue Shirts Society. This confusion has persisted to the present, largely due to the Japanese press, which for years referred indis¬criminately to all of the activities of the Lixingshe and its front organizations as the doings of the Blue Shirts, regardless of whether they were actual Spe¬cial Services Department operations or spontaneous acts of patriotic resis- tance.51 To be sure, the confusion was initially perpetrated by Liu Jianqun himself, who was eager to take credit for the formation of this paramilitary force in order to press his own claims for recognition within the ranks of Chiang Kai-shek’s right-wing supporters.52
Liu Jianqun put forward these contentions to reporters in a press con¬ference that he convened in January 1933, eleven months after the Lixing- she founding, when he was serving as commander of the North China Pro¬paganda Brigade (Huabei xuanchuan dui) in Beiping. At that meeting he distributed three treatises of his creation, including one entitled “The Or¬ganization of the Blue Shirts Society of the Chinese Guomindang.” This was the proposal that he had circulated to the Guomindang Central Executive Committee meeting in Nanjing in October 1931, calling for the formation of a Blue Shirts Society “in an endeavor to strengthen the internal organi¬zation of the party” at a time when so many members of the GMD were said by him to be avaricious militarists, corrupt officials, local bullies, and rotten gentry.53
Liu’s tract went on to say that there had been disputes about the name of this proposed society, with some people favoring the term “Youth Corps” while others wanted to call it the “Cotton Cloth Corps.” 54 Liu felt that both of these titles were unsuitable, “as the former might be misunderstood for the youth group of the Communist Party, while the second name is not complete as there are other native products such as silk.” Because the Guo- mindang regarded blue-green (qing) and white as party colors, and because blue shirts were both stipulated formal attire for the Nationalists and the standard dress of the common people since ancient times, Liu proposed taking the name “Blue Shirts Society of the Chinese Guomindang” for his new group. There was both a nativist and a populist tone to these sugges¬tions, which took homespun as a symbol of patriotism and western clothing as a sign of cultural betrayal. “Members of the society must use native goods everywhere, and those who attend a formal conference of the society must wear the Sun Yat-sen uniform.” 55
The briefing may have been held because Liu wanted to elevate his posi¬tion among Chiang Kai-shek loyalists alongside as well as within the Lixing- she power structure. After he was recommended by Gui Yongqing to Chi¬ang Kai-shek, Liu was introduced by He Zhonghan and Teng Jie to the inner circle of the Lixingshe. Through their formal tuijian (recommendation) Liu was invited to join the second tier of the organization as a full-fledged member of the Revolutionary Youth Comrades Association. Now, by claim¬ing to have urged Chiang Kai-shek to set up a Blue Shirts Society eighteen months earlier, Liu Jianqun was both seeking to create a power base of his own and establish a right to higher office within the core and satellite orga¬nizations of the Lixingshe.56
His effort proved to be successful. More than a year later, in April 1934, Liu Jianqun was transferred from the Beiping branch of the Department of Political Indoctrination (Zhengxun chu) to become secretary of the headquarters of the Renaissance Society in Nanjing. At the same time he was made standing staff officer of the Society for Vigorous Practice—an office he was reappointed to after Feng Ti’s disgrace over the Wang Jingwei assas¬sination attempt in November 1935. Although his Lixingshe post was kept secret, Liu Jianqun’s position as secretary-general of the Renaissance Soci¬ety must have strengthened the link in the public’s mind between the Fux- ingshe and the Lanyishe. This infuriated Lixingshe insiders, who were dis¬mayed by the connection Liu’s position suggested between their movement and a fascist Blue Shirts movement.57
Gan Guoxun, who was the standing staff officer (changwu ganshi) of the Revolutionary Youth Comrades Association and a founding member of the Lixingshe, accused such latecomers as Liu Jianqun of belonging to satellite organizations that were deliberately excluded from the highest tier or in¬nermost circle of the structure and prohibited from making horizontal links of their own.58 Such outsiders, Gan argued, ignorantly or malevolently iden¬tified the Fuxingshe with the Blue Shirts.
They linked together the third-tier satellite organization, the Renaissance So-ciety, which was a false front [xu she], to the Blue Shirts Society, which never existed at all [jue wu] What they wrote catered to the curiosity of some of
those people who did not understand the true situation. However, they erred in alluding to fascism and to special services organizations.59
Gan Guoxun’s argument falters insofar as Liu Jianqun was his superior leader within the core organization of the Lixingshe, though not one of
the founding members. The high office Liu held as secretary-general of Chiang’s top-secret freemasonry may have even reinforced other Lixingshe members’ sense of connectedness to the Blue Shirts. Certainly, the public continued to make that connection, thanks precisely to Liu Jianqun’s evi¬dent importance among Guomindang propagandists.60
NEW SATELLITES
The connection between the mysterious Lixingshe, the Fuxingshe, and the Lanyishe was reinforced by other satellite members, many of them younger Whampoa alumni, who knew that at least some of these organizations were formed around March 1, 1932, by the cohort of Chiang loyalists who were prominent in propaganda, military indoctrination, and intelligence work. They knew of the existence of a Society for Vigorous Practice, which they believed was based on three principles: Chiang Kai-shek would be the su¬preme and permanent Leader; Whampoa alumni would form the base of the group; and its members would follow the precepts of the Three People’s Principles, practice Communist organizational techniques, and cultivate the spirit of Japanese samurai.61 They thought that responsibility for actu¬ally forming and organizing the Lixingshe was delegated to five members of the founding group: He Zhonghan, Feng Ti, Teng Jie, Zhou Fu, and Kang Ze.62 They understood that the organization was completely centralized around this “core nucleus” (hexin zu) of five men plus fifty-odd others, in¬cluding Gui Yongqing, Yuan Shouqian, Deng Wenyi, Xiao Zanyu, Huang Yong, Gu Xiping, Jiang Jianren, Du Xinru, Chen Shaoping, Yi Deming, Li Yimin, Zheng Jiemin, and Dai Li. And they were told that a number of cells within the Lixingshe held weekly meetings in Chiang Kai-shek’s official res¬idence inside the Mingwalang compound, where they were given lectures by their “principal” on the “philosophy of practicing with vigor,” and where they also studied German and Italian fascist organizations.63
The association between this group and the Blue Shirts was reinforced even more when the Japanese became convinced of the group’s existence.64 This came about partly through Liu Jianqun’s press conference and partly through the writings of Fu Shenglan, who published a book called The In¬side Story of the Blue Shirts (Lanyishe de neimu) in which he described the Blue Shirts as a secret service organization.65 Fu was a member of the Communist Party who was persuaded by Kang Ze to join one of the satellite organs of the Lixingshe in 1933. Later he transferred his allegiance to the Wang Jingwei puppet government, and during the War of Resistance he served as the collaborationist mayor of Hangzhou. His book on the Blue Shirts was adopted by the Japanese military police in Shanghai as teaching material to train Chinese who worked for the Japanese secret service.66
Meanwhile, all that the public knew, according to Liu Jianqun, was that membership in the Blue Shirts Society had to be kept a strict secret.
With a view to attaining the object of immediately overthrowing the feudal influences, exterminating the Red Bandits, and dealing with foreign insult[s], members of the Blue Shirts Society should conduct in secret their activities in various provinces, xian, and cities, except for the central Guomindang head-quarters and other political organs whose work must be executed in an official manner.67
Even though Blue Shirts were supposed to “launch people’s movements,” they were also told to be prepared to assume “secret service” duties and never to reveal to others that they were from the Guomindang.68
Indeed, the reason the Shanghai Municipal Police Special Branch had so few details about the Blue Shirts during their seven years’ existence was pre¬cisely because those who had sworn oaths to join the society “were forbid¬den to admit to outsiders that they were members of the Blue Shirts Society or to disclose its secrets under the penalty of death, which was the only pun¬ishment.” 69 Needless to say, the existence of the Blue Shirts was never pub¬licly recognized by Chiang Kai-shek.70
Liu Jianqun himself, while claiming credit for suggesting the establish¬ment of the society in the first place, had to go on record before the press as not having created the organization. Questioned by a Beiping chenbao re¬porter as to whether or not the Blue Shirts had actually been formed, Liu replied:
In the winter of 1931, I suggested the reorganization of the Guomindang with the sole object of promoting universal respect towards the Three Principles of the People. The foundation of the Blue Shirts Society is interlocked with that of the Guomindang. The Blue Shirts Society will have no new doctrines be¬yond those of the Guomindang. We can at once know the object of the orga¬nization by understanding the original title, the Blue Shirts Society and not the Blue Shirts Party. This scheme of mine was only a suggestion to the Guo- mindang. I have not as a matter of fact participated in any movement of this nature. I am not in a position to give any reply to all kinds of questions relat¬ing to the activities of this organization.71
The reporter concluded at the end of the January 1933 press conference that “From Mr. Liu’s statement, it was still impossible for us to speak with any certainty of the existence or non-existence of this society.” 72 What was cer¬tain, however, was that the press, as well as foreign intelligence and police organs, would thereafter equate the activities of the Renaissance Society (and, behind it, the Lixingshe) with right-wing or fascist Blue Shirts in their midst.73
Who, for example, was behind the formation of the new Nationalist ver¬sion of the Chinese Boy Scouts (Zhongguo tongzi jun) in April 1933? There
Figure 9. Chinese Boy Scouts. Imperial War Museum, IB2797c.
had been a Boy Scouts movement in China since 1915, when Jing Hengyi established a national branch that participated in the Boy Scouts world con¬gress after the war.74 But the Chinese Boy Scouts of the 1930s embodied a much more militaristic effort, closely associated with the Office for National Military Training (Guomin junshi jiaoyu zu) that was formed in July 1932.75 Zhao Fansheng, a military academy graduate who served as the office’s di¬rector, and Yang Kejing, head of academic affairs for the Guomin junshi jiaoyu zu, had originally been section and unit heads in the national Boy Scouts headquarters.76
With the help of Lixingshe founder Gan Guoxun, Zhao and Kang drafted a program, complete with charter and budget, to train Boy Scouts officers from around the country. After Chiang Kai-shek approved the proposal, 160 students were recruited for cadre training. One-third were graduates of the military academy, and the rest were Boy Scouts officers already serv- ing in schools in the provinces. The purpose of the six-month program was to train officers and instructors “to reform the Chinese Boy Scouts, to strengthen and enlarge their organization, to stimulate their intellectual and physical capacities, to heighten their consciousness, to firm up their pa¬triotic and revolutionary will, and to give these youths some military knowl¬edge.” 77 At the same time, the Lixingshe set up another satellite operation in the form of a Society for Vigorous Advancement (Lijinshe), which was specifically charged with penetrating the Boy Scouts. By April 1933 the Li- jinshe had three hundred members, all of whom were provincial and mu¬nicipal officers of the newly staffed Zhongguo tongzi jun.78
Other freshly formed satellite groups of the Society for Vigorous Practice sought to control the activities of non-Han peoples within China, including members of nationalistic movements abroad. These activities were coordi¬nated by the Ethnic Movements Committee (Minzu yundong weiyuanhui), which was formed by Lixingshe founders in April 1932 to aid in the “inde¬pendence movement of minority races.” 79 The Ethnic Movements Com¬mittee covertly sponsored a League of Korean Righteous Martyrs (Chao- xian yilie tuan, or Uiyóltan in Korean), headed by Chin Kuk-pin, who was a Korean graduate of the fourth class at Whampoa.80 The latter organization, which was quite separate from the Korean Independence Party (Chaoxian dulidang) of Kim Ku, organized top-secret “Korean revolutionary training classes” (Chaoxian geming xunlianban) that were held in a temple deep in the Mao Mountains, where Hu Hanmin was under house arrest.81 Each class had about one hundred students enrolled from six months to a year under brigade officers and instructors who were all of Korean origin.82 Later, in 1936, the unit was taken over by Kang Ze, and then moved to Chongqing via Wuchang. Chin Kuk-pin, the class director, hoped for U.S. support of his League of Korean Righteous Martyrs after 1945, but he parted ways with Syngman Rhee, and eventually fell into American disfavor and subsequent obscurity.83
Training operations like these were undoubtedly seen by the Japanese as yet another instance of the nefarious Blue Shirts’ involvement in their own colonial affairs. They were, in fact, tantamount to clandestine intelligence activities that fell under the purview of Dai Li’s Special Services Depart¬ment, so that the line between Lixingshe guidance and SSD direction was not always clearly drawn.
DAI LI’S GROWING INDEPENDENCE
As we have seen, Dai Li was given instructions by Chiang Kai-shek to set up a separate Tewuchu (Special Services Department) even before the Lix- ingshe was ceremonially founded in February and March 1932. Formal es¬tablishment of the SSD occurred a month later, on April 1, 1932, which became the official date of the founding of Dai Li’s secret service, tobe com¬memorated annually thereafter in ceremonies that grew more and more elaborate through the late 1930s and early 1940s. At the time of the found¬ing, according to an account by one of Dai Li’s deputies, Chiang Kai-shek instructed his disciple to turn to The Water Margin (Shui hu zhuan) for guid¬ance, “because when the bravos of Liangshanbo got together in the Hall of Loyalty and Righteousness, their activities consisted of nothing more than intelligence and operations [qingbao yu xingdong].”
In historical texts there is mention of the Eastern Depot and Western Depot of the Ming dynasty.84 In novels there are descriptions of the activities of the xuedizi [assassins] of the early Qing. But there are no real records for us to look into about any of these activities. For historically reliable evidence, there is only chapter thirteen of Sunzi, the assassination of Song Jiaoren by the Northern Government [of Yuan Shikai], the assassination of Chen Qimei,85 and the time when Sun Yat-sen sent an agent carrying huge sums of money from Guangzhou to Shanghai to try to influence the northern warlords. These are cases for which there is evidence.86
Along with this advice to look into fiction for the lore of assassins and to peruse the few recorded instances of special operations in modern times, Chiang provided more immediately practical help to Dai Li. He ruled that all personnel matters related to this new department would come under the Leader’s direct supervision and not be reported to the Society for Vigorous Practice. The SSD was accordingly housed apart from the Lixingshe in Dai Li’s apparatus at 53 Chicken Goose Lane.87
The establishment of a Special Services Department within the Lixing- she-Fuxingshe structure marked a crucial change in the evolution of Dai Li’s own secret service. While a liaison unit (lianluo jiguan) was formed in the Communications Department at the Central Military Academy in Mingwa- lang, Dai Li was also given the authority in late March 1932 to organize an Intelligence Personnel Training Class (Qingbao renyuan xunlianban) in the Honggong Temple (Honggong citang) for military academy graduates and others demonstrating a “special talent for intelligence.” 88
Gan Guoxun later claimed that the training class was intended to pro¬vide personnel for the Lixingshe in general and not Dai Li’s apparatus in particular.
He addressed himself to the needs of the Lixingshe and syncretically adopted the very best teaching materials from China, Japan, Germany, Russia, Britain, and America. He also picked instructors and staff officers with a wide range of backgrounds. He gave his students rigorous, secret, short-term training in in-telligence operations. Upon graduation all of these students took an oath of loyalty to the Three People’s Principles, to the Leader, and to the organiza¬tion. They swore to sacrifice all personal interest, to adhere strictly to secrecy, and to be faithful to their duties and responsibilities. The size of each class was about one hundred or fewer. They were guided by the wishes of the Leader and the ruling principles of the Society for Vigorous Practice. They were un¬der the command of the Special Services Department. They sought to con¬tribute their efforts to the Lixingshe’s four main movements, to supply infor¬mation, and to be responsible for taking extraordinary measures. However, they had to observe discipline strictly as well as be loyal to the Leader. This was a surprise strike force [qibing] for the implementation of all of the Lixingshe programs.89
However, the actual experience of those who went through the first Intelli¬gence Personnel Training Class between May and December 1932 was that Lixingshe members rarely showed up at the Honggong Temple.90 Zheng Jiemin, who was in charge of educational affairs, and Li Shizhen, who was in charge of training, seldom came, and except for Dai Li and Chiang Kai-shek himself, no other Lixingshe members visited the class at all during those eight months.91
According to the charter of the Lixingshe, members without direct re¬sponsibility were not allowed to involve themselves in lower-level organiza¬tions. That might be one explanation for the lack of contact between Lix- ingshe members and the Honggong Temple training unit. But the obvious reason was that the SSD was by then already well on its way to attaining semi- autonomous status within the Lixingshe-Fuxingshe conglomerate.92
Chiang Kai-shek was by then discovering that it was easier and less time-consuming to entrust certain tasks to Dai Li than to call upon the other zeal¬ous and contentious Whampoa men who had formed the SVP in the first place. By the summer of 1932 there were already signs of rifts within their ranks. Not only were there the fisticuffs between civilian and military mem¬bers of the “inner layer” associations, but there was also an incipient fac¬tionalism developing along regional lines that would eventually prove fatal to both the Lixingshe and the Renaissance Society.93 But it was less latent factionalism than administrative inexperience and sectarian zeal that put Chiang off at this point. Initially he had been determined to train these ar¬rogant and often conceited young men into a staff of ultraloyal assistants.94 During the first six months of 1932 he consulted the Lixingshe about a wide variety of national matters, both trivial and important.95 However, on June 5 Chiang wrote in his diary, “Every meeting I have had with the Lixingshe has lasted over three hours. The naiveté of these students burns my heart. How can I nurture cadre talents and acquire true assistants?” 96
Part of the problem was the time and effort that Lixingshe members demanded of him. Normally, when people wrote to Chiang Kai-shek they tried to be as concise as possible. Lengthy articles were always abstracted and memoranda were summarized so that Chiang could get a glimmer of their contents at a glance. But members of the Society for Vigorous Practice
ignored the fact that Chiang’s time was precious, and they frequently pre¬sented him with documents that were tens of thousands of characters long. From time to time Chiang advised his new cadres to write more pithily, but they ignored this and continued as loquaciously as before, even bragging to friends about the length of their memorials to the Leader.97
Another quality of his boastful disciples that infuriated Chiang Kai-shek was their readiness to recommend their friends for high office regardless of their qualifications. On September 13, 1921, Chiang wrote in his diary that he had sent Teng Jie and Kang Ze the following cable:
Many of those people recommended by members of the Lixingshe are not fit for their jobs. Some of them are corrupt. They have the bad habit of boast¬ing and demanding loans. From now on, before the Lixingshe recommends someone, it should do a solid job of scrutinizing the person’s qualifications. From this point on, if anyone who has been recommended does something that brings shame to his office, then the person doing the recommending will be punished for the same crime. Please transmit this message to all staff officers [ganshiyuan]. 98
By then, less than four months after the Honggong Temple intelligence training program had begun, Chiang was already inclined to favor Dai Li over other self-serving Lixingshe stalwarts.
Meanwhile, Dai Li was making certain that none of his SSD lieutenants confused allegiance to the Lixingshe with loyalty to him and the Leader. Qiu Kaiji, one of the Lixingshe founders, was put in charge of the SSD Ex¬ecutive Section (Zhixingke). It was clear that Qiu owed his position to the Staff Officers Commission, to which he directly reported. Dai Li refused to brook such independence, and tension between the two men grew. One day in May 1932 Dai Li and Qiu Kaiji met in the SSD offices, and while they were engaged in conversation a shot was fired through the door, wounding Qiu behind the ear. Dai Li instantly reported the “accident” to Chiang Kai-shek, saying that a guard had been polishing his gun in the next room and the pistol went off by mistake. Qiu Kaiji eventually recovered from the injury, but after he recuperated he was transferred from 53 Chicken Goose Lane to a position in Hankou.99
The Staff Officers Commission was well aware of the tension between Dai Li and Qiu Kaiji, and after this incident occurred He Zhonghan came to see the Lixingshe secretary-general, Teng Jie. He Zhonghan said that the SSD was growing dangerously autonomous, and he demanded that the situation be corrected. Teng subsequently arranged a meeting with Dai Li. He Zhong- han confronted the SSD chief directly, but Dai Li had no intention of back¬ing down. As the argument intensified, Dai Li lost his temper, pounded on the table, and was about to storm out of the room, when Teng Jie soothingly urged a compromise. Eventually Dai Li agreed that for matters handed
down by the Leader, the SSD would be directly accountable to the lingxiu; for matters decided by the society (tuanti), the SSD would be accountable to the Lixingshe.100
Nevertheless, the staff officers and secretaries at the Mingwalang head¬quarters of the Lixingshe were not permitted to inquire about the activities of the SSD, which continued to remain directly under Chiang Kai-shek’s su¬pervision. Similarly, at the provincial level—where tewuzhan (special ser¬vices stations) were established and where the station chief (zhanzhang) was also a member of the provincial Ganshihui and a staff officer in his own right—the provincial affairs commission and its secretaries were not al¬lowed to delve into the operations of the special services station either. The secret service within the Renaissance Society was thus quite hermetic, a sep¬arate xitong (system) in its own right.101
It is important to recognize, however, that Dai Li could not do without the Renaissance Society and the so-called Blue Shirts that constituted its membership. The nominal relationship of the SSD to the Fuxingshe not only provided Dai Li with the cover of all the local branches of the Renais¬sance Society that would be founded in the provinces in months and years to come; it also gave him a public affiliation for his own satellite group, the Loyal and Patriotic Association (Zhongyi jiuguo hui), which was attached directly to the Special Services Department.102 The Loyal and Patriotic As¬sociation, which was established in the spring of 1935, was distinguished from other front groups by being regarded as a fourth-tier organization thanks to its membership of merchants and workers, who were ranked lower on the Confucian social hierarchy than soldiers and peasants. Moreover, its branches in the provinces and municipalities were supervised by the staff officer in charge of special services in the local Renaissance Society or RYCA office, and that person reported directly to Dai Li’s headquarters in Chicken Goose Lane. The purpose of the Zhongyi jiuguo hui was “to organize and train members of labor and commercial circles, and to reform gangs and se¬cret societies [bang hui] and get them to join the national revival movement [minzu fuxing yundong]. The Loyal and Patriotic Association will assist in the reform of the lower level of society, and also in the gathering of intelli¬gence.” 103 The membership of the Zhongyi jiuguo hui was the foundation of what later became the Loyal and Patriotic Army (Zhongyi jiuguo jun), which was trained by the Sino-American Cooperative Organization in World War II as anti-Japanese guerrillas to support future American military landings in southeastern China.104
But that was yet to come. For the moment the single most important benefit to Dai Li of the establishment of a semi-independent SSD within the Lixingshe-Fuxingshe organization was the provision of a reasonably stable and regular budget for his secret apparatus’s activities.105 Thereafter, Dai Li was able to prepare his annual budget request and submit it directly to Chiang Kai-shek, who kept it apart from the Renaissance Society’s regular budget that was funded through the Revolutionary Youth Comrades Asso¬ciation. The moneys were earmarked for the SSD, however, on a formal ba¬sis and no longer came out of the special operating funds that Chiang pre¬viously had to supply out of irregular Guomindang resources. Because the sums were not insignificant (according to hearsay at the time, the total bud¬get of the SSD was more than ten times larger than the regular general af¬fairs budget of the RYCA), there had been some criticism of Chiang’s di¬version of funds that might have been put to more productive use.106 By placing his secret service operations within the Fuxingshe and providing funds from the Military Affairs Commission and its branch offices, together with contributions from military schools, Chiang allayed such criticism.107
These new revenues came to 54,000 Chinese dollars per month, which covered about one-quarter of the SSD’s $200,000 of expenses every thirty days. By 1934, however, Dai Li’s expanded secret service activities report¬edly required $1.2 million per month. Chiang Kai-shek therefore had to turn to other sources of income to keep the SSD in operation.108 Japanese investigators reporting on the Blue Shirts said that one source of their money was the confiscation of opium.109 According to a Shanghai Munici¬pal Police memorandum, Chiang’s men seized a large quantity of morphine in Hankou in 1933, and Chiang Kai-shek had Du Yuesheng, the racketeer, open up a plant in Pudong to refine the drug to be sold for medical pur- poses—the proceeds of which were supposed to support the Blue Shirts. In actuality, this provided Du with an opportunity to refine drugs for the ille¬gal narcotics market using morphine that he acquired clandestinely from Zhang Xueming (one of Zhang Zuolin’s sons), who was director of the Pub¬lic Safety Bureau in Tianjin. But other funds were made available to Chiang Kai-shek when he learned about Du’s illicit enterprise, and they presumably found their way to the coffers of the Special Services Department at 53 Chicken Goose Lane.110
As the next chapters will show, the Lixingshe and the Fuxingshe were ex¬tremely active for a brief period in Shanghai and in the provinces of north China. However, in June of 1935 core elements of the Renaissance Society were expelled from the north by the Japanese army.111 And when the United Front was signed with the Communists in September of 1937 the Renais¬sance Society itself was supposed to be dissolved under the terms of the agreement. In March of the following year the Guomindang convened a special national conference at Wuchang, and the Blue Shirts Society was formally disbanded, its local offices and budgets, along with those of the Revolutionary Youth Comrades Association, being taken over by the Three People’s Principles Youth Corps (Sanminzhuyi qingnian tuan or Sanqing- tuan) in July 1938.112
Although some of the spirit and many of the cadres would survive in the form of the Youth Corps, the old Renaissance Society was finished, and with it the hopes of some of its members who had wanted to use it as a firm foun¬dation for their own basis of power. He Zhonghan, for instance, had obvi¬ously seen his appointment to the secretary-generalship of the Lixingshe in early 1933 as an opportunity to elevate his own fortune as the leader of the Hunanese clique within the Blue Shirts. Teng Jie, even as he handed over the affairs of the society to He Zhonghan at a secret meeting in a Nanjing bathhouse, hoped to head off such self-interest.113 But He was not to be de¬terred, and relations with both the “CC” clique at Party Center and com¬rades within the Lixingshe worsened under his leadership. Chiang Kai-shek eventually wearied of the “constant friction and discord among leading cadres,” and the Society for Vigorous Practice atrophied as a result.114
Much later, in 1941, He Zhonghan told a friend who had gotten drunk at a dog-meat feast and who had criticized Chiang Kai-shek for being of “muddled temper” (hun bao):
You know better than that. Mr. Chiang certainly does have a temper [bao], but he’s not at all muddled [hun]. You haven’t noticed how extraordinarily bril¬liant his technique of control is. What he always grasps very tightly are the three lifebloods [ming genzi]: the army [jundui], the secret police [tewu], and finances [caizheng]. For each of these three lifebloods, there is one set of most trusted followers to keep watch for him. At the same time, he also lets these three kinds of power [liliang] mutually depend upon and check each other, while only obeying one person’s orders, his own. Each side of these three aspects also is supported by the strength of three legs of a tripod, so that one acts as a check upon the others. The army side is Chen Cheng, Tang Enbo, and Hu Zongnan.115 The secret police side is Dai Li, Xu Enzeng, and Mao Qingxiang. The financial side is Kong Yingxiang, Song Ziwen, and the broth¬ers Chen. Among them, no one dares to do anything without having to think twice. All of these people, except for his relatives Kong and Song, are every one of them from Zhejiang. Even Song Ziwen’s place of origin is Zhejiang. You can say that they are all his closest followers, but he still takes every sort of precaution and defense. How can you call that being muddled? As for we Hunanese, he especially understands the political facts of life about Hunan people and absolutely doesn’t let up in the slightest. Organizations like the Renaissance Society are only used by him for a while, just long enough for him to be boosted up into becoming an absolutely autocratic Leader, and then, of course, he no longer needs the organization. That was because he was afraid that the Fuxingshe would develop one day to the point of becoming hard to control, especially since the higher-level basic cadres of the organization were Hunanese, which was also hard for him not to be worried about.116
He Zhonghan—who had fallen from grace five years earlier at the time of the Xi’an incident—summed up his assessment by telling his drunk young friend, a former Fuxingshe section chief on his way back to Chongqing for reassignment, that Chiang’s plans and ploys were wielded with “the most consummate political cunning,” and that he was insulting Chiang by call¬ing him muddled. “It’s obvious,” He concluded by way of comfort to his comrade, “that you’re still quite young and don’t understand affairs all that well.” 117
Chapter 8
The Blue Shirts’ “Fascism”
Anytime, anywhere, we must be firm, solid, unadorned, fulfilling. We must have ab¬solutely no fear of difficulty, and resist opting for temporary ease and comfort, su¬perficiality, luxury, skipping ahead without following the proper order, calculatingly taking advantage. Revolution is an extremely difficult and dangerous enterprise. If we wish to be a member of the revolutionary party we must content ourselves to be slow-witted [dai] and dumb [ben]: what the Ancients referred to as preserving awkwardness [zhuo], or what was meant by the phrase, “To counter the clever with clumsiness, to attack the empty with solidity” [yi zhuo zhi qiao, yi shi ji xu]. Only the slow-witted man [dai ren] and the dumb man [ben ren] will be engaged in this solid endeavor.
CHIANG KAI-SHEK, “How To Be a Revolutionary Party Member”1
THE BLUE SHIRTS “PARTY”
In a secret memorandum prepared for its own internal use, the Shanghai Municipal Police’s Special Branch explained why the public used the term “Blue Shirts Society,” which frequently appeared in newspapers in 1932, es¬pecially when any untoward incidents were reported.2 On August 25, 1933, members of the Special Branch felt that although it was impossible to name the principal members of the group, there was reliable information that “the section of the Kuomintang closest to Chiang Kai-shek has formed a se¬cret organization that is popularly known as the Blue Shirts Society.”3
No title was officially adopted by this group of men for their organization, but in view of its similarity to the “Black Shirts” in Italy in regard to its organiza¬tion and operation, the title of “Blue Shirts” was automatically adopted by the public for it despite the strong denial of its existence by the Kuomintang or any of its leaders.4
Thus, when the China Forum printed an article reporting the existence of Blue Shirts death squads in the summer of 1933, the public relations chief of the Guomindang, Fang Zhi, came to Shanghai in person to guarantee that the “so-called Blue Shirts Party” did not exist and to denounce the mag¬azine’s publisher, Harold Isaacs, as a radical who was deliberately mislead¬ing the public.5 And three years later, in May 1936, when Asia Magazine pub¬lished an article by Wilbur Burton entitled “China’s Secret Blood Brothers,” claiming that Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek were members of the “Red Circle” and “Green Circle,” and that these were closely related to the Blue Shirts, the Chinese consul general in New York City, Yu Junji, demanded a retraction, denying that the Blue Shirts had ever existed.6
Yet, according to numerous Shanghai police reports from Chinese in¬formants, including several who may only have belonged to satellite orga¬nizations of the Lixingshe, there were individual members of the Fuxing- she and the Chinese Revolutionary Comrades Association who frequently identified themselves as belonging to the Blue Shirts.7 They claimed to hold to a common political program, which was devoted to strengthening the “dictatorship of General Chiang Kai-shek,” if necessary by force.8 According to them:
The “Blue Shirts Society” was established in 1931 with a view to achieving an effective “Party Rule” and was sponsored by Chiang Kai-shek with a num¬ber of his most ardent supporters. This society was a secret organization and onlyoperated within the Kuomintang, its main object being to create a “strong Kuomintang feeling among the rank-and-file in the army.” When this was accomplished, the warlords and their abuse of military power would be defeated.9
According to the intelligence reports, three movements were to be launched. First, a “movement to make the army sound” ( jianjun yundong) was supposed to maintain surveillance over generals throughout the coun¬try and carry out a “fascistization” of the Chinese armies by conducting mil¬itary training classes at the Political Training Department. This jianjun yun- dong probably corresponded to the “national military training movement” (guomin junxun yundong) referred to in accounts of the Society for Vigorous Practice.10 Second, a “movement to make the party sound” ( jiandang yun- dong) was intended to drive out competing cliques and restore the full pow¬ers of Chiang’s presidency, while dispatching Blue Shirts elements to local party branches “in order to safeguard the fascist movement of the associa¬tion.” And third, a “movement to make finances sound” ( jiancai yundong) would equalize land rights, raise loans for state-owned enterprises, and “provide the Fascist movement with material supports.” 11
This last “movement to make finances sound” was probably what the Lixingshe called a “movement for national economic construction” (guo- min jingji jianshe yundong), which followed Sun’s desire to create a nation of owner-cultivators. In an explicit spirit of “self-reliance” (ziligengsheng), the Lixingshe sought to reclaim land, nurture farm labor, and actively promote agricultural productivity and exports.12 This program was to be carried out with funds from the membership dues of the Whampoa Alumni Associa- tion.13 In the summer of 1932, Chiang Kai-shek actually ordered the alumni group to set aside Mex. $350,000 from its endowment, to which was added $650,000 from the treasury of the Nanchang headquarters command. These moneys were used to set up the Peasants Bank (Nongmin yinhang) for the provinces of Henan, Hubei, Anhui, and Jiangxi. The bank was char¬tered to provide loans for peasants returned to areas recently reclaimed from “bandits.” 14 More funds were added by Chiang Kai-shek in the spring of 1933, bringing the total to $4,000,000.15 With this endowment and the approval of the minister of finance, a national China Peasants Bank was founded to provide credit unions with low-interest loans. Chen Guofu was named chairman of the board.16
As far as the public knew, however, there was no connection at all be¬tween the China Peasants Bank and the Blue Shirts, whose ideological prin¬ciples were evidently being spelled out in speeches and writings by the group’s three major “theoreticians,” He Zhonghan, Deng Wenyi, and Liu Jianqun.17 The message that their tracts repeatedly put forth was that in order to repel foreign invaders the Chinese people had first of all to unify and strengthen the nation by exterminating the Communist Party. After that eradication was accomplished there would be a social and economic revival in the countryside, giving the Chinese the resources needed to build up their armies. They would thus be able to concentrate their “racial spirit” (minzu jingshen) upon the single Leader and party destined to command them against their foreign attackers.18
There was a vague political program outlined in these writings, but a for¬mer provincial leader of the movement in later years could only remember its general goals: to support absolutely the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek, to carry out the centralization of government, to recover lost territory and protect national sovereignty, to abolish the unequal treaties, to carry out the equalization of land rights, to develop agriculture, to carry out eco¬nomic controls, to develop national capital, to strengthen national defense, to carry out a system of conscription, to thoroughly train and develop a national people’s army, to clean up bureaucratic corruption in the govern¬ment, to establish universal education, to eradicate the Communist Party completely, and to bring peace and social order to the country. Of all these, the two goals he recalled as being the most emphasized were to fully support Chiang Kai-shek’s leadership and to completely exterminate the Communists.19
ELEMENTS OF FASCISM
It is difficult to know how seriously to take these calls for “fascistization,” or even to estimate how representative they were of the Blue Shirts’ ideology as a whole.20 Certainly, contemporary newspaper reports depicted the Blue Shirts as “fascist” or “semifascist” elements with national socialist leanings.21 Describing a “gang of semifascists known as ‘Blue Shirts’ [who] have estab¬lished their headquarters in a luxurious flat in Caine Road” in Hong Kong, the North China Daily News claimed that they wanted to establish a dicta¬torship along the grounds of Mussolini’s government.22 “These Chinese Fascists believe that strongmen are needed to hold the reins of govern¬ment. Hence, ‘swastika’ methods will be used in dealing with political op¬ponents.” 23 Judging from contemporary police reports, moreover, there does seem to have been at least a relatively vocal segment of the Renaissance Society that took its fascist label to heart. This element among the Wham¬poa graduates was dominated by former cadets who had studied in Ger¬many, France, Italy, and Belgium, and who looked to Feng Ti, first secretary of the Renaissance Society and later the Chinese military attaché in Berlin, as their leader.24
Feng in turn allied himself with Tang Zong, who also served as military attaché in Berlin, with Gu Xiping, who had studied in France, with Liu Pan, who had undertaken police training in Belgium, and with Tang Wu, who had studied in Italy.25 This group, which urged Chiang Kai-shek to model himself after Hitler and Mussolini, was usually identified with the suppos¬edly ubiquitous Blue Shirts Society.26
Whatever the internal ideological authenticity of the Lanyishe, the SMP Special Branch equated the Blue Shirts Society’s membership—which the Japanese Foreign Ministry’s Bureau of Investigation estimated to be four¬teen thousand by the end of 1935—with the fascist wing of the three-tiered Fuxingshe. However important Dai Li’s role was in the super-secret SSD, he was not yet listed on police blotters as a Blue Shirts chief. Rather, He Zhong- han was singled out as the Blue Shirts’ primary leader.27
He Zhonghan clearly envisaged himself as becoming the political leader of the so-called “Whampoa clique.” The term itself generally referred to graduates of the first three years of the academy, but the closest thing that it had to a genuine factional structure was the Renaissance Society.28 The Blue Shirts were sometimes viewed, therefore, as being purely and simply the Whampoa clique, and, as such, members of the Lixingshe and its front groups thought of themselves as being part of Chiang Kai-shek’s dixi—that is, his direct line of descent, or family.29
CHIANG KAI-SHEK’S “DIXI,” OR DIRECT FAMILY
The use of the term di, which represented an invidious intrafamilial dis¬tinction between the progeny of a wife and the offspring of one’s concu¬bine, was very revealing. It signaled the creation of cliques within the Gen¬eralissimo’s own power structure, below the level of competition between Chiang Kai-shek and rivals Wang Jingwei and Hu Hanmin, to control the le¬gitimate institutions of the regime such as the Central Executive Commit¬tee and the Political Council. These cliques were competing at the level of policy implementation, where the regime’s resources were actually allo¬cated; their struggles accompanied the rise of Chiang Kai-shek to para-mountcy, if not total hegemony, within the governing structure of China.30
Hence, the distinction between direct and indirect “family” was not even primarily a civil cleavage. It was used by extension to refer to Chiang Kai- shek’s “family troops” (dixi budui), the half-million men who were com¬manded by Generals Chen Cheng, Hu Zongnan, and Tang Enbo, and who were considered to be the Generalissimo’s praetorian guard.31 From the perspective of these self-styled “wife’s sons,” other cliques within Chiang’s power structure were interlopers masquerading as filial progeny. Members of the “CC” clique, for instance, were viewed as being Chiang’s “adopted sons” (minglingzi), while the Political Study Group leaders Yang Yongtai and Zhang Qun were mere “yamen advisors” (shiye) and “household stewards” (guanjia).32
Although the Blue Shirts did not have a particularly hostile attitude to¬ward the Zhengxue xi (Political Study Group), which they regarded as be¬ing no more than hired help, they did regard the “adopted sons” of the “CC” clique as being serious enemies; and beginning in 1933 they began to direct a great deal of activity toward supplanting the Chen brothers’ influ¬ence, especially in newspaper publishing and educational circles.33
THE “CC” CLIQUE
The Organization clique, which was also commonly known as the “CC” clique, was led by the brothers Chen Guofu and Chen Lifu (see fig. 10), both of whom had enjoyed very close ties with Chiang Kai-shek long before the Guomindang came to power.34 The two men were nephews of Chen Qimei, the leader of the Zhejiang and Jiangsu faction of the Chinese Revo- lutionaryParty(Zhonghua gemingdang), who had been a model for Chiang Kai-shek’s own personal development when Chiang first met him in Japan in 1906 while Chen was studying police law.35
In 1907, when Chiang Kai-shek was taking the artillery course at the Shinbu Military Training School in Tokyo, Chen Qimei had recommended him for admission to the Revolutionary League (Tongmenghui); and in 1911-12, during the Xinhai Revolution, Chiang had served as a regimen¬tal commander under Chen, then military governor of Shanghai, leading one of Chen’s “dare to die brigades” (gansi dui) in the attack on the Zhejiang viceroy’s yamen at Hangzhou.36 During the Second Revolution of 1913 Chiang continued to be identified as one of Chen Qimei’s personal follow¬ers, and he remained personally devoted to Chen until the latter was assas- sinatedbyYuanShikai’ssecretagentsin 1916.37 Thereafter, however, Chiang
Figure 10. Chen Lifu, founder of the Central Statistics Bureau. Fan Hsiao-fang, Chiang chia tien hsia ch’en chia kuang. Taibei: Chou chi wen-hua shu yeh kung-ssu, 1994.
Kai-shek continued to maintain close relations with his former patron’s other followers and relatives, including the two nephews, who came from Wuxing, not far from Chiang’s hometown in Zhejiang.38
In 1920, during the period of political retrenchment in Shanghai, Chiang Kai-shek became deeply involved with Chen Guofu’s financial ac¬tivities in the Shanghai Stock and Commodity Exchange (Shanghai zheng- quan wupin jiaoyi suo), which Dai Jitao and Zhang Jingjiang had helped set up at Sun Yat-sen’s behest to raise money for the Chinese Revolutionary Party.39 Four years later, when Chiang was appointed president of Wham¬poa, Chen Guofu was briefly an instructor and then served as a party re¬cruiter in the Zhejiang-Jiangsu-Anhui region to attract new cadets to the military academy.40
Meanwhile, Chen Guofu’s younger brother, Lifu, had returned from two years of study in Pennsylvania, where he had earned a degree in mining engineering at the University of Pittsburgh and worked as a coal miner in Scranton. Turning down a job in the Shandong coalfields, Chen Lifu be¬came Chiang Kai-shek’s confidential English-language secretary in 1926, serving as his chief code clerk during the Northern Expedition.41 The two brothers quickly took the lead in organizing support for Chiang among anti-Communist elements. In November they helped found the Zhejiang Society of Revolutionary Comrades in Canton. And the following month Chen Guofu went to Nanchang to recover the Jiangxi GMD branch from the Communists and to link up with the Anti-Bolshevik (AB) League led by
Duan Xipeng and Cheng Tianfang.42 Some of these figures subsequently ended up as core members of the “CC” clique itself, which was formally cre¬ated in June 1927 by an amalgamation of the Zhejiang Society of Revolu¬tionary Comrades, the Western Hills group, the Sun Yat-sen Study Society, the AB League, and the “Stickers” clique, which was so named because its members favored using clubs to intimidate Communist opponents.43
The secret of the “CC” clique’s strength within the Nationalist Party was the Chen brothers’ ten-year domination of the Guomindang’s Organiza¬tion Department, which was in charge of establishing and inspecting lower party units up through city and provincial levels, and of assigning middle- and high-level personnel to party branches in government, military, labor, and youth organizations.44 Chen Guofu became department director in 1926 and held that post for the following six years while his younger brother, Lifu, headed the department’s Investigation Division, which main¬tained a central file on the political inclinations of registered party mem¬bers and supervised the purges of 1928-29.45
Then, in 1932, Chen Lifu succeeded his older brother as Organization Department director, where, during the four years that followed, he ex¬tended his activities in intelligence, investigation, and security, becoming the scourge of the Communists.46 The result was the Chens’ overwhelming preponderance within Party Center.47 In 1931, 15 percent of the seventy- two new members of the Central Executive Committee belonged to the “CC” clique. Fifty of the 180 CEC members selected in 1935 were identi¬fied with the Chen brothers, and at the peak of its ascendancy, just before the War of Resistance broke out, the “CC” clique could count upon more than 10,000 members, most of them being middle- and low-level party bureaucrats.48
For all of its success within the party and government, the “CC” clique as¬pired to find or create what one historian has termed “the relays in society through which to transmit its projects and have them accepted by the en¬tire population.” 49 A fascist movement, organized through secret societies, may have appeared to offer the sort of relays that members of the clique sought. In that respect the “CC” clique’s organs were confused by both the British and the Japanese with the fascist Blue Shirts. According to one high- level informant to the SMP Special Branch:
A fascist movement in China is said to have been General Chiang Kai-shek’s ambition ever since his latest return to politics. This ambition was brought to life when General Chen Li-fu, his closest collaborator, organized a secret political society, “Si-si yuen” [Xixi yuan, or West West Garden], with General Chen Kuo-fu, his elder brother, at its head. The society changed its name af¬ter the inauguration and became [the] “Blueshirts Group” (Lan-yi tuan) [Lanyi tuan] of [the] Chinese Nationalist Party, but as a result of the reason¬ing that it is not proper to have any specific group among one party start a sec¬tarian movement, the society changed its name again and was called “Blue¬shirts Association.” It was decided at the same time that the association should have groups among its own organization.50
The Japanese special services actually identified something that they called the “CC Corps,” which was thought to be an anti-Japanese propa¬ganda arm of Chiang Kai-shek’s government and which functioned as a civilian counterpart to the Blue Shirts proper.51
The mission of the Corps is to organize the patriotic intelligentsia within China with the aim of awakening the masses and facilitating racial develop¬ment, meanwhile contributing toward the restoration of the national move¬ment for the betterment of the country. The organization opposes the anti¬Chiang military clans and all social or academic organizations tinged with anti-Guomindang color. It also aims at removing the pressure of foreign in¬fluence. The ultimate object of the Corps’ activities is the accomplishment of the second revolution in China.52
The Japanese also regarded the CC Corps as adhering consistently to the Three People’s Principles, whereas the Blue Shirts proper were thought to be “despotic, following the principles of fascism.” 53
This seems to have been a valid distinction, especially insofar as the “CC” clique sought to extend its influence into academic circles and youth groups around the country.54 The instrument of this penetration was to be the Association of Nationalist Party Loyal Comrades (Guomindang zhongshi tongzhi hui), which was nominally headed by Chiang Kai-shek, and which sent “central staff officers” (zhongyang ganshi) to most provinces and major cities with the secret mission of establishing branch organizations and front groups for work among the educated youth.55 The names of the branch or¬ganizations all ended in she (club), and in some cases—notably Shanghai, where Wu Xingya was sent—there were several different “clubs” with dis¬tinctive titles. In Beiping and throughout Hebei, on the other hand, all the “CC” front groups set up by Zhang Lisheng (who was both a member of the Central Committee’s Organization Department and a special delegate of the CEC Party Affairs Bureau to the Hebei provincial government) went by the name “Sincerity Club” (Chengshe).56 The “Sincerity Club” held meet¬ings every second Saturday in the auditorium of the Hebei provincial party headquarters—meetings that were attended by twenty or thirty represen¬tatives who were themselves heads of the five- to ten-person cells (zu) that they, as “backbone cadres” (gugan), organized in universities and colleges.57
In Beiping proper the key organizer, in addition to Zhang Lisheng, was Hu Menghua, who was instructed to select male university students with the best grades and most exemplary moral behavior to be interviewed for posi¬tions as journalists.58 In April 1933 Hu was given a subsidy to start up a tri¬monthly journal to promote pro-Chiang Kai-shek slogans; in May he began publishing Renmin pinglun (People’s Review), which ran pieces opposing the joint army set up at Zhangjiakou by Ji Hongchang and Feng Yuxiang to fight the Japanese, and exposing the connections between Wang Jingwei and the Northeastern government of Zhang Xueliang.59 Students who pre¬sented themselves for interviews were vetted, and if they seemed promising candidates, they were invited to become “basic elements” ( jiben fenzi) and urged to recruit their classmates and fellow townsmen as Chengshe mem¬bers. By the winter of 1933-34 the “CC” group in Beiping had enrolled more than seventy student cadres, with most coming from the law depart¬ment at Beida and from the Pingda Law School.60
This attempt by members of the “CC” clique to enlist regular student followers was simultaneous with, but quite apart from, the Whampoa-dom¬inated efforts to recruit Resistance Society members to support Chiang Kai- shek against Wang Jingwei and other rivals. Journalists, and through them the general public, associated the Whampoa clique’s secret effort to enlist paramilitary Blue Shirts with the so-called “thirteen grand guardians” (shisan taibao) led by He Zhonghan.61 For instance, a newspaper account that appeared in the Beiping chenbao in 1933 held that “eventually Chiang Kai-shek’s party resolved on a plan to deal with Wang Jingwei’s threat. Thir¬teen graduates of the Whampoa Military Academy . . . held several confer¬ences and finally they resolved to form a fascist society for which they later obtained Chiang Kai-shek’s sanction.”62
“FASCIST” FORMATIONS
Despite the notorious rivalry between the Lixingshe and the “CC” clique, Chen Lifu was also linked in the public’s eye with these new “fascist” forma¬tions. According to a French intelligence report dated August 12, 1933, Chiang Kai-shek held a summer conference that year at Lushan, which was attended by Chen Lifu, Zeng Kuoqing, Wu Xingya (chief of the Shanghai Social Affairs Bureau), and Pan Gongzhan (chief of the Shanghai Educa¬tional Bureau of the GMD), among others.
During the course of the conference, development of the fascist movement in China was discussed. It was decided to establish in the first place fascist cells in the Guomindang headquarters in “loyal military units” and in schools and universities We are informed among other things that the influence of
the fascist elements begins to be more and more noticeable in the following universities: Sun Yat-sen (Canton), Central (Nanjing), Henan (Kaifeng), and Jing’an (Shanghai).63
Despite this conflation of the “CC” clique and Lixingshe “fascist movement,” the president of Sun Yat-sen University, Zou Lu, had earlier that summer ac¬cused the Blue Shirts alone of being a major annoyance at his school. Blam¬ing the Blue Shirts for recent movements of the undergraduates to impeach him before the Ministryof Education, Zou alleged that “the Blue Shirts were trying to undermine the Guomindang at the behest of certain militarists who wish to gain absolute powers in government like Benito Mussolini or Adolph Hitler.”64
The press, meanwhile, maintained that this new body of Chiang loyalists, whose appearance coincided with the advent of the Nazis, had been con¬sidering adopting various names, including the Chinese Fascist Society and the Black Shirts Party.65 However, they had finally taken the name of Blue Shirts “because they thought that the [other] names . . . might cause [the] Guomindang to think that the new organization would be in violation of the rule of the Guomindang that there can be no other political party besides the Guomindang and that there must be no parties in the Guomindang.” 66
The Lushan conference to which the earlier French intelligence report referred may have been the summer session of the Army Officers Train¬ing Brigade ( Junguan xunlian tuan), which Chiang Kai-shek addressed on July 23, 1933, during the weekly memorial ceremony for Sun Yat-sen (zongli jinian zhoujiang). In that speech, which was entitled “What a Modern Soldier Must Know,” Chiang described the three “newly developing nations” (xin- xing guojia) of Italy, Germany, and Turkey as having a “collective slogan”: “La¬bor (Laodong)! Create (Chuangzao)! Military force (Wuli)!” “Labor,” he ex¬plained, meant that the people of the entire country, from rulers to masses (laobaixing) and from generals to privates, work together unstintingly and incessantly. “Create” signified the construction of a new nation, the crea¬tion of a fresh society out of the old. “Military force” was the “substantive strength” (shizhi de liliang) required to bring forth revolution, sweeping aside all obstacles in order to foster the growth of the nation.67 All three of these, Chiang insisted, were intertwined and indispensable; they explained why the “newly developing nations” were rising so rapidly.68
Fascism as a form of modern nationalism was the subject of a speech that Chiang delivered two months later, on September 20, 1933, in Xingzi county, Jiangxi, entitled “How to Be a Member of the Revolutionary Party.” Claiming that “dependability” (shizai) was the primary essence of being a “revolutionary party member” (geming dangyuan), Chiang called for a stoical and even stupid stolidity to counter merely “clever” superficiality of the city slicker sort. Denouncing modern society for its frivolity and emptiness, Chiang claimed to find this bedrock solidity in the “fundamental essence” ( jiben jingshen) of a common or “shared” (gongtong de) fascism. The essence of that fascist spirit was national self-confidence (zixin). A fascist necessarily believes that his own nation is “best of all” (zui youxiu), with the most glori¬ous history and superior culture of any country. For Chinese this meant rec¬ognizing the fundamental precepts of The Great Learning as the “highest cul¬ture of our people.”69
Loyalty, filial piety, humaneness, charity, righteousness, peace, and harmony are one and the same as our nation’s traditional virtues of propriety, righ-teousness, integrity, and frugality. Our traditional national essence [jingshen] is the spirit of wisdom, benevolence, and courage. Our nation’s one and only revolutionary principle is the Three People’s Principles. And all of these spir¬its and principles come back to the single principle of sincerity [cheng]. There¬fore, as members of the revolutionary party we must dedicate ourselves sin¬cerely to the preservation of the traditional virtues and the traditional spirits. Only by doing so will we be able to revive the highest culture of our nation, to restore our nation’s very special standing in this world, to create a glorious and radiant world order for mankind, and in achieving this noble and great en¬terprise thereby save mankind and save the world.70
As an international force, Chiang went on to explain, fascism was charac¬terized by extreme militarization.71 Although members of the revolutionary party might not always be members of an actual military unit, they must consciously adopt a military style of life:
We must all have the soldier’s habit and spirit. We must all have the army’s or¬ganization and discipline. In other words, we must all obey, make sacrifices, be somber and serious, neat and orderly, tidy and solid, alert and diligent, se-cretive, unadorned and simple in habit, all of us unanimous in our firmness and courage, sacrificing everything for the collectivity, for the party, for the nation.72
COLLECTIVE ORDERLINESS
Chiang’s obsession with neatness and orderliness, coupled with his constant frustration at the slovenliness of the peasant troops he commanded, their leggings unlashed and pants unbuttoned, lent a fussy air to this imitative fascism, which confounded manners with morals. This formal heteropraxy lacked substantive content. It was merelyritualistic: “rivers and lakes” ( jiang- hu) romantic chivalry without genuine righteousness, brute piety without deep moral commitment.73 During the second convention of the Lanyishe in Jiangxi, Chiang declared, in a rambling speech filled with harshly anti¬septic tones of cultural self-loathing, that:
The Chinese fear death. As individuals they are intelligent but they seek only their own interests and do not wish to sacrifice themselves. A selfish people has no group spirit China is romantic. Discipline is done away with, law
and order tolerate the barbarians, and all the noble attributes of politeness and honor are lost The distinction between freedom and the individual’s
self-interests is not clear but this is a great error. Because the Chinese are probably merely self-seekers, human desires overflow, politeness is non-exis¬tent and honor is unknown The vanity of the Chinese is too strong. This
vanity is not something produced at present but is something that has been handed down from our ancestors They wish only for high rank and lots of
money In addition the greatest fault is falsehood or lying The partic¬
ular [way] in which the Chinese as moderns lack character is that without po-liteness they do not know purity. Everywhere dirt and filth run to extremes
All reveal a state of mind which is ruinous to the state Everything is filthy.74
Clearly impressed by the village neatness and scientific precision that the Germans and Japanese evinced, Chiang Kai-shek somehow seemed to equate tooth brushing and public sanitation with the collective engine of power and popular will that fascism represented in the mid-1930s. And, of course, there was no question but that fascism was associated with premier military qualities that the Chinese attributed to the Germans—a people they may have found less threatening precisely because Germany had lost its privileges of extraterritorialityin China during the preceding world war.75
Chiang Kai-shek thus grafted his own view of fascist military discipline onto a classic Neo-Confucian view of community hierarchy and lineage sol¬idarity. This given wisdom no doubt suffused his own “comfortable” (xiao- kang) upbringing as the member of an affluent village family dominated by a self-righteous mother who surely believed that sons should sweep the cot¬tage floor with the same care and respect that they showed in bowing to their elders.76 In domestic guise, then, fascist militarization was just another way of teaching Confucian citizenship to the Chinese people.77
It was also taken to be yet another way of unifying the nation under cen¬tral political dominance. The Lixingshe’s National Military Training Move¬ment (Guomin junxun yundong) was intended to bring together the “sheet of loose sand” (yi pan san sha) that constituted Chinese agrarian society by teaching people how to “unite” ( jihui) and “congregate” ( jieshe) in order to defend themselves against the Communists and Japanese. Toward that end a Department of National Military Education (Guomin junxun jiaoyuchu) was established under the auspices of the Ministry of Training and Supervi¬sion (Xunlian zongjianbu). Its mandate was to organize local training com¬mittees (guomin junxunhui) in all of the provinces and municipalities under the authority of the Executive Yuan.78
According to one of its initiators, this civilian military training exercise wasa “social reform movement of a revolutionarynature,” designed to move China into “the era of the scientific masses” (kexue de qunzhong shidai). Just as the May Fifth Draft Constitution of 1934 established a General Affairs Office the following year to elect delegates to a national congress, and just as preliminary elections were held in 1935 and 1936, the military training
movement (which soon came under Dai Li’s influence) was meant to go along with Article 24 of Sun Yat-sen’s plan for national reconstruction that called for returning power to the people after 1937. It was, in short, sup¬posed to be part of the overall evolution of the political tutelage system that Sun had visualized for republican China, and that was summarily called to a halt by the Japanese invasion of July 1937.79
Chapter 9
Ideological Rivalries
The Blue Shirts and the “CC” Clique
We cannot positively say whether or not fascism is suitable for China, because we have our own Three People’s Principles, which are completely appropriate for the con¬ditions of our country. But we should make a study of fascism so that we can make use of it as a mirror for ourselves.
XIAO ZUOLIN, letter to a reader of Zhongguo geming1
EUROPEAN FASCIST MOVEMENTS
Although Lixingshe insiders may have claimed that the military training ac¬tivities of the Blue Shirts were actually a form of voter education, the gen¬eral public thought otherwise. In newspapers and magazines of the period the Blue Shirts were frequently compared to the Gestapo, and the Blue Shirts themselves took considerable interest in European fascism.2 This fas¬cination with the Nazis and Fascisti was shared with the general public: in 1933 talk about fascism became a fashion in China, and a large number of publications on the Black and Brown Shirts were advertised in the pages of Shanghai shenbao. 3
Yet even though a Society for German-Chinese Translation (Zhong-De bianyi xueshe) was established within the Lizhishe headquarters in Nanjing, the editors of the Renaissance Society journal Future (Qiantu), which was published with funds from the Political Indoctrination Department pro¬vided by He Zhonghan, were at first leery about mentioning fascism for fear of offending some of their readers, including Chiang Kai-shek himself.4 Later, their editors were profoundly distressed by Nazi notions of Aryan racial supremacy.5 Xiao Zuolin, who was the editor of another Fuxingshe magazine called The Chinese Revolution (Zhongguo geming) in 1934, said that although there was great interest in explaining what fascism had to do with the phenomenal rise of Mussolini and Hitler, he and his writers were ini¬tially afraid to write about it because Chiang himself did not use the term.6
At the same time we knew what the hows of fascism were but not the whys. When we wanted to say what lay behind it, we couldn’t come up with anything. Moreover, even though Chiang Kai-shek was actually carrying out fascism as the Three People’s Principles, never was there a moment when the word “fas¬cist” passed through his mouth. Whenever he opened or closed his mouth, it was always Sanminzhuyi. Therefore, no one was yet daring enough to openly use the term.7
Meanwhile, however, the chief editor of Future, Professor Liu Bingli, had decided to devote the sixth issue of the magazine to a special survey of fas- cism.8 The stated purpose of the magazine was vaguely related to doing away with traditional individualism and speedily promoting a new flourishing of corporatism ( jituanzhuyi) in China.9 But the articles in this issue on fascist Germany and Italy were quite specific, and many different aspects of fas¬cism—including its economic policies—were examined in some detail.10
And, at least in terms of interests and their articulation of their ideology, the Blue Shirts did bear some resemblance to fascist movements in Ger¬many and Italy in the 1930s. Lloyd Eastman argued that “the Blue Shirts may accurately be described as fascist because the methods they employed and ideas they expressed coincided with those of recognizably fascist move¬ments; because they consciously admired, emulated and propagandized European fascist ideas; and because many of them thought of themselves as fascist.” 11 Structurally, however, Chiang’s party-state was a military dictator¬ship; the regime was authoritarian rather than fascist; and the ideology of his Renaissance Society was “a form of reactive, developmental nationalism” that has been identified generically by political scientists as an “ideology of delayed industrialization.” 12 Regime and party were based upon an organic conception of state and society that sought to avoid both “the amoral in-dividualism of capitalist society and the class war promised by revolution¬ary socialism.” 13 As Walter Gourlay has pointed out, the relationship of the Nationalist government to the urban working classes was very different from the organizational linkages between European fascist regimes and trade unions.
Fascist unionism was both bureaucratic and dynamic. A conscious effort was made to educate, indoctrinate, and orient labor to play a part in the “new or¬der” of Fascism. Individual workers were constantly encouraged to become the leaders of fascist unions, and a place was made for such leaders in the party hierarchy. Through them the working class was directly linked to the State. The workers, instead of being depoliticalized, were politicalized in a very carefully controlled manner, and thus the party had the elements of a mass base in the factories. In contrast to this, Chiang’s solution was bureau¬cratic with nothing dynamic about it. “Yellow” unionism was controlled and administered with a minimum of labor participation. The leaders came from outside the ranks of labor, a situation unthinkable in Italy just as it is un¬thinkable that Mussolini would have permitted himself to share control of the workers with a “Green Gang.” In labor control as in so many other things, Chiang was an eclectic, able to borrow tactics and techniques but unable to borrow their spirit. Chiang was not a fascist; he was incapable of it. He was a military bureaucrat. His solution was not to win over the workers but to sit on them.14
Moreover, a Blue Shirts training manual written in 1936 repudiated too close an identification with Western fascism. It admitted that “many com¬rades believe that our organization was founded just at the time that Euro¬pean fascism was rising; that in order to resist the aggression of Japanese imperialism and lay the foundation for order in Chinese society, we opt to move with the world tide and adopt fascism; and that our ideology there¬fore is fascism.” But the manual argued that this view was misguided, if only because the imitation of foreigners would surely cause the Blue Shirts to ig¬nore China’s unique conditions and fail to realize that the Three People’s Principles was an ideology entirely appropriate to the particular conditions of China at the time.15 Writing many years later, Gan Guoxun, one of the Lixingshe founders, was infuriated by the allegations that the so-called Blue Shirts were fascists. “How can we allow our enemies to calumniate our ac¬tivities,” he asked, “and call us a fascist Blue Shirts secret service?” 16
According to Gan, a number of journalists and commentators who were never really part of the inner circle of the Lixingshe, being members of the third-tier Renaissance Society, both misunderstood the purpose of the orig¬inal Whampoa founders of the movement and bandied about all too easily the term “fascist.” These figures—including men like Chen Dunzheng, the author of Dongluan de huiyi (Memories of turmoil)—were misled by the su¬perficial appearance of some of the Renaissance Society leaders, who ap¬peared to be aping the European fascists.17 Chen, for instance, who served in the Training Department (Xunlian chu) of the Fuxingshe, described his boss, Teng Jie, returning from a tour of Germany and Italy garbed in the lat¬est Schutzstaffel style. “Mr. Teng was dressed in an olive-green uniform. The jacket was of Sun Yat-sen style. He was wearing a tie. The trousers were rid¬ing pants with narrow bottoms. He was wearing riding boots. He was very cocky and arrogant. Mr. Teng told me that this was the uniform of Hitler’s Germany.” 18 Actually, Teng Jie was merely one of several Renaissance Soci¬ety officers (including Du Xinru, Li Guojun, Feng Ti, Pan Youqiang, and Hu Gui) who went to Germany, Italy, England, France, and Belgium. Their pur¬pose was not to study fascism as such, but rather—in line with Chiang Kai- shek’s policy of annei rangwai (pacification first, resistance second)—to see how Germany and Italy had managed to escape the trammels of liberalism that constrained England and France from exterminating Communism within their borders.19
If the example of European fascists’ ruthless attacks on Communists helped strengthen the Lixingshe members’ resolve to set aside whatever lib¬eral scruples they still harbored and observe republican civil rights, the Ger- man Brown Shirts and Italian Black Shirts also created a new paramilitary code and rally ritual for the Renaissance Society to copy. There quickly emerged in the gatherings of some of the front organizations of the Blue Shirts a “proto-fascist” cultural style.20 This collective quality, which one member later called “the sword and knife culture of the police vanguard” ( jingcha qianwei de daojian wenhua), did at moments assume a ceremonial manner akin to European fascist ritual.
For example, the Fuxingshe in 1934 founded in Hangzhou a Cultural Vanguard Brigade (Wenhua qianwei dui), which consisted of three to four hundred students from Zhejiang University and the National Arts School (Guoli yizhuan xuexiao). During the initiation ceremonies, which were held before a sword and dagger to represent the “blood and iron” of the brigade, groups of cadets from the Central Air Force Academy and the Jiangsu Police Training School lined up in military uniform to form an honor guard under the command of the principal of the police academy, Zhao Longwen, a founding member of the Lixingshe. The thousands of spectators who looked on as the new brigade members swore an oath of al¬legiance to Chiang Kai-shek in front of the naked weapons appeared to be deeply moved by the solemnity of the occasion.21
Although Dai Li himself was not personally engaged in such panoply, remaining a hyper-anonymous figure well behind the scenes, the extension of this proto-fascist culture via the activities of the Lixingshe and its front groups served to enhance Dai Li’s personal authority among inner-core members throughout China. “Mr. Dai’s career had the closest connec¬tion with the Lixingshe. Had there been no Lixingshe, his career and his achievements would have taken on a different aspect. When we speak of Mr. Dai’s history, we cannot fail to mention the woof and warp of the Li- xingshe.” 22 Because Lixingshe members regarded the activities of the SSD as part of the umbrella organization’s “special work,” they were more than willing to recognize Dai Li’s clandestine leadership and cooperate with his secret service officers.23 In that sense, the SSD formed an embryonic Ge- heimestaatspolizei (Gestapo) within the larger Schutzstaffel (SS) of Wham¬poa Academy Blue Shirts.
Nevertheless, there was a considerable distance between a small group of Hangzhou paramilitary students pledging loyalty to the portrait of Chiang Kai-shek and the serried ranks at Nurnberg saluting their Fuhrer or the fisted crowds in Piazza di Roma hailing Il Duce.24 A journalist writing at the time spelled out the difference quite perceptively by coming at the problem from a different direction, that is by searching for parallels to the Blue Shirts in European fascist movements:
Nor is such an organization as the Blue Shirts unknown in the West. Both Mus¬solini and Hitler have their personal secret police to watch elements both in- side and outside the party. Some commentators, Western and Chinese, have designated the Blue Shirts as Fascist. Such a convenient label, however, is mis¬leading. In the first place, no Fascist party can be or wants to be secret; its strength lies in its ability openly to propagandize and organize on a broad mass base and thus establish a common front of sections of all classes in sup¬port of the movement. In the second place, conditions in China are so differ¬ent from those of any country of Western Europe that political technique has varied too radically to be classified in Western terminology. The Guomindang itself resembles Western Fascist parties to some extent, but it is far more het- erogeneous—and also because it sprang more from Western democratic than from dictatorial traditions, it has not proved very adaptable to the peculiar conditions of modern China.25
But even if the European Black and Brown Shirts and the Chinese Blue Shirts were not precisely analogous, the image of fascism throughout the world was powerful and compelling during those years. As we have seen, no small number of Chinese military officers had been sent to Germany and Italy for training, and they returned to China full of admiration for fascism “and convinced of its value under present conditions in China.” 26 Further¬more, fascism’s emotional appeal to Chinese ultranationalists must have gained a certain ideological edge if only because the Blue Shirts were so keen to find fresh political ideas with which to challenge the monopoly of the Chen brothers and their partisans on newspaper and magazine publishing.27
MEDIA COMPETITION
By competing with the “CC” clique for control over the new instruments of print capitalism, which were regarded as belonging to the civil political sec¬tor, the Blue Shirts were departing from the brief that they had been given by Chiang Kai-shek to concern themselves mainly with public security and police affairs.28 At first, therefore, there was little formal activity short of the creation of several Fuxingshe-dominated newspapers and journals. The “official” newspaper of the Renaissance Society was the Zhongguo ribao (China Daily), which had formerly been called the Wenhua ribao (Cultural Daily).29 Its editor in chief was Kang Ze, Chiang Kai-shek’s former aide-de- camp and the leader of the “Southwestern clique” within the Blue Shirts.30 Kang Ze would later be put in charge of organizing a Special Operations Brigade (Biedongdui) to “exterminate Communists” ( jiao gong) in the “ban¬dit suppression” zones, and his assignment at this point to propaganda work may have been intended in part to keep him from extending the influence of his clique by participating in Blue Shirts training programs.31
Whatever the reason for his appointment, Kang Ze turned out to be an excellent newspaper publisher for the Blue Shirts. After the January 28,
1932, Shanghai War, there was a severe shortage of newsprint, but Kang had prepared for this by setting in a large supply of paper. Because of that and because his wartime news came directly from the front lines, China Daily en¬joyed excellent circulation.32
There were other Lixingshe-controlled newspapers as well. In addi¬tion to Qiantu (Future) and Saodang (Mopping up), printed in Nanchang and Hankou, respectively, the Renaissance Society could claim direct influence over at least four major publications.33 A host of additional mag¬azines and newspapers were written or edited by intellectuals who were Fu- xingshe members, but who had no common theoretical stance apart from adherence to the two slogans mentioned earlier: “To expel the outsider you must first pacify the interior,” and “absolutely support one party and one Leader.” 34
Some of these newspapers could by their very flavor be identified as be¬longing to the extreme right wing of the Guomindang. Others, like Shijie ribao (Beiping), which was edited by Zeng Kuoqing, appeared to the read¬ing public to be unaffiliated and impartial.35 The ideological fuzziness of such Fuxingshe-related publications reflected the political vagueness of the Blue Shirts’ doctrines.36 It was partly to compensate for that blurring, and partly to provide the Blue Shirts with a front organization to expand their activities into cultural circles, that the Chinese Culture Study Soci¬ety (Zhongguo wenhua xuehui) was founded on December 25, 1933, by a group of Chiang Kai-shek’s followers that included Deng Wenyi, his per-sonal secretary.37
Deng Wenyi had a longtime commercial interest in cultural affairs, hav¬ing borrowed money from friends to open the Give Us a Lift Bookshop (Tiba shudian), which published collections of Chiang Kai-shek’s speeches and a series of handbooks for the military man. The bookstore and editing house—together an archetype of petty print capitalism—was so successful in attracting customers eager to better themselves by studying the words of the head of state that it provoked a bitter and, for Deng Wenyi, potentially devastating quarrel between him and his Leader.
First, envious politico-commercial competitors had spitefully reported to Chiang Kai-shek that Deng Wenyi was using his Leader’s name and reputa¬tion to turn a handsome personal profit. Then, when Chiang’s 1930 New Year’s speech to the Whampoa students appeared in one of these “uplifting” publications with the serious misrepresentation that the Nationalist Army was going to move into the northeast (where it was bound to come into conflict with Zhang Xueliang’s troops), Chiang Kai-shek called his secretary in and severely reproached him, announcing that he was of a mind to shut the bookstore down. Deng Wenyi at first refused to be cowed, arguing heat¬edly for more than an hour that the bookstore could not be closed without proper legal procedures and that the shareholders would first have to be consulted. Chiang simply grew angrier and angrier, and Deng ultimately quailed under the attack, returning to his home where he shut himself in and wept, bereft, for an entire day and night.38
For the next few weeks Deng Wenyi remained inconsolable, immured at home and not even sending a formal request to his chief’s headquarters for sick leave. Chiang himself affected not to notice the absence. Finally, after a month, Deng Wenyi presented himself at the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum, where Chiang Kai-shek was giving a lecture to the team in charge of propa¬ganda for the Jiangxi Bandit Extermination Campaign. After the lecture Chiang took the initiative and motioned Deng forward, inquiring solici¬tously about the state of his health and the reasons for his absence. Then the xiaozhang said gently, “Your weakness is laziness. Once you get ener¬gized, you do a good job. From now on you must reform your behavior and work hard. You will return to headquarters starting tomorrow morning.” Deng came back to work the next day.39
NEW LIFE
After this intense emotional crisis, which reflected the complex nature of the relationship that bound together Chiang Kai-shek and his subordinates, Deng Wenyi continued to manage his publishing company. Indeed, as the Lixingshe’s Blue Shirts sprang into being, Deng’s Give Us a Lift Bookshop expanded into a chain of stores that distributed Chiang loyalists’ publica¬tions in Nanjing, Hankou, Nanchang, Changsha, Guiyang, and other cit- ies.40 The Chinese Culture Study Society was thus grafted onto a simple but extensive propaganda dissemination network that Deng Wenyi had already set in place. Its appearance coincided with the inauguration of the New Life Movement, formally proclaimed in Jiangxi by Governor Xiong Shihui in February 1934; and it sprang from the same moral revivalism that charac¬terized this “ideological hodgepodge of classical Confucian tenets, a Chris¬tian code of ethics, and military ideals.” 41 The society also demonstrated how Confucian revivalism paradoxically crystallized the fussy shopkeeper’s mentality of small-scale print capitalism together with the vaguely bucolic yearnings of petty urbanite military socialism.
Within the Lixingshe, the New Life Movement was regarded one of the Blue Shirts’ “four major movements.” All society cadres and members were governed by it, especially insofar as their personal assets and earnings were concerned. According to the rules of the Society for Vigorous Practice, all members were supposed to register their personal property. Any increase or decrease in future holdings would have to be accounted for by their regu¬lar salaries, and these assets were supposed to be inspected at random either by the bookkeepers of the secretariat or the inspectorate of the Lixingshe. An embezzlement of two hundred yuan was supposed to lead to imprison-
ment; those who stole five hundred yuan would be punished by death. Lo¬cal Lixingshe organizations coordinating the program would thereby create “a new atmosphere” that would lead to the eradication of such “evil cus¬toms” as extravagance, greed, laziness, deception, treachery, gambling, lust, and all that “longing for leisure and abhorrence of labor” (hao yi wu lao) characteristic of the “feudal gentry” ( fengjian shidaifu). Under this new moral order, which would do away with waste and peculation, men and women “would revive [fuxing] our ever self-generating and self-renewing national spirit [minzu jingshen]” to “recover a confidence lost since the Opium War in the nation’s ability to survive.” 42
The primary goal of the Chinese Culture Study Society was, correspond¬ingly, to “renew life” (gengxin shenghuo) by moving people’s minds to com¬mon public purpose. The heart of this effort was a program of “militariza¬tion” ( junshihua) initially restricted to members of the Renaissance Society and later extended to the public at large through the mechanism of the New Life Movement Promotion Association. It was this association that im¬plemented many of the most controversial and intrusive measures of the New Life Movement, including restrictions on smoking, dancing, and the wearing of certain kinds of Western clothing.43 The Blue Shirts were conse¬quently blamed by foreigners, and especially the American missionary com¬munity, for having subverted the original intent of the New Life experiment by turning it into a fascist-dominated movement.44
The Chinese Culture Study Association was nominally chaired by Chiang Kai-shek, but its actual day-to-day leaders were Deng Wenyi, Xiao Zuolin, He Zhonghan, and Wu Shoupeng. Deng was made lishizhang, while Xiao served as secretary-general in the central office in Nanchang. At the same time, it was decided that Xiao Zuolin should go to Shanghai and help set up a branch of the new society there with the help of Liu Bingli (the editor of Future), Ni Wenya, and other local Blue Shirts.45
The Blue Shirts were already well established in Shanghai. In Janu¬ary 1932 the “preparations department” (choubeichu) of the Lixingshe had sent Ye Wei to Shanghai to build up an organization there to control the stu¬dent movement.46 And, in April, Chiang Kai-shek had already given Dai Li’s SSD responsibility for a range of covert activities within the city. Two years later, according to Japanese reports, the Blue Shirts held an executive com¬mittee meeting in Shanghai.47 At the meeting the Blue Shirts adopted a set of group principles, drew up a table of organization, and established mem¬bership rules and categories. The Japanese claimed that the Blue Shirts’ principles declared that “Fascism shall be adopted as a step toward the ma¬terialization of the dictatorship.” Their oath committed them to help bring forth a spirit of national independence, to work toward the simultaneous abolition of all of the unequal treaties, and to bring about the centraliza¬tion of the entire nation. While martial discipline was to be enforced among
bureaucrats, who “shall be made to accept fascism,” positive steps would be taken to develop commercial, mining, and agricultural enterprises by stim¬ulating rural handicrafts region by region, by suppressing class war between capital and labor, and by establishing agricultural experimental stations on a large scale. And, in order “to materialize the new social order as well as a state based on fascism as soon as possible,” the Blue Shirts were to engage in intelligence, propaganda, and execution activities as the need arose.48
According to these same highly alarmist Japanese sources, the Shanghai Blue Shirts’ table of organization showed the local special district branch coming under the direct authority of the general headquarters in Nanking. There were also 1) a general Beiping-Tianjin branch, which included the Tianjin gendarmerie intelligence bureau; 2) a Beiping-Tianjin circuit dis¬cipline office; 3) regular branches in Datong, Ji’nan, Qingdao, Shandong, Tangshan, Kalgan (Zhangjiakou), and Suiyuan; 4) a north China special mission with its own branches in Dairen (Dalian), Mukden (Shenyang), Sinking (Xinjing), Harbin, Heilungkiang, Situng, Yingkow, Chengte, and Chowyang (Zhouyang); 5) a Wuchang office; and 6) scattered provincial and municipal units throughout the country.49
Other foreign intelligence and police services also accumulated infor¬mation on the Blue Shirts. By no later than August 1933, the French Con¬cession police claimed to have discovered the existence of a Blue Shirts organization in Shanghai under the command of the chief of the Guomin- dang Social Affairs Bureau (Shehui ju), Wu Xingya, who was thought as well to be the head of General Chiang Kai-shek’s Shanghai intelligence service.50 The International Settlement Police also mistakenly identified the Shang¬hai Blue Shirts branch with the “CC” clique and Chen Guofu, and believed that the organization was formed to “inculcate a new spirit, fascism, into the masses as a measure to save the country from its perilous position.” And they, too, identified the leader as being Wu Xingya.51
CONTROLLING CULTURE
If Wu Xingya was indeed a “CC” clique member, as a number of intelligence sources so identified him, the Blue Shirts in Shanghai nevertheless stood in opposition to the Chen brothers just as soon as Xiao Zuolin arrived in Shanghai in February 1934 to form a “preparations committee” (choubei wei- yuanhui) at 76 Huanlong Road to promote the cultural mission of the Re¬naissance Society.52 Before long, special invitations had been sent out by Xiao’s preparatory group to Wu Tiecheng, the mayor of Shanghai; to Weng Zhilong, the president of Tongji University; to Li Zhaohuan, the president of Jiaotong University; and to Pei Fuheng, the head of the National Com¬mercial Institute (Guoli shang xueyuan). Each of these important figures agreed to join the new committee, and within a month seven or eight hun- dred other people—mostly college students and professors—had been re¬cruited as members of the Chinese Culture Study Society, which was headed by three standing councilors (changwu lishi): Mayor Wu Tiecheng, Liu Bing- li, and Xiao Zuolin.53
According to Xiao Zuolin himself, the organization of the Chinese Cul¬ture Study Society coincided with the “high tide” of the Renaissance So¬ciety’s “fascist propaganda movement,” when the Blue Shirts were able to attract the most followers and exert the greatest influence on public opin¬ion in Shanghai.54 After opening up a bookstore and publishing house at 50 Huanlong Road, the CCSS began issuing a regular bulletin, along with collections of titles on youth (Qingnian congshu), military affairs ( Junshi cong- shu), and democracy (Minzhu congshu). The society also published a number of works in translation through the central headquarters of the society un¬der Wu Shoupeng in Nanchang.55
It was the Renaissance Society’s hope to use the Chinese Culture Study Society to launch a “cultural movement” (wenhua yundong) that would give Blue Shirts intellectuals an opportunity to lead a national revival movement by exercising control over the reading public’s thought and behavior. The program was vaguely put forth in the form of a special issue of the Fuxing- she’s monthly, Future, to which Wu Tiechang, Liu Bingli, He Zhonghan, and others contributed essays with titles like “Cultural Control [Wenhua tongzhi] in Chinese History,” “A Historical View of Our Country’s Cultural Control,” “The Phase of the Control of the Three People’s Principles,” and “Control¬ling Culture in Order to Lead to a Plan for Salvation from Extermina¬tion.” 56 Common to all of these was the simple notion of tongzhi, which rep¬resented the vague sense that the Fuxingshe ought somehow to gain control over the intellectual life of the country, as well as the much more particular notion that the Blue Shirts, and not the members of the Chen brothers’ “CC” clique, should take charge of a new thought movement in the major cultural center of China at the time, Shanghai.57
The “CC” clique was aware of this challenge and was prepared to respond to it. As soon as the Chinese Culture Study Society was founded by the Re¬naissance Society, members of the “CC” clique formed the Chinese Cultural Construction Association (Zhongguo wenhua jianshe xiehui). When Xiao Zuolin went to Shanghai in 1934 to establish a Chinese Culture Study Soci¬ety branch there, he was followed almost immediately by Chen Lifu, who set up headquarters at 45 Rue Victor Immanuel III for a Shanghai section of the Chinese Cultural Construction Association, with the intention of com¬peting with Xiao Zuolin’s group to win over “distinguished scholars” (mingliu xuezhe) in literary and cultural circles.58
The “CC” clique also established a “special body” whose duty it was “to in-vestigate the political inclinations of Chinese literati.” 59 The “special body” later came to include among its members Wang Xingming, the editor of Chenbao (Shanghai Morning Post); 60 He Bingsong, chairman of the edito¬rial committee of the Commercial Press; 61 Wu Yugan, professor of political science at the Central University in Nanjing; 62 Sun Hanbing, dean of law at Fudan University; 63 Huang Wenshan, dean of social sciences at the Central University; 64 Tao Xisheng, professor of journalism at Beiping University; Zhang Yi, dean of education at Fudan; Chen Gaoyang, professor of law at Ji’nan University; Fan Zhongyun, editor of Wenhua jianshe yuekan (Cultural Construction Monthly); 65 and Sa Mengwu, professor of political science at the Central University.66
The formation of a rival cultural society by the “CC” clique created a particularly awkward situation for Mayor Wu Tiecheng and the university presidents who had already joined the preparatory committee for the Re¬naissance Society’s group. The safest course to follow was to join both soci¬eties, which they and a number of more prominent professors promptly did. Shanghai university students, however, were not so ambivalent, and the Chi¬nese Culture Study Society turned out to be much more adept than the “CC” clique’s cultural organization at arousing their support, especially at the large specialized schools (dazhuan xuexiao). 67At Ji’nan University, for ex¬ample, the Blue Shirts were able to capture the allegiance of a majority of student activists, and because the CCSS cadres were mainly former military students themselves, they were able to organize and discipline their sup¬porters more effectively.68 When the “CC” clique supporters attempted to fight back, open warfare erupted: the CCSS cadres simply arrested and locked up the Chinese Cultural Construction Association members on the campus, to the dismay of Wu Xingya and Pan Gongzhan, the chiefs of the party’s Social Affairs Bureau and Education Bureau.69 It was only after Mayor Wu Tiecheng interceded and brought the Fuxingshe members (who deliberately tried to remain out of sight so that they would not be forced to release their rivals) to the negotiating table that the imprisoned students were set free.70 The Shanghai Blue Shirts were also better than their “CC” clique rivals at organizing support among police and military elements in nearby cities, including Hangzhou, where they established a branch of the Chinese Culture Study Society shortly after the Shanghai group was formed, and where the Cultural Vanguard Brigade (whose fascistlike ceremonial was described earlier) was also set up with students from Zhejiang University and other local schools.71
Yet even though the “CC” clique could not compete successfully against the Blue Shirts when it came to organizing student support through these cultural front organizations, the Chen brothers could resort to Chiang Kai- shek’s own plan for assigning intellectual work to themselves while restrict¬ing the Fuxingshe and its various affiliates to military indoctrination and surveillance. Stymied at the level of mass organization, Chen Lifu therefore went to the very top and persuaded Chiang to issue orders dissolving the Chinese Culture Study Society around June 1934, just at the time that the New Life Movement was burgeoning in Shanghai under the official auspices of the Shanghai Public Safety Bureau.72
The “CC” clique’s resistance to the Blue Shirts in Shanghai was only partly successful. The Blue Shirts continued to function in the city, especially through student military training programs and through educational as¬sociations such as the Chinese Youth Strength Society, headed first by Wu Xingya and later by Pan Gongzhan. Though by no means a Blue Shirts front, the Chinese Youth Strength Society had many connections with the Fuxingshe and was assigned the task of keeping surveillance over Shanghai students’ political activities. When one of Wu Xingya’s agents, Yuan Xueyi, a returned student from Japan, was arrested as a Communist agent in May 1935, the CYSS was eclipsed by the China Vanguard Society (Zhongfeng- she), a more militantly disciplined organization promoted by Pan Gong- zhan and the Bureau of Social Affairs.73 Some observers speculated that the Yuan Xueyi affair was related to the “CC” clique’s struggle with the Blue Shirts, but regular police officers reported otherwise.74
Meanwhile, Dai Li’s Special Services Department—quite apart from the Fuxingshe with which it was often publicly identified — continued to oper¬ate with relative impunity in both native and foreign sectors of Shanghai.75 But the Blue Shirts cadres of the Chinese Culture Study Society—men such as Xiao Zuolin and Liu Bingli—had their hopes for a new thought move¬ment in the metropolis dashed by the “CC” clique’s démarche, and they were forced to turn instead to military training programs in the provinces in their effort to bring culture under the “control” of the radical right wing of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime.76
Chapter 10
The Blue Shirts in the Provinces
Every evening, in the dead of the night, the pitiful cries of the tortured wailed in des¬peration, sending shivers down one’s spine. [Wu Gengshu, head of the Kaifeng Spe¬cial Services Station] routinely in the early hours of the morning would take the dead and put them in hempen sacks and throw them into the Yellow River, where their corpses were found along the banks in the morning. No one knew how many pro¬gressive and patriotic revolutionary youth were tortured and killed in this way. The very term “Eastern Flower Gate” [which was where the Renaissance Society had its headquarters in Kaifeng] was enough to cause one’s heart to flutter.
XIAO OLIN, Fuxingshe shulue, 54
PROPAGANDA BRIGADES
The earliest deployment of the Blue Shirts in the provinces was the hand¬iwork of Kang Ze, the former assistant head of Chiang Kai-shek’s escort office (shicongshi, or ADC) who had both a taste and a knack for espionage and security operations. Kang had been named editor of China Daily (Zhong- guo ribao) when it became the chief organ of the newly founded Renaissance Society, and he used that position to consolidate the strength of his own clique of Whampoa students who had served on the propaganda brigades (xuanchuan dadui) that Kang had helped command during the Northern Expedition. These were mainly students from Yunnan, Guizhou, and Si¬chuan, and the clique was correspondingly called the Southwestern Club (Xi’nanshe).1
The propaganda brigades were part of the political department system of the army, the personnel of which had been downgraded from commissars to indoctrination officers during Chiang’s March 20, 1926, Canton coup. During the early part of the Northern Expedition the brigades were quite successful, teaching soldiers and officers party principles and standards of acceptable behavior toward the civilian population. As the Northern Expe¬dition advanced, however, the demand for political cadres to retrain pris¬oners from the surrendered warlord armies quickly exceeded the available supply of indoctrination officers, and their success at re-education faltered. On August 22, 1927, during the suppression of the autumn harvest upris¬ings, Bai Chongxi disbanded the political department system altogether, and it remained inactive until the following January, when it was resurrected by Chiang Kai-shek within the National Revolutionary Army in the form of a political training department that dispatched agents to set up special party headquarters (tebie dangbu) at the divisional level throughout the National¬ist Army. Though ineffective at indoctrination, the tebie dangbu became im¬portant elements in the counterespionage system developed by Dai Jitao to ferret out Communists within the Nationalist Army units directly under Chiang Kai-shek’s control.2
The launching of the first suppression campaigns against the Commu¬nist forces in Jiangxi coincided with a fresh emphasis upon ideological in¬doctrination work and the recall of Kang Ze from his editorial position to more active duties.3 In 1932, the research institute of the Society for Vigor¬ous Practice in Nanjing had formulated plans for a special counterinsur¬gency program to be carried out in Jiangxi. Lixingshe members Teng Jie, Xiao Zanyu, and Kang Ze presented the plans to Chiang Kai-shek in person while he was in Linchuan county, supervising the campaign against the Communists. Chiang approved the scheme on the spot and ordered the three men to discuss its implementation with Xiong Shihui, chief of staff of the Nanchang traveling headquarters and provincial governor of Jiangxi. On their way back to Nanchang, Kang Ze told his two companions that run¬ning a newspaper was not much of a challenge for him, and that he wanted to be responsible for managing this new program. He threatened to resign and go abroad otherwise. Teng Jie and Xiao Zanyu saw in Kang Ze “a per¬son who could endure hardship, who had great perseverance, who was highly motivated, and who had great ambition.” 4 They agreed to back him for the job, and when they reached Nanchang they persuaded Xiong Shihui to make Kang Ze director of the “special training class” (tebie xunlianban) to prepare “special services backbone cadres” (tewu gugan) for propaganda, in¬doctrination, and security work in the “bandit suppression zones.” 5
Xingzi county, bordering Poyang Lake right next to Five Elders Peak (Wulaofeng) at Lushan, was picked as the site of the first class, which con¬sisted of more than six hundred students from the Central Military Acad¬emy. In addition to being physically conditioned and taught how to climb mountains and cross rivers, the men were given four months of special training in Communist affairs, intelligence work, disguises, guerrilla am¬bush tactics, search and destroy techniques, night raids, and “organizing and training the populace” (zuxun minzhong). They were then assigned to companies (zhongdui), platoons ( fendui), squads (xiaodui), and cells (xiaozu) that together formed the Bandit Suppression Special Operations Chief Brigade (Jiaofei biedong zongdui) under the command of Kang Ze and di¬rectly responsible to the chairman of the Military Affairs Commission, Gen¬eral Chiang Kai-shek. As such, they became known popularly as the “Gen¬eralissimo’s GPU.” 6
SPECIAL OPERATIONS BRIGADES
The initial Special Operations Brigade (SOB) numbered one thousand. Eventually the Biedongdui totaled twenty thousand, divided into five main brigades of four thousand men each. The SOB cadres accepted responsi¬bility for “advising and supervising” (dudao) local suppression-campaign military officers.7 Their rank-and-file, armed with pistols, grenades, and specially manufactured lightweight radios, moved about the countryside in disguise, conducting surprise attacks on “bandits in hiding” (qianfei), killing or capturing underground Communists and breaking their party organiza- tion.8 At the same time SOB cadres assisted local government in building self-defense units so that regular administration could take place and the civilian population could return to the fields and resume normal life.9
Though the SOB soon earned a notorious reputation among progres¬sives, who accused its armed cadres of ruthlessly torturing and murdering civilians, it received high marks from Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists for indoctrinating peasants against Communism and for mobilizing rural resistance to the Soviet Red Army in Jiangxi.10 More tewu gugan were trained for work in Henan, Hubei, Anhui, Jiangxi, Fujian, and Zhejiang while Kang Ze and his followers constituted themselves as a special task force that dom¬inated portions of south and southwestern China, and that even defied the provincial leadership of warlords in Guizhou and Sichuan.11
The efforts of Kang Ze’s Special Operations Brigade to conduct coun-terinsurgency activities in Communist-dominated rural areas were supple¬mented by the political indoctrination programs adopted by the Guo- mindang and conducted mainly by that other leading Blue Shirts figure, He Zhonghan.12 In 1932, at the same time that Kang Ze was beginning to train special services backbone cadres, He Zhonghan—who popularized the term “bandit suppression” or “bandit extermination” (jiaofei)—was ap¬pointed chief of the Department of Propaganda for Bandit Suppression ( Jiaofei xuanchuan chu) for the Xiang-E-Gan (Hunan-Hubei-Jiangxi) Bandit Suppression Headquarters, as well as chief of the Department of Po¬litical Indoctrination (Zhengxun chu) in the Nanchang garrison.13 By the following winter, just at the time the Fuxingshe was being formed, He Zhon- ghan’s propaganda office had become the political training office for all bandit-suppression troops, and by the following June He had been placed in charge of the bandit-suppression command for Henan-Hubei-Anhui with headquarters at Hankou.14
The Hankou headquarters for bandit suppression was supplied with cadres through the Henan-Hubei-Anhui-Jiangxi Regimental Cadres Bri¬gade Training Class (Yu-E-Wan-Gan tuangandui xunlianban), which was formed under the leadership of Lixingshe members in January 1933.15
One-sixth of the 1,700 students were Central Military Academy graduates. The rest were recruited from county peace preservation corps and from dis¬trict self-defense units throughout the four provinces. They were all given six months’ training in intelligence work, military knowledge and battle techniques, politics, and Communist affairs. Then they returned to their original units to coordinate the bandit suppression campaign against the Chinese Communist Party and the Red Army with the Nationalist head¬quarters in Nanchang and Hankou.16
In the Hankou headquarters it was He Zhonghan who provided the bulk of the Nationalists’ anti-Communist propaganda, establishing a motion pic¬ture studio and publishing the violently anti-Communist journal Saodang (Mopping Up). By then there was a series of other offices in the capital con¬cerned with political indoctrination, and He Zhonghan decided to fashion himself master of this entire zhengxun xitong (political indoctrination sys¬tem), making propaganda work his special stock in trade.17
POLITICAL INDOCTRINATION
He Zhonghan was not without rivals in this respect.18 Feng Ti, who was identified as the leader of the clique of Blue Shirts who had studied in Eu¬rope, and who had succeeded Teng Jie as secretary-general of the Fuxing- she when Chiang found the latter to be weak and incapable, believed that propaganda work among the young was the key to military victory and personal success. While he was secretary-general, Feng set up a summer mil¬itary training program for students under the aegis of the Training Over¬sight Section (Xunlian zongjian bu). “Chief brigades” (zongdui) were orga¬nized in important provincial cities around the country and were put under the command of high-ranking garrison officers or of special cadres sent out from the Lixingshe in Nanjing.19 After Feng Ti fell from power and the Japan-trained faction of Blue Shirts united with Deng Wenyi and He Zhong- han to get He named secretary-general of the Renaissance Society, the fo¬cal point of propaganda work shifted to the Political Indoctrination De¬partment, which had been put under He Zhonghan’s command in 1935 after he was transferred back to Nanjing from Hubei, and which became the Blue Shirts’ main stronghold in the army.20
The zhengxun xitong (political indoctrination system) of the army held a key position in the secret operations of the Military Affairs Commission. Po¬litical Indoctrination Departments (PID) were established at every level of the military forces of the government and in every military school and mil¬itary unit. Through overlapping membership in the Renaissance Society, He Zhonghan and his comrades linked the indoctrination system to the De¬partment of Party Affairs in the Military (Jundui dangwu chu), which was
supposed to direct local propaganda against the Communists. Although the department came under the central party organization of the GMD, it was dominated by backbone cadres from the Fuxingshe.21
Lixingshe members also dominated training units for political indoc¬trination cadres.22 The most important of these was the Training Class for Cadres (Ganbu xunlianban) attached to the Military Affairs Commission and directed by Sun Changjun, who was both a graduate of Whampoa’s first class and a member of the Lishe.23 The Training Class for Cadres was formed in April 1932 with five brigades of more than 1,800 students. One¬fifth of these were Central Military Academy graduates, and the rest either had received training in former imperial military schools or were surren¬dered warlords’ staff assigned to “temporary army officer training units bri¬gades” (linshi junguan xunlianban dui). After a half-year of training, most graduates of the Training Class for Cadres were sent out to the provinces to become military training instructors (guomin junxun jiaoguan) in municipal and county civilian schools. A few were kept behind as cadres and staff officers (zhiguan) for other Lixingshe training programs.24
Although all of He Zhonghan’s chief lieutenants were backbone cadres in the Renaissance Society, and a majority of “political worker personnel” (zhenggong renyuan) at middle levels and above belonged to the Fuxingshe, the political indoctrination system was quite independent of the Renais¬sance Society as such. He Zhonghan and his comrades received their orders directly from Chiang Kai-shek, and a significant number of PID department chiefs (chuzhang) were not members of the Fuxingshe. Their major task, apart from carrying on anti-Communist propaganda work, was to investi¬gate and maintain surveillance over the heads of each brigade (dui), so they functioned on the whole as political commissars both for the troops directly under Chiang Kai-shek’s control and also for forces that he did not imme¬diately command.
They were also expected to keep watch over the thoughts and activities of military officers and students at all levels of the armed forces. If a military cadet was suspected of Communist activity, the Political Indoctrination Officer (PIO) supposedly had the authority to order his arrest and punish¬ment by the military police, which had a special services section of its own in all major Chinese cities.25 In addition, the PIO was under orders to in¬vestigate Communist activities within the area where his military unit was stationed, and his own commands had to be obeyed on the grounds that they were martial law, compelling local law enforcement organs to cooper¬ate fully.26
During and after 1932, Chiang Kai-shek did not in principle permit offi¬cers in command of troops, and especially those above the rank of division commander (shizhang), to join the Fuxingshe or Blue Shirts, even if they were graduates of the first three Whampoa classes. There were exceptions, of course, in the cases of Hu Zongnan, Teng Jie, and Gui Yongqing.27 Also, a small number of regimental commanders (tuanzhang) participated in the Renaissance Society, but they were either unknown to Chiang or else they were officers who had been sent out to supervise troops that were “not under his direct control.” 28 In general, however, Chiang always maintained a clear distinction between surveillance and command, and in that respect his military commissar system was quite different from the Chinese Red Army system in which the commissars acted both as political indoctrination officers and as members of a collective leadership, enjoying high status and authority.29
Authority and status go together, for the most part, and because PIOs lacked the right to command in the conventional sense, they were looked down upon by regular military officers.
[Chiang Kai-shek] did not allow military commanders who had real power to participate in political special services [zhengzhi tewu]. Rather he used political special services to keep watch over military commanders who held real power, as a way of keeping them in check. However, the actual effect was just the op¬posite. Commanders among the Whampoa students who had real power not only did not participate in the Renaissance Society organization, but they greatly deprecated political work and its personnel. The vast majority of po-litical indoctrination personnel were unwilling to do this work, calling politi¬cal work “selling quack remedies” [mai gaoyao] and believing that it had no fu¬ture for them. This was especially so with Whampoa students who really felt that they were out of luck [if they were assigned to be political commissars]. They only wanted to turn political work into a bridge, hoping to use this to es¬tablish guanxi with each commander so that they could be transferred into commanding troops themselves.30
As a result they not only failed to maintain effective surveillance over the unit commanders, but they curried favor with them in hopes of being given a military command of their own. Commanders — especially of fei dixi (“non-family”) units—in turn bought out their commissars with offers of appointments and even of money. In the long run, these two incentives made posting as a PIO to one of the units “not under direct command” much more attractive than assignment to a dixi (“family”) unit. PIOs also preferred to be assigned to fei dixi units because life in these commands was much gayer and more frivolous than in dixi postings, where gambling and consorting with prostitutes were more often discouraged and despised.31
The Political Indoctrination Department, and the Renaissance Society cadres who staffed so many positions within it, were to be the key instru¬ments in Chiang Kai-shek’s plan to extend his control over north China af¬ter the Japanese army invaded Rehe ( Jehol) in January 1933 and tried to break through the defenses at the Great Wall coordinated by the “Young Marshal,” Zhang Xueliang. The Chinese military situation was complicated by the rivalry between Zhang Xueliang and the other two major warlords of the north, Yan Xishan and Feng Yuxiang, who were trying to capitalize upon fervently patriotic opposition to Chiang Kai-shek’s “pacification first, resis¬tance second” policy. Feng was at Zhangjiakou, biding his time after resign¬ing from the Nationalist government as minister of the interior.32 Yan Xi- shan was in Taiyuan, serving as Pacification Commissioner of Shanxi and Suiyuan.33 Neither general was willing to attend to Zhang Xueliang’s or¬ders. Meanwhile, though General Song Zheyuan was being sent to Chang¬chun, the “Young Marshal’s” Manchurian soldiers were already straggling down into the Central Plain, where they easily fell prey to puppets and collaborators.34
COHORT LEADERSHIP
By March 1933, when the Lixingshe was holding its annual meeting in Nan¬jing, it was clear to Chiang Kai-shek that a stronger hand was needed in the north both in the form of vigorous leadership and of trusted cadres. Con¬sequently, when Zhang Xueliang submitted his resignation, the Generalis¬simo accepted it and named General He Yingqin head of the Military Af¬fairs Commission in Beiping.35 At the same time, he heeded Lixingshe staff officers’ advice to form special teams of their members to be sent to the north as support cadres. Chiang believed that a cohort of devoted followers could assume leadership of propaganda work and covert activities so as to stay the hand of the Japanese and their collaborators in the north. As we shall see, this expectation was dashed, paving the way for Dai Li to assert his personal control.36
The first special team, which included Zheng Jiemin, arrived in Beiping on March 12. Zheng immediately took control of the two standing Lixing- she organs in the city: the branch office ( fenhui) of the Revolutionary Youth Comrades Association and the Revolutionary Army Comrades Association under the command of Jia Yi, the local Lixingshe secretary; and the Special Services Department’s Beiping Station. A second team under Deng Wenyi, who was the secretary of the Office of Confidential Communications ( Jiyaoshi) at the Nanchang headquarters, began arriving in the old impe¬rial capital at staggered intervals after March 15.37
Dai Li himself went to Beiping in early April, taking along a number of confidential secretaries and code clerks. They were put up in a two-story house with courtyard that his agents had rented in an alley in the eastern part of the city.38 Dai Li’s activities were not limited to intelligence gather¬ing. They also entailed high-level political manipulation, including liaison with such civilian and military leaders of Manchuria as Li Tiancai, Guan Qiyu, Wang Zhuoran, Wang Lizhe, Fan Chongyi, and Feng Yong.39
The person with the most important team assignment was He Yingqin’s former confidential aide, Liu Jianqun, who was given the task of recruiting political cadres in Nanjing for propaganda work in the north.40 Since July 1932 Liu had been director of the principal training unit for higher cadres of the Lixingshe, the Class for the Study of Political Indoctrination of the Military Affairs Commission ( Junshi weiyuanhui zhengxun yanjiuban), which consisted of about 120 Central Military Academy cadets and 480 col¬lege graduates.41 The class’s motto, written in Chiang Kai-shek’s calligraphy, was jian ku duo jue (extreme hardship and difficulties); and the training guidelines were “illuminate principle and righteousness, know virtue and shame, take responsibility, and maintain discipline.” Students enrolled in the six-month political training course had been instructed that li (prin¬ciple), yi (righteousness), lian (virtue), and chi (shame) were the four car¬dinal pillars of the state; once they were firmly established, the nation would enjoy a renaissance ( fuxing). 42 This promise had underlain all of their grounding in the Three People’s Principles as they prepared to issue forth and indoctrinate other Blue Shirts throughout China. However, just as soon as these six hundred cadres had concluded their training in February 1933, the Great Wall War had broken out between the Japanese and Chinese. Now, they would serve instead under Director Liu Jianqun to stiffen civilian resistance and combat Japanese spies in the north China war.43
On March 19, 1933, Liu was designated chief commander of the Anti-Japanese Propaganda Brigade (Kang-Ri xuanchuan dui) and given a monthly allowance of 2,800 yuan to set up a preparatory department (choubeichu) on Hanjia Lane in Nanjing. Within ten days more than three hundred cadres had been selected from graduates of the elite political training course run by the Lixingshe under the Military Affairs Commission, and a special unit was formed called the North China Chief Propaganda Brigade. Eventually nearly five hundred men—some of who were unem¬ployed Whampoa graduates—joined this unit, which was divided into three smaller brigades that accompanied Liu Jianqun to the north.44 Their stated mission was to explain the central government’s decision of annei ranqwai (pacification first, resistance second), to unite the military and civilians in order to resist the enemy with one heart and mind, to put an end to the ac¬tivities of Japanese intelligence organs and their underground Han collab¬orators, and to make sure that northern China and Inner Mongolia would not fall under Japanese domination as newly created “autonomous” zones.45
On March 27 several of the duizhang (brigade commanders), including Li Bingzhong, left for Beiping.46 Two days later, after he had given them a final lecture, Liu Jianqun led the rest of the new brigade members north, and as soon as they arrived in Beiping, Liu took Jia Yi’s place as secretary of the local branch of the Society for Vigorous Practice.47 Because Liu Jianqun and a number of his brigade leaders were former subordinates or students of He Yingqin, they also participated in a special team to support He, who had only brought along three or four aides-de-camp. That team, which was informally attached to the Military Affairs Commission Beiping branch of¬fice, included Dai Li’s deputy Zheng Jiemin. All the other members, with one exception, belonged to the Lixingshe.48
For his part, He Yingqin wanted simultaneously to discourage outright collaborators and block aggressive counterattacks against the Japanese, who were rapidly occupying Rehe and only partly willing to entertain negotia¬tions for a truce. He was helped in the former by members of Liu’s unit, who were sent out in ten-man teams to urge the “mixed brand” (zapai) armies to unite under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek’s government to fight a joint war of resistance against the enemy. Team members were told to use “thought” (sixiang) in the form of the Three People’s Principles as a way of gradually “centralizing” (zhongyanghua) control over those forces not under Chiang’s direct command while also infusing every level of society with the message that the country could only be saved by the Guomindang, by the Sanminzhuyi, and by the Leader himself.49
POLITICAL ACTION IN THE NORTH
For “action” instead of “thought,” He Yingqin looked to Dai Li’s man, Zheng Jiemin, who arranged the assassination of Zhang Jingyao, the Hunanese warlord then negotiating with the Japanese.50 Zhang’s demise probably dis¬couraged other potential collaborators from undermining the negotiations that were then about to take place between Chiang Kai-shek’s representa¬tives and the Japanese. That, at least, was the claim put forward by Gan Guoxun, who later said that the assassination had
aroused and excited the heroes[haojie] of Yan and Zhao . . . completely chang¬ing the social atmosphere of northern China, which was feudal and self-in¬dulgent. All these hanjian [traitors], such as Wang Kemin, Wang Jitang, and Gao Wenyue, went into hiding. Squirming like worms, they were afraid to make any move whatsoever. Representative northern warlord figures such as Duan Qirui and Wu Peifu bowed to public opinion and pledged loyalty to the center.51
Chiang Kai-shek’s leading representative in the negotiations was his senior adviser Huang Fu, the former mayor of Shanghai and minister of foreign affairs. Huang Fu had been Chiang Kai-shek’s fellow student (to¬gether with Yan Xishan) at the Shinbu gakko (Military Preparatory School) in Tokyo in 1908.52 Although retired from public life, Huang Fu had re¬turned to political prominence in 1932 when, in response to the national crisis over war with Japan, he went back to Shanghai and founded the New China Reconstruction Society that published Renaissance Monthly (Fuxing yuekan). Now, he was named chairman of the Beiping Political Affairs Coun¬cil in May 1933, and instructed by Chiang Kai-shek to enter into unpopular negotiations with the Japanese.53
Meanwhile, once the Japanese consolidated their occupation of Rehe and proceeded to attack Chahar, Feng Yuxiang decided to come out of his own retirement at Zhangjiakou and make a bid for national leadership by mobilizing a resistance movement. On May 26, 1933, Feng announced the formation of the People’s Allied Anti-Japanese Army (Minzhong kang-Ri tongmeng jun) and began gathering troops.54 Five days later, on May 31, Huang Fu finally succeeded in negotiating a cease-fire with the Japanese. But public opinion seemed to support Feng; the Tanggu Truce was decried as a sellout and Huang Fu denounced as a pro-Japanese “traitor.” 55 Never¬theless, the key to policy at that moment was military power, not public opinion. While He Yingqin massed troops south of the Beiping-Suiyuan Railroad, Huang Fu and Song Zheyuan (whose own army controlled east¬ern Hebei) “persuaded” Feng Yuxiang to disband his People’s Allied Anti¬Japanese Army in August 1933. At the same time, in order to get He Yingqin to disperse his forces, Feng Yuxiang turned Chahar military and adminis¬trative authority over to Song Zheyuan and retired to his home at Taishan in Shandong. Song thereby emerged as the leading political figure of the Hebei-Chahar region, becoming garrison commander of Beiping-Tianjin at the time of the He-Umezu Agreement in May 1935.56
One of the provisions of the Tanggu Truce was the abolition of the Anti-Japanese Propaganda Brigade. This was only nominally observed. The var¬ious propaganda brigades were changed into or incorporated with the political indoctrination departments (PID) attached to each army unit. Liu Jianqun himself became chief of propaganda, and thereafter all Renais¬sance Society activities were conducted under this cover. The head of any particular military unit’s PID was almost invariably a Fuxingshe cell staff officer (xiaozu ganshi), and every major meeting within the unit was always attended by someone from the PID, the first section (ke) of which acted as the Renaissance Society’s propaganda organ. The second ke was the intelli¬gence unit, and if it had need of special services, it called upon the third regiment (tuan) of the local military police, who acted both as guards ( jing- wei) for each army post and as investigators or detectives ( jicha) charged with the responsibility of investigating the activities of progressives and Communist Party members.57 On occasion, the second section also used civilians—often local secret society or bandit elements, sometimes mem¬bers of the Red or Green gangs, and sometimes members of religious
sects—against peasants, merchants, and workers not under the direct juris¬diction of military or disciplinary authorities.58
MILITARY TRAINING IN THE SCHOOLS
During 1933-35 the Blue Shirts also extended their influence into north China via the military training system that was established throughout the country for students in senior middle schools and colleges. A National Military Affairs Educational Department (Guomin junshi jiaoyu chu) was created in Nanjing under the auspices of the Training Oversight Section. The department, which was first administered by Pan Youqiang, a Lixingshe member, and then later by Du Xinru, in turn appointed committees for na¬tional military training (guomin junshi xunlian weiyuanhui) in every major provincial city. These committees were run by “persons in charge of military training” ( junxun zhuren), who were for the most part Whampoa Academy graduates. Many of them, along with the “military training officers” ( junxun jiaoguan) sent to the army training offices ( junxun shi) in senior middle schools and colleges, were also members of the Renaissance Society.59
Their orders were to organize ninety-day training courses for high school and college students. At the middle school level, these were nominally di¬rected by the local mayor or county magistrate, but actually run by the mil¬itary training officer attached to that particular school. At the college and university level, chief brigades and brigades were organized under the pres¬ident’s office of the institution, but again run by the military training officer. In this way the Fuxingshe reached into each university and middle school, spreading the Blue Shirts’ propaganda, maintaining surveillance over “pro¬gressive” youth, and ferreting out Communist Party underground workers. These training officers were intimately linked with Dai Li’s Special Services Department, and some of the worst aspects of the White Terror were attrib¬uted to them by Communists.60
Most of the actual military training took place in summer programs that were held in the provincial capitals. For example, during the school holidays various student brigades from the provinces of Henan and Shaanxi were convened in Kaifeng to form a training camp. Political indoctrination pre¬vailed over instruction in military affairs, and the political officers—who were mainly Fuxingshe members—gave courses on the Leader’s words and thoughts, on the Three People’s Principles, on international affairs, on the development of German and Italian fascist organizations, and on the no¬tion of “one party, one Leader.”61
The most important course was “spiritual education” ( jingshen jiaoyu). Its basic goal was to instill in the youth who attended the Kaifeng summer camps adulation for Chiang Kai-shek: not only was the phrase jing’ai lingxiu (revere and love your Leader) frequently invoked, but any time a student heard the title “chairman” (weiyuanzhang), he was supposed to snap to atten¬tion and listen respectfully to whatever words followed. In reality, however, the students were bored to distraction by the three- or four-hour lectures in the stifling summer heat, and behind their political instructors’ backs they referred to the sessions as zhengren jianghua (talks to steam people alive). The instructors themselves were held in considerable disrespect and con¬tempt, although the students dared not affront them for fear of being given a “red hat” (hong maozi) to wear in return.62
In the summer of 1934, for instance, a summer camp was held at the Huangsi in Beiping for more than two thousand middle school students.63 During that “military training” ( junxun) session a discussion was held in which the participants were told about the importance of “pacification first, resistance second.” 64 One student insisted upon speaking out against this policy of conducting a civil war against the Communists, boldly asking why defeating the Japanese depended first of all upon exterminating the Com¬munists. The young man was seized on the spot, and the rest of the students were told that he had been sent on a secret mission by the Communist Party to undermine their resolve. Subsequently, the fellow was turned over to the military police of the Twenty-fifth and was never seen again.65
During these sessions, and during regular academic-year programs in the universities, Blue Shirts among the instructors were constantly on the lookout for students who seemed strongly opposed to the Communists and their policies. When they spotted adamant anti-Communists, they tried to train them to become “professional anti-Communist elements” (zhiye fan¬gong fenzi) in order to help destroy CCP student organizations, such as the cells that were particularly successful in attracting followers in the student body at Henan University in Kaifeng.66 The “professional anti-Communist elements” were encouraged to become police informers and serve as “leads” (yinxian ren) to help public security officers and military policemen track down and arrest Communist students. If these agents of White Terror were successful, they were given special allowances and scholarships; many in turn were recommended for membership in the Fuxingshe.67
One of the other major purposes of junxun (which was, after all, a form of reserve officers’ military training) was to recruit cadres for later politi¬cal work in the army. While serving as chief of the Department of Politi¬cal Indoctrination, Liu Jianqun further organized a Political Training Class (Zhengzhi xunlianban) that brought together in Nanjing about one thou¬sand senior middle school students to be indoctrinated with the principles of “one party, one doctrine, one Leader, one enemy.” After graduating they were supposed to have the same status as a Whampoa student, and they were all taken into the Renaissance Society as regular members before they became political cadres in the army.68
BEIPING MANEUVERS
In April 1934 Liu Jianqun was transferred to Nanjing to become secretary¬general of the Fuxingshe. His place as chief of the Beiping branch of the PID was taken by Zeng Kuoqing, who thereby also became head of the local Renaissance Society organization.69 Zeng found the political situation in the city more than unusually complicated, especially with respect to the capital’s various police agencies. The chairman of the Beiping Political Affairs Coun¬cil of the Executive Yuan was, of course, Huang Fu, who had negotiated the Tanggu Truce.70 The mayor was Yuan Liang, a coprovincial of Huang Fu from Zhejiang, who had graduated from Waseda University in Japan. Yuan Liang had served as a police official in Fengtian and in Shanghai, where he was commissioner of the Public Safety Bureau, before taking over Beiping municipality.71 Each of these two men was a powerful political figure, yet neither was able to exert very much control over the city’s police chief, Yu Jinhe, who was also a Zhejiang provincial who had studied in Japan at the same time as Huang Fu but as a student at the Tokyo Gendarmerie Train¬ing Institute.
Yu Jinhe was very close to the Japanese, having served first as port com-missioner and then as commissioner of public safety in Qingdao, and as a member of the Luda Mining Company, which was a Sino-Japanese joint en- terprise.72 Moreover, he had a vigorous personality and was able to arrogate for himself and his men a good deal of the police power and authority that by rights belonged to the head of the military police, Jiang Xiaoxian.73 Jiang’s superior, Shao Wenkai, who had the ultimate responsibility for com¬manding the MPs as head of the Military Police Headquarters (Xianbing sil- ingbu), complained about these inroads, but neither he nor Liao Huaping, the man seconded by Dai Li to act as a special secretary in the headquarters section, was able to do much about Yu Jinhe’s aggressiveness.74 Fortunately for Zeng Kuoqing (who had to run his own special operations from the Fu- xingshe), Liao Huaping was a fellow Sichuanese.75 When Zeng needed help from the military police to arrest suspects wanted by the Fuxingshe, he was able to turn to Liao, who usually was happy to cooperate.76
Operations concerning the “external enemy” were another matter alto¬gether. Throughout his tour of duty in Beiping during 1934-35, Zeng Kuo- qing was kept completely in the dark about intelligence work vis-à-vis the Japanese.77 That responsibility was left entirely to two men whom Dai Li had sent to north China as his intelligence and security representatives: Lou Zhaoyuan and Lu Qixun. Although these two were seconded to the PID, they came and went as they pleased, reporting to no one within the local Blue Shirts organization about their work against the Japanese, their “ex¬ternal operations” with respect to Chinese citizens, and their surveillance activities over native military personnel in the Beiping area. Since it was as¬sumed that they reported all they learned to Dai Li, Lou and Lu generated a discernible aura of fear about themselves, and “responsible persons” in military units in the area regarded the two agents with fear and mistrust.78
The Japanese naturally identified the activities of the PID with espionage, and on June 10, 1935, when He Yingqin met with Lieutenant General Umezu Yoshijiro (commander of the Japanese north China garrison), he had to accede to demands that in addition to transferring Governor Yu Xuezhong’s Manchurian troops (the entire Fifty-first Army) out of Hebei and abolishing Guomindang party organs in north China, the Chinese should also dissolve the Blue Shirts and close down the PID and military po¬lice in Beiping.79 Dai Li’s men remained behind, but Zeng Kuoqing and the Fuxingshe ceased their operations, and, after reporting back to Chiang Kai- shek at Chengdu, Zeng moved his PID group—including many of the Bei- ping staff—to Xi’an to set up anti-Communist activities under the Young Marshal there.80
Just as Dai Li conducted operations hermetically within the Fuxingshe in Beiping, so did he eventually establish a watertight intelligence compart¬ment of his own inside the extremely active Blue Shirts organization in Henan to the south. The success of the Fuxingshe in Henan rested in con¬siderable part upon the support of Governor Liu Zhi, who had been an in¬structor at Whampoa and who was one of Chiang Kai-shek’s most highly decorated generals.81
THE RENAISSANCE SOCIETY IN HENAN
Because of Liu Zhi’s encouragement, the Renaissance Society was able to develop an extraordinarily extensive Henan network, spreading into every school and most government offices in the province. All relatively impor¬tant functionaries in each government bureau, most military officers in the middle ranks of the army, a significantly large number of teachers and stu¬dents in the primary schools, middle schools, and universities, and a fair portion of the leaders of martial arts groups and local gangs were co-opted by the Blue Shirts into becoming members of the Fuxingshe or one of its front groups. Indeed, many petty bureaucrats, schoolteachers, and officers thought that they would not be able to get a promotion unless they joined the Renaissance Society, and a certain proportion actually believed that they would lose their jobs with the government if they failed to become members.82
In addition to the governor’s support, the Blue Shirts also gained the approval of Ai Jingwu, counselor (canyi) of the Henan provincial govern¬ment since 1930. Ai was a Chiang Kai-shek loyalist who believed in “one party, one Leader, one country” most fervently. When the Fuxingshe estab¬lished a branch office in Henan in 1932, its assistant secretary, Chen Qi,
persuaded Ai Jingwu to join on the grounds that it was not a separatist clique but rather a core organization of close followers of Chiang Kai-shek drawn from graduates of the Whampoa Academy. Ai disliked the idea of forming a group that went against the grain of the “one party” doctrine, but he was convinced enough that the Renaissance Society consisted of pure and strictly disciplined elements who might “save” the Guomindang that he abandoned his scruples and swore membership. He was later asked to join the Society of Chinese Revolutionary Comrades, and he accepted that invi¬tation as well.83
The Fuxingshe provincial headquarters was initially located in Kaifeng, where it was housed at the Eastern Flower Gate (Donghuamen) together with the Communications Post (Diaochachu tongxunshe) of the Central Military Academy’s Alumni Investigation Department and with the Intelli¬gence Division (Diebao gu) of the Henan Provincial Peace Preservation Office. Both of the latter used the same cover: tongxunshe, which means “press agency” or “communications post.” 84
The secretary of the Fuxingshe, Feng Jianfei, was also concurrently head of the Peace Preservation Office. Branches (zhishe) and cells (xiaozu) of the Renaissance Society were formed in each district and county. None of these was allowed to form horizontal connections with other branches or cells, and members were forbidden information about the other persons in their group, having been forced upon joining to write out a curriculum vitae ( jingli biao) and to swear to preserve the society’s secrets. They were, in fact, told that Chiang Kai-shek himself had written the parallel phrases that sealed their fates once they became members: rushe ze sheng, chushe ze si— “enter the society and be born, leave the society and die.” 85
The Renaissance Society’s penetration of educational institutions was fa-cilitated by the activities of two members—Wang Gongdu and Jian Guan- san—who were section leaders in the provincial Bureau of Education. The many middle school and university students who enrolled in the Fuxingshe along with their teachers mainly investigated dissident elements in their academic units, putting together “black lists” (hei mingdan) of names of Communist and “CC” clique elements.86
The Blue Shirts’ reach extended deep into district government as well. Nearly all peace preservation constabulary (baoantuan) chiefs and deputy chiefs were members of the Fuxingshe, and about half of Henan’s district magistrates belonged to the society also.87 In 1936, when the provinces were choosing delegates for the National Party Congress, Henan established a special Surveillance Office ( Jiancha shiwu suo) under Governor Li Peiji to supervise the selection. Orders came down to the Fuxingshe Communica¬tion Post to try to manipulate these elections. The head of the Tongxunshe by then was Counselor Ai Jingwu, who also edited Henan Evening News (He¬nan wanbao).
Using the Communication Post’s authority, he and other Renaissance So¬ciety members ordered local branches and cells to concentrate their efforts on getting like-thinking fellows to serve as representatives. At the same time, Fuxingshe members were instructed to take positions as teachers in the spe¬cial training classes (xunliansuo) that were being created to train students sent up by the rural lianbao (mutual security organizations) and xiang (vil¬lages) to become local administrators in the form of lianbao chairmen or school principals.88 Once these lowest-level administrative cadres entered training school, they were co-opted by the Fuxingshe and either made Re¬naissance Society members or invited to join the Loyal and Patriotic Associ¬ation (Zhongyi jiuguo hui), which was the front organization created by Dai Li’s SSD in the spring of 1935.89
Chiang Kai-shek authorized the Henan Fuxingshe to set up the Loyal and Patriotic Association in the province in order to enroll “society’s lower elements,” including “leading elements” from “martial arts circles” (guoshu- jie) and gangster leaders from the Green and Red gangs. These tulie (local bullies and evil gentry) and liumang (loafers) were brought under the lead¬ership of one of the harshest of Blue Shirts, Xiao Sa, who by 1935 had as¬sembled a network of military and GMD elements, workers and peasants, lo¬cal gangsters and bandits, all centered upon the Eastern Flower Gate office, which became a semipublic “den” for paramilitary Loyal and Patriotic Asso¬ciation members.90
Xiao Sa, a native Henanese who had graduated with the first class at Whampoa, was assistant head of the provincial Peace Preservation Depart¬ment (Baoan chu). He had been named secretary of the Renaissance So¬ciety’s provincial headquarters in Kaifeng in 1934, and for the next two years—helped by Chen Qi, his assistant secretary (zhuli shuji)—Xiao pro¬ceeded to turn the Fuxingshe into an instrument of terror. The headquar¬ters occupied two large inner courtyards of the Communications Post com¬plex, and it incorporated a Special Services Station (Tewu zhan) run by the notorious Wu Gengshu, who was a homicidal sociopath capable of the most barbaric and cruelest deeds. While Chen Qi expanded the membership of the Zhongyi jiuguo hui and turned it into a guardian corps for the Special Services Station (SSS), Wu Gengshu used the information funneled to him by the Fuxingshe to secretly seize people suspected of revolutionary (“reac¬tionary”) activities and imprison them within the compound, where they were night after night tortured to death.91
The situation became so terrible that teachers and students who were tar¬gets for recruitment by the Renaissance Society refused to have anything to do with the Blue Shirts. Instead of being a group of Chiang Kai-shek die¬hards recruited mainly from among teachers and functionaries, the Fu- xingshe took on the qualities of both the special services group and the liu- mang who joined the Zhongyi jiuguo hui in such large numbers, attracted by the opportunity to use the reputation of the Eastern Flower Gate to throw their weight around. These “loafers” would enter restaurants and stores throughout the city of Kaifeng and consume anything they wanted without paying for it simply by saying “Wo shi Donghuamen de!” (“I’m with the Eastern Flower Gate!”). Not only were lower-ranking military units afraid to defy them; the liumang even had the effrontery to raise trouble in the public offices of special agents and in the seats of county government. Often, Xiao Sa and Chen Qi provided Loyal and Patriotic Association members with let¬ters of introduction to local Fuxingshe-connected magistrates, who were in¬furiated by this presumptuousness but who dared not open their mouths for fear of mayhem. By 1936, the Henan Fuxingshe itself had become com¬pletely identified with these types of people, and the public was utterly un¬able to distinguish between its activities and the murderous goings-on of the Special Services Station under Wu Gengshu.92
Members of the “CC” clique were not slow to take advantage of the dis¬order in Kaifeng to bring news of the situation there directly to Chiang Kai- shek’s attention. Chiang was furious. He instantly ordered the SSD to ca¬shier Wu Gengshu and the Fuxingshe to dismiss Xiao Sa as the Kaifeng secretary. One of Dai Li’s more trusted followers, Liu Yizhou, was then sent into Henan to take over the Special Services Station altogether and move it from Kaifeng, where the Henanese tulie and their gang supporters were so powerful, to Zhengzhou, where the SSS could be, in effect, insulated from provincial interests and brought more effectively under the control of the central Special Services Department at 53 Chicken Goose Lane in Nanjing.93
At the same time, the SSS was also insulated from the regular Fuxingshe post still headquartered in Kaifeng. When Xiao Zuolin, Xiao Sa’s successor, arrived at his new post, he found himself snubbed by Station Chief Liu, who did not deign to grant him an interview for three full months. When they did meet, Liu treated Xiao with extreme haughtiness, just as though the lat¬ter were one of his subordinates. And though the SSS in Zhengzhou did set up a branch office across the street from the Fuxingshe headquarters in Kaifeng, the two offices had nothing whatsoever to do with each other.94 Liu himself, as SSS chief, was also a member of the ganshihui (staff officers com¬mittee) of the Renaissance Society, but he seldom participated in meetings, and when he did come, he never once spoke of special services activities.95 As for the Fuxingshe itself, whenever cells or branch offices sent in political intelligence reports, the information was not handed over to the SSS, but rather was transmitted directly to the central headquarters of the Renais¬sance Society in Nanjing, to be handed over at that level to the SSD under Dai Li.96
Locally, the Renaissance Society was deliberately kept in the dark about political arrests and seizures. For example, a Zhengzhou middle school teacher disappeared mysteriously in 1936, and because he was a Fuxingshe member, the local Renaissance Society representatives asked the SSS if it had any information about his whereabouts. They were told that the SSS knew nothing about this man, and it was only after the teacher was released from detention that the Renaissance Society learned that he had been ar¬rested by Liu Yizhou’s men under suspicion of being a Communist Party member. Not only did students and others recruited or paid by the SSS apparatus simply cease attending Fuxingshe meetings; the SSS even had moles in the Kaifeng offices of the Renaissance Society, with orders to re-port all the activities of Xiao Zuolin and his deputies to Liu Yizhou and his minions.97
SEPARATION OF THE FUXINGSHE
AND THE SPECIAL SERVICES DEPARTMENT
Although relations between the Fuxingshe and the SSD were usually not so acrimonious elsewhere, the separation of the two organizations became in-creasingly obvious in other places as well. During 1933-35 a majority of the basic-level agents in Dai Li’s secret service wanted to participate in the ac¬tivities of the Fuxingshe. But once they became members, Dai Li’s agents tended to form cells that were composed of SSD officers exclusively. At that time, for example, Shen Zui and several other group heads (zuzhang), in¬cluding Huang Jiachi and Yang Huabo, who worked in the police training unit, formed their own cell in the Renaissance Society. Whenever they held meetings, however, they never reported on precise details of their own in¬telligence work in front of the others; and they simply ignored orders from the central Fuxingshe office to carry out special activities on the club’s be¬half. It was not long before these secret agents ceased to hold any Renais¬sance Society cell meetings at all. The same was to be said for their partici¬pation in the Society of Revolutionary Comrades, which remained merely nominal.98
The separation of activities — or, rather, the sealing off of SSD activities from ordinary Fuxingshe personnel—was typical of Blue Shirt operations in Hubei as well. When Xiao Zuolin was secretary of the Hubei branch of the Renaissance Society in 1935, neither the head of the SSS, Zhou Weilong, nor any of the organs operating under him ever reported anything to Xiao, whose only information about the SSS was the address of Zhou’s personal residence.99
Partly this was because the SSD wanted to protect itself against the slip¬shod, argumentative, disputatious, and inefficient organizational quality of the Blue Shirts’ larger organization, the Renaissance Society as such.
The SSD’s organizational discipline was by comparison much tighter than the ordinary organization of the Fuxingshe. It had absolute authority of control over the people belonging to it, and all of its personnel at every level were pro-fessional agents with appointments and salaries. Personnel management was very easy, and disputes were not permitted; and as far as the outside was con-cerned, if you wanted someone killed, you killed him. Whomever you wanted dealt with got dealt with, and naturally this made people turn pale at the mere mention of [the SSD].100
The situation in Shanghai illustrated this contrast quite dramatically. Dur¬ing Wang Xinheng’s tour of duty as Shanghai SSS chief, he made a special point of never participating in the Fuxingshe’s activities, which were typi¬cally clouded by contentious and petty quarrels.101
Nevertheless, the SSD had to pay special attention to the Shanghai Fux- ingshe because of the rivalry that had developed within the Renaissance So¬ciety between its head, Liu Bingli, and his assistant, Niu Peijiang. The strife between them became so intense, in fact, that each man was actually plot¬ting the assassination of the other. These machinations attracted the atten¬tion of Chiang Kai-shek, who sent secret orders to the Shanghai SSS to carry out a confidential investigation of the affair. The central headquarters of the Fuxingshe seconded one of its members, Xu Jin, to Dai Li, who ap¬pointed him in turn to serve as a secretary to Wu Naixian in the SSS. Wu, then station chief, repeatedly told Xu Jin that he must not leak any infor-mation about this secret investigation to other Renaissance Society mem¬bers, as it would call down upon them an extremely unwelcome reception from certain figures in higher places. Xu Jin complied, and the affair was kept secret until the Fuxingshe succumbed to the “CC” clique’s attacks.102
In Henan, meanwhile, the SSS continued to try to function without us¬ing the sorts of “local bullies and evil gentry” who had given the secret po¬lice such a bad name before Dai Li split off his men from the provincial Fu- xingshe. Xiao Sa and his ilk, however, had far from disappeared. When the Japanese began to invade the province after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in July 1937, the Fuxingshe entertained notions of a levée en masse, along fa¬miliar populist lines in the Water Margin tradition. Orders went out from Kaifeng to local branches to arouse local bravos and magnates, and, as was to be expected, the local bandit chiefs for which Henan was justly famous began to make plans to come together and form a confederation to resist the invaders. A major meeting was held at Zhengzhou, dominated by such well-known bandits as Gao Laomo and Zhao Tianqing; and even though the Guomindang counselor Ai Jingwu withdrew from the meeting on the grounds that the authorities were simply giving these local desperadoes carte blanche to stir things up, the magnates created twenty-eight guerrilla brigades under the leadership of the infamous Xiao Sa.103
The guerrillas lived up to Counselor Ai’s worst fears by spending the next several months gambling and whoring in Zhengzhou until Chiang Kai-shek finally had them arrested and sent to Wuhan.104 But by then it was too late: in both Henan and Hubei, where the Fuxingshe had experienced relatively successful results in their initial recruitment and organization, the Blue Shirts had ended up by being badly compromised in the public’s eyes be¬cause of their association with these rowdy and unruly elements, as well as because of their identification with the fearsome operations of the SSD— despite the secret efforts made by Dai Li and his men to seal off their own licensed and still relatively rational police activities from the more licen¬tious and unruly terrorism of the provincial tulie. 105
Chiang Kai-shek was not in the end unhappy to observe the Fuxingshe’s failure to establish an independent Blue Shirts movement in the provinces. For one, he had always been leery of the efforts of men like He Zhonghan to use the Renaissance Society as a political weapon to realize their own po¬litical ambitions. He Zhonghan already had his own Hunan group of sup¬porters, but through his domination of the political indoctrination system of the Blue Shirts, He hoped to be able to seek the backing of others to en¬sure his own ascendancy within the party. Turning first to Chen Cheng and then later to Hu Zongnan as patrons, He Zhonghan thought of himself as having such ecumenical support as to be able to speak for the Whampoa clique as a whole. Chiang Kai-shek, however, did not want to see a single figure emerge who could pretend to represent the Blue Shirts in particular and the Whampoa Academy graduates in general against his own authority. He therefore consistently and characteristically played off other Fuxingshe leaders like Feng Ti, Kang Ze, and Dai Li in order to keep He from mo¬nopolizing secondary ideological authority within the “fascist” wing of the party.106
He Zhonghan utterly fell from favor at the time of the Xi’an incident in December 1936, when Chiang Kai-shek was captured by Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng in the capital of Shaanxi.107 During Chiang’s captivity He Zhonghan strongly supported He Yingqin’s authority and became one of the important figures in the movement to taoni, or “punish the refractory bandits,” by attacking and bombing Xi’an. He believed that if Chiang Kai-shek were eventually released, then he—He Zhonghan—would have earned the reputation of having “succored the king” (qin wang), thereby gaining Chiang’s favor. If, on the other hand, Chiang died in the assault, then He Zhonghan would be in an equally strong position for having sup¬ported He Yingqin as his successor. He Zhonghan could not foresee that when Chiang was escorted back to Nanjing by Zhang Xueliang, then he himself would fall under suspicion of plotting to seize power. Once his am¬bition was discovered, He Zhonghan had no choice but to tender his resig¬nation as head of the Fuxingshe. Chiang Kai-shek readily accepted his res¬ignation, forcing He Zhonghan to “sit outside the tent of his ruler” until
1942, when He was finally made head of the Labor Bureau of the Ministry of Social Affairs. In his place as director of the Renaissance Society, the Gen-eralissimo appointed Liu Jianqun, who soon gave way to Kang Ze.108
DISSOLUTION OF THE FUXINGSHE
After the Second United Front was formed, the Fuxingshe had to be dis- solved.109 Chiang Kai-shek ordered the dispersion of the society in April 1938. That August, the first chu (department) was secretly renamed the Guomindang zhongyang dangbu diaocha tongjiju (Nationalist Party’s Cen¬tral Bureau of Investigation and Statistics), or Zhongtongju (CSB). The sec¬ond chu (that is, the Fuxingshe’s SSD) was reformed as the Bureau of In¬vestigation and Statistics for the Military Affairs Commission (Juntong, or the MSB for short) and placed under the nominal command of Chiang’s chief aide-de-camp (shicongshi zhuren), while actually being directed by Dai Li.110
Publicly, the Restoration Society merged with the Three People’s Prin¬ciples Youth Corps (Sanminzhuyi qingnian tuan). Outside of a small group of Blue Shirts who separated themselves from the new organization alto¬gether, most of the former Fuxingshe cadres became members of the Youth Corps (Sanqingtuan). Local Renaissance Society offices became “branch corps” (zhituan), replacing one sign with another, while the shuji in office changed his title to that of “branch corps secretary-general” (zhituan gan- shizhang). Kang Ze became head of the Organization Department (Zuzhi chu) of the Youth Corps, and the PID was attached to the Ministry of Poli¬tics (Zhengzhi bu).111
Xiao Zuolin argues that these changes were merely nominal because Fuxingshe personnel retained their power under Chiang Kai-shek’s per¬sonal command.112 Certainly, the Blue Shirts continued in the 1940s to be known by that name as cadres controlled by MSB special operations squads — especially in Shanghai, where they built upon the organizational resources mustered by Dai Li and his men in the early 1930s in the local SSS. But as far as the Fuxingshe itself was concerned, the change in nomen¬clature was organizationally decisive because it stripped away the Renais¬sance Society’s clandestine powers.113 In 1941, when Kang Ze and Xiao Zuo- lin were in Chongqing together running special training programs for youth and army cadres under the auspices of the Sanqingtuan, Kang told Xiao that the Youth Corps was simply not up to the same level of activity as the old Fuxingshe had been. This was because a secret organization—Kang said—had more power than a public one, and could manage many more activities. Had the Fuxingshe continued to exist, he concluded, then the Na¬tionalists’ operations against the Communists would have been much more effective than they otherwise were.114 He could easily have added that the
Renaissance Society was but a step on the way to the private and most secret activities of Dai Li’s former Second Department, which would thrive and grow as never before.
The larger point was lost because both men failed to realize that the demise of the relatively corporatist Fuxingshe, under the pressure of the Japanese truce agreement and the Second United Front, left the way com¬pletely open to a single person’s clandestine plans. That is, as Chiang Kai- shek abandoned a collective Whampoa leadership of covert activities, Dai Li was freed to step in and establish his own relatively singular, partially indi¬vidual, and nearly personal secret service operations under the Genera¬lissimo’s aegis. Chiang’s successive disappointments with all but one of his Whampoa clique would-be fascist propagandists and police authorities ul¬timately left dominion over the tenebrous world of repression in the hands of his “hound and horse,” Dai Li.
Chapter 11
The Shanghai Station, 1932-35
There were a number of Communists who seemed unable to take any more [pain] un¬der torture and were willing to sell out their organization. Then our special agents would blithely take [the prisoner] along to go and arrest the persons that he had fingered. It was only then that they would discover that [the prisoner] had been us¬ing them as a way to warn the others, so that the leading [Communist] organs and personnel could quietly get away.
SHEN ZUI, Juntong neimu, 22
EARLY DAYS OF THE SHANGHAI STATION
Shanghai, until the war with Japan, was always Dai Li’s primary arena of se¬cret service activity. Even before the Special Services Department was formed within the Fuxingshe, Dai Li had already sent a nucleus of agents— Weng Guanghui, Chen Zhiqiang, and Wang Changyu—to Shanghai to con¬duct operations in the various sectors of the city. And once the SSD was es¬tablished in April 1932, Chiang Kai-shek assigned Dai Li two missions that further focused his attention upon Shanghai: to oppose the Communists, and to “do away with dissidents” (paichu yiji) who used the international set¬tlements in the city as a haven and refuge.1
The first chief of the Shanghai Station, which was initially organized as a regional office or zone (qu), was Weng Guanghui, a native of Zhejiang who had graduated from the third class of Whampoa to become an intelli¬gence agent in the navy.2 Weng’s command was at the start quite modest.3 He presided over no more than thirty or forty agents, divided into three sections under Chen Zhiqiang (a fellow classmate from Shanghai who had joined the gangs when he was a liumang before entering Whampoa), Wang Changyu (a Cantonese from Qiongzhou who had graduated with the fifth class), and Xu Zhaojun (also a classmate, from Sichuan). Later, a fourth sec¬tion of newly graduated agents from the Hangzhou training unit was added under Zhang Renyou (Wenzhou, Zhejiang), so that the field units, or zu, which were solely engaged in espionage, corresponded to parts of the city: Nanshi, the French Concession, the International Settlement, and Zhabei (which included Jiangwan and Wusongkou).4
The station, which was supposed to operate on a shoestring budget oftwo hundred yuan per month, rented rooms successively at Lafayette, Lebon, and West Gate roads.5 The agents’ change of address was deliberate for fear of discovery by the Communists, who—in the SSD’s eyes at least—domi¬nated the foreign sectors of Shanghai.
At that time the special agents had very little courage, and for fear that the Communist Party would be able to strike back at them, the regional office— except for communications with a few group heads—did not let its ordinary personnel know where it was located. Every day coming and going they were also afraid that people would follow them. They didn’t even have a single au-tomobile. At that time there was only one car for the operations group. But outside of kidnappings and assassinations, it was not permitted to be used for routine duties at all.6
Communications between the Shanghai Station and SSD headquarters in Nanjing were initially quite simple. As information was collected it was copied down in a kind of disappearing ink and posted by ordinary mail to central headquarters.7
Communications between the station and its agents through 1933 and 1934 were also relatively primitive. Field agents simply used a post office box without any special cover organization, and couriers spent most of the day running from box to box to pick up the letters prepared weekly by their “communications agents.” By the time Shen Zui joined the SSD in 1932, the entire station only had 160 or 170 people, of which the headquarters staff (neiqin) numbered 30.8
Weng Guanghui did not serve as head of the Shanghai regional office for very long. He was dismissed after trying to transmit a piece of valuable in¬telligence to Chiang Kai-shek without first going through Dai Li himself.9 His replacement was a former training unit instructor at the Nanjing and Hangzhou xunlianban, Yu Lexing. Yu (zi Chunyun, Zengsheng), who oper¬ated under the alias of Jin Mingsan, was originally from Liling in Hunan; after spending some time in France on the work-study program, he had gone to the Soviet Union to enroll at Sun Yat-sen University and to learn from the Cheka how to become a secret service bodyguard (baowei). 10 When he took over the Shanghai Station in the fall of 1932 it was expanded to be¬come the East China Region (Huadong qu), and a special operations group was added: the East China District Operations Group (Huadong qu xing- dong zu). This special action group, which first consisted of nearly twenty thugs and gangsters who were experienced robbers and murderers, was led by Zhao Lijun, whose penchant for torture and murder later led to his own demise.11 The assassination work that Zhao conducted out of his head¬quarters in a three-story building on Rue Marseilles in the French Con¬cession was directly under the supervision of the Nanjing General Affairs
Office, which also controlled personnel and budget matters of the opera¬tions group. Kidnapping and secret arrests in the area, however, were com¬manded by the East China Region director independently of Nanjing.12
In principle, the East China Region Office was in charge of secret service activities in Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Fujian. In practice, none of the stations outside Shanghai proper were willing to accept the regional office’s author¬ity. It was not long, therefore, before the station was renamed the Shanghai Special Region (Shanghai tequ). The basic-level organizations within the regional office continued to be the various groups (zu) engaged in intelli¬gence gathering. By 1934, and before war with Japan broke out, Group One was still under Chen Zhiqiang; Group Two was headed by Shen Zui; Group Three, Wang Changyu; and Group Four, Zhang Renyou. After Wu Naixian became head of the regional office in 1934, each of the zu was formally at¬tached to a district: Group One became known as the Nanshi zu (South¬ern City Group); Group Two, the French Concession Group; Group Three, the International Settlement Group (or English Concession Group); and Group Four, the Huxi zu (West Hu Group).13
INDIVIDUAL GROUP ACTIVITIES
Group One was centrally situated in the Nanshi on Penglai Street, and its main responsibility consisted of looking after affairs in the old Chinese city proper. As a xiao toumu (small gang head), Chen Zhiqiang used his racke¬teering connections to carry out special service activities, and his police and government guanxi (relations) to protect fellow gang members who had gotten into trouble because of their involvement in the narcotics traffic. He was obviously making money in the drug trade himself, because he had a private limousine and was enjoying a lifestyle far above the means of his se¬cret service position. Dai Li was aware of this, but he had no special evi¬dence of Chen’s malfeasance to warrant punishment. Perhaps even more important, Dai Li was always very pleased with the intelligence that the Southern City Group forwarded on conditions in the Chinese section of Shanghai. For, through the gang linkage, Chen Zhiqiang was especially well connected with the Chinese police force, and his agents included precinct chiefs ( fenjuzhang) and the head of the detective division (zhenji zongdui) of the municipal police.14
Shen Zui, who became the head of Group Two in 1933, had joined Dai Li’s Shanghai Station after leaving school in 1932 at the age of eighteen. He was introduced (and, of course, guaranteed) by his brother-in-law, Yu Le- xing; and Shen Zui in turn brought into the organization three brothers and two sisters-in-law.15 Shen’s initial assignment was to the Communications Group, and one of his duties as head of the runners was to serve as a courier between the secret service headquarters and the “communications agents” (tongxunyuan) in the field. Shen was under orders not to communicate with these agents while handing over “activities expenses” (huodong fei) in ex¬change for intelligence inserted into a newspaper or short story manuscript. But when he actually met the field agents in a teahouse or restaurant, the informants—who were usually in their thirties or forties—treated the twenty-year-old messenger as a didi (younger brother), offering him a bite to eat along with advice on how to take care of himself in their rough-and- tumble world.16
For a time Shen Zui continued to oversee the Communications Group af¬ter being appointed head of Group Two, where he had more than twenty regular agents under his control, with each of these running another twenty or more subagents (yanxian, or “eye-beams”) of their own.17 Later, more agents were added to the intelligence section and placed under the com¬mand of Liu Guoqing (a graduate of the special agents training course at Hangzhou who had come to Shanghai for special field training and ended up developing working connections of his own); still other agents, mainly “loafers” and gang members, constituted a group under Ruan Yacheng. All of these agents were handed over by Shen Zui to Su Yeguang after Shen be¬came a group chief in the garrison command’s detective brigade in 1935. Shen thereby relinquished his leadership of Group Two’s intelligence activ¬ities in exchange for direction of “operations” (xingdong) under the cover of the military police.18
Although Group Three was charged with gathering intelligence in the International Settlement, its head, Wang Changyu, continued to live in the French Concession for fear of the more disorderly conditions across the English-patrolled boundary. He did move about in the settlement, however, pretending to former fellow Whampoa students whom he encountered to be an outspoken opponent of Chiang Kai-shek. His standard complaint was that he was unable to find work, and often the Whampoa alumni he im¬portuned in this manner would either try to find work for him or “loan” him a few dollars to get by. Quite a few Whampoa graduates were taken in by this pose, and Wang Changyu managed to cultivate a number of interesting con¬tacts among anti-Chiang circles who in turn generated information useful to Dai Li’s operations personnel. Wang also nurtured an extremely active network of Cantonese agents, most of whom lived in Hongkew (Hongkou), and some of whom had developed close relationships with Cantonese war¬lords, with the “New Guomindang” (Xin Guomindang), and even with the “democratic party clique” (minzhudang pai). Wang Changyu’s “eye-beams,” or informants, also worked as waiters in Shanghai’s three major Cantonese restaurants (Xinya, Xinya, and Dasanyuan), and as clerks in two of the big
Cantonese-run department stores (Xianshi and Yong’an). Dai Li was very impressed by Wang’s net of informants and kept him in charge of Interna¬tional Settlement activities all the way down to the Sino-Japanese War.19
Zhang Renyou’s Group Four, which ostensibly had jurisdiction over Zha- bei and Hongkou in the Huxi (Western Hu) sector of the city and which had its headquarters near Ximo and Jing’ansi roads, does not seem to have been nearly as active as Group Three. Zhang himself was a spy thanks to the secret service training course he had taken at the Hangzhou Police Acad¬emy, and he did not have very good contacts in Shanghai proper.20
This lack of practical experience and public connections was character¬istic of many graduates of the Hangzhou training program, the inception of which otherwise marked a major turning point in Dai Li’s own organization building.21 Yet, even though the Hangzhou special services training unit gave Dai Li a chance to cultivate cadres of his own, transforming his infor¬mal “spy” organization into a real intelligence organ, it did not produce sophisticated spies. Since most of Dai Li’s agents were Hangzhou training school students, their activities in Shanghai more resembled a kind of on- the-job training than refined espionage. All that they were good for, in ef¬fect, was social investigation and surveillance work.
Zhang Renyou and Group Four eventually did manage to come up with two very good agents with working-class connections. One was Cheng Muyi, from the Hangzhou student group, who managed to chiku (endure difficul¬ties) by living in the working-class districts of Huxi where he picked up con¬siderable information on Communist Party front organizations.22 Another exceptionally good agent was Tao Yishan, a graduate of the Central Military Academy who was an instructor at the Wusong Merchant Marines School (Wusong shangchuan xuexiao). Tao had very good contacts throughout the Wusong area, and his reports on the social situation there, and on condi¬tions within the Merchant Marines School, were highly valued by Dai Li.23 Later, when Dai dismissed Zhang Renyou for having squandered money he had borrowed from Yang Hu, Cheng Muyi took over Group Four, which in 1935 managed to liquidate several leading members of the Jiangsu provin¬cial Communist organization.24
As the Shanghai Station’s activities expanded, it gradually became im¬possible to confine each group’s activities to the boundaries of that par¬ticular district because the targets of its attention readily crossed back and forth from one sector of the city to the next. Eventually, the only distinction that could be maintained was between the nature of the “surveillance and monitoring work” ( jianshi gongzuo) in each case.25
Shen Zui’s Group Two, for example, was given the task of maintaining surveillance over Communist Party suspects, democratic party elements, and anti-Chiang organizations, simply because most of these forces had sought shelter in the French Concession that comprised Group Two’s juris- diction.26 The suspects themselves, needless to say, hardly confined their ac¬tivities to the French Concession. Consequently, Group Two often found it¬self operating in other parts of greater Shanghai, where lines of command and control became quite confused. It was common practice for SSD agents to become agents provocateurs under the cover of being “progressive ele¬ments” themselves. In that guise, they easily attracted the attention of other SSD agents operating out of the additional groups in the city. Since both sets of agents were using aliases unknown to the other, and since both were often posing as Communist sympathizers, each side might inaugurate a co¬vert operation against the other group’s agents. On numerous occasions Group Two agents would be on the very eve of mounting a kidnapping only to be told by the regional office that the person they were about to seize was working for another zu. 27
SECRET SERVICE SOCIOLOGY
The agents themselves, especially during the early 1930s in Shanghai, were a mixed lot. They included lawyers, professors, bank clerks, reporters, un¬employed “loafers,” and even the heads of gangs and associations (bang and hui). Many of them had joined up initially because of family connections. As we have seen, Shen Zui—fresh from the Zhejiang countryside in 1932— made his connections in the secret service through his older sister’s hus¬band, Yu Lexing, who was a member of the Shanghai Station himself. Oth¬ers, just as callow as Shen Zui, formed a small and irregular army of agents whose tradecraft was often no match for the sophisticated tactics of the Communists, led by cadres like Zhou Enlai, who easily outwitted these gun- toting young men. Indeed, despite the sinister terror they aroused, the se¬cret police were sometimes remarkably inept; and there was occasionally a whiff of the Keystone Cops about their otherwise sinister antics, as they ran through the streets of Shanghai chasing subversives who easily slipped out of their grasp, or as they gunned their old Studebaker coupes in pursuit of the newer and faster touring cars that easily outsped them.28
Dai Li deliberately underpaid his Shanghai agents, who earned on the average between thirty and one hundred yuan per month, plus prizes and bonuses. But even though a group chief (zuzhang) received an addi¬tional one hundred yuan a month for special expenditures, the pay was not enough to cover regular expenses, and a great deal of thought was devoted to getting bonuses or rewards ( jiangjin). When Shen Zui complained about the trouble SSD agents had making ends meet, Dai Li would always senten- tiously answer, “We are doing revolutionary work. We can’t talk about en¬joyment. We must be more frugal.” But once, when Dai Li was particularly
angry and therefore unusually candid, he told Shen Zui that he kept salaries low because his agents then worked harder to earn bonuses, which in turn created an incentive system that increased the efficiency of the apparatus.29
Of course, low salaries also enhanced the likelihood of corruption.30 At first, few agents could make money on the side because most lacked posi¬tions of public authority that enabled them to extort fees from the citizenry. Outside the small number of people who were officially members of the Mil¬itary Affairs Commission or who held rank as staff officers, none of the Shanghai Station agents carried badges that gave them legal authority to ar¬rest or detain suspects. Consequently, one of the most prevalent dreams of the average young field agent was to acquire some sort of public post, either as cover or as a regular position, that would both pay an additional salary and provide an opportunity for illicit fees.31 The first day that Shen Zui ar¬rived for work in the detective squad of the garrison command, he discov¬ered a red envelope (hongbao) in his desk drawer, with”qing xiao na” (“please smile upon taking”) written on the outside. Inside the envelope he found two hundred yuan. Shen Zui thought this very strange and reported the dis¬covery to his brigade commander, Weng Guanghui, who smiled and said that he knew nothing about it. Thereafter no more envelopes appeared in his desk, but Shen Zui noticed that his officemate, Lin Zhijiang, would of¬ten reach into his desk and smile as he withdrew something that he put in his pocket.32
Lacking police authority and cover, Dai Li’s men frequently chose to pose as journalists, since this gave them a plausible reason for asking ques¬tions and taking photographs. Zhang Renyou, for example, pretended to be in charge of the Shanghai office of Wenzhou ribao (Wenzhou Daily). 33 Many agents actually held bona fide jobs as reporters or even published journals and magazines. Mao Fangmei, who was a field agent in Group Two, worked as a journalist for one of the big Shanghai newspapers, Chenbao, and used his newspaperman’s camera to photograph documents purloined from pro¬gressives in Democratic Party (Minzhudang) circles by his subagents, who were also formally employed as reporters.34 Another Chenbao photographic reporter, Gao Gongbai, who was very active in educational movements and cultural activities, was also a SSD agent, as was the chief editor of Torch (Huoju), Cui Wanqiu.35
Shen Zui himself used a reporter’s cover, working for the Hunan Press Agency (Xiangguang tongxunshe) under the aliases of Chen Lun and Chen Cang. He also opened a feminist bookstore in the French Concession di¬rectly across from the Paris Movie Theater where he published a magazine entitled Women's Monthly (Nuzi yuekan) that circulated mainly in southeast¬ern China and the Nanyang. He continued to use this magazine as a cover, deceiving many of its reporters even after he became a group chief in the detective brigade of the garrison command and routinely engaged in kid¬nappings and murders.36
SURVEILLANCE
The most onerous burden shared by Shanghai Station agents was general surveillance. Dai Li attached special importance to this set of duties, which was construed both as a means of social control and as a kind of punishment to be meted out to Chiang Kai-shek’s enemies. Angered by a figure’s politi¬cal activities, the Chairman would bark out the order, “Put him under sur¬veillance!” and word would come down via Dai Li that a special watch over that person had to be organized by one of the groups in the Shanghai Sta¬tion. At that time, however, each zu had only about a dozen regular field agents, and even though each agent could enroll his friends and relatives (qinyou) as helpers, there were still not enough spies to go around. The re¬sult was that most of the surveillance was sporadic and discontinuous. Group heads naturally tried to keep this a secret from Dai Li, who liked to believe that so-and-so was under constant watch. In reality, only periodic observation was being maintained, along with dummy records and reports. Paradoxically, however, this heightened the public’s impression of ubi¬quitous secret service activity, since the agents were stretched thinly but widely across the city, inefficiently maintaining a guard against the regime’s many suspected enemies but effectively projecting an aura of secret police watchfulness.37
Major suspects were treated somewhat differently. Shen Zui’s men kept constant watch over the offices of Huang Yanpei’s China Vocational Educa¬tional Society (Zhonghua zhiye jiaoyu she) at Hualong and Huanlong roads in the French Concession, hoping to spot “reactionaries” contacting the fa¬mous educator and journalist.38 Fang Dingying, who had incurred Chiang’s disfavor after founding the Revolutionary Alliance to Resist the Japanese (Kang Ri tongmenghui), was put under permanent surveillance.39 And when Xue Dubi resigned in protest against the government’s appeasement policies and went to Shanghai to practice law and organize a national unity movement to oppose Japanese aggression, special agents were assigned to keep his house and office in the French Concession under surveillance while others acted as agents provocateurs by pretending to be patriots seek¬ing his support.40
Warlords and their emissaries were carefully watched as well. During the early 1930s important militarists maintained the equivalent of diplomatic posts in Nanjing and Shanghai, dispatching agents to represent their inter¬ests and conduct negotiations on their behalf.41 The Sichuanese warlords, for example, were represented by a graduate of the fourth class of Wham- poa named Zhou Xunyu, who set up headquarters in the Yipinxiang Hotel in Shanghai.42 The Yipinxiang— or “First-Class Fragrance”—was more or less the equivalent of a Landsmannschaft, or provincial guesthouse for Si- chuanese in Shanghai. It was presided over by two old Sichuanese gentle¬men, Xie Wuliang and Zeng Tongyi, who had lived in the hotel for years while owners had changed beneath them. So relaxed were they and their coprovincials in this setting that they spoke freely about nearly anything that came to mind, and after he had established himself there Zhou Xunyu re¬alized that this was an excellent place to collect intelligence about condi¬tions throughout Sichuan, which was fragmented into many different war¬lord satrapies. This became all the more important after Zhou Xunyu was recruited by Dai Li’s men for secret service work. Zhou was such a staunch Sichuan patriot, however, that he functioned as a double agent, funneling information in both directions. For that reason, Dai Li never trusted him entirely, and after discovering that Zhou was withholding information from him, Dai Li had the man thrown into one of Juntong’s secret prisons, where he utterly slipped from sight.43
CULTURAL PENETRATION
Book publishing and cultural activities also received special attention from the SSD, even though this supposedly fell under the purview of the “CC” clique and what eventually became Zhongtong (Central Statistics). One Group Two agent, Jia Jinbo—a Sichuanese who frequently brought “reac¬tionary” books and pamphlets into the Chinese city in order to win the trust of progressives—had especially good contacts in publishing circles, and his reports were read with great interest by Dai Li. The secret service chief also paid special attention to Zou Taofen’s Shenghuo Bookstore (where he man¬aged to place an agent’s son as an apprentice clerk, hoping to develop a long-term hidden asset—hopes cut short by the war with Japan when the plant lost contact with his superiors), and to the Uchiyama Bookstore, whose owners helped protect Lu Xun. However, Juntong was unable to penetrate the Japanese bookstore, a failure for which Dai Li repeatedly reproached Jia Jinbo.44
Another Group Two agent, Cui Wanqiu (the editor of Torch, mentioned earlier), gathered intelligence from a network of informers in cultural cir¬cles and also subsidized journalists who wrote in favor of the government’s policies. One of Cui’s acquaintances was Zhang Chunqiao—later a member of the “Gang of Four” along with Jiang Qing—who wrote several articles at¬tacking Lu Xun under the nom de plume “Dick” (Dike). 45 As a Group Two agent living in the French Concession, Cui received a salary of eighty yuan plus bonuses. Shen Zui delivered the money himself, and he several times saw the actress Lan Ping in Cui’s living room. Cui made a point of always tak- ing Shen Zui through the house and back to the kitchen, where the money and information changed hands, so the group head never actually was in¬troduced to the actress, who later changed her name to Jiang Qing.46
Although the larger organization of the Blue Shirts was quite successful in penetrating schools and colleges in the Shanghai area before the “CC” clique forced them aside, the Shanghai Station as such only controlled a couple of schools of its own. One was the Zhaohe Middle School, founded and supported by Yang Hu. A small number of the teachers in this school worked directly for Dai Li’s secret service. However, they were so compro¬mised by their association with Yang Hu—the “executioner” of the 1927 purge—that they had very little chance of influencing the majority of the students in the school or of coming into contact with progressives in edu¬cational circles at large.47 The Shanghai Station did establish a special com¬munications school in the French Concession, but Dai Li decreed that the Sanji Wireless Radio Training Institute (Sanji wuxiandian chuanxisuo) was exclusively to train radio operators. It was forbidden to engage in special operations, and secret service agents were not allowed to use it as a cover.48
Neither was the Shanghai Station very skillful at recruiting and using col¬lege students. In 1934-35 the most troublesome university, in the secret service’s eyes, was Ji’nan daxue. Other than opening up a coffee shop as a cover for SSD agents, the Shanghai Station was only able to enlist the help of a group of Chinese students from Southeast Asia who were ostensibly studying at Ji’nan. A rowdy lot who were more interested in living as play¬boys than as students, these subagents were given to brandishing their ser¬vice pistols just to impress young women, and the best of them ended up leaving the university and entering Juntong on a full-time basis as backbone cadres.49
Fudan University, also considered a hotbed of “reactionary” activity, was equally difficult to penetrate. Group Two did manage to enlist Professor Yao Mingda of the History Department, and Yao and a few of his students acted as informers during those years; but initially the most effective espionage was conducted by culinary means.50 At Dai Li’s order, a former Whampoa cadet named Chen Shaozong opened a restaurant at the back gate of Fu- dan, where he and his wife were able to run a flourishing business popular with students. Chen had once taught military training classes at the univer¬sity, so he already had some student contacts. Thanks to the resources af¬forded him by the Shanghai Station, he was able to enlarge these even more by extending generous terms of credit to student customers, who were al¬lowed to run up considerable chits on their accounts. The restaurant had two small rooms, and while one served for banquets and dining, the other could be loaned to students for discussion meetings and political delibera-tions. Chen would routinely send his ten-year-old daughter into the meet¬ing room to eavesdrop while refilling the students’ teacups. The intelligence she gathered Chen then secretly wrote down on meal tickets that were sold by Mrs. Chen sitting at the cashier’s stand to Group Two couriers who dropped by for lunch or dinner. A number of student radicals were impli¬cated in this fashion, and their interrogations yielded the names of yet oth¬ers whom the secret service kept under periodic surveillance.51
Efforts to penetrate radical groups redoubled when Wu Naixian became regional chief of the SSD in Shanghai in 1934. Wu, a first class graduate of Whampoa, had initially gained Chiang Kai-shek’s confidence by betraying Deng Yanda to him. Chiang and Dai Li subsequently tried to use Wu to es¬tablish connections with what was then called the “third party” (disan dang), the Chinese Nationalist Party Temporary Action Committee (Zhongguo guomindang linshi xingdong weiyuanhui). In this way they hoped both to undermine this rival force within the Guomindang and to use it to draw close to the underground organization of the Chinese Communist Party that was still tenuously connected to the old “left wing” of the United Front. This range of activities, incidentally, was always directly under the supervi¬sion of SSD headquarters in Nanjing. Dai Li’s men in the capital made their own connections with “third party” figures in Shanghai, more or less by-passing regular channels in the Shanghai Station to work through Wu Nai- xian directly.52
Wu’s deputy in the Shanghai Station was the regional secretary, Zhang Shi, who had formerly been a Communist. Dai Li hoped that Zhang’s expe¬rience in underground work would make it easier for the secret service to gain an entrée into core CCP cells. The Shanghai Station’s budget was increased by 50 percent, and a regional inspector (ducha) was added to the table of organization.53 But Wu Naixian and Zhang Shi were unable, like Cheng Muyi, to chiku and live among the workers where the Communists had organized their defenses. Wu and his deputy were even more cautious than their predecessors, moving the headquarters of the regional office from the French Concession to the Old West Gate (Laoximen) in the South¬ern City, which was an area controlled by the Guomindang. Yet because the Chinese part of Shanghai was thought to be so dirty and unsanitary, Wu and his aides lived in the French Concession on Huanlong Road in a secret res¬idence, the address of which was known only to two persons within the Shanghai Station proper.54 Partly because of their squeamishness, then, Shanghai Station leaders did not enjoy much success in penetrating the un¬derground, but even more debilitating to their effort, at least until 1935, was their lack of police authority to prosecute Chiang Kai-shek’s enemies.55
POLICE CONNECTIONS
At first, the Shanghai Station had tried to use private connections with members of the Chinese municipality’s Public Safety Bureau in order to get the detectives’ help in carrying out SSD missions. The chief of police in 1933, Wen Hongen, and his chief of detectives, Lu Ying, were reluctant to cooperate with Dai Li.56 Dai Li was therefore somewhat grudgingly forced to ask his Group One leader, Chen Zhiqiang, to use his Green Gang guanxi to link up with individual detectives on the squad. But as Chen’s grip over this group of police officers tightened, so did his own ambition swell. Within two years Dai Li had promoted Chen out of Shanghai to head the detective brigade (zhenji dui) of the Shaanxi provincial police office, abolishing Group One and dividing its personnel among the various other zu. 57
By then, the Public Safety Bureau had a new chief, Cai Jingjun, who was much more willing to cooperate with Dai Li. Gradually, he allowed SSD agents to assume positions in the police training unit ( jingshi jiaolian suo); and eventually Dai Li was able to get his agent Chen Zhiping the post of chief of indoctrination in the PSB while two other secret service men were made guidance counselors (zhidaoyuan) in the Police Academy.58 However, owing to Lu Ying’s reluctance, Dai Li did not directly control the bureau’s detectives division.59
Curiously enough, Dai Li and his men had better fortune in using the French Concession police force, mainly because the French authorities had come to rely so heavily upon the use of gang members as detectives in the Chinese division to control the native population in their settlement. One of the key figures in that division was a petty gang leader (xiao touzi) named Fan Guangzhen, who—like almost all of the detectives (baotan) on the force—had started out in the ranks as an ordinary patrolman (xunbu), and who was eventually promoted to detective sergeant (tanmu). As his se¬cret service chief in Group Two put it, “Fan’s social relationships were ex¬tremely complicated.” 60 Not only was he a gangster working as a detective, but he was also a partially loyal servant of his French masters while working on the side for the Nationalist intelligence services. As Dai Li saw it, Fan was more devoted to the French colonial authorities than he was to the SSD, but he obviously felt that he had to curry favor with both sides. If he were put under too much pressure, then Fan might feel forced to sacrifice his Chi¬nese relationships in order to maintain his bread-and-butter ties to his for¬eign employers. Therefore, Dai Li only had recourse to him when it was absolutely necessary, asking Fan Guangzhen to tap his widespread net of in¬formers for an occasional lead into the underground, and requesting cover and help whenever the Shanghai Station had to carry out a kidnapping in the French Concession.61
Because of Fan Guangzhen’s unreliability, Dai Li believed that it was nec¬essary to introduce someone he could really trust into the ranks of the Chi¬nese detectives division of the French police. Dai turned to a Whampoa classmate, Ruan Zhaohui, whose first assignment had been as a communi¬cations officer in the Nanjing headquarters of the SSD in Chicken Goose Lane.62 Offering Fan Guangzhen five hundred yuan as a bribe, Dai Li man¬aged to get Ruan an appointment as a baotan, even though unlike all the other detectives he had not gone through his apprenticeship as a foot pa¬trolman. Once appointed to the post, Ruan became Fan’s superior within the Shanghai Station apparatus, though he was nominally his assistant on the police force proper. This put Fan in a delicate position, because he was unwilling to communicate directly with Group Two for fear of being com-promised. Receiving his instructions directly from Ruan Zhaohui, then, Fan allowed the newcomer to use, and thus appropriate, the gang leader’s con- nections.63 As a result, the Shanghai Station was able to keep watch over and control a number of progressives who had sought safety in the shelter of the French Concession; and later, they were able to use their men within the de¬tective squad to protect SSD agents who were for one reason or another vul¬nerable to arrest.64
The detective squads of both the Chinese Municipal Public Safety Bu¬reau and the French Concession Police were only indirectly put at Dai Li’s disposal. The SSD still lacked direct police authority in the Shanghai area, and if the secret service wished formally to arrest and interrogate a suspect, that person had to be illegally kidnapped and secretly transported to Nan- jing.65 This structural weakness in the Shanghai apparatus was not overcome until 1935, when Chiang Kai-shek finally decided to turn over to Juntong control of two major law enforcement groups, the military police detectives division and the transport police.66
THE ACQUISITION OF THE DETECTIVE BRIGADE
Early in 1935 General Chiang granted Dai Li authority over the Main De¬tective Brigade of the Song-Hu Garrison Command (Song-Hu jingbei sil- ingbu zhencha dadui), and Wu Naixian—chief of Juntong’s Shanghai Sta- tion—was named commander (daduizhang) of the entire division, which was housed in the Baiyunguan on Fangxie Road in the Chinese sector of the city.67 In theory, then, all of the military detectives in the Shanghai area were now subject to the SSD’s commands. In practice, however, it amounted to little more than a change of administrative hats. That is, Station Chief Wu simply asserted his nominal authority over the detective brigade. If the se¬cret service commander wished to do more than take charge at the top, then he would have to control the intermediate sections of thezhencha dadui (detective division) by filling the posts of superintendents (ducha) with his own men.
This critical line staffing came about when Wu Naixian was succeeded as detectives commander by Weng Guanghui, who brought with him four top SSD agents to be appointed ducha: Shen Zui, Cheng Muyi, Lin Zhijiang, and Ni Yuanchao. The new inspectors quickly encountered two impediments to their plans to turn the garrison command’s detective squad into a political and paramilitary secret police unit: the recalcitrance of the standing deputy brigade commander, and the reluctance of the regular detectives already on the roster.68
Peng Bowei, the deputy brigade commander, was one of Yang Hu’s men. Ever since the 1927 purge he had run the seamen’s union for Yang Hu, and he had a large network of loyal followers among customs officers and in¬spectors who had acquired their jobs thanks to him. As long as Peng re¬mained second in command of the zhencha dadui, Dai Li’s interests were not going to be completely served. Consequently, when the command next changed at the top, with Wang Zhaohuai succeeding Weng Guanghui as daduizhang, Dai Li squeezed Peng Bowei out and replaced him with the cur¬rent head of Group One, Yang Fengqi.69
The regular inspectors ( jichayuan) — the old-timers in the military po-lice—represented another sort of obstacle to the transformation of regular MP detectives into a “red squad.” In their outlook and training, the military inspectors were mainly devoted to maintaining local law and order (zhixu). It was offensive to them to think of turning their detective brigade into an instrument of terror and coercion that used its powers of arrest as a substi¬tute for illicit kidnapping and that transformed acceptable interrogation procedures into techniques oftorture.70 Yet the jichayuan could not be read¬ily dismissed nor replaced. For one, many of them had developed close working relationships with detectives in the French Concession Police and the Shanghai Municipal Police. This made arresting suspects in the Inter-national Settlement a lot easier for the SSD, but it also made the Shanghai Station agents leery of arousing the suspicions and hostilities of the foreign concession police by suddenly getting rid of old friends and acquaintances in the military police. The decision was made, therefore, to proceed very slowly in culling the detective brigade ranks and to try whenever possible to get former military detectives to allow themselves to be co-opted into the Shanghai Station.
Gradually, then, after Wang Zhaohuai took over the brigade, a dozen or so new inspectors were brought in from regular secret service ranks, and a number of important jichayuan of the former brigade, such as Zhu Youxin and Wang Kaiming, were enrolled as full-fledged members of the SSD. As the misgivings of the new inspectors were allayed, the military detectives di¬vision was transmogrified into a true secret police, functioning as an outer service or field organ for the Shanghai district headquarters of Juntong. Whenever the Shanghai Station wanted to transform a kidnapping into an arrest, the detective brigade simply requested the garrison command to sign a warrant. The latter invariably complied. Occasionally, when there were cases of gross injustice, the secret police turned to the Military Law Depart¬ment ( Junfa chu) of the garrison headquarters for cosmetic legal support.
The chief of that department was Lu Jingshi, a disciple of Du Yuesheng who was very close to Wang Zhaohuai, the head of the detective division. If the secret police felt that they had to release a prisoner, nearly beaten to death while under arrest, they would ask the Military Law Department to take over. Lu Jingshi was quite happy to comply, although his lieutenants grumbled constantly, complaining that they were forced to act as a front for the Shanghai Station’s detective squad. As a consequence, Dai Li’s men came to possess full and unimpeachable powers of arrest, which actually su¬perseded the authority of the Shanghai Municipal Public Safety Bureau, and which gave them carte blanche to turn the Shanghai Station into the fearsome Leviathan that Juntong was rapidly becoming in areas directly un¬der Nanjing’s control. Political suspects could now be incarcerated and tor¬tured with complete impunity on the spot.71
Dai Li took over the transport police in Shanghai the same way that he had taken over the garrison command’s detectives: in the autumn of 1935 he had Wu Naixian appointed head of the Nanjing-Shanghai-Hangzhou Railroad Police ( Jing-Hu-Hang jiao tielu jingcha). This was a major ad¬ministrative job, and it meant turning over Wu’s responsibilities as dadui- zhang of military detectives to Weng Guanghui and as Shanghai Station chief to Wang Xinheng.72 Shortly after that, the police inspectors’ office of the China Steam Merchants Navigation Company was also turned over to Dai Li’s men, who staffed leading posts directly from Nanjing. Henceforth, SSD agents traveled free of charge on the railway and on steamboats, and whenever prisoners of the secret service had to be transported from Shang¬hai to the capital, the Shanghai Station agents had the complete support and aid of the railway police, with special compartments in the sleeping cars turned over to them for clandestine use.73
WANG XINHENG
The acquisition of the detectives brigade and the responsibility for staffing of the transport police vastly increased the duties of the Shanghai Station, which flourished under the direction of its energetic new chief, Wang Xin- heng. A former Communist who had studied at Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow, Wang was a native of Ningbo who had many contacts among mer¬chants from that city in Shanghai. He was also well connected with the Shanghai underworld, being a close friend of Du Yuesheng and a warmly welcomed guest at the Hengshe (Constancy Club), which was organized by the Green Gang.74
Thanks to these links, Wang was able to attract a broad membership to the secret service, enlisting as agents students who been in the USSR, mer¬chants, working-class leaders, gangsters, members of the Shanghai Postal General Union, writers, and entertainers. New clandestine district offices were opened in Hongkew, Zhabei, and southern Shanghai (Hu’nan). A dozen or so individual stations (zhan) were attached to military investigation groups (diaocha zu). A large wireless broadcasting station was installed to form a central communications network. Altogether the personnel of the Shanghai Station increased fivefold, from one hundred to five hundred members working full-time at headquarters or in the field.75
Dai Li’s appointment ofa Communist “renegade,” or pantu, such as Wang Xinheng to direct the Shanghai regional office reflected the secret service chief’s belief that no one was better equipped to deal with the underground than a former CCP member. In that respect, Wang was just one among many Communist Party defectors such as Liang Ganqiao, Xie Ligong, Ye Daoxin, Lu Haifang, and Cheng Yiming who became senior SSD agents in the 1930s.76 Upon their shoulders supposedly rested much of the responsibility for penetrating and smashing the enemy’s own clandestine organs, which they hoped to reach through the peripheral or front organizations that were the only public manifestations of the CCP readily detected.77
This was not an easy task, even when the most skilled of agents posed as a “progressive element” by attacking the government’s policies in news¬papers or journals. One of Group Two’s best spies was a Hunanese named Su Yeguang who had once been a member of the Communist Party and who participated actively in the affairs of the “democratic party clique” (minzhu- dang pai).78 Yet even though he frequently criticized Chiang Kai-shek in public in the most cutting of ways, and although he published numerous gloomy articles indicating his unhappiness with contemporary society, Su appeared to fool none of the activists in the New Nationalist Party (Xin Guomindang) and had no success at all in penetrating various CCP front 79
groups.79
COMMUNIST COUNTERESPIONAGE
One explanation for Juntong’s failure to bore into the radical underground was the Communists’ own extremely effective security system, based upon a combination of Moscow tradecraft and their own inventiveness. In Shang¬hai the CCP counterespionage effort was commanded by General Chen Geng, who had made his way to the French Concession after being severely wounded in the Nanchang uprising of 1927. Treated by the famous surgeon Niu Huilin, who was T.V. Soong’s cousin, Chen Geng recovered from his in¬juries and faded into deep cover.80 The Shanghai Station somehow learned of his presence in the city, but even though Dai Li assigned Wu Naixian— Chen Geng’s tongxue (classmate) in the first class of Whampoa—to the case, the Chinese Communist security chief slipped through their fingers.81
Thereafter, SSD agents had to redouble their efforts to keep track of known CCP members, who learned to abandon safe houses frequently and cover their trails whether they suspected they were under surveillance or not.82 Indeed, Chen Geng’s operatives mounted a countersurveillance, keeping watch over the residences of important Shanghai Station officers as well as the Main Detective Brigade headquarters on Fangxie Road.83
The acme of General Chen’s clandestine career in Shanghai was the se¬curity arrangement he devised for the Communist Party’s Fourth Plenum in January 1931. In order to bring together safely all of the delegates under the hypersensitive noses of Guomindang agents who had gotten wind of the CCP conclave but did not know where it was being held, Chen Geng set up a fake hospital, complete with medical equipment, physicians, and nurses. Delegates arrived swathed in bandages or were carried in on blanket-cov¬ered stretchers, and Dai Li’s men never suspected a thing.84
When Communists were captured, they received very short shrift. Ac¬cording to the operating procedures that Dai Li worked out with Chiang Kai-shek, Communist agents arrested by the SSD fell completely under the bureau’s jurisdiction. They were never handed over to other agencies for in¬vestigation but were nearly always arraigned, sentenced, and punished within Dai Li’s organization.85 This was not strictly legal, of course, but in 1934—as one secret policeman later recollected—Shanghai Station agents simply took it for granted that if you were lucky enough to get your hands on a Communist, you routinely tortured and killed him, unless he agreed to change sides.86
This made it a relatively simple matter to cover up mistakes. In one of those cases where the left hand did not know what the right hand was do¬ing, Shanghai field agents from one group became interested in a man named Ma. Pretending to be “progressives” themselves, they sedulously cul¬tivated Ma, who was thought to be an important underground Communist cadre. A special task force of more than twenty agents was set up within the Juntong group, and more than a thousand yuan were spent satisfying Ma’s various appetites. Yet the cost seemed worthwhile because Ma repaid them with credible intelligence about the underground, including the revelation that he was an important leader in the Huadong (east China) branch of the Chinese Communist Party. This information was duly relayed to Dai Li, who was so delighted by the group’s success that he reported the case directly to Chiang Kai-shek. Sure that they had netted a big fish, the group decided to close the case by arresting Ma and submitting him to interrogation. But when they hauled him in for questioning, identifying themselves as mem¬bers of the Shanghai Station, Ma quickly told them that he was already working as a pantu for other SSD agents in Shanghai. A quick check with that other group revealed that he was telling the truth. He had been a Com¬munist in the past for sure, but now he was working as a “renegade” for an- other Shanghai Station group whose agents had thought that they were us¬ing Ma to penetrate an enemy network themselves.87
When Dai Li was told of the mix-up, he was furious, cursing out the Shanghai regional office agents for being “fatheads” ( fantong). In turn, Sta¬tion Chief Wang Xinheng excoriated the case officers who were running Ma and threatened to punish them severely for having failed to report the op¬eration to headquarters. But it was too late: Chiang Kai-shek had already been told that Juntong was going to be arresting the “responsible person” of the East China bureau of the CCP. Unwilling to lose face (diu chou) before his master, Dai Li tacitly indicated to Shen Zui that he considered Ma the Communist leader he was pretending to be. “So this guy finally dared use our activities to give himselfa cover,” Dai Li said. “Luckily we caught on soon enough. Otherwise we’d be getting the worst of it from him.” Since punish¬ment was decided entirely within Juntong, Ma was simply remanded to Nan¬jing, where he was cruelly sacrificed. Thereafter, Dai Li insisted that all fu¬ture operations involving the discovery of either a fresh trail or people posing as “progressives” be reported in full detail to SSD headquarters.88
EXTERMINATING THE DOG KILLERS
Ofcourse, the Shanghai Station had its successes too. One ofits agents’ best- known victories was against the Communist assassination squad that called itself the Dog-killers League (Dagou tuan) and that was devoted to mur¬dering “renegades” as a lesson to others.89
In 1935 Group Two captured an underground Communist and per¬suaded him to become one of their agents. His assignment was to break into the higher-level leadership of the Shanghai CCP, but he quickly fell under suspicion within the party, and eventually he was shot and left for dead in a vacant lot near Xujiahui. The man was still alive, though badly wounded, when he was discovered by the police. Dai Li was in Shanghai at the time, and he decided to use the double agent to bait a trap. A story was planted in one of Shanghai’s “mosquito” newspapers that the secret service had a Communist in custody, and that the man was recovering from critical wounds in a hospital in the French Concession. Dai Li’s plan was to let the Communist hit squad actually kill the wounded man, and then use his own SSD agents to trail the assassins back to their safe house.90
The scheme nearly misfired. A team of SSD agents from Group Two was assembled and convincingly disguised as hucksters and ricksha men to be stationed around the hospital entrance. On the fifth day of the surveillance two visitors presented themselves at the wounded agent’s door with bags of fruit. Moments after they entered the sickroom shots rang out. Two secret service men ran into the hospital and found the hostage dead in a pool of blood. While they were searching the hospital floor for the assailants, one of the assassins ran out of the front gate. The rest of the Group Two agents chased after the man, some on bicycles and some on foot. Though the cy¬clists quickly outstripped the other SSD agents, they were still unable to keep track of the assassin, who slipped away down a crowded alley. After searching the neighborhood in vain, the dispirited agents gave up and returned to headquarters, flinching at the thought of Dai Li’s wrath. But just as they were telling Dai Li that they had lost both bait and prey, a tele¬phone call came in from the laggardly foot agents. They had been so hope¬lessly outdistanced by the others that they had decided to take a streetcar back to headquarters. Passing along Rue Foch, one of them had casually glanced out of the trolley car window and spotted the suspect walking calmly along the street. Jumping off at the next stop, the agents had circled back and had trailed the assassin into a silverware store, where he was now under observation.91
Dai Li instantly ordered a full-scale raid of the store. Yang Fengqi, deputy commander of the Main Detective Brigade, and group leaders Xu Pengfei and Shen Zui were sent along with nearly the entire contingent of military detectives to pick up a squad of Chinese detectives from the French Con¬cession police headquarters. Then they surrounded the jewelry store and dashed in. The inhabitants were caught completely by surprise. Three men and a woman were seized, along with six pistols and ammunition. One of the three men was identified as the assassin from the hospital. Dai Li wanted to interrogate the Communist agents himself, but the French police insisted that they had the right to a preliminary investigation because the suspects had been arrested in the Concession proper. After Dai Li acceded, the French interrogators learned that these were the key members of the Dagou tuan, which had been executing Communist defectors throughout Shang¬hai. Since their victims were agents working for the Nationalists, the pris¬oners were turned over to Dai Li’s men in the garrison command. Further interrogation revealed nothing more, and eventually the members of the assassination squad were remanded to Nanjing, sentenced to death, and executed.92
THE SSD’S ROLE IN THE NOULENS AFFAIR
Certainly the most sensational spy case in Shanghai in the early 1930s was the Noulens affair, which remains something of a mystery even today.93 Hi¬laire Noulens, whose real name was Yakov Rudnik, was an experienced agent of the Comintern’s Department for International Liaison (Otdel Mezhdunarodnoi svyazi—OMS) operating in Shanghai undercover as a professor of French and German who supposedly headed the Organization Department of the Comintern’s Far Eastern Bureau (FEB).94 Aided by Ma¬dame Noulens (Tatyana Moiseenko), his responsibilities included:
All communication between the ECCI [Executive Committee of the Commu-nist International] and the CCP, between the ECCI and the FEB, between the FEB and the CCP, and between the FEB and other Communist parties in the Far East (not only enciphered telegrams, but also letters, packages, illegal printed matter, and so on). He had to distribute the money received from the Metropolitan Trading Co. to the FEB, KIM [Communist Youth International], CCP, and so on. Flats and houses, whether for living purposes, for “business” (for the FEB, for the FEB’s military section, for OMS activities like encipher¬ing and record-keeping all unconnected from each other) or as meeting¬places (separate places for meetings between members of the FEB and of the CCP, meetings with couriers, or meetings with members of other East Asian Communist parties), had to be rented by him, as well as cover addresses, P. O. Boxes and telegraphic addresses. Flats had to be furnished, staffed with ser-vants and wound up when the respective agent had left. Students for the KUTV (Communist University for Eastern Workers) as well as agents of the Comintern had to be channelled through Shanghai. In short, everything to do with accommodation, finance and communication was within Noulens’ purview.95
He had arrived in the city with a stolen Belgian passport under the name of Ferdinand van der Cruysen, and he had many aliases, including Charles Alison, Donat Boulanger, Samuel Herssans, and Dr. W. O’Neill. In Shang¬hai he had ten separate apartments, eight post office boxes, seven tele¬graphic addresses, two offices, one shop, and ten separate bankbooks with deposits totaling $500,000—which was an astonishingly high figure at the time, smack in the middle of the Great Depression.96
The first inkling the police had of Noulens’s existence came when the British authorities in Singapore arrested a French Comintern courier named Joseph Ducroux, alias Serge Le Franc. Among his belongings was found a Shanghai telegraphic code address (“Hilanoul, Shanghai”) and the number of a post office box in the International Settlement.97 The code was part of an elaborate communications arrangement that was later found to consist of two different cryptographic systems involving one code to corre¬spond with Comintern workers in Asia, and a second set to correspond with Comintern leaders in Moscow and Europe.98
Meanwhile, following leads of their own, Chinese investigators began to track down the same Comintern network. The case began with the arrest of a suspected Communist agent in Hubei province. Juntong’s interrogators in Wuhan tried repeatedly to break the suspect, whose name was Guan Zhao- nan, but he held out under torture until a legal official sent out from Nan¬jing persuaded him to write a letter to the Shanghai branch of the CCP ask¬ing that a courier be sent to contact him.99
Shanghai duly complied, and soon an agent named Lu Dubu arrived in Wuhan, where he was picked up by Dai Li’s men. Although he quickly broke under torture, Lu could tell them very little about the inner organization of the CCP in Shanghai because he was restricted to external communications liaison duties in the party. Dai Li therefore decided to use Lu to smoke out other underground agents, and had the hapless Communist brought back to Shanghai and put in the custody of the garrison command’s detective brigade. Then Lu was made to follow his usual contact procedure by regis¬tering in the East Asia Hotel (Dongya luguan) on Nanking Road, and by posting a letter to his elder brother with his whereabouts.
At the same time, Shanghai Station agents were stationed in Lu Dubu’s room and in the room next door. The following day Dubu’s brother, Lu Haifang, came to the hotel and went directly to Dubu’s room, which he en¬tered without knocking. The moment he opened the door, Lu Haifang spotted the SSD agent asleep in a chair, and he quickly backed out of the room without awakening the dozing secret service man. But the agents in the other room did spot him, and—led by Shen Zui—dashed after him as he ran downstairs. Lu Haifang almost got away. He slipped into the Xianshi department store to lose himself in the crowds of shoppers, but Shen Zui cannily waited by a side door, and when the Communist agent tried to sneak out that exit, Shen managed to get handcuffs on him in spite of furious resistance.100
Lu Haifang proved to be an invaluable catch. First of all, he turned with surprising rapidity. On the day of his arrest he was first taken to the Louza Road police station (Laozha bufang) of the SMP, and a few hours later he was extradited to the zhencha dadui of the garrison command. Dai Li was present to supervise the interrogation. Before anyone had laid a hand on him, but just as they were bringing out the instruments of torture, Lu Haifang volunteered to betray his leaders to Juntong. This was one of the quickest defections of a seasoned Communist agent that anyone could re¬member. Second, his position in the party was unique: he was—Dai Li’s men soon discovered—the English-language secretary of the top Comin¬tern intelligence agent in the Far East.101
Shen Zui later claimed that it was Lu Haifang who betrayed Noulens to the French police.102 Actually, it was the SMP who made the arrest on June 15, 1931, seizing the Russian spy in one of his flats on Sichuan Road.103 But Lu Haifeng did cooperate closely with the SSD agents, even though he was excoriated by his wife for being a “renegade.” 104 He successively im¬plicated as Communists a member of the League of Left-Wing Writers, an actress who was making a film of Blithe Spirit (Ziyou shen), and a young woman nicknamed “Black Peony” (Hei Mudan) who had studied in Ger¬many with the support of Yang Hu and Zhang Qun.105 Lu also told them all that he could about his chief, which was precious little. In fact, the police initially could find out almost nothing at all about their prisoner, who first identified himself as a Swiss named Germain Xavier Alois Beuret, and then as one Paul Ruegg.106
Noulens, in the meantime, observed a quiet and dignified demeanor, in contrast to his arrested wife, who was aggressive and belligerent.107 Dai Li at first was forced to confess to Chiang Kai-shek that he did not know who the man was, though the suspicion was that he was the head of the Far Eastern intelligence division of the Comintern whom the British were seeking. In the end Noulens and his wife were put on trial in Wuhan, where they were sentenced to death by the Nanjing court. This was commuted to life im¬prisonment, but the Noulenses ended up serving only five years for their es¬pionage. When the Japanese took Nanjing, the Noulenses were released from jail to seek their own bail money and reappeared briefly in Shanghai before disappearing again, probably headed for the Soviet Union.108
The “case of the strange Westerner” (guai xiren an), which is how the Chi¬nese newspapers referred to the trial, fascinated the Shanghai press. When the Noulenses went on a hunger strike, Soong Qingling, Yang Quan, and Shen Junru went to the Nanjing prison to see the couple, and then sent two telegrams to the government demanding their release. One read, “If you refuse the Noulens’ request [to be released] and force them to go on fast¬ing, revolutionary and liberal opinion throughout the world will hold the KMT [GMD] responsible for their deaths. This way of killing them is com¬parable to the atrocities of Nazi Germany.” 109
Although the government refused the request, the Noulenses eventually resumed eating, but neither ever admitted guilt.110 Their stoic demeanor confirmed the image in many people’s eyes of the implacable Communist agent who refused to reveal even his name under interrogation.111 This im¬age persisted in later years in spy stories and novels, especially those written and published after 1949 in the PRC. In Red Crag (Hong yan), which con¬cerns the secret service after Dai Li’s death, the Communist prisoner who is about to be interrogated is described as having a “gaunt face” that was “ex¬pressionless” and that had a “look of cool detachment.” The character of Xu Pengfei—the actual head of Group Two of the Shanghai Station in 1934- 35—is, on the other hand, depicted in the novel as being apprehensive and nervous, as well as convinced that only by means of sudden and harsh cru¬elty can the secret service chief rattle the composure of a prisoner of such “strength of character.” According to the novel, “Xu Pengfei had a start. The cool detachment of this man would be a ticklish thing to handle. He pulled himself together and reflected that the only way to deal with such a man was to strike him with lightning-like blows.” 112
In fact, most people broke sooner or later under secret police torture. What Communist prisoners appeared to be particularly skillful at doing— perhaps because they were trained ahead of time for the experience of in- terrogation—was providing false information that would help other mem¬bers of their organization get away. Often, for instance, a CCP agent being tortured in the zhencha dadui would pretend to reveal the location of the headquarters organization but actually give an address one or two blocks away. Until the secret police caught on to this trick, they would launch a raid against a totally harmless address close enough to the real headquarters to alert the party leadership to seek safer refuge elsewhere.113
ARRESTING COMMUNISTS
One should not exaggerate the skill of the Communists and deprecate the often deadly success of the secret police altogether, even though one of our main sources—the turncoat Shen Zui—does so in works published in the PRC after his “reeducation” was completed. In May 1933, for example, GMD secret agents intercepted intelligence about a secret rendezvous with Ying Xiuren, the poet and children’s book writer who was doing underground work for the CCP after spending several years in the Soviet Union. When Ying, who was a member of the League of Left-Wing Writers, went on a se¬cret mission to a building near Kunshan Park, armed agents were waiting for him. In the struggle that followed he was hurled through the window to his death. Ying Xiuren was the seventh member of Shanghai left-wing cul¬tural circles to be killed by the secret police hors de la loi.114
Generally speaking, however, the more contact Shanghai Station officers had with Communist underground agents, the more skittish they were about trying to approach or arrest them.115 Their wariness was understand¬able. SSD agents who were formerly Communists sometimes found that when they attempted to cultivate CCP members they still knew, they ran the risk of getting beaten or killed as pantu themselves. Wang Kequan, the as¬sistant head of the operations section, once spotted two people in the Pudong factory area whom he recognized as having formerly worked under him in the CCP. Thinking he could persuade them to join him in the SSD, he took them off for a quiet talk, only to be beaten half to death with his own gun until a police patrol came along and scared away his former comrades. Thereafter Wang, like many other “renegades,” shunned former party con- frères out of sheer self-preservation.116
Shen Zui himself came to appreciate the risk of running up against un¬derground agents one night in the summer of 1935 when he led a dozen or so SSD men up to Jiangwan to arrest a group of Communists who were hold¬ing a meeting. As they approached the gathering place, they were discov¬ered and the group of Communists scattered, leaving one man behind with a gun to hold off the secret police. In the flurry of shots that followed Shen Zui was shot in the chest by the Communist. Surgeons removed the small caliber bullet, but Shen carried the scar thereafter.117
Later that winter, after he had recovered, Shen Zui took two agents along when he went to Caojiadu to arrest a writer suspected of being a Commu¬nist. Since the suspect was a literary person, he seemed to pose no threat, and the SSD agents were quite relaxed after they had gained entry to his apartment with the help of his landlord. The writer asked to be allowed to get his clothes on, and then, just as it was time to leave, he suddenly reached into his hat, pulled out a hand grenade, and snatched out the safety pin. No one dared reach for his gun. The writer then backed to the door and sud¬denly switched off the lights. Pandemonium ensued. The agents were sure he had dropped the grenade and scurried for protection, but there was no explosion. By the time the SSD men had gotten the lights back on, they dis¬covered that the writer had slipped away, locking them in. Shen Zui and his men broke down the door and rushed outside, but a nearby factory was changing shifts and it was impossible to find the suspect in the crowd.118
It was much safer for Shanghai Station officers to collar “progressive” stu¬dents handing out anti-Japanese pamphlets or to mount raids on book¬stores carrying pro-Soviet literature than to detect and arrest a known Com¬munist agent. According to Shen Zui’s own biased account, during the three years that he served in the Shanghai Station’s communications section, from 1932 to 1935, not one of the thirty or more “communications agents under direct control” was a Communist Party cadre, and there were only two who were members of peripheral organizations of the CCP. And Shen claimed not to know of a single successful penetration of the party itself dur¬ing his six years of active service in Shanghai.119
This failure on the part of Juntong’s Shanghai Station constantly pro¬voked Dai Li’s rage.120 “If we go on in this way,” he shouted at the station chief and several group leaders one night during a dinner party in the Apricot Flower Pavilion (Xinghua lou) on Sima Road, “our work is going to collapse. How can you manage not to penetrate a single Communist organization?” 121
Dai Li’s criticisms must have echoed Chiang Kai-shek’s complaints, de¬spite the very real success of the Nationalist secret police in securing key CCP defections.122 Later on neither man could forget that during those years the Shanghai Station was utterly ignorant of the fact that, as of 1931, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party had moved itself, lock, stock, and barrel, from the French Concession to the rugged moun¬tains of Jiangxi. It was a colossal intelligence failure, hardly made up for by the waves of kidnappings and assassinations that fell upon other suspected enemies of the regime.123
The Nationalists’ counterespionage successes on the ground did, how¬ever, imperceptibly alter the balance of power within the Chinese Commu¬nist Party, setting the stage for Mao Zedong’s rise to supremacy after the Zunyi Conference of January 1935.124 Because Chiang Kai-shek’s secret po- lice was able to sever all electronic communication between the Comin¬tern’s Shanghai office and the Executive Committee of the Communist In¬ternational in Moscow, “the total isolation of the Central Committee [of the CCP] from the outside world was to play an inestimable role in the further development of the Party. It gathered even more significance when it lasted into 1936, the year of the Comintern’s Seventh World Congress, which de¬termined the strategic and tactical course of the Communist and Workers parties.” 125 Even as Wang Ming was addressing the congress on the need to end the civil war in China, Mao, left to his own devices, was mustering strength for a new rural strategy that would eventually lead to victory over Chiang and his urban minions in Shanghai and beyond.
Chapter 12
Death Squads
Because murdering people had become his second nature, [Zhao Lijun] came into friction with special agents of Central Statistics in Henan, and ended up secretly ar¬resting and burying alive six people, including a Central Statistics administrative inspector and a middle school principal. After an investigation by Central Statistics brought forth positive proof [of Zhao’s involvement in these murders], Chen Lifu and others tearfully implored Chiang Kai-shek to punish him severely. Dai Li still thought that he could protect him, but because Chiang Kai-shek wanted Central Sta¬tistics special agents to continue to exert all of their strength on his behalf against the Communists and the people, he decided to have Zhao shot. Thus, the executioner who had slaughtered people for Chiang Kai-shek for more than a decade was in the end killed by his own master. In addition to being grief-stricken for a while, Dai Li later, whenever he came to Chongqing, always went to the Military Statistics cemetery at Longquanyi to pay a visit to his grave.
SHEN ZUI, Juntong neimu, 58
ABDUCTION
Kidnapping was a specialty of the secret agents commanded by Dai Li, and it was conducted on a vast scale, especially by the Shanghai Station of Jun- tong.1 Zhao Lijun, head of the East China District Operations Group (Hua- dong qu xingdong zu), simply could not remember how many persons he had ordered abducted and killed during the years when he was in charge of “secret arrests” (bimi daibu) in the Shanghai area.2 Of course, certain key ab¬ductions always stood out in agents’ memories, and these famous cases later became the examples used in the curriculum of Juntong training camps where secret service cadres, in addition to learning how to drive the auto¬mobiles so indispensable to modern abduction techniques, were also given seven or eight hours of instruction drawn from the accumulated experi¬ences of kidnapping missions during the early 1930s.3
By 1937, SSD agents boasted that they could kidnap anybody, anyplace, anytime.4 But that was not always the case, especially in a city the size of Shanghai, where one was hardly ever out of the sight of another human be¬ing, and where—before the Shanghai Station’s budget grew large enough to afford an automobile—kidnappings often had to be conducted on foot.5 Since, more often than not, this meant carrying out the abduction in the midst of a slew of pedestrians, deception was absolutely essential. Typically, one agent would pretend to be a robber and use a homemade blackjack, fashioned out of a rubber tube filled with shotgun pellets, to knock the victim unconscious. Another agent standing nearby would then rush up through the crowd and pretend to be a relative, dragging the coshed victim away from the assailant and hailing a ricksha, which he would loudly or¬der to the nearest hospital. Once away from the crowd, however, the agent would tell the ricksha coolie that he wanted to take the victim home first. Then the agent would deliver the unconscious suspect to another address, where he would be picked up by other members of the unit and taken off to be interrogated.6
Once there were enough cars to go around, Dai Li’s men began to use the standard gangland technique of hustling their victim into a waiting au¬tomobile at gunpoint from behind. This was not a foolproof method, and victims sometimes managed to get away before they could be shoved into the motorcar and driven off. Dai Li himself was infuriated by several of these botched attempts, and he insisted that members of the Shanghai Station perfect their craft by practicing on one other. Gradually, Shanghai agents developed a standard modus operandi requiring four assailants. They shad¬owed their victim until they had determined his or her daily routine, then they stationed a car nearby. As the victim, or “meal ticket” (roupiao), strolled along the street, one agent approached from the rear while another walked toward the hapless person from the front. When the two converged, a car simultaneously pulled alongside. The driver would stop the car, engine idl¬ing, while another agent in the backseat opened the curbside door. At that same moment, the agent to the rear would shove a gun in the victim’s back just as the man to the front stepped forward and punched the victim in the belly. When the roupiao bent forward as the wind was knocked out of him or her, the agent behind would put his hand on the victim’s back to keep him or her from straightening up, and the man inside the car would simply reach out and yank their prey into the backseat. Within moments the car would be moving smoothly through traffic again while the two curbside agents melted back into the crowd as though nothing had happened.7
Various “soft” (ruan) variations were developed on this technique in or¬der to satisfy Dai Li, who wanted his men to be able to snatch their victims from crowded streets in broad daylight without attracting more than pass¬ing notice. To avoid flashing firearms, Shanghai field agents learned how to disable the victim momentarily by using qinna pressure points. The two curbside secret policemen would pretend to play a friendly trick upon the victim, as though he were an acquaintance. From behind, the agent would put his hands over the person’s eyes, jamming his thumbs with great force into the mastoid area so that the victim was too stunned to cry out. The sec¬
ond agent would step forward then and grab the “meal ticket” firmly by the hands, saying, “I bet you can’t guess who it is.” Then the two agents would laughingly tumble the disoriented victim into the car, leaving bystanders with the impression that they had just witnessed a happy reunion among old friends.8
Another variation, which was particularly effective with targets who were men about town and thought of themselves as lotharios, was to use two fe¬male field agents. One, dressed flashily enough to be the man’s mistress, would accost the victim on a crowded street, shouting and crying as though he had thrown her over for another girlfriend. While the victim insisted that this was a case of mistaken identity, another woman would alight from a passing car and pose as the mistress’s friend, offering to mediate the quar¬rel if the two of them would come along with her for a talk. As the victim hesitated, two other agents—male this time—would step forward from the crowd, saying, “What? At it again? Aren’t you ashamed to conduct this kind of behavior on the open street? Let’s get in the car and talk this over.” In¬variably, the victim would feel that the easiest way to resolve this problem was to get in the car and explain who he really was to these strangers. Once inside, of course, the poor “meal ticket” disappeared forever.9
Sometimes rapid improvisation was required. For example, Chen Liuan, the special agent in charge of the Guixi clique’s activities in Shanghai, was put on the Shanghai Station’s kidnapping list. Keeping Chen’s house under surveillance, Shen Zui saw Chen come out of the front door with a suitcase in his hand, obviously looking for a cab that he had phoned to take him to the train station. Shen Zui instantly ran down to the end of the lane and hopped into the arriving taxi, pretending to be a member of Chen Liuan’s entourage. Then, when the car pulled up in front of Chen’s gate he jumped out again and acted as though he were the chauffeur’s aide by opening the door and ushering Chen into the backseat. Once they were clear of the house, however, Shen asked the driver to pull over as they came abreast of two of the SSD men on stakeout. The secret servicemen clambered into the car, drew their guns, and directed the frightened chauffeur to drive them to the garrison command. Chen’s panicked protests notwithstanding, the chauffeur dared not resist the military detectives and obligingly took them to their destination.10
These elaborate kidnappings were not the practice in the Chinese sec¬tions of Shanghai, where the seizures were carried out as regular secret po¬lice arrests, usually in the middle of the night.11 In the French Concession and the International Settlement, however, they were the norm. Although SSD agents, operating as regular PSB or garrison command detectives, could request—and get—help from the police in either foreign concession to make an arrest, Dai Li preferred not to operate that way.12
VICTIMS
One reason for Dai Li’s reluctance in Shanghai to seek the help of the in¬ternational police was that most arrests were made in the early evening, and the prisoners were then held over until the following day, when a formal request for extradition could be submitted. This gave journalists time to run down the story and publish articles about the case in local newspapers that Dai Li had no way of controlling. Consequently, Shanghai Station agents working out of Zhao Lijun’s operations section, which was later com¬manded by Shen Zui, were instructed to carry out “secret arrests” (bimi daibu), which were actually political kidnappings. This kept the prisoners completely out of the hands of the Western police, and the stories of their arrest utterly out of the pages of the local press.13
Dai Li’s abhorrence of press reports was quite reasonable: publicity exposed his secret realm and tied his hands. One of the best-known ex¬amples of this was the disappearance of the writer Ding Ling on May 14, 1933, when police agents raided her apartment on Kunshan Road and seized her, her husband Feng Da, and a Communist friend—all of whom completely slipped from public view.14 The semipublic kidnapping was protested by the secretary-general of the League for the Protection of Hu¬man Rights, Yang Xingfo (Yang Quan), but the protest was met with official silence, and Yang himself was assassinated soon afterward.15
Another, perhaps even better, example was the Liu Luyin affair, which took place in 1936. Liu Luyin, who was believed to be a follower of Wang Yaqiao, had come to Shanghai that winter to represent the interests of Chen Jitang, Hu Hanmin, and other members of the Guangdong clique.16 Like most of Chiang’s enemies who knew that they might end up on a death list, Liu chose to quarter himself in the safety of the French Concession. Orders therefore went out from Dai Li to the Shanghai Station to stage a kidnap¬ping and bring the victim back to Nanjing for secret trial and execution.17
The first task was to locate Liu. Shen Zui’s agents learned that Liu’s young concubine, a woman named Hua, was living near Rue Pétain and that Liu was likely to be with her most evenings. After loading his men into the sta¬tion’s Studebaker, Shen Zui was driving across the French Concession to¬ward Rue Pétain when he spotted Liu and the young woman coming in the opposite direction in a new bright green Ford. The SSD agents quickly made a U-turn, but the Ford sped up and swiftly outran their old sedan, los¬ing them in Shanghai’s back streets. However, Shen Zui had been able to jot down Liu’s license number, and word went out to his men to search for the car throughout the city. Agents soon spotted the Ford parked in front of the Yangzi Restaurant on Sanmalu off Fuzhou Road in the International Settle¬ment. Shen Zui surrounded the restaurant with his men, and when the couple came out of the building at midnight, stepping into a lightly falling
snow, the Juntong men pounced upon them, forcing Liu and his concubine into the backseat of their sedan.
The two of them put up a desperate resistance. Miss Hua screamed for help at the top of her voice, and Liu threw himself across the partition into the front seat and struggled with the chauffeur, who was trying to drive off. Before the car could pull away, an English policeman ran up and placed them all under arrest, taking them into custody at the Louza (Laozha) head¬quarters of the Shanghai Municipal Police. The SSD men had their own po¬lice badges to fall back upon, of course, and they were able in short order to arrange for Liu Luyin’s extradition to Wuhan on charges of instigating the assassination of Yang Yongtai, the head of the political study clique and the chairman of the Hubei provincial government who was supposedly mur¬dered by Cheng Xiechao at the Hankou ferry wharf after attending a re¬ception at the American consulate on October 25, 1936.18 But once the af¬fair was thrown into the open in this way, Dai Li could no longer arrange one of his secret trials and peremptory military executions. Liu Luyin’s fate was decided in an open hearing by the criminal section of the Wuchang Dis¬trict Court, which eventually sentenced him to ten years in jail and five years’ deprivation of civil rights.19
Celebrated cases notwithstanding, most of the victims of Dai Li’s death squads were anonymous students and workers. Workers were usually seized outside their factories, which the SSD men hesitated to enter for fear of en¬countering resistance from fellow comrades.20 Whenever possible the ab¬ductions were made at night, when there would be more time for the inter¬rogators to extract information before the victim’s absence was noticed.21 Once in the clutches of the SSD, both workers and students simply disap¬peared from sight, suffering anonymously at the hands of torturers who sel¬dom knew their captives’ real identities.22
TORTURE
In Shanghai, the torture room was behind the lice-ridden sheds where the prisoners were kept. With the exception of a small number of captives who defected to Juntong on the spot, all of the other unfortunates routinely underwent torture, which was conducted by a special guards unit ( jingwei) under the supervision of a section chief, inspector, or deputy brigade head, without any legally appointed interrogation officials (shenxunyuan) pre- sent.23 There was no one, in other words, to prevent the torturers from hor¬ribly maiming their victims. As the jailers themselves put it, “You only have people in good walking condition upon entry. You seldom have people in good walking condition on their way out.” 24
Torture was perforce routine, and the threat of it was always present in interrogations, as the novel Hong yan (Red crag) showed when the secret po¬lice chief Xu Pengfei was questioning the Communist Xu Yunfeng.25 Dur¬ing the interrogation, when the Communist agent presented a particularly haughty mien, Chief Xu suddenly had an iron door in the wall opened, and out of the adjoining torture cell came a dazzling glare and the reek of blood, shed by the Communist’s battered assistant, who had also been dragged in by the secret police. “A torn, bleeding body was lying on the concrete floor with heavy fetters on its ankles. Blood was still dripping from the motionless figure. Several hairy-chested men stood over him holding gory whips. One of them picked up a brown leather jacket and with a hideous laugh tossed it towards the unconscious man.” 26 Torture, which is described again and again in the novel in the most harrowing detail, brought the masters of the secret world—Dai Li and his lieutenants—their most intimate and de¬praved sense of ultimate power.27
There was the sound of whips whistling through the air and thudding on naked flesh The man in the swivel chair straightened up and lit a ciga¬
rette. Slowly blowing out smoke rings, he listened to the cries, the faintest hint of a smile playing around his lips. To him the screams of the torture were like music. He was used to this life. A lull in the groans and shrieks, and a feeling of emptiness and fear would overtake him. Without interrogations under tor¬ture, he would have lacked a sense of his own existence and power.28
The man in the swivel chair was a thinly disguised Major General Xu Yuanju, one of the “bloodthirsty monsters” in Juntong who by 1948 was chief of the Second Department of the Southwest Bureau and concurrently director of the Security Department of the MSB.29
It is not pleasant to dwell upon this harrowing aspect of the SSD death squads’ activities, but we will never comprehend the terror of the victims’ experience nor the horror of their disappearance unless we stop briefly to consider the way in which torture became part of the Nationalist secret ser¬vice’s routine operating procedures under Dai Li.30 Certainly, the practice cannot merely be viewed pathologically, although the stereotype of the tor¬turer is that of a sadist. Some torturers may be psychotic, but medical stud¬ies have found “that most are not sadists in the psychological sense; that is, they are not people who derive sexual excitement from the infliction of cru¬elty.” Rather, conditions that lead someone to become a torturer include “a fervently held ideology that attributes great evil to some other group and defines the believer as a guardian of the social good; an attitude of unques¬tioning obedience to authority; and the open or tacit support of the torturer by his peers.” 31
ESA torturers serving in 1970 at the Eidikon Anakritikon Tmima (Spe¬cial Interrogation Center) in Athens or at the military prison in Boyati, for example, were guided by fanatical anti-Communists like Major Theo¬doros Theofiloyannakos, who was “totally indifferent” to the physical con¬dition of his prisoners.32 “I am convinced,” said the prosecutor at his trial, “that if there had been a catastrophic earthquake, the only person in the whole of Greece to attribute it to the Communists would have been Major Theofiloyannakos.” 33
Along with this fanatical self-certainty went a process of brutalization that “tried to awaken the beast” in the police cadets.34
If the proper learning procedures are applied under the right circumstances, any individual is a potential torturer. An explanation that has recourse to the presence of strong sadistic impulses is inadequate, and to believe that only sadists can perform such violent acts is a fallacy and a comfortable rational-ization to ease our liberal minds.35
Here is testimony from the 1975 trial of the Greek Military Police delivered by Georgios Kambanas, an ESA corporal and jailer:
From the moment we arrived at KESA from the basic training center, the tor¬ture began. They snatched us from the army lorries and threw us down like sacks. The beating began, and they made us eat the straps from our berets
They beat us with belts and clubs The beating never stopped. They beat
us in the lorries, in the lecture halls, and during the lessons I thought of
asking to be transferred from ESA, but I realized that it was as much as my life was worth I beat prisoners to save myself.36
One former ESA soldier said that their training “had the effect of turning the trainees into ‘clockwork soldiers’”; and a dentistry student, twice ar¬rested by ESA men, claimed that the military torturers “had been specially trained so that fascism had passed into their personalities They are not
weird monsters but the results of a system of training.” 37 They were on their way to becoming, in Shen Zui’s words that described his own acceptance of the need to torture prisoners, “persons who had lost their human nature” (shiqule renxing de ren). 38
The interrogation room in the Shanghai Station lockup was traversed by a thick joist. Hempen ropes were suspended from the heavy wooden beam. The end of one of these was made fast to the thumbs of the prisoner, whose hands were tied behind his back. At the shout “diao!” (“lift up!”) the rope was yanked and the person was lifted off the ground. At first the victim was left with his tiptoes touching the ground, and the rope was tied to a hook while the interrogation continued. After several minutes the victim’s face would be covered with perspiration. If there were no confession at that point, then the torturers would shout—like lictors in a traditional yamen announcing the next level of judicial punishment—“Che!” (“pull!”), and the body would be hoisted clear of the floor, its weight suspended entirely from the victim’s thumbs. While the wretch’s entire body broke out in sweat, the interrogators would sit in relaxed positions, smoking cigarettes while they watched the person writhe in torment. If the prisoner still refused to talk, the pain usually made him pass out.39 Then the body was taken down and doused with cold water until the victim recovered consciousness and could be hoisted again. Usually, one session of diao was enough to get the prisoner to reveal all that he knew.40
If diao—and the use of the insider’s jargon (the esoterics of cruelty) is very telling—were not enough, then the Juntong torturers moved on to “fry the ribs” (chao paigu). 41 Again, the person was hung from the beam on his tiptoes, and his legs were tied together to keep him from kicking.42 The vic¬tim’s clothing was stripped away and the person’s back was pressed against the wall. One of the interrogators would don thick leather gloves and then slowly squeeze down on the ribs, moving the gloves up and down the flanks both to create friction and to put pressure on the internal organs. Although prisoners who survived this torture might feel internal pains for a long time afterward, the agony at the time of the ordeal was not sufficient to cause un¬consciousness, and SSD interrogators favored it for precisely that reason until much later, when they learned how to use magnetos for torture.43
DEHUMANIZATION
The fundamental psychological device of the torturer is to divide the world into “us” and “them.” Scapegoating and devaluing are important means of effecting this division. The cruelty unleashed upon the victim is promoted by the torturer’s need to believe that the world is just. One consequence of this belief is that interrogators view the prisoners as having brought their plight upon themselves. The victims, in effect, deserve what is happening to them; and their suffering, in the torturer’s eyes, justifies further mistreat¬ment. These are not uncommon thought processes, and they rarely lead to brutality under normal circumstances. But they are the mental precondi¬tions for mistreating another person, and thus they function as the psychic seeds of brutal dehumanization for those who are able to define the victims as an evil group posing a threat to social order or as a source of racial in-fection and impurity.44
Torturers are mostly made, not born, and they have to be initiated into that perverse mentality gradually. Amnesty International has reported that guards who become torturers are often first posted just outside the interro¬gation cells, where they hear the sounds of beating from within. Then they are moved into the detention rooms, where they witness the degradation of the victim. Finally, if they get through these duties satisfactorily, they are “suddenly actively involved” and brought forth to beat the prisoners themselves.45
Just as the torturers “lose their human nature,” so must the victim be made to feel that he has lost his spiritual way, and that he is also going to lose part of his physical wholeness.46 Dai Li’s men used two types of torture to this end: the “tiger bench” (laohu deng) and “treading on the stick” (dao gangzi), both of which left the victim crippled.47 SSD interrogators often ap¬plied this treatment to suspected Communists, whose bodies they wanted to maim. “The special agents, in order to force a revolutionary to come out with a new clue, would always want to use every means possible to torment the body of the revolutionary.” 48 The desire to debase and deform was bal¬anced by the drive for scientific efficiency. Secret policemen such as Shen Zui who taught “operations techniques” (xingdong jishu) to new recruits were always interested in developing more effective methods of torture and perfecting new devices, both of which were tried out within a day or so of their “invention” on prisoners in the Shanghai Station lockup before being incorporated into the Juntong training curriculum.49 Psychologically, this “professional” and seemingly detached interest in “go[ing] about the busi¬ness of torture” was part of what Robert J. Lifton calls “doubling”: the de¬velopment of “a full repertory of feelings and habits that are quite specific to [the torturer’s] evil role” and that allow him “to revert to his ordinary self while away from work.” Doubling is the key to doing day-to-day evil, and it explains how people can become immersed in activities that are so much out of keeping with the rest of their lives.50
But doubling was not an entirely hermetic process. The brutalization that characterized the making of a torturer spilled over, and a bestialization of the entire personality gradually took place as taboo after taboo was bro¬ken within the confines of the torture chamber. Juntong torturers, for in¬stance, engaged in cannibalism. Playing upon the term “chicken-hearted” (dan xiao, literally “with a small bladder or guts”), Dai Li’s men would take the heart and liver from a murdered prisoner, fry the organs, and eat them, saying, “Eating someone’s heart makes your own dan stronger.” 51 They also routinely raped young women, especially suspected Communists, with the blessings of Dai Li, who thought that this was a reward or “encouragement” (guli) to his operations agents for work well done.52
The ranks of torturers obviously include more than an average share of sexual perverts or sexually obsessed people. Yet Amnesty International representatives who followed the trials of the ESA officers in Greece re¬marked that:
Although such sexual aberrations among torturers often attract considerable attention and deserve condemnation from well-meaning opponents of tor¬ture, it is important to see that these individual perversions are not the cause of a system of torture. Rather, once a system of torture has been created in or¬der to support the political needs of those in power, the ruler’s agents will ex¬hibit patterns of behavior that they would not otherwise be in a position to do so. Social jealousy and sexual aggression are two cases in point.53
Nevertheless, in the eyes of a Juntong officer himself, secret service inter¬rogations of women, and especially of defiant young student radicals, were an opportunity for his men “to give vent to their bestial desires” by inflict¬ing sexual pain and humiliation upon members of the opposite sex.54
SSD agents seemed to save their cruelest and most sadistic outrages for the women in their custody. Their nipples were pierced with pins, bamboo slivers were driven into their fingernails, and their genitals were whipped with rattan canes. These were all tortures ultimately sanctioned by Dai Li, who used exactly the same cruelties himself against Yao Ying, the wife of the man who tried to assassinate Chiang Kai-shek and instead wounded Wang Jingwei in November 1935.55
Sexual humiliation was almost too common to bear mention, with mod¬est young women of good family being forced to strip off their clothing and expose themselves to their brutish torturers’ mockery and fondling. Occa¬sionally, but only very seldom, was a woman able to shame her torturers in return. Shen Zui tells the story of Xu Yuanju’s interrogation of the Com¬munist Jiang Zhuyun in Chongqing. After she disdainfully refused to answer his questions, Xu resorted to his usual practice (which he claimed in nine cases out of ten broke the will of the female prisoner) of ordering his men to strip off Jiang’s clothes. But she refused to be cowed, shouting back:
Do you think you can strike terror in me by humiliating me with your base methods of stripping me naked? But I say to you, do not forget that you were born of woman. Your mother is a woman; so are your wife, your daughter, and your sisters women. When you submit me to such humiliation, not only I but all the women on earth are being humiliated, which also includes your own mother! You have humiliated her too! If you have no sense of decency towards your mother, your sisters, and all women, then order your men to strip me! 56
At this point Shen Zui, who was observing the interrogation, “prodded [Xu] lightly with [his] foot and murmured, ‘Can’t you find some other way of dealing with her?’” Xu Yuanju fell back upon the tried-and-true method of driving bamboo splinters under her fingernails, but even that excruciating pain did not in the end bring Jiang to confess.57
DISPOSAL
The victims of torture frequently died. Indeed, standing orders from Nan¬jing were that if a kidnapped suspect refused to waver under interrogation, then he or she should be killed and the corpse concealed or destroyed.58 There were so many people who fell into the hands of the death squads and disappeared that, after 1949, many people claimed that acid baths or pools were used to dissolve their bodies. This was hardly necessary during the hey¬day of the secret service in Chongqing between 1945 and 1949, when bod¬
ies were simply buried (often still alive) with impunity, and only occasion¬ally was a corpse disfigured or burned to conceal the person’s identity.59 But in Shanghai, before the war, Dai Li’s men did not want to have the victims’ bodies discovered by the Concession police and the death squads’ crimes denounced to the foreign authorities. They therefore conducted “experi¬ments” (shiyan) with acid baths, but they discovered that the procedure was much more time-consuming and costly than they had anticipated.60
Instead, they favored a cheaper and simpler method of disposal called “moving the corpse by transport” (yi shi jia huo). After someone had been killed by Juntong, the body was dismembered and the grisly remains put in a trunk. Then the agents left the trunk in a deserted place or else carried it to the sidewalk and hired a ricksha boy to haul the container to a railroad station or hotel. At the first available opportunity the agents, who walked along behind the coolie pulling the laden ricksha, slipped away. When the ricksha boy reached his destination and found that his fares had disap¬peared, he would then, more often than not, take the trunk home thinking that he had fallen heir to foreign treasure until he opened it up and dis¬covered what its gruesome contents really were.61
The death squads used other means of disposing of their victims’ corpses. Sometimes, in order to mislead people into thinking that the death was a revenge for adultery, the agents would castrate male victims and stuff the dead man’s genitals in his mouth. Other times they simply bundled the corpse into a sack and threw the body into the Huangpu River. But Dai Li preferred the yi shi jia huo solution, believing that it was a tidy way of dispos¬ing of the thousands of persons who fell prey to secret police terror between 1928 and 1936, and ended up in the torture chambers of Zhao Lijun and his inquisitors.62
Chapter 13
Assassinations
Dai Li was a sadist addicted to killing [canren shisha]. Not only did he want to kill Communists and patriotic democrats, as well as all those who were opposed to Chiang; but if any of the members inside Juntong offended him or his gang rules [bang gui] in the slightest way, then the jig was up. Those among them who were secretly executed would have to be counted in the thousands.
ZHANG WEIHAN, “Dai Li yu ‘Juntong ju,’” 138
REVOLUTIONARY ASSASSINATION
The first Chinese revolutionary to attempt political assassination was Shi Jianru, who tried, as a “man of determination” (zhishi), to kill Deshou, the Manchu governor of Guangdong in October 1900.1 Although Shi had no developed rationale of his own for this suicidal effort, others influenced by Japanese anarchism and Russian nihilism began to enunciate a doctrine of sacrificial terrorism beginning in 1902. Yang Dusheng, a Chinese student at Waseda, learned of Russian revolutionary assassination efforts through the work of Kemuyama Sentaro, whose Modern Anarchism (Kinsei Museifushugi) was translated into Chinese under the title Freedom’s Blood (Ziyou xie); and Yang subsequently helped Huang Xing, the Hunanese student leader, to found the first of several assassination corps that culminated in the forma¬tion of the Northern Assassination Corps (Beifang ansha tuan) in 1905.2
The Northern Assassination Corps was best known for its member Wu Yue, who tried to bombard a delegation of five government political reform commissioners at the Beijing Railroad Station in September 1905. Wu Yue blew himself up instead, but he left behind a tract called Heaven’s Vengeance (Tian tao) that was published in April 1907 in the Revolutionary Alliance or¬gan, Minbao. The tract called for “assassinationism” (cishazhuyi), quoting the reform movement martyr Tan Sitong; and it cited with admiration the con¬scripts’ revolt led by Chen She against the tyrant of Qin as an example of the inspirational righteousness of the romantic xia, or medieval knight.3
Early on, then, the figure of the revolutionary assassin was cast with molds drawn both from the new world of international revolutionaries and from the traditional realm of self-sacrificing knights-errant and loyal re¬tainers, pledged to avenge their masters’ life and honor.4 Although partic¬ular motivations varied, the assassinations of Enming, governor of Anhui, in 1907 by Xu Xilin; of Fuqi and Fenshan in Guangdong in 1911; and of Liang Bi by Peng Jiazhen in January 1912 partook of these two traditions that converged most dramatically on the eve of the Xinhai Revolution in the famed effort by Wang Jingwei to blow up the Manchu regent Zaifeng (Prince Chun).5
Political assassination did not cease once the Qing dynasty was over¬thrown, but—as in the infamous conspiracy of Yuan Shikai to murder Song Jiaoren in 1913—revolutionary pretexts were often absent. Moreover, dur¬ing this period of political fragmentation and reordering, when boundless ambitions flourished, adventurers in the haohan (manly fellow) tradition were not slow to present themselves as the leaders of armed men, merce¬naries to some and loyal followers to other, willing and ready to serve as the “claws and teeth” of competing claimants to power. Dai Li was just such a leader himself, and he was by no means unique.6
WANG YAQIAO
In the early 1930s, for instance, readers of the “mosquito press” grew famil¬iar with the name of Wang Yaqiao, who was eventually identified by the Shanghai Times as “public enemy number one,” a mysterious figure “widely known as a notorious assassin responsible for a number of political mur¬ders.” 7 Wang, whose father was a country doctor who sold coffins on the side, was leader of the Anhui branch of Jiang Kanghu’s Chinese Socialist Party. Fleeing from local warlords to Shanghai in 1913, he became head of the Anhui Gang (Anhui bang) thanks to a band of “dare to die” hatchet- toting thugs who helped him control a number of labor unions and even¬tually followed him into the service of warlord Lu Yongxiang. Named com-mander of the Zhejiang Brigade Headquarters (Zhejiang zongdui siling) in 1923, Wang Yaqiao actually accepted Dai Li as one of his disciples, inviting him into his own home. According to later interviews conducted on Taiwan, Dai believed that the charismatic Wang was endowed with unique political skills. Because the “king of assassins” was able to attract support by project¬ing an aura of warm solicitude toward his followers, Dai Li reportedly emu¬lated Wang and learned to muffle his own cold and harshly dominant style of leadership.8
Wang Yaqiao first appears in the Shanghai police files as a leader of mer-cenaries during the military struggles over control of the Yangzi delta in the spring and fall of 1923.9 He soon, however, appeared to take on a “radical” cast, first as a sympathizer of the Bolshevik Revolution, and later as an affili¬ate of the social democratic Chinese Racial Revolutionary Union and head of special services for the Nineteenth Route Army.10 In November of that same year, the Shanghai Municipal Police, always hypersensitive to the Bol-
shevik danger, became alarmed by Wang Yaqiao’s activities in connection with the pro-Russian leanings of certain Chinese labor organizations. On November 7, 1923, the Chinese National Laborers Salvation Society, which had its headquarters in an office near St. Catherine’s Bridge in Shanghai, sent a telegram of congratulations to the Soviet representative in Beijing, extending congratulations on the sixth anniversary of the foundation of the Soviet Russian Republic and acting for the southwestern warlords in seek¬ing an alliance with Russia:
This day six years ago Russia became a republic. The Chinese laborers have the pleasure of congratulating you on this occasion and take this opportunity to express our wishes for your success and to request you to leave Peking at once and proceed to the south to sign a Russo-Chinese commercial treaty with the government of the Southwest. The friendly relations between China and Russia will thus be upheld, and the peoples of the two nations will benefit.11
Wang Yaqiao, who was the organizer and chairman of the society, had per¬sonally presided over the meeting that drafted the telegram.12
However high-minded and patriotic Wang Yaqiao’s motives might have been as leader of the Laborers Salvation Society, he was at the very same time deeply involved in the intrigues and machinations surrounding the monopolization of illegal narcotics in the Shanghai area. Three days after the meeting was held to draft the telegram to the Russian representative, the Chinese general who was in charge of the native constabulary of Shang¬hai and Song-Hu was assassinated. The murder of General Xu Guoliang on November 10, 1923, was perpetrated by a man named Li Dasheng. Li, alias Zheng Yiming, was a follower of Wang Yaqiao and was said to have been act¬ing on his master’s orders. Wang in turn was believed to have ordered the killing both to resolve a jurisdictional squabble and to remove a police of- ficial—Xu Guoliang—who refused to condone the massive traffic in opiates through Shanghai.13
The jurisdictional squabble was related to the struggle then taking place between the Jiangsu dujun (warlord) who was military governor of Nanjing, General Qi Xieyuan, and the Zhejiang warlord General He Fengling.14 The official version of this affair, which was issued by General Qi’s representative fifteen days after the assassination took place, claimed that He Fengling had become jealous of Xu Guoliang after he had been named superintendent general of the constabulary by Governor Ji.15 But Qi Xieyuan himself read¬ily admitted that the immediate reason for Xu Guoliang’s murder was the narcotics traffic. In an interview that appeared on January 8, 1924, in the North China Daily News, Governor Qi said:
General Hsu was in the way of a gang of official opium smugglers. He tried to stop the smuggling but met with little success. In fact, his efforts to expose those connected with the affair resulted in his death. He managed, however, to report the affairs of this official gang to the civil governor just before his death and made it plain that those in charge of the affairs of the gang wanted the money for war purposes and wanted to murder him.16
The two reasons were obviously connected: if one of the two warring sides could establish a narcotics monopoly in Shanghai, then the revenue from that source would help finance the military preparations that would in turn guarantee victory and ultimate control over the city’s drug trade. Since it was in Qi’s interest to keep that source of revenue out of his enemies’ hands, supposed opium suppression was one facet of an all-around policy of de¬priving the Zhejiang warlords, Lu Yongxiang and He Fengling, from addi¬tional funds.17
Hence, once Governor Qi’s government announced plans to establish a police office at Shanghai under Xu Guoliang’s aegis to stop opium and arms smuggling, He Fengling countered by setting up an office of his own under militaryjurisdiction at Wusong ostensibly to control smuggling. Actually,the Song-Hu opium control office abetted, rather than prevented, smuggling. Its director, a man nominated by Lu Yongxiang’s chief of staff, was a smug¬gler operating in cahoots with the three leading racketeers of Shanghai: Du Yuesheng, Huang Jinrong, and Zhang Xiaolin.18
Together, the racketeers and the Zhejiang warlords organized a company that acquired a small fleet of steam launches and motorboats to smuggle the drugs to wholesale dealers. Protected by the warlords’ soldiers, the dope dealers were able to garner profits of more than one million Mexican dol¬lars per year that they shared with their military patrons. Forty percent of the proceeds, or about one thousand Mexican dollars per day, went to the military governor’s yamen; 40 percent more went to the gangsters in the French Concession; and 20 percent went to the authorities in Hangzhou.19
General Xu Guoliang not only refused to partake of these spoils; when he learned that the bribes were being funneled through the Wusong gar¬rison command, he accosted the officer in charge of the operation and threatened to expose him.20 This interference, plus General Xu’s vaunted incorruptibility (“It is a well-known fact that General Xu did not receive any money on opium smuggling”), supposedly marked him for death.21 Accord¬ing to one account, Wang Yaqiao was contacted at this point to arrange for the assassination. He in turn got in touch with two members of the military police and promised them forty thousand taels for the murder. They then engaged a third person, who had a contact within the detective squad of the Shanghai arsenal. This was the person who finally carried out the attempt, successfully assassinating Xu Guoliang. Wang Yaqiao’s involvement in the affair seemed confirmed shortly thereafter, when Wang suddenly left his haunts in Shanghai and showed up in Hangzhou at the head of a military unit, said by some to be the reward for his having arranged the assassination in the first place.22
The reward was short-lived. In September 1924 Lu Yongxiang—Wang Yaqiao’s Zhejiang warlord patron—was defeated and had to flee to Japan. Once again Wang bolted to Shanghai with two hundred of his followers, where he resumed his racketeering activities as head of the Anhui Gang. Dai Li quickly grew disillusioned. Wang was clearly not the charismatic strategist Dai had taken him to be; he was really no more than a gangland chief. And so the future secret service chief took his leave, stepping onto the path that would soon lead him to the Whampoa Military Academy.23
Thereafter Wang Yaqiao surfaced from time to time in one prominent as-sassination case after the other. On July 24, 1930, Zhao Tieqiao, former managing director of the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company, was murdered. According to police reports, the assassins were agents of Wang Yaqiao, whose brother Wang Zeh Chao, a lawyer practicing in Shanghai, was later arrested by the Shanghai Municipal Police and eventually handed over to the Chinese authorities.24 A year later, in July 1931, gunmen tried to kill T. V. Soong at Shanghai’s North Railway Station, and in the attempt they murdered his secretary; Wang Yaqiao was accused of organizing that assas¬sination as well.25 And again, nominally as a freelancer, Wang was believed to have planned to assassinate members of the inquiry mission sent to China by the League of Nations to investigate the Manchurian Incident of Sep¬tember 18, 1931. The plot against the League of Nations investigation team was frustrated due to the close surveillance and protection provided by the Shanghai Municipal Police.26
Wang Yaqiao certainly had collective backers, to whom he may have had to turn for help after the central government offered a reward of Mex. $100,000 for his arrest.27 In 1932 Wang sought out the protection of Gen¬eral Chen Mingshu, the leader of the Fujian People’s Government; and he became a close follower of the general, serving as the head of his special ser¬vices section.28 After the 1933 Fujian Incident, when Li Jishen and Chen Mingshu established a separatist government in that province, Wang Yaqiao offered his services to Chiang Kai-shek, asking Chiang’s secret agent, Fan Hanjie, to arrange his defection to the Generalissimo. But the covert al¬liance collapsed when Chiang turned the affair over to Dai Li, whom Wang by then openly held in contempt; and the master assassin instead sought the patronage of Chiang’s enemies in the Guangxi clique.29
The connection between patrons and client, however, was largely nomi¬nal. Wang Yaqiao remained a maverick, operating according to his own whims and with access to his own personal resources. And such a romantic image of the assassin as a maverick persisted to a certain extent through the 1930s and early 1940s, when political murder was extended, as we shall see, to puppet collaborators and Japanese colonialists.30
THE ORGANIZATION OF ASSASSINATION
In reality, however, assassination was more of a group business, and the secret organizations created by the ruling party to exterminate the Com¬munists were political instruments that stressed blind obedience to Chiang Kai-shek and the Party Center.31 The men and women who joined the Shanghai Municipality Comrades Association for the Elimination of Com¬munists had to fill out members’ pledges, complete registration forms, and agree to abide by the elaborate sets of secret rules that governed relation¬ships with friends, other members, and officers of the association.32 And as technicians of homicide, the Special Services Department assassins of the 1930s drew more upon the modern practices of secret service hit teams and group training units than the legends and tales of individual heroes.33
The primary clandestine outfit in central China charged with political homicide by Dai Li’s secret service was staffedbymen—including the group leader Mao Sen—who were all graduates of the Juntong training unit at Linli, where they were taught the skills of the knife and gun.34 The same kind of collective discipline was shared by the members of the SSD’s North China Zone Action Unit (Huabei qu xingdong zu) such as Bai Shiwei, Huang Siqin, and Chen Gongshu.35
Chiang Kai-shek was said tobe extremely impressed by the successful kid-napping and assassination operations of the SSD’s North China Zone office, and especially by the killings of Ji Hongchang and of Zhang Jingyao, both of whom he personally ordered Dai Li to dispatch.36 Zhang Jingyao was or¬dered killed after the Henanese warlord began to intrigue with the Japa¬nese, and Dai Li entrusted the mission to the section chief of the north China section of the Special Services Department, Zheng Jiemin.37 The section chief in turn ordered operations agent (xingdongyuan) Bai Shiwei, who was a graduate of the seventh class of the Whampoa Academy, to take charge of the case.38
To his admirers in the secret service, Bai (who was descended from Man- chu bannermen) was cast in the mold of a traditional haojie (courageous brave). “Bai Shiwei had the fabulous flair and quality of the valiant of Yan and Zhao. He was generous, straightforward, gallant, and yet observant of details. He was both calm and brave.” 39 On the morning of May 7, 1933, at 8 A.M., Bai Shiwei, together with his classmates Wang Tianmu and Chen Gongshu, met Zheng Jiemin in a safe house at No. 18-A Beichang Street, in Beiping. Zheng told Bai:
You must successfully accomplish your mission, or else you must at least seek to end your life with that of the enemy [tong gui yu jin]. You must avoid falling into the hands of the Japanese at all cost. Your capture would give the Japa¬nese militarists further excuses for invasion, and would put our government in a difficult position. The chance of your safe return is slim. What will be the words to your family, should the unfortunate happen?” 40
Bai replied, “I have parents, two older brothers, a wife, and an infant daugh¬ter, Zonghui. We have some property, and my family will not have problems making a living. Should I die, I hope that the government will take care of my parents, wife, and daughter. I will die in peace.” 41
Zhang Jingyao occupied rooms in the Liuguo Hotel in Beiping. That same day, May 7, Bai Shiwei, full of “dignity and the determination to kill,” tracked the warlord to his quarters. He forced his way into the suite and shot the general down.42 The screams of the warlord’s female companion brought hotel waiters and managers running, but they were so awed by Bai Shiwei’s intimidating manner that they let the assassin get away. General Zhang succumbed to his assailant’s bullets and died in the arms of his fe¬male companion. Bai, who after his escape survived the War of Resistance, became chief of the Tainan city police after 1949, and eventually served as a member of the Legislative Yuan on Taiwan in the 1950s.43
Dai Li’s other target, Ji Hongchang, had fallen afoul of Chiang Kai-shek after he had become deputy commander of Feng Yuxiang’s Chahar People’s Anti-Japanese Allied Army (Minzhong kang-Ri tongmeng jun), which was the 200,000-man force organized in May 1933, when the Tanggu Truce was signed with the Japanese. After Chiang forced Feng Yuxiang to resign his command, Feng’s deputy commanders, including Ji Hongchang, were tricked into surrender.44 When they were ordered arrested, however, the Nationalist general in charge of the operation balked and instead provided Ji Hongchang with transportation to Tianjin, where he took refuge in the relative safety of the city’s foreign settlements. There, Ji evaded Chiang Kai- shek’s agents by renting accommodations in the French Concession’s Na¬tional Hotel (Guomin fandian).45
After Chiang told Dai Li to kill Ji Hongchang, the secret service chief arranged for the Huabei district office of the Special Services Department to assign the head of the operations squad (xingdongzu), Chen Gongshu, to the assassination.46 On November 9, 1933, Chen and another operations squad agent, Lu Yimin, went to the Guomin fandian to kill Ji. The attack failed. Ji was only wounded by a ricochet in the shoulder, and another man, Wang Hua’nan, was killed by mistake.47 The incident did help provoke the French Concession police to arrest Ji Hongchang, who was extradited at Chiang Kai-shek’s orders and handed over to the Beiping Military Police headquarters. In the course of an investigation conducted by He Yingqin in his capacity as head of the Military Affairs Commission in Beiping, Ji Hongchang acknowledged that he was a Communist Party member. How¬ever, he refused to recant, and on November 24, 1933, is said to have died a martyr’s death.48
Ji Hongchang’s execution was considered one of Dai Li’s great coups in north China during Juntong’s early days.49 His most famous analogous ac¬complishment in the south—an act that became known in SSD lore as a jiechu zhi zuo, an “exceptional deed”—was the assassination of Yang Xingfo on June 18, 1933, in the Shanghai French Concession.50
THE KILLING OF YANG XINGFO
The Yang Xingfo assassination was intimately connected with the founda¬tion of the Chinese League for the Protection of Human Rights (Zhongguo renquan baozhang tongmeng), which in turn was connected with the death of Deng Yanda, leader of the left wing of the Guomindang. On August 19, 1931, the Guomindang left wing had sent Deng Yanda to preside over the closing ceremonies for the Third Party Cadres Training Course. This pro¬vided an opportunity for Chiang Kai-shek’s men to seize Deng and hold him in prison, where he was personally interrogated and chastised by the Generalissimo. After four months in captivity Deng was ordered killed by Chiang Kai-shek; and on December 29 the head of Chiang’s bodyguard, Wang Shihe, secretly executed Deng at Shazigang outside the Qilin Gate of Nanjing. However, the disappearance of one of Chiang’s major political op¬ponents could not be kept concealed for long, and as news of the heinous affair spread, it created a public furor.51
As yet one more example of the abuse of citizens’ rights by the secret services of the Chiang regime, the death of Deng Yanda added fuel to the campaign to condemn the government for human rights violations. In December 1932 a group of some of the nation’s most prestigious intellec¬tuals, including Cai Yuanpei, Song Qingling (Soong Ching Ling), Lu Xun, Ma Xiangbo, Shen Junru, and Shi Liangcai, came together to found the Chinese League for the Protection of Human Rights. The chief secretary (zongganshi) and vice chairman ( fuhuizhang) of the league, which quickly became known in liberal and progressive circles around the world, was Yang Xingfo.52
Yang Xingfo (Yang Quan) was a graduate of Qinghua University who had studied abroad at Columbia University.53 At the time of his involvement in the Zhongguo renquan baozhang tongmeng he was serving as both a dep¬uty of the Shanghai government and one of the engineering officials for the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum. His wife, Zhao Zhidao, and he were living then in Shanghai’s French Concession at No. 7 Mingdeli, on Huanlong Road, not far from the headquarters of the league at No. 331 Yaerpei Road. The de¬cision to have him killed was evidently made by Chiang Kai-shek both in a fit of pique about Yang’s activities in the league and as a way of frightening others from engaging in similar protest movements.54
The league had already infuriated Chiang by publishing an English- language announcement of the death of Deng Yanda in Shanghai and for¬eign newspapers.55 Furthermore, early in 1933, in the wake of the Man¬churian Incident and the Shanghai hostilities, Yang Xingfo had made a trip to north China to try to drum up support for a national alliance against the Japanese. Chiang Kai-shek was furious, and sometime in March or April of 1933, Dai Li received orders from his leader to arrange for Yang’s assassi¬nation. The secret service chief promptly established a temporary head¬quarters in Shanghai to oversee the project.56
Dai Li’s first step was to set up surveillance to determine Yang Xingfo’s daily habits. His men soon discovered that Yang regularly went for a one- or two-hour horseback ride every day outside the French Concession. They quickly developed a plan to accost and kill him during his exercise period. Chiang Kai-shek did not agree with this plan. He thought that Yang should be killed in the French Concession, where his death would have a greater impact on Song Qingling. Dai Li, who believed that one of the major points of the exercise was to intimidate other members of the league, naturally agreed, and new plans called for killing Yang somewhere near the Acade¬mia Sinica offices, which were located in a part of the French Concession where there were relatively few pedestrians.57
The hit squad was led by Zhao Lijun, chief of the operations group, who took with him Li Ada, Guo Decheng, and Shi Yunfei.58 On June 18, 1933, the assassins — each of who had sworn to the others not to let himself be captured alive—hid themselves in the freight doorway of the interna¬tional publications division of the Academia Sinica on Yaerpei Road. As Yang Xingfo’s car pulled up in front of the door, the killers stepped for¬ward and opened fire. Yang was hit ten times. In the fracas one of the gun¬men, Guo Decheng, became confused and ran into the line of fire of Zhao Lijun, who wounded him by accident. Guo was subsequently arrested by the French Concession police—his suicide oath notwithstanding—and had to be silenced later by Dai Li’s agents.59 The rest of the assailants escaped. Yang, mortally struck, was taken to the Guangci Hospital on Jinshenfu Road, where he died from his gunshot wounds.60
Yang Xingfo’s assassination was a cause célèbre. Song Qingling published a stirring announcement:
These people and their hired thugs think that by relying on force, kidnap¬ping, torture and assassination they can crush the struggle for freedom
But, far from being crushed, we shall battle on more staunchly because Yang Quan has lost his life for aspiring to freedom. We shall redouble our efforts until we attain our goal.61
Lu Xun wrote in a more melancholic vein a poetic lament that read:
My fire of days gone by is chilled. Whether flowers bloom or fade;
I did not think in the tears of the southern rain;
To weep again for this fine son of China.62
And when the final funeral procession was held, fittingly enough in a warm summer rain on June 20, both Song Qingling and Lu Xun risked their own lives by marching with the retinue.63
Song Qingling was under constant surveillance during this entire period, and Dai Li’s men made several attempts to suborn one of her female ser¬vants. Each effort failed. Furthermore, the plainclothesmen charged with the surveillance merely took note of the comings and goings of visitors, writ¬ing down license plate numbers but never following the callers back to their own homes. The watchers did report, however, that Song Qingling ap¬peared undaunted by Yang Xingfo’s death, and Chiang Kai-shek was so an¬gered by her courageous poise that he supposedly ordered Dai Li to put the fear of death in her by arranging for an auto accident. Shen Zui set about solving the technical details (including the provision of shatterproof glass for their own European sedan, which was to be the instrument of punish¬ment), but at the last minute Chiang grew afraid that his secret servicemen would inadvertently kill Song Qingling in the process, and he called off the assault, lest his wife and brother-in-law become furious with him for having harmed their sister.64
Song Qingling’s courageous composure in the wake of Yang Xingfo’s as-sassination helped galvanize international opinion against the excesses of the Chiang regime. If the murder had a deterrent effect on some Chinese liberals, it also brought disrepute and dishonor to the Generalissimo’s gov¬ernment. On July 19, 1933, the Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury published an article entitled “Mysterious Document Marks 55 Chinese Leaders on Death List for Assassination by ‘Fascists’— General Chiang Kai-shek De¬picted as Ordering Murderous Activities of ‘Blue Shirts’ to Strengthen Per¬sonal Power.” Aroused by Yang Xingfo’s death, the public was said to be ag¬itated over news of a “mysterious document” that supposedly emanated from the “secret Blue Gown or Chinese Fascist organization” of Chiang Kai- shek and that contained orders for wholesale assassinations. A copy of this document had been received, it seemed, by Harold Isaacs’s China Forum di-rectly from the Communists’ Central Press Agency (Zhongyangshe) in Guangzhou. According to the China Forum report, the document—which was dated June 15,three daysbeforeYangXingfo’sdeath—notonlymarked Chinese Communist leaders for assassination, but it also extended the tar¬gets to Nationalist rivals of Chiang such as Hu Hanmin.65
COMMUNIST COUNTERMEASURES
Of course, the Communists were not without assassination plans and expe¬rience of their own. They had their own operations unit in the Party’s Spe¬cial Department in Shanghai, the duties of which included the punishment of traitors. Contemporary journalists reported the killings of hundreds of “renegades,” mill foremen, detectives, guild officials, gangsters, philanthro- pists,key industrialists,noncooperative labor leaders,and Nationalist agents over the course of the 1930s by specially trained Communist assassination squads furnished with municipal maps, special weapons, and detailed oper¬ations plans.66
The most infamous case was the murder of Gu Shunzhang’s family after he defected to the Nationalists in 1931.67 Gu, who worked for the Nanyang Brothers Tobacco Company, had been in charge of the secret service de¬partment of the Chinese Communist Party, working first under, and then over, Zhou Enlai.68 Gu, who had the air of a Shanghai playboy about him and belonged to the infamous Green Gang, was a master of disguise and de¬ception. He often posed as a famous magician named Hua Guangqi, and his ability to move unnoticed past the police of a dozen different foreign con¬cessions was legendary.69 When he was captured by agents of the Central Statistics Bureau (Zhongtong) in Hankou it was a terrible blow to the CCP security apparatus.70 The Communists were able to cut some of their losses, thanks to a mole placed high in the ranks of the CSB.71 But Gu Shunzhang’s defection (he went on to become head of the “converts,” or zishou clique of former Communist “renegades,” within the Nationalist secret services) led to numerous arrests and the death of the CCP secretary-general, Xiang Zhongfa, among others.72
In self-defense, the Politburo decided at a meeting in September 1931 to make an example of Gu, and it entrusted the task of retaliation to Zhou Enlai, who had already shown that he was capable of taking care of traitors among his closest followers.73 Zhou subsequently ordered one of Gu’s for¬mer lieutenants, Wang Shide, to liquidate the entire Gu family.74 Wang, who was said by foreigners to resemble a “consumptive Chinese tailor,” mur¬dered Gu Shunzhang’s wife, his parents-in-law, and his brother-in-law, and buried the corpses beneath an apartment in the French Concession.75 Gu’s young son, Ansheng, was spared.76 When Wang Shide was captured by the government, he helped the French Concession police uncover the grue¬some site. As a result, Zhou Enlai was charged with the crime and placed on the wanted lists of the Shanghai Municipal Police and the Public Safety Bureau.77
Throughout this secret war between Nationalist and Communist assas¬sins, each side steadfastly discounted the accusations of the other.78 The publication by Isaacs of the Blue Shirts document issued by the Central Press Agency thus led Nationalist representatives to claim that this was a baseless piece of disinformation fabricated by the Communists’ “anti¬government [press] organ.” 79 Shanghai mayor Wu Tiecheng even filed a formal protest with the American consul general in Shanghai, complaining about calumnious articles in the Shanghai Evening Post concerning the Blue Shirts Society.80
Yet the policy of assassination was not abandoned—at least as far as the mosquito press was concerned. On August 12, 1933, Xiao gongbao claimed to have gotten hold of the assassination plans of the Blue Shirts Society, which had been training agents to attack Chiang Kai-shek’s enemies.
Since their return to Shanghai from Lushan to await instructions from Gen¬eral Chiang Kai-shek, local assassination members of the society have been be-coming increasingly active. Drastic training of secret service members is un-derway in the headquarters of the society, and the selection of assassination members to carry out the work in all districts is being made.81
This elaborate scheme listed fifty-seven agents divided into fourteen dif¬ferent corps under the leadership of Dai Li and Zhao Yongxing: six corps in the French Concession, five in the International Settlement, and three throughout the Chinese parts of the city.82 These terrorists, who were said to be armed with pistols, were supposedly disguised as ricksha coolies, for¬tune-tellers, hawkers, and other members of the city’s lowlife. Their assign¬ment was to locate the whereabouts of persons on the Generalissimo’s hit list, and then kill them on sight.83
Whatever the truth of sensational accounts such as these, which fed upon public rumor and concern, there was substance to fears that another major opponent of the regime would be struck down by Dai Li’s men. Despite neg¬ative public opinion, Chiang Kai-shek had by the time of these reports al¬ready ordered preparations for the murder of a second leading member of the League for the Protection of Human Rights: the editor of Shenbao, Shi Liangcai.84
THE MURDER OF SHI LIANGCAI
Shi Liangcai was marked for murder for three reasons.85 One was his con¬tinuing involvement in the League for the Protection of Human Rights and his newspaper’s vociferous condemnation of the government’s assassination of Yang Xingfo.86 A second was Shi’s vigorous public support for a strong policy of resistance against Japanese aggression. After the January 28, 1932, war with Japan broke out in Shanghai, Shi Liangcai publicly contributed his own money to provide military rations for the Nineteenth Route Army, which was courageously defending the city in marked and seemingly delib¬erate contrast to Chiang’s pusillanimity.87 The third reason had to do with
the government’s policy of “partification” (danghua) of education, which was being carried out by the new minister of education Zhu Jiahua, whose po¬lice background did not bode well for the academy. Zhu had gotten his doc¬toral degree in geology from Berlin University, and was “credited with be¬ing an admirer of the Nazi form of government.” 88
In 1932, when Zhu became minister of education, he was replaced as president of Central University (Zhongyang daxue) by Duan Xipeng, a leading right-wing ideologue who had been a prominent member of the Anti-Bolshevik League. The students at Zhongyang daxue had shrilly re¬sisted Duan’s appointment, and when he showed up to take over his new position a riot broke out, with the students physically attacking the new president and driving him off the campus. The government retaliated by ar¬resting sixty of the students,including their leaders Wang Zhiliang and Qian Qiming. Shi Liangcai’s Shenbao actively attacked these moves as reactionary components of a larger strategy designed to suppress Chiang’s internal op¬ponents while he bought time from the Japanese by refusing to mount a united opposition against the external aggressors.89
These charges, which were made by the chief editor of Shenbao, Li Lie- wen, in his column “Free Talk” (Ziyou tan), infuriated Chiang and his sup¬porters. When Wu Xingya, head of the Guomindang Social Affairs Bureau and a leader of the right-wing youth movement, demanded that Li Liewen be dismissed, Shi Liangcai refused. The conjunction of all three causes, and especially the dramatic linkage that Shenbao drew between internal persecu¬tion of liberal human rights proponents and external appeasement of the Japanese, constituted a direct provocation to Chiang Kai-shek.90 Sometime in the fall or early winter of 1933, consequently, Chiang commanded Dai Li to make ready to assassinate Shi Liangcai, who was then serving in one of the most prominent public positions in Shanghai: head of the Chinese Mu¬nicipal Council.91
Dai Li originally planned to conduct the assassination operation in Shanghai, but Shi Liangcai lived in the International Settlement, where po¬lice protection was difficult to circumvent. In October 1934, however, Shi decided to leave the sanctuary of the International Settlement and take his family for a holiday to Hangzhou, where he had rented the Autumn Waters Mountain Villa (Qiushui shanzhuang) off West Lake. Dai Li moved quickly. An operations squad of six men headed by Zhao Lijun and his deputy Wang Kequan was assembled and sent to Hangzhou.92
Also, in addition to cabling a request for assistance to Zhao Longwen, the chief of the Zhejiang provincial police force, Dai Li had one of the SSD chauffeurs, Zhang Bingwu, drive a black Buick limousine from Nanjing headquarters at 53 Chicken Goose Lane down to the Hangzhou Police Academy.93 With the help of one of the instructors, Jin Minjie, the car was
repainted and fitted with a new license plate so that it resembled one of the cars from the Nanjing Salt Gabelle Bank (Yanye yinhang).94
On November 14, 1934, Shi Liangcai and his family wound up their hol¬iday and prepared to return to their Shanghai residence by chauffeured au¬tomobile. The party, which included Shi’s wife Shen Qiushui, his son Shi Yonggeng, his niece Shen Lijuan, and his son’s schoolmate Deng Zuxun, took the Hu-Hang highway. As the car drew near Boai zhen, not far from the harbor of Wengjia in Haining county, they came across another auto¬mobile drawn athwart the highway. Shi’s chauffeur, Huang Jincai, slowed down, and just as he was rolling to a stop the doors of the other car opened and the assassins jumped out with drawn guns. In the first hail of bullets the chauffeur and schoolmate were shot dead. The others tried to flee across a nearby field. Mrs. Shi was hit and fell wounded, as was her niece. Shi Yong- geng, the son, managed to run to safety. But Shi Liangcai, who tried to hide in a dry drainage ditch, was shot in the head by Zhao Lijun, his body riddled with bullets by the other assassins who clambered into the Buick to make good their escape. Although alarms were quickly sounded, Police Chief Zhao Longwen had tied up all of his mobile brigades by calling a meeting of the Hushu and Xiaohe police precinct stations as well as of the motorcar inspection personnel (qiche jiancha zhan renyuan), so that Zhao Lijun and his men were able to drive back into Jiangsu without being stopped. By then Dai Li already knew that the mission was successful, for Chief Zhao had sent a coded message to the SSD via Dai’s brother-in-law,Mao Zongliang,report- ing that “one set of the twenty-four [dynastic] histories has already been bought at Hangzhou.” 95
Somehow, for all of their planning, Chiang Kai-shek and Dai Li had failed to foresee the tremendous hubbub both inside and outside China that would be caused by the brutal killings and woundings of Shi Liangcai and his family.96 As one public figure after another expressed outrage over the terrorist act, the entire body of members of the Shanghai Chinese Mu¬nicipal Council resigned in protest.97 And although their resignations were rejected by the municipal government, Nanjing was forced to make other gestures to alleviate the overwhelmingly hostile public opinion. Chiang Kai-shek cabled a set of mournful condolences to Shi Liangcai’s family and charged the chairman of the provincial government of Zhejiang, Lu Diping, with special responsibility for solving the heinous crime. Zhao Longwen made a great show of trying to run down the murderers, offering ten thou¬sand yuan as a reward for information leading to the arrest of the assailants. But Zhao had to flee the glare of public opprobrium by leaving for England to join H. H. Kung in attending the coronation ceremonies of George VI in May 1937.98 And because the case never was broken, Lu Diping felt duty¬bound to resign as governor. Lu went on to become head of the Military Af¬fairs Commission Staff College ( Junshi canyiyuan), but he was still in dis¬grace when he died of illness shortly afterward.99
Political assassination was soon to become inextricably linked with anti-Japanese terrorism,first in north China during and after the Great Wall War, and then in the south after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. In the mean¬time, Wang Yaqiao, the “king of assassins,” continued to inflame the public’s imagination, especially after the sensational attack on Wang Jingwei’s life at the meeting of the Sixth Central Committee of the Fourth Plenum of the Guomindang in Nanjing in November 1935.100
THE WOUNDING OF WANG JINGWEI
The attentat was as dramatic and arresting an incident as anything the pub¬lic had witnessed that year. On November 1, as the Central Committee was launching its formal opening ceremonies, the committee members lined up to have their presence at the gathering commemorated by official and press photographers. Chiang Kai-shek was supposed to be in the group photo¬graph, but he was in the washroom when the picture taking began.101 The rest of the notables lined up around and alongside the leading figure pre¬sent, which happened to be Wang Jingwei. As the photographers prepared to take pictures, one of the press cameramen, bearing an identification pass from the Chenguang Information Agency (Chenguang tongxunshe), fid¬dled with his camera, which suddenly erupted with a flash and a bang. At that same moment Wang Jingwei fell to the ground wounded. The camera was actually a camouflaged weapon that concealed a small-caliber gun, fired through the lens.102
As Wang Jingwei fell a melee broke out in the auditorium. Wang’s chief bodyguard fired at the photographer, whom he struck, and two of the other national leaders on the dais, Zhang Xueliang and Zhang Ji, grappled with the assailant and knocked him down.103 Fortunately, Wang Jingwei was not mortally wounded. But that did not deter his wife, Chen Bijun, from angrily accusing Chiang Kai-shek of engineering the murder attempt. Chiang him¬self was infuriated by the accusation, and he angrily called in Dai Li and ordered that no stone be left unturned in finding out who was behind the plot.104
Dai Li conducted the interrogation of the wounded attacker, Sun Feng- ming, personally, first trying to find out how the photographer had gotten a pass to attend the opening ceremony as a journalist. The answer to that question led Dai Li in two different directions. The first direction was to¬ward his comrades in the Society for Vigorous Practice, and beyond them to Chiang Kai-shek himself; and the second was away from the Whampoa Blue Shirts and toward Chiang’s opponents in the Nineteenth Route Army.
Sun Fengming first confessed to having an accomplice in the Central Mil¬itary Academy. This officer turned out to be none other than Chen Guang- guo, the headquarters assistant (zhushu) to the secretary-general of the Li- xingshe, Feng Ti. Dai Li immediately conveyed this information to Chiang Kai-shek, who appeared shocked to learn of Chen’s involvement and in¬stantly convened a meeting of all Lixingshe staff officers and inspectors. Ac¬cording to Gan Guoxun, who was present at the meeting:
After they were all seated, [Chiang Kai-shek] raised his eyes and looked around. He said, “Why isn’t Feng Ti here?” No one responded. He immedi¬ately ordered Dai Li to summon Feng Ti. Shortly after that Feng Ti arrived. As soon as he sat down, Chiang Kai-shek said, “Who told you to appoint Chen Guangguo?” Feng Ti [at first] did not answer. Then he admitted that it was naturally he himself who had appointed him. Chiang Kai-shek said angrily, “For a position as important as this, you make appointments without asking for any indications of my preference? You never brought this up at the gen¬eral meeting for discussion and adoption. This is really a case of idiots taking things in their own hands, and now he is involved in the Wang Jingwei assas¬sination case! Since you never gave a thought to the safety of my life, then I do not care for your life either.” All of a sudden it became very tense. Feng Ti said, “Let the Leader please punish.” Chiang Kai-shek said, “Do you think punishment will take care of this?” He Zhonghan got up with tears streaming down his face: “Comrade Feng has always been loyal and faithful. This time, because of his negligence, he made a major mistake. All of us should assume responsibility. Let the Leader please punish us.” 105
Feng Ti’s life was saved by Dai Li’s second line of investigation. During his interrogation, Sun Fengming also implicated members of the Chenguang Information Agency, including the owner Hua Kezhi, editor in chief Zhang Yuhua, and section chief He Boguang.106 All three of these men were in¬stantly placed on a wanted list by both Dai Li’s SSD and Chen Lifu’s Central Statistical Bureau.107
Dai Li’s men captured Zhang Yuhua, who broke his leg while trying to es¬cape arrest at the Cangzhou Restaurant in Nanjing. At the same time CSB agents were able to nab He Boguang, whom they tracked down to a hideout in Danyang ( Jiangsu) after interrogating his mistress.108 Neither secret ser¬vice managed to arrest Hua Kezhi, who was living in the International Set¬tlement then, and who got away before they could seize him.109
Nevertheless, Hua Kezhi’s complicity established a connection between the plotters and the “king of assassins” Wang Yaqiao. Hua Kezhi was known to be one of Wang’s right-hand men and was implicated in a series of mur¬ders of Japanese sailors and civilians—including the Nakayama and Tami- nato killings—between 1935 and 1936.110
This connection led in turn to the diehards of the Nineteenth Route Army, for Nationalist authorities had reasons to believe that these killings were deliberate provocations undertaken by the Communists in cahoots with former officers of the Nineteenth Route Army operating out of the Burlington Hotel, a property owned by General Chen Mingshu in Shang¬hai. In November 1934, the Shanghai PSB had requested the help of the Shanghai Municipal Police in keeping track of former officers of the Nine¬teenth Route Army, tracing the comings and goings of suspicious characters at the railroad station, and paying special visits to hotels to catch assassina¬tion teams by surprise. The reason for this heightened caution, the Chinese authorities said, was that they had received information that the Commu-nist parties of China, Japan, and Korea had decided “in collusion with ex¬officers of the Nineteenth Route Army, one of whom is named Chu, to organize a group in Shanghai to assassinate important leaders of the Guo- mindang and leading Japanese personages, including HIJM’s minister, with a view to embarrassing the Guomindang and causing a serious breach be¬tween China and Japan.”111
THE KING OF ASSASSINS
After the Wang Jingwei assassination attempt, this belief in a Communist plot waned, and the Nationalist police authorities came to feel that the Nineteenth Route Army group was operating on its own accord but with the help of Wang Yaqiao and his band of professional killers. SSD agents un¬derstood that Wang Yaqiao had managed to escape to Hong Kong; and soon reports in the press were linking Wang Yaqiao with his patrons in the Re¬organization clique (Gaizu pai), Generals Chen Mingshu and Li Jishen, who were supposed to have ordered him to mount an assassination attempt against either Chiang Kai-shek or Wang Jingwei or both.112
The linkage was only circumstantial, however, until Dai Li’s detectives supplied direct evidence from successive interrogations of Zhang Yuhua and Sun Fengming, who were questioned in the hospital daily, of the com¬plicity of Yu Likui, who had close connections with the Reorganization clique in Hong Kong. The real break came with the arrest of Sun Fengming’s wife, Cui Zhengyao, who was spotted in the Xinya Restaurant on Sichuan Road in Shanghai. Dai Li personally conducted the interrogation, which was one of the few occasions on which he directly engaged in the cruelest torture, and when Cui Zhengyao broke she not only implicated Yu Likui; she also betrayed Zhou Shiping and Hu Dahai—men whose membership in the Reorganization clique finally convinced Chen Bijun that Chiang Kai- shek had not been behind the attempt to assassinate her husband in the first place.113
Chen Bijun’s forgiveness of Chiang Kai-shek probably saved Feng Ti’s life. Certainly, Feng Ti’s own position in Chiang’s inner circle, plus his de¬fense by He Zhonghan, who requested that they all be allowed to share Feng Ti’s punishment, made a difference. But it was Sun Fengming’s revelation of all these connections with the Reorganization clique that lent credence to Chiang’s own denials and that protected Feng Ti from his full wrath. In the end, only Chen Guanguo ended up being secretly executed for his involve¬ment with Sun, while Feng Ti was simply removed from his position as secretary-general of the Lixingshe. This, too, was done secretly, while the attention of the public was focused on the possible involvement of Wang Yaqiao in the Wang Jingwei assassination plot.114
Once Cui Zhengyao’s disclosures confirmed Wang Yaqiao’s role in the plot, this “notorious leader of a gang of assassins” risked arrest or assassina¬tion himself if he continued to remain in Hong Kong or Macao, where Dai Li’s agents, led by Zheng Jiemin, circulated freely.115 Consequently Wang, with the help of Li Jishen, left Hong Kong in July 1936 and made his way up the West River to Wuzhou, where he moved into a house belonging to the provincial governor of Guangxi, Huang Xuchu, and took over the special service corps within the Wuzhou military headquarters of General Chen Mingshu.116
But Zheng Jiemin, who had arrested Yu Likui and “turned” his wife into a Special Services Department agent, was not far behind.117 The moment Wang Yaqiao reached Wuzhou he was under the surveillance of Nationalist secret service men, but he seems to have been oblivious to danger. He quite comfortably settled into the life of Wuzhou, ensconcing his concubine, Jin Shixin, in a riverfront inn at 14 Taidong (Great Eastern) Street in this large if somewhat decaying provincial city.118
That fall, Miss Jin decided to take the West River ferry down to Hong Kong to shop for clothes. When she arrived in the British colony she was spotted by Dai Li’s agent, Chen Zhiping, who subsequently recruited the beautiful young woman for the SSD. Chen—who later served as Chiang’s ambassador to the Philippines—introduced her to one of the SSD’s best field agents, a man named Wang Luqiao, who booked passage back to Wu- zhou with her when she returned on the overnight ferry on November 17, 1936.119 Four nights later, on Saturday, November 21, Wang Yaqiao was en¬tertained by two officers of the Guangxi Army.120 The three of them got very drunk and then proceeded together to Miss Jin’s rooms on Taidong Street. At 11 P.M., not long after they arrived at the concubine’s residence, five shots were heard. Police and Peace Preservation Corps officers rushed to the scene, but by the time they had arrived the assassins and the alluring Miss Jin had already disappeared.121 Wang Yaqiao’s body was found on the floor, struck by three bullets and stabbed twice.122
Police officers in far-off Shanghai doubted that the “king of assassins” could really have been so handily killed. Initial reports of the assassination had referred to a Chinese male about forty years old, whereas Wang Yaqiao was about fifty-five years of age. Also, there were rumors that he had been seen in Xi’an, where Chiang Kai-shek had just been kidnapped, conferring with General Yang Hucheng as the representative of Bai Chongxi and the Guangxi clique.123 But as time went by, there seemed no doubt that Wang Yaqiao had really been assassinated, and that his body had been buried just above the Wuzhou golf course across the river from the city. When the Wuzhou magistrate sent men to look into the matter, they were denied en¬trance to the house on Great Eastern Road, and not long after that the Pub¬lic Safety Bureau was instructed by the military to drop its investigation of the case.124
Thus, whether killed by Dai Li’s SSD agents in retaliation for the Wang Jingwei attempt or by Guangxi officers who feared that the “king of assas¬sins” was getting out of control, Wang Yaqiao passed from the scene just as terrorism was about to take off on a new trajectory as full-scale war with Japan broke out in 1937. By then political assassination would have taken on an entirely different cast, as individual “heroes” (haojie) gave way to en¬tire bands of special agents with mixed motives and confused ideals.
Chapter 14
Police Academies
Then I discovered that this skunk, this Dai Li fellow, had been the chief of the Chi¬nese Police Academy in 1932 1937 and that was a police academy in the Hang¬chow area in East China that trained all the major police officers in the whole coun¬try of China. That’s something like they believed in out there was having a National Police. It was sort of like a National Guard, I guess. But they were trained in police activities and they had many people in from the United States and from Great Britain to be assistant instructors, but the bossman of the whole outfit was this man Dai Li. One of the things that the Chinese all look up to, one of the people they look up to, is their instructors. They think the world of their instructors and their fathers. Once an instructor, you’re always an instructor. So that several thou¬sands and thousands of people that Dai Li had trained in the police academy, no matter what happened to them afterwards, they became—they were still students of Dai Li.
ADMIRAL MILTON MILES, 19571
TRAINING SPIES
Modern Chinese historians are by now quite familiar with the storyofSACO, the Sino-American Cooperative Organization (Zhong-Mei hezuo suo), es¬tablished under the direction of General Dai Li and Admiral “Mary” Miles during the Pacific War.2 Although SACO was hailed by the U.S. media in the last year of the war as a shining example of successful Sino-American guer¬rilla activities against the Japanese, SACO’s darker side—the training of Dai Li’s nefarious secret policemen by American military and police advisers whose “scientific” techniques were eventually directed against the Commu¬nist underground movement—only emerged much later.3
This was partly because, at the time, the American side of the operation deliberately tried to exclude “China hands” from staffing the units that were training Dai Li’s gaoji tewu (high-level special agents).4 It was also partly be¬cause, until the 1980s, Western historians had much easier access to favor¬able Nationalist accounts of SACO rather than to confidential (neibu) analy¬ses by Communist historians who were sharply critical of the Americans’ involvement in training Chiang Kai-shek’s counterespionage cadres.5 Now, however, it is possible not only to come to a deeper understanding of the nature of the alliance between the Nationalists’ Military Statistics Bureau
( Juntong) and the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence and Office of Strategic Services, but also to recognize that the American training of Chinese police agents had begun a decade before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.
Modern spies are the creations of training courses and special schools. From the days of the Cheka on, espionage and secret service work have in¬variably begun with a special formation: the training unit or short course that moves one, by rites of passage, from civilian bearing and outlook to agent status and mentality.6 The military academy experience is more pro¬found and lasting than the special intelligence course, but the latter is much more intense, especially insofar as it cultivates the secrecy vital to preserv¬ing the clandestine identity of the covert agent. Spymaster Dai Li had rec¬ognized the importance of this form of specialized training early on, and it was not long after he had opened his office in the Whampoa Alumni Asso¬ciation that he established a special training center (xunlian suo) to develop cadres for his secret service.7
The secret service training system flourished independently only after the War of Resistance broke out. Until then and the ensuing Pacific War, when American aid proved to be so important, Dai Li’s training units had to operate behind and within the regular police academy structure that had developed in China, hand-in-hand with the establishment of modern po¬lice forces, since the turn of the twentieth century.8
MODERN POLICE
The first modern police force in China was created in Changsha (the capi¬tal of Hunan) during the Hundred Days of Reform in 1898.9 Although the Changsha Guards Bureau (Baowei ju) was dissolved during the reaction against the Hundred Days, modern police forces reappeared under impe¬rialist auspices during the foreign occupation of Beijing at the time of the Boxer Rebellion. After the Qing court fled to Xi’an, the various nations in the allied army of occupation set up Public Offices for the Security of the People (Anmin gongsuo), which were meant to handle police work, road repair, and other municipal administrative tasks.10 The upper ranks of the Anmin gongsuo were composed of foreigners, while the cadres were foreign military policemen and the regular patrolmen (xunbu) were Chinese. When the allied forces withdrew in September 1901, the Anmin gongsuo were re-placed by a Reconstruction Assistance Patrol Regiment (Shanhou xie xun ying), which was in turn the nucleus in 1902 for the Patrol and Construc¬tion Department (Gong xun zongchu), which quickly became a model for other police forces in North China.11
Yuan Shikai (governor-general of Zhili, 1901-7) was the leading spon¬sor of the new European-style police forces of North China, replacing tra- ditional lictors and yamen runners (buban) with police modeled on the Eu¬ropean and Japanese examples in occupied Beijing. Yuan began in Bao- ding, the provincial capital, by placing five hundred demobilized soldiers under a Head Bureau of Police Affairs (Jingwu zongju). Once Tianjin was recovered from the allies in September 1902, Yuan made that city his police headquarters, intending to use these new forces both to pacify the people and to provide the viceroy’s government with a means of bypassing local home-rule interests, who until then controlled their own local militia and village braves.12
The new Tianjin police were called “constables” (xunjing), xun meaning “to patrol or go on circuit” and jing meaning “to warn.” Terminologically, they stood somewhere in between traditional lictors (xunbu, “to patrol and arrest”) and modern police ( jingcha, “to warn and investigate”). The latter term was first used by the Japanese who were sent to Europe in 1872 to study Western police systems and who submitted proposals (which in turn be¬came regulations in 1874 and 1875) for the establishment of police in Meiji Japan. The term “jingcha” came into common usage in China sometime be¬tween 1915 and 1925.13
JAPANESE ADVISERS
The Japanese etymological provenance is hardly surprising, given the preva¬lence of the Japanese police model in China after 1901, when the Qing gov¬ernment began sending students to Tokyo to study the Meiji control system. After these students returned home many of them were assigned positions as officers or instructors in the new military schools and police academies established either by strong provincial officials like Yuan Shikai or by the re¬formists more directly loyal to the Qing monarchy.14
One of the leading organs of the latter was a police training unit in Bei¬jing that was established by Prince Jing, Manchu head of the Office of For¬eign Affairs (Zongli yamen), with the aid of a Japanese police expert, Kawa¬shima Naniwa. Kawashima’s services were contracted in order to supervise police training in this new academy, but he soon came to act as a general ad¬viser to the Qing government in its last-ditch reform efforts. Indeed, one of Kawashima’s memoranda, which was submitted in 1902, constituted the ba¬sic document for a program of police reorganization that was launched in 1905-8. The rationale for this program was spelled out in the memoran¬dum itself:
There is no country that does not have a police system. It stands as the com-plement of military strength. One is the preparation for protection against the outside to resist foreign countries in order to protect national interests and rights. The other is an instrument for internal control to restrain the people in order to extend national laws and national orders. These are the two greatest forces of the country and cannot be done without for even one day.15
In addition to establishing what was to become the ruling metaphor of Na¬tionalist political domination—the two wings of army and police protec- tion—Kawashima’s memorandum called for a national police system re¬sponsible directly to the emperor. As Kawashima made quite clear, this new Chinese police system was modeled after the centralized police forces of continental Europe, closely resembling above all the police of the Nether¬lands and of Berlin.16
Seeking European wealth and power, the Qing government accordingly decided in 1905 to follow many of Kawashima’s proposals, issuing orders to establish training schools for police officials. On October 8, 1905, a Patrol Constable Board (Xunjing bu) was set up under the chairmanship of Xu Shichang, senior vice president of war; and in 1907, when the Green Stan¬dards were abolished, the Xunjing bu was folded into a Board of Civil Ad¬ministration (Minzheng bu). Within that board all police work was brought under a single Department of Police Administration (Jingzheng si), and it was this department, nearly twenty years later, that would be the key ad¬ministrative nucleus of Dai Li’s power within the Nationalist Ministry of the Interior.17
Between 1907 and the Revolution of 1911, the constables of Beijing be¬came the dynasty’s model police force.18 The Beijing police were also held up as a national model after Yuan Shikai’s death. The department was fea¬tured prominently in the conference on police affairs ( jingwu huiyi) that was convened in Beijing in April 1917 by the minister of the interior, who seven months later ordered that the provinces open police training schools. Be¬cause of the internecine militarists’ wars that broke out that same year, how¬ever, central and local governments were too distracted to concern them¬selves with the details of police administration, and reform efforts lagged. In that respect, the history of the early republic followed the history of the late Qing: despite the promises of centralized authority provided by the Jap¬anese model and European examples, police control was difficult to impose in China without prior military unification. More effective and lasting po¬lice reform had to await the completion of the Northern Expedition and the establishment of a new regime in Nanjing.19
NATIONALIST BUREAUS OF PUBLIC SAFETY
If the Beijing constabulary was in some respects the national model for the Beiyang warlords, the Guomindang paragon in 1927 was the Guangzhou (Canton) Bureau of Public Safety (Gongan ju), whose title was inspired by the euphemistic name for police departments in the United States in that period. The Canton Bureau of Public Safety was established by Sun Ke when he put into operation an American system of municipal administra¬tion in Guangzhou before the Northern Expedition. After the Nationalists took power every police department, except for the metropolitan police headquarters in Nanjing, dutifully changed its name to “Bureau of Public Safety.”20
Titular unity nominally entailed administrative unity. In 1928 a national commission of police experts was established, consisting of four capital of¬ficials and eight provincial officials under the chairmanship of the director of the Department of Police Administration in the Ministry of the Interior.21 The following year regulations were promulgated calling for the education of all police officials and recruits; and police academies were established in Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Shanxi, Guangdong, Jiangxi, Hubei, Shaanxi, Shandong, Yunnan, Hebei, Gansu, Chahar, Qinghai, Fujian, and Guangxi.22 The na¬tional commission itself was supposed to meet four times a year, but in fact there was never a quorum nor an official meeting, and later the body sim¬ply atrophied.23
In 1931 a fresh effort was mounted to establish a national forum for po¬lice reform. In January the Ministry of the Interior convened the First Na¬tional Conference on Internal Affairs (Diyici quanguo neizheng huiyi), which met at Nanjing to discuss police administration. This was followed in December 1932 by a second conference, consisting of more than one hun¬dred delegates from various cities and provinces who made proposals for the introduction of pension systems for police, the use of new weapons, the hiring of policewomen, and the unification of the fingerprint system.24
Throughout this period the Japanese police system continued to enjoy a good reputation. In 1930 the Ministry of the Interior held an examination to select the ten best graduates from the fifteenth class of the higher police school to attend the police training school of the Ministry of Home Affairs in Tokyo. And that same year the Zhejiang Police Academy sent twenty-one of its best graduates to Japan as well.25 But European police forces remained the primary model. In 1929 Wang Darui, one of the members of the na¬tional police commission, had taken advantage of attendance at the Fifth International Police Conference in Paris that September to study European police systems. The Viennese police force seemed one of the best systems to copy, and in 1930 the governor of Zhejiang invited Dr. Rudolph Muck and other Austrian police experts to serve as administrative and training con¬sultants. That same year ten members of the graduating class of the Zhe¬jiang Police Academy were sent to Vienna to study, and by 1932 Dr. Muck had become a police adviser to the central government in Nanjing, serving also as a consultant for the reorganization of the Shanghai Public Safety Bu- reau.26 Two years later a commission headed by Feng Ti was sent by the Min- istry of War to study the police and military systems of England, France, Italy, and Germany; and in 1935, Li Shizhen—a member of the central cadres group of the Lixingshe core of the Blue Shirts—was also sent abroad to study the police systems of Europe, the United States, and Japan.27
One of the law enforcement experts invited to China in 1930 was Cap¬tain A. S. Woods of the Berkeley, California, police department.28 Woods was selected as an adviser to help reorganize the metropolitan police of Nanjing because of the Berkeley department’s growing reputation as one of the best police forces in the world, thanks to August Vollmer, whose “V- men” were to local U.S. police departments what J. Edgar Hoover’s “G-men” were to the national police force.29
AUGUST VOLLMER AND THE AMERICAN
MODEL OF POLICE PROFESSIONALIZATION
August Vollmer, the “father of police professionalization” in the United States, was born in 1876 in New Orleans. His father died when he was eight years old, and his mother took him back to her native Germany for two years, between the ages of ten and twelve, before returning to New Orleans. Vollmer, who was a determined boxer, wrestler, and swimmer as a boy, stud¬ied secretarial skills at the New Orleans Academy for a year before the fam¬ily moved to San Francisco, and then, in 1890, to Berkeley, where the tall, strong boy drove a delivery wagon. Within five years, before he was twenty, Vollmer had started his own feed and coal store in Berkeley; but in April 1898, when the United States declared war on Spain, he decided to enlist in the army and fight in the Philippines.30
That summer Vollmer participated in the American attack on Manila and in the capture of Fort Malate. During the autumn of 1898 he helped po¬lice Manila; and the following February, when Aguinaldo’s partisans arose, he volunteered to serve on an armored riverboat, firing three-inch how¬itzers against the Filipino guerrillas and earning distinction for a special be- hind-the-lines mission to contact guerrilla allies against Aguinaldo’s men. Vollmer returned to California at the end of his tour, a robust and fearless six-footer impatient with indoor work and restless as a simple civilian.31
In January 1905 a group of Berkeley’s leading citizens asked Vollmer if he would like to run for town marshal on a reform slate. The twenty-nine- year-old Vollmer stood and won. His first major act was to close down the largest Chinese fan-tan, faro, and roulette casino in town. At the same time he commenced a series of administrative and technical innovations that made the Berkeley police force famous throughout the country. It was Au¬gust Vollmer who initiated a bicycle-mounted patrol force, created the first regular beat system, copied a telephone alarm and call box setup from a pri¬vate detective in Los Angeles (and financed the signal apparatus with a spe¬cial city bond election), opened a modus operandi file, perfected a finger¬print filing method, inspired the invention of the lie detector, mounted the first wireless radios in patrol cars, and appointed college graduates as patrolmen.32
As August Vollmer’s reputation spread, especially after he was elected chairman of the International Association of Police Chiefs, he not only agreed to reorganize law enforcement agencies in other American cities, but he also accepted the invitations of foreign governments to reform ail¬ing police departments. In 1926, for instance, Vollmer went to Havana at the request of Cuban president Gerardo Machado, who greeted him when he arrived as a kind of professional healer of social pathologies. “You are a doctor of police departments,” Machado told him, “and we need you here.” 33
After curing the Cuban dictator’s law enforcement ills by setting up a po¬lice training school and installing a teletype communication system, Voll¬mer returned to Berkeley to find yet another plea for aid from a foreign government, this one an invitation from the Nationalist regime in Nanjing. Chief Vollmer reportedly called Captain A. S. Woods into his office and said, “Captain, this letter is from the chief of police of Nanking, China. He needs some real help. How about you tackling the job?” 34 Thus, while Woods went off to China in 1930 as a police adviser to both the central government and the Guangdong provincial Ministry of the Interior, Vollmer stayed behind in Berkeley to develop academic criminology at the University of California and to train the growing number of students who were coming there to study police administration under his tutelage.35
VOLLMER’S CHINESE STUDENTS
Vollmer’s foreign students that year included a man named Feng Yukun, who took a special six-week summer-session course at Berkeley on police organization and administration before enrolling in the fall at the Univer¬sity of Michigan, where he was among a group of fifteen students sent from China to learn about municipal administration. In November 1930 Feng wrote to August Vollmer from Ann Arbor, explaining that he was interested in “finding out the cause of crime” and “the method of prevention,” and that he was hoping to make a “comparative study of crime statistics” in America based upon data taken from the writings of the eminent criminol¬ogist Raymond Fosdick.36 During the following academic year, 1931-32, Feng enrolled in the Berkeley criminology program, and the next summer he returned to China to help reform the police system by conveying Vollmer’s scientific criminology to his countrymen.37
As a returned student trained in the latest police methodologies, Feng Yukun did not go unheard. He was immediately invited in July 1932 to call upon General Chao Chen, the police commissioner of Nanjing; and shortly after that he was granted an audience with Chiang Kai-shek, to whom he submitted two papers in Chinese, one on “the condition of police forces in the world,” and one on a plan to study “the condition of all the police forces in China.” 38 Then, after a brief term as the head of Nanjing’s traffic division (where he revised the city’s traffic regulations), Feng was seconded in March 1933 to Commissioner Chao’s office to serve “as an extra secretary” in the security division.39 He promptly set about popularizing Vollmer’s ideas by translating an article on police professionalization from the Jour¬nal of Criminal Law and Criminology, and by giving university lectures that stressed the “scientific basis” of police work his American professor advo- cated.40 He also, of course, tried to introduce the latest police technology, seeking Vollmer’s help to copy the Berkeley Police Department’s communi¬cations setup in Nanjing by installing two-way radio telephones.41
In March 1934 Feng Yukun was invited by the president of the Zhejiang Police Academy, Zhao Longwen, to come to Hangzhou and serve as dean of police training.42 The Zhejiang Police Academy was one of the pre¬mier cadre-training institutions of the new Nationalist regime. It had been founded just after the Northern Expedition by Zhu Jiahua, the administra¬tive director of Zhongshan University who in 1926 had helped Dai Jitao purge the school of left-wingers. The following year he had been appointed to serve as director of the Department of Civil Affairs for the province of Zhejiang, and in that capacity he founded the Zhejiang Police Academy. As head of the local government training school (difang zizhi zhuanxiu xuexiao), Zhu Jiahua was able to ensure that the budget of the police academy was generously funded. And even though he left his provincial post in 1930, Zhu saw to it that the academy was kept in the hands of a man he person¬ally trusted, Shi Chengzhi. Shi, however, did not remain president of the academy beyond 1932: Wang Gupan succeeded him in 1933, and Zhao Longwen became principal in turn in 1934.43
Feng Yukun was one of several returned students appointed to a lead¬ing position in the academy. Another police specialist trained abroad was Dr. Liang Fan, an agricultural student and secret service agent who had been the assistant of the French forensic scientist Dr. Locard at the Lyon Police Laboratory.44 Liang had returned from his studies in Lyon with two French women: one was his wife and the other was a detective who became the head of the policewomen section of the Zhejiang Academy. He also brought back with him the makings of a complete police laboratory, in¬cluding all of the instruments and chemicals needed for ballistics, toxicol¬ogy, handwriting analysis, and fingerprint investigation. This equipment formed the foundation of the first forensic laboratory in China outside the International Settlement Police facilities in Shanghai; and although Liang’s abilities as a forensic scientist were later called into question, he was soon offering courses in the latest police laboratory techniques to students at the academy.45
The third most prominent returned student was another Vollmer disci¬ple named Yu Xiuhao (Frank Yee). Yee, who was a Cantonese well known to the Chinese community of San Francisco, had asked Vollmer to recom¬mend him for a job at that same prestigious police academy.46 Vollmer ac¬cordingly wrote Feng Yukun about Frank Yee, and when the latter arrived in Shanghai aboard the President Wilson of the old Dollar Line, Feng was at the dock, standing alongside Yee’s “many cousins” to greet him.47 Af¬ter the homecoming was over, Yee was offered a position at the Zhejiang Police Academy, which he discovered to be “the largest of its kind in China” and in Chiang Kai-shek’s eyes “the model so far as police academies is [sic] concerned.” 48
THE ZHEJIANG POLICE ACADEMY
The Zhejiang Police Academy was located on a “large piece of land” cover¬ing ten mu at Shanghongjiang, where more than five hundred students could be accommodated.49 According to Frank Yee’s description, the 350 “girls and boys” who were enrolled were all high school graduates between the ages of twenty and thirty. They were well provided for, receiving room and board plus $15 a month, and were equipped with “rifles, revolvers, ma¬chine guns, bicycles, as well as horses and automobiles.” 50 The timbre of the school was distinctly military, with the students awakening to bugles at dawn and the raising of the national colors, with drills conducted by army officers, and with courses in “political training” taught by “men from the central gov¬ernment” identified as Guomindang “commissars.”51
The academy itself was—like Vollmer’s program at Berkeley — closely connected with the local police force, which in Hangzhou consisted of two thousand policemen, divided into eight precincts and supported by a bud¬get of about one million dollars. After September 1, 1934, the president of the academy, Zhao Longwen, served concurrently as the chief of the Hangzhou Public Safety Bureau; and Yee and Feng Yukun, along with a Berlin police academy graduate, were appointed his confidential advisers.52 At the advice of a planning commission (sheji weiyuanhui) chaired by Zhao, a cadet system was established so that students from the academy could ex¬perience a tour of duty on the Hangzhou force. By January 1935, Frank Yee had devised a patrol system modeled after the Berkeley beat system that Vollmer had pioneered.53 The regular members of the Hangzhou police force strenuously resisted the new system, but with Feng Yukun’s support Frank Yee managed to get the beat plan implemented on April 1, 1935, in the area around West Lake. Within two months, crime rates had dropped by 50 percent.54
From Frank Yee’s perspective, their position at the helm of the Zhejiang Police Academy provided Vollmer’s students with a golden opportunity to see that “the Berkeley System and Spirit are transplanted here [in China].” 55 He told Vollmer that “our school has been under the Japanese and Austrian influence because of the fact that students only [were] sent to the two men¬tioned countries. Now, you might say new blood has been injected. Namely, American or, to be more specific, Berkelian [sic].” 56 And he asked Chief Vollmer to tell the friends that he had made in the “famous [Berkeley] sem¬inar that we are in a position to modenize [sic] the whole Chinese police ad¬ministration” by translating the latest works on criminal investigation and the secret service, by introducing the use of police dogs, by building mod¬ern police laboratories, and by importing into China the newly invented lie detector.57
The reforms of the American-trained contingent were not automatically accepted. In his letters to August Vollmer, Frank Yee frequently complained about the reluctance of his fellow instructors, and even of Feng Yukun, to accept all of his innovations.58 But Feng Yukun did agree to help Frank Yee draw up a new curriculum for the Zhejiang Police Academy. Courses on economics, psychology, crime prevention, municipal government, ra¬dio, police dogs, and so forth were added to the general offerings, supple¬menting the New Life courses “initiated by General Chiang.” Yee and Feng also designed a first-year syllabus patterned after the Berkeley training pro¬gram, which included target practice, swimming, self-defense (jujitsu), and military science as required courses.59
During the second year students were allowed to major in one of four de-partments: administration, criminal investigation, foreign services, and po-licewomen training. Frank Yee was chairman of the administration major, which consisted of the study of Anglo-Saxon, European, and Japanese po¬lice systems; of police personnel; of traffic accident prevention; of census taking and police records; and of radio communications and the distribu¬tion of police forces.60 The criminal investigation major had courses in forensic chemistry, photography, criminal identification, police dogs, cryp¬tology, and police records. The other two sections were much less well de¬veloped, though the foreign services section offered courses in European history, world diplomacy, radio, and psychology.61
By the fall of 1934 the Zhejiang Police Academy was well on its way to be-coming a national prototype. In September the faculty learned that in Nan¬jing the National Police College and the Central Military Academy had been amalgamated into a single institution, leaving the Zhejiang Academy as “the only national police institute in the field.” The student body was recruited from all over the country, including sergeants drawn from a number of lo¬cal police forces who were chosen after a battery of physical and mental tests instituted by Frank Yee according to the Berkeley model.62
NATIONAL POLICE TRAINING
Early that winter, while Frank Yee and Feng Yukun were awaiting a special audience to present their plans to Chiang Kai-shek for national police re¬form, they were also being courted by important local officials such as the mayor of Shanghai, Wu Tiecheng:
Right away we were invited to take over some important posts in Shanghai. Mayor Wu was especially pleased with my article in the Shanghai police mag-azine “Police Lantern.” But under no circumstances the Special Commission¬ers who control all the police organizations in China permits [sic] us to leave. Together with [Feng] Yukon [and Liang Fan] we three are held responsible for police education in China.63
Mayor Wu Tiecheng, who tended to appoint fellow Guangzhou natives to the Shanghai city government, may have been attracted to Frank Yee be¬cause of his Cantonese provenance. Nevertheless, the central authorities— including, no doubt, Dai Li himself—were not about to let their best for¬eign-trained police specialists become advisers to major municipal police forces that they hoped eventually to dominate. The Zhejiang Police Acad¬emy was meant to set national standards, not provide support to regional and provincial institutions. Thus, when Frank Yee was offered a teaching job at Zhejiang University he felt obliged to turn it down because of his full-time position at the police academy.64
As a national institution, the Zhejiang Police Academy also assumed responsibility for the policing of Lushan, the popular mountain resort in northern Jiangxi where Chiang Kai-shek had his summer residence.65 Lu- shan was already being used as a training zone for counterinsurgency forces. The Military Academy Lushan Special Training Unit (Junxiao Lushan te- xunban) was billeted there, and while some of its graduates were assigned to the anti-Communist investigative unit commanded by Deng Wenyi in the Nanchang garrison, a special cadres brigade under Lian Mou was set up by Dai Li to prepare agents for Special Services Department missions. (Dai Li was assisted by Kang Ze, whose more orthodox military standing made Dai Li jealous and eager to move from police to paramilitary forms of organi¬zation.) 66 During the summer, the Lushan area was overrun with more than twenty thousand visitors who were easy prey for thieves. It seemed logical, therefore, to give the Zhejiang police cadets a chance to try their hand at practical law enforcement while also beefing up the security of the Gener¬alissimo’s favorite mountain spa and showing the foreign-run police in the territory leased by the British at Guling that the Chinese were capable of policing themselves.
In July 1934 Feng Yukun was ordered to take the Zhejiang Academy’s sec¬ond graduating class of nearly one hundred policemen to Lushan and pa- trol the area. Then and during the following summer Feng and his men did an impressive job, building up modus operandi files and instituting other criminal procedures that permitted them to solve a number of outstanding crimes.67 Frank Yee came along as well, climbing with his students more than 3,500 feet up to Guling, where they escaped the lowlands’ heat and plunged vigorously into a practicum of police work. Using the fingerprint¬ing and camera equipment that Yee had brought back from Berkeley, and wishing that they had one of Vollmer’s new lie detectors as well, the police cadets successfully conducted burglary investigations and helped imple¬ment Chiang Kai-shek’s New Life Movement.68 Their record was so good that the British relinquished their police powers in the leasehold to the Chi¬nese, and the Zhejiang cadets were held up as national models to police officials from other parts of Jiangxi and Hunan. The impressed provincial officials duly returned home in the fall and held competitive examinations to send up to twenty men and women from their own areas to the Zhejiang Police Academy to receive similar training.69
For all of his candor, Frank Yee wrote nothing at all to his mentor about one of the most intriguing aspects of the Zhejiang Police Academy. Al¬though ostensibly a provincial institution dedicated to the formation of reg¬ular police officers, the academy was actually a closely connected part of the national secret police apparatus that Dai Li had been building since 1932. The president of the academy, Zhao Longwen, was one of Dai Li’s agents, and virtually all of the school’s political training officers (zhengzhi zhidao- yuan) were cadres of the Special Services Department.70
DAI LI AND THE ZHEJIANG POLICE ACADEMY
Dai Li had seized control of the Zhejiang Police Academy in the summer of 1932, when the second class of regular students had just graduated and were living in the alumni association dormitory at 30 Xiongzhen lou, await¬ing job assignments.71 Using the authority granted him by Chiang Kai-shek to act as Special Political Officer (Zhengzhi tepaiyuan) for the Zhejiang Police Academy Special Training Section (Texunban) and maintaining wireless contact with the central government, Dai Li had moved into the academy with a team of special agents. The team—which included Wang Kongan, Mao Renfeng, Mao Zongliang, Zhao Longwen, Hu Guozhen, Xie Juecheng, Luo Xingfang, and Liu Yiguang—virtually took over the entire school during the vacation months of that year. Wang Kongan was named secretary-general (shujizhang) of the Political Training Department (Zheng- xun chu); Mao Renfeng became secretary (mishu); and Mao Zongliang served as the unit’s communications officer. The rest were designated po¬litical training officers (zhengzhi zhidaoyuan).72 By the fall of 1932 Dai Li was able to set up, under the cover of the Political Department, a special secret service training unit divided into “A” ( jia), “B” (bing), “C” (yi), and Commu¬nications sections. Each section was divided into classes (qi) that lasted six months and that consisted of twenty to thirty people who were meant to be¬come “basic personnel” ( jigan renyuan) in the Special Services Department. Many of the “higher-level special services elements in Juntong in later pe- riods”—such “high cadres” (gaogan) of the 1940s as Mao Sen, Xiao Bo, Yang Chaoqun, Ruan Qingyuan, Ding Mocun, Zhang Weihan, Lou Zhaoyuan, and Huang Yong—thus received their initial clandestine training within the Zhejiang Police Academy during 1932-35.73
Section C, or yi, was formed with thirty students chosen from among the graduates of the police academy each year. Their brigade commander was Liu Yiguang, who also served as the class’s political instructor. After their period of training was over, the graduates were sent to serve as plainclothes agents in Chiang Kai-shek’s bodyguard ( jingwei zu). 74
Section B, or bing, was set up to train “cover” (yanhu) personnel, who were female agents. Six of the police academy’s women graduates were chosen for this training section, which was supervised by Zhang Cuiwu, the politi¬cal instructor of the policewomen’s class in the academy’s regular student body.75 The students were given special classes in haircutting and cooking before being assigned to serve as personnel in charge of “arranging cover relations” (buzhi yanhu guanxi) in individual special services units.76
Section A, or jia, was the most critical training group of the three, its graduates designated “backbone cadres” (gugan) to operate under the SSD chief’s direct control. Dai Li nominally served as head instructor of the training class, which was composed of both graduates from the police acad¬emy’s second and third classes and agents already on active duty in the Spe¬cial Services Department. The actual chief of instruction was Yu Lexing, who supervised the classes held on the premises of 30 Xiongzhen lou, and who offered classes in the theory of special operations, the use of secret codes and chemical means of communication, and the employment of poi¬sons and morphine. Xie Ligong, a former Communist, taught classes in mil¬itary geography, international espionage, and ciphers; Li Shizhang offered courses on political parties and factions; Liang Hanfen on the detection of tracks and fingerprints; Yin Zhenqiu on explosives and demolition; Guan Rongde on stenography and speed writing; Ye Daosheng on intelligence (qingbao); Zhu Huiqing on physiognomy (kanxiang); Wang Wenzhao on photography; Jin [Kim] Minjie on jujitsu (qinna); Liu Jinsheng on Chinese self-defense (guoshu); Zeng Timing and Huang Siqin on automobile driv¬ing; and Tan Jincheng on equestrianism. Japanese language classes were of¬fered by Huo Shuying and a Japanese national named Shantian Yilong.77
The major textbooks were Communist-inspired. Wang Xinheng, who had been trained in the Soviet Union, translated two books from Russian into Chinese.78 One was on “Gebowu,” the GPU, and the other was on the Cheka.79 Students also read Tegong lilun he jishu (The theory and technique of special operations), which was written by Gu Shunzhang, the Communist defector who had later offered his services to Dai Li.80 Gu Shunzhang’s own knowledge of Bolshevik secret service tradecraft was sharpened by his ex¬perience as the chief liaison officer between the rural soviets and the urban party cells of the CCP.81 In fact, former Juntong officers believe that his in¬formation was so valuable to Dai Li that it may have cost Gu his life. They have claimed that not long after joining Zhongtong as the top Communist pantu (renegade), Gu Shunzhang was assassinated. Although his murderers were never apprehended, MSB historians believe that they were dispatched by Chen Lifu, who had never forgiven Gu for offering his talents to Dai Li and who wanted to keep the other spymaster from milking the Communist’s secrets. This has been denied by Chen Lifu, who suggested to the author that Gu Shunzhang had to be dispatched because he was a pathological killer.82
By 1935 the Zhejiang Police Academy was completely under Dai Li’s con¬trol. That same year, however, Chiang Kai-shek announced his decision to create a national police training institute by merging the Zhejiang school with the Jiangsu Police Academy to form a new Central Police Academy (Zhongyang jingguan xuexiao).83 This merger presented both a challenge and an opportunity to Dai Li.84
THE CENTRAL POLICE ACADEMY
Chiang’s decision to create a central academy stemmed from a wider vision of a countrywide police system that would integrate other systems of lo¬cal control. In 1936 Chiang Kai-shek summoned a special Conference of Higher Local Administrative Officials (Difang gaoji xingzheng renyuan huiyi) to discuss local police and security problems.85 The meeting took place within the context of a long-standing debate between officials from the central government and provincial leaders over the retention of the peace preservation corps (baoandui).86 Provincial officials naturally favored preserving local militia that they themselves funded and controlled, while representatives of the central government opposed the baoandui and ar¬gued for the creation of regular police departments that would be directed and trained by the new Nationalist government, albeit financed with local resources.
After hearing both sides of the argument, Chiang Kai-shek came down on the side of the police. As Frank Yee wrote to Chief Vollmer, “General Chiang is now very much concerned with the improvement of police ad¬ministration in China. He wants to abolish all the Peace Preservation Corps, gendarmes, and what not, leaving the responsibility of maintaining internal peace to the police in three years.” 87 The Executive Yuan duly approved a proposal that required the provinces to submit plans for police reform ac¬cording to principles worked out by the Department of Police Administra¬tion. The department proclaimed, first, that as of the end of 1936 the peace preservation corps would be abolished and over three years their duties would gradually be taken over by the regular police. Second, as each baoan- dui was dissolved, its budget would be transferred over to the county police departments. Third, the establishment of various grades of local police forces would be as uniform as possible. Fourth, in rural areas too poor and remote to afford regular police, law enforcement duties would be assigned to the former baojia mutual responsibility units. Fifth, in order to improve the quality of the police, requirements for police service would be gradually raised, with graduation from elementary school being the minimum quali¬fication for employment. Sixth, monthly police salaries would start at ten yuan. Seventh, higher police officials would all receive an education at the new Central Police Academy. Eighth, ordinary police recruits would be put through training courses offered in the provincial capitals and cities. And ninth, the firearms of the dissolved peace preservation corps were to be turned over to the regular police for their own use.88
Clearly, one of the major instruments of vertical integration was to be the Central Police Academy, which was “entrusted with the mission of trans¬forming the old peace preservation corps into police after some process of elimination.” 89 As this new national organization superseded provincial in¬stitutions, the Zhejiang Police Academy closed its doors and transferred its fifth class to Nanjing.90 Zhao Longwen’s—that is, Dai Li’s—students were now nominally the disciples of the Central Police Academy’s forty-year-old president, Li Shizhen.91
Li Shizhen was the leading police expert in China. A 1924 graduate of the Whampoa Military Academy, he had completed a regular training course at the Japanese Police Academy in 1931 after service as commander of the Peace Preservation Corps of Zhejiang. In 1935 Li was named head of the Chinese delegation sent to study police systems in nineteen European and American countries, and after he returned to China he was appointed director of the Higher Police Officials School (Jingguan gaodeng xuexiao) in Nanjing and then, in September 1936, he succeeded Chen Youxing as academic dean ( jiaoyu zhang) of the new Central Police Academy (Zhong- yang Jingguan xuexiao).92
Li quickly set about building his own campus. He selected a site in the suburbs of Nanjing, near the Qiling gate, where he put up buildings, brought in new equipment, and recruited trainees (xueyuan) and cadets (xuesheng). 93
Members of the trainee class were already police officers in provinces, cities, and districts who were ordered to report to this place in various classes that
were divided into new-style training [sections], such as fingerprints, house¬hold registration, interrogation, jujitsu [qinna], tracking [zhuizong], commu¬nications, signals, and training and use of police dogs. These fellows were trained for half a year. Regular cadets [xuesheng] were admitted by examina¬tion from among junior and senior middle school graduates who had to have passed entrance tests. They were given instructions in all kinds of police sub¬jects, in political theory, and in foreign languages; they were also given mili¬tary instruction and military drill, and trained in physical fitness. Their train¬ing was for three years. The purpose of this sort of class was to reform police administration.94
Dean Li believed, along with Chiang Kai-shek, that the foundation of a modern country was an excellent police force. He told the graduating ca¬dets of the Central Police Academy’s class of 1943 that “if you want to es¬tablish a new nation [guojia], then you must first establish a new society. If you want to establish a new society then you must first of all establish a modern national police force.” 95 Li Shizhen also combined administrative leadership with scholarship.96 After his return from Europe he published a major survey of police systems around the world, and he founded and chaired the Chinese Research Society for the Study of Police Science (Zhonghua jingcha xueshu yanjiushe).97 His professional credentials were thus unimpeachable.98
Dai Li was nonetheless determined to undercut Li Shizhen by wresting police “training powers” (xunlian quan) from his grasp at the Central Police Academy, which was housed in a “magnificent” new quarter-million-dollar building in the Nanjing suburbs.99 To counter Li’s authority over the stu¬dents, Dai Li first became a member of the academy’s School Affairs Com¬mittee (Xiaowu weiyuanhui).100 Then, he used his secret service authority to set up a Special Services Committee (Tewu weiyuanhui) within the acad¬emy, and had himself named chairman of the group, which included pro- tégés and followers such as Wang Gupan, Feng Yukun, and Zhao Long- wen.101 He also secured appointments for former Zhejiang Academy instructors like Hu Guozhen, Lu Zhengang, and Yu Xiuhao (Frank Yee) on the faculty of the new central training institute. And, to lend himself pro¬fessional academic respectability and counter the police administration principles of Li Shizhen’s police science group, Dai Li established as well a Chinese Police Study Association (Zhongguo jingcha xuehui), which be¬came actively engaged in policy debates with Li Shizhen’s Chinese Research Society for the Study of Police Science.102
To succeed in his competition with Li Shizhen, who was basing his own reform of the Chinese national police system on survey questionnaires developed in Berkeley by August Vollmer, Dai Li needed to acquire some measure of control over the national police administrative policies of the Ministry of the Interior.103 He therefore arranged for Feng Yukun to be ap- pointed to the one post in the central government that looked after police programs in the provinces: department director (sizhang) of the Depart¬ment of Police Administration ( Jingzheng si), which was “entrusted in the planning, directing and supervising of the entire policing in China.” 104 In that capacity, Feng controlled “the police administrative affairs sections [ke] in the people’s government offices belonging to each provincial section, grasping control over personnel matters [renshi] throughout the entire po¬lice system.” 105 He also managed to plant secret cells of Dai Li’s men within the capital police force.106
At the time of Feng Yukun’s promotion, his fellow student from Berkeley, Frank Yee, was put in charge of the division within the Police Administration Department that was responsible for police education, fire prevention, for¬eign affairs, criminal investigation, and “special services.” In his letters to Vollmer, Yee presented their appointments as the triumph of the Berkeley po¬lice reform program.107 “Hereafter,” he wrote Vollmer, “the whole police ad¬ministration and education will be in the complete control of the V-men.” 108 Since Berkeley’s “V-men” were by then SSD agents, several critical aspects of central police administrative control were thus in the hands of Dai Li’s lieutenants. The years 1936-37 consequently saw the extension of the secret police chief’s influence into regular municipal police bureaus—Jiujiang, Zhengzhou, Wuhan, Luoyang—through the manipulation of Ministry of the Interior training programs and personnel assignments.109
Feng Yukun played an absolutely crucial role in this expansion. As the highest-ranking police administrator in the Ministry of the Interior, Feng could lend his office’s name whenever Dai Li needed the legal authority of the central government to transform regular police units into secret service squads. This was especially evident after war broke out with Japan. In 1941 Dai Li wanted to have the regular investigation and apprehension brigade (zhenji dui) of the Chongqing police force changed into an expanded large brigade (dadui) and placed under the control of his former Shanghai sta¬tion chief Shen Zui. When Dai Li sent this request to Tang Yi, the chief of the Chongqing police, Tang naturally sought instructions from the Ministry of the Interior’s Department of Police Administration.
At that time the director of the Ministry of the Interior’s Department of Po¬lice Administration, which was in charge of managing the entire country’s po¬lice operations, was Feng Yukun [who] was a Juntong special agent; and this department was under the control of Juntong as well. At the same time that Dai wrote his letter to Tang, he also telephoned Feng, explaining that he wanted to change this system [from a regular detective squad to a large brigade under Juntong control]. Over the telephone Feng was extremely compliant, affirming again and again his willingness to obey his commander’s orders.110
Within a week Dai Li’s aide and protégé Shen Zui was named head of the Chongqing detective squad.111
Tang Yi himself was a powerful force in Dai Li’s takeover of the Sichuan- ese police. Originally head of the intelligence office in Liu Xiang’s head¬quarters, Tang was named head of the intelligence unit (diecha) in the Si- chuanese garrison command.112 Though an opium addict and member of the Gowned Brothers Society, Tang earned the favor of the provincial sec¬retary Wang Zuanxu by providing him with a favored prostitute. Appointed a special aide to Wang, Tang also made contact with Dai Li, who considered him a regular special agent. By 1938 Tang Yi was chief of the reformed Chengdu police force, which gave Dai Li complete entrée to the very cen¬ter of Sichuan law enforcement.113
The Chinese secret service’s plan to recruit agents through legal educa¬tion coincided with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation’s police chief training program, and to a certain extent it drew common strength from the “scientific” goal of spreading police professionalism to local law en¬forcement agencies. Frank Yee reported to Vollmer that from Septem¬ber 15, 1936, on, “high police officers from all parts of China will receive an intensive refresher training in the academy” in Nanjing, while other police officers would be attending a special summer training program at Lushan, where the syllabus would be Yee’s writings, including translations of Voll¬mer’s texts on American police systems.114 These courses were supple¬mented by Frank Yee’s lectures and inspection trips around the country, as well as by Feng Yukun’s frequent public radio broadcasts “emphasizing the importance of police administration and the need of cooperation from the people.” 115 And they accompanied as well moves to introduce the latest American methods for centralizing identification and record-keeping pro¬cedures in the Ministry of the Interior’s police section. Early in 1937, for ex¬ample, Feng Yukun contacted J. Edgar Hoover in order to find out how the FBI organized and handled fingerprints, and the Nationalist government began to set up its own Central Fingerprint Bureau in Nanjing.116
This attempt to introduce the latest police methods combined a drive toward modern administrative efficiency with the Chinese government’s traditional and long-standing effort to assert national control over local paramilitary systems. In that sense the returned students’ zeal for reform coincided neatly with Chiang Kai-shek’s determination to exert his influ¬ence by placing the police alongside the army as one of the two main wings of his government’s rule. In his role as chancellor (xiaozhang) of the Central Police Academy, Chiang Kai-shek told the graduating seniors of the class of 1937 that:
There are two great forces in our country; the army and the police; one is for national defense, and the other is for maintenance of peace. Like a plane, it takes two wings to fly; but because of the complexity of modern police duties and because they are the only public functionaries that are in constant con¬tact with the people, the position of the police is even more important in our society.117
As an arm of the state, the police in Republican China promoted central power in the largest sense.118 As a system unto itself, however, the police were never a unified administrative instrument.
Chiang Kai-shek deployed the police at large to undermine the power of local military rivals.119 But he also tacitly supported followers who struggled among themselves within the national law enforcement system to capture fragments of legal authority for their own bureaucratic interests. At the time that Dai Li was seeking to wrest control of the Central Police Academy train¬ing program from Li Shizhen, he was also trying to take the postal and tele¬graph inspection service out of Chen Lifu’s grasp.120 The outcome of each of these clandestine bureaucratic battles invariably depended upon the Generalissimo’s support. At the end of the day it was Dai Li’s personal de¬votion to his master that counted most, especially within the secret services struggling so furiously for paramountcy among themselves.
Chapter 15
Sleeping in Their Coffins
In the midst of this [bombing of Pucheng by the Japanese], a band of university students appeared, pitching in enthusiastically, talkative and carefree. But some¬one, in the midst of this, whispered “Dai Li,” and suddenly they were tongue-tied and obviously awestricken. I took little stock in the Intelligence stories about the gen¬eral that I had read in Washington, but I had been told that the general’s name was sometimes used to frighten children into behaving. I asked him about it while the fires burned around us and he admitted that it served his purposes. He had no wish to frighten children, he told me, but his name sometimes served to deter racketeers, smugglers, and defectors. “A righteous fear,” he told me, “works better than guns.”
MILTON E. MILES, A Different Kind of War, 54
THE COMPETITION FOR RESOURCES
Although a revolutionary “mass line” eventually prevailed in the Chinese civil war, Dai Li and Chiang Kai-shek lived in an age in which political dom¬inance appeared to be as much a question of efficiency, achieved with the help of modern technology and organizational discipline, as of the creation or nurturing of cultural and political consensus. A huge following of poor and illiterate peasants did not necessarily promise immediate political re¬wards to a relatively small number of organized and reliable personal fol¬lowers whose ability to assert control was disproportionately enhanced by the possession of modern techniques and material resources.
As we have seen, Dai Li consistently sought to control the Chinese police forces, both because public security forces provided a legitimate cover for his men’s secret service activities, and because local public safety bureaus af¬forded him a means for penetrating urban political systems.1 Although it may be an exaggeration to claim that “by 1933 police personnel matters in the major cities of the nation were at Dai’s disposal,” from 1932 on Dai Li’s influence began to permeate an impressive array of public security organs.2
Dai Li was never free of competition, however. Throughout this period his power increased by fits and starts, but it was always checked by Chen Guofu and Chen Lifu.3 They also commanded their own party secret police, known after Chiang’s reorganization of the special services in 1938 as the Bureau of Investigation and Statistics of the Party Central Office (Zhong- yang dangbu diaocha tongji ju, or Zhongtong for short).4
The director of Zhongtong—which, in addition to maintaining its own central, provincial, and district offices, ran agents in the Bureau of Statistics and Investigation of the Ministry of Communications, in the Gabelle Unit of the Ministry of Finance, in the Institute for the Training of Judicial Per¬sonnel and the Institute for the Training of District Magistrates of the Min¬istry of the Interior, in the Diplomatic Club of the Ministry of Foreign Af¬fairs, in the Ministry of Education, and in the Overseas Chinese Office— was Xu Enzeng, Chen Guofu’s nephew.5 Xu was a graduate of Communica¬tions University in Shanghai who had studied electrical engineering in the United States. From his point of view, Dai Li’s Tewuchu (Special Services Department) was a band of rash and semiliterate ruffians who knew no bet¬ter than to commit arson and murder.6
THE CHEN BROTHERS
From the perspective of Xu’s uncles, the Chen brothers, on the other hand, Dai Li’s Special Services Department was from the start intended by Chiang Kai-shek to offset their own secret surveillance forces. John Carter Vincent reported in 1942, for example, that “[Dai Li’s] organization is at times uti¬lized to counterbalance the Party police under the ‘CC’ Clique—an illus¬tration of one of the fundamental tenets of Chiang’s policy of controlling the Kuomintang, that is, the maintenance of an equilibrium of forces by means of checks and balances.”7
Chen Lifu himself claimed to have only learned of the existence of Dai Li’s independent secret service two years after its formal foundation. Up un¬til 1934, Chen Lifu thought that he alone was responsible for intelligence activities as chief of the Central Bureau of Investigation and Statistics, first under the Guomindang’s Organization Bureau, which he and his brother controlled, and then directly under the Military Affairs Commission. As far as Chen knew, Dai Li functioned as a kind of special bodyguard for Chiang Kai-shek, being charged with his personal security. “Wherever Mr. Chiang went, Dai Li sent his men to make advanced preparations. The head of the bodyguards held a very sensitive post There were spies also among the
bodyguards.” 8
But when Chen Lifu turned over Zhongtong to Xu Enzeng, he discov¬ered that Dai Li was cultivating another independent secret service organ alongside his own, and at Chiang Kai-shek’s orders.
Shortly after I turned over the Central Bureau of Investigation to Xu Enzeng, Mr. Chiang told Dai Li to head a separate organ without informing me. You
see, when there was only one secret police organ, our work was very efficient. We were very powerful. I think Mr. Chiang wanted some other organ to check us.9
At first we didn’t know anything about Dai Li’s organ. How did I find out? Dai Li told people that Mr. Chiang had assigned him to do investigative work. People of the Central Bureau of Investigation told me that Dai Li was getting active. My comrades in the Bureau were naturally unhappy. They felt that Mr. Chiang lacked confidence in them. I explained as follows: Our work was what the Chinese call “the ears and eyes.” I asked them how many eyes and ears they had. Two, of course. So, I said, there should be two organs for car¬rying out our work. I told them not to harbor any suspicion of this parallel or¬ganization but to cooperate with it.10
Chen Lifu himself feigned ignorance of Dai Li’s activities at first. “I pre¬tended not to know,” he recalled. “Later Mr. Chiang ordered everything to go through my hands, but despite his order the system did not work a hun¬dred percent. I didn’t mind.” 11
Actually, he did mind, as he candidly confessed later:
I was placed in a difficult spot. If I did not ask Mr. Chiang about Dai Li, it would look as though I was not carrying out my work well. On the other hand, ifI asked him, it would look as though Iwas suspicious. In any case, a few weeks after [I found out about Dai Li] I told Mr. Chiang that Dai Li said Mr. Chiang had told him to do investigative work. I asked Mr. Chiang whether this was true. He seemed embarrassed. He said Dai Li was doing a certain kind of work and told me to direct him.12
This placed Chen Lifu in an even graver predicament. Who, after all, would want to take on the responsibility of harnessing Dai Li’s dangerous and of¬ten violent efforts?
I was not very keen to assume direction over Dai Li’s organ. Why? I was get¬ting tired of this sort of work. I went to see Mr. Dai Jitao. Whenever I had a problem, I always talked to Mr. Dai, who was a very thoughtful man. He always gave me good advice. I told Mr. Dai that I was a kind man and not fit for the job. He reminded me that when one entered a temple—Mr. Dai was a devout Buddhist—one would see the smiling Maitreya Buddha with his big tummy, but behind him one would see the Vedas [sic] holding a big club. When one walked further into the temple, one would see the kind and smiling Tathagata sitting in the center, but on the sides one would see the eighteen lohan look¬ing ferocious and holding various kinds of weapons. The idea was: I was kind and smiling, but if you didn’t listen, I held a big club; you had better be care¬ful! Mr. Dai told me I had better take the job. If I didn’t take it, who could con¬trol these people armed with powerful weapons? He likened the job to a sharp knife. When directed by someone else, it might do real harm, but if watched [by] my men, they wouldn’t dare do anything wrong. I could reduce the dan¬ger. No one was better suited for the task. Mr. Dai was speaking first of gen¬eral principles in solving problems as well as the fact that I was kind. I was like
Maitreya. His point was that a kind person was needed to direct ferocious men. I took his advice.13
Chen Lifu may have been far from happy with Chiang’s parallel and com¬peting system of intelligence organizations, and he certainly must have re¬sented the interloping Dai Li, but the strategist in him appreciated the need for checks and balances.
Of course, Mr. Chiang trusted Dai Li. Someone who took charge of such work had to be absolutely reliable. If Dai Li was involved in the slightest trouble, it would have been disastrous. On the one hand, Mr. Chiang watched him; on the other hand, he told me to watch him too As far as my own opinion is
concerned, Dai Li was absolutely reliable, but it was always better to play safe, to double-check.14
To be sure, the extent of Chen Lifu’s actual control over Dai Li was ques¬tionable. “Did I actually direct Dai Li’s organ? When important problems came up, I talked them over with Dai Li and directed him.”15
THE JOINT ORGAN
In fact, Chen Lifu’s control was quite indirect. Sometime in 1935, a special secret committee, or “joint organ” (also called the Michazu or Investigation Group), was created under Chen Lifu to coordinate intelligence activities for Chiang Kai-shek.16 According to Chen Lifu:
A joint organization was set up in 1935 to promote coordination between the central and the military bureaus of investigation. It was subordinated di¬rectly to Mr. Chiang. I was the head of the joint organ. My deputy was Chen Zhuo [Chen Kongru],17 who did important work at the Military Council
The joint organization was composed of three sections. The first section was headed by Xu Enzeng. Most of its personnel held concurrent posts at the Cen¬tral Bureau of Investigation and Statistics under the Organization Depart¬ment. They drew their pay primarily from Central Party headquarters. At the second section, headed by Dai Li, the majority of the personnel received their pay from military organs. Most of them held concurrent posts in in¬telligence organs of military organs in army units and the center. The third section, headed by Ding Mocun, was relatively small. It was maintained by spe¬cial funds.18
The first section was supposed to handle all “anti-Communist work except that of a military nature,” which was assigned to the second section.
Dai Li’s organ or working group was subordinated to the Military Council. Its task was to protect Mr. Chiang on the one hand, and on the other hand to carry out work assigned by Mr. Chiang. This gradually developed in a military direction. Dai Li’s men worked in army units and military organizations and in the territory of some militarists. However, the organ also dealt with the communists and Japanese and problems in general. This aspect of their work was of secondary importance. Their principal work was to eliminate spies working for communists or for Japan in the army.19
Section three was responsible for international intelligence, and especially intelligence on Japan.20
The task of this mysterious “joint organ”—which “had no name”—was to coordinate activities among the various sections or bureaus, and especially between the civilian Central Bureau of Investigation and Dai Li’s Special Services Department (Tewuchu). The coordination was carried out via weekly meetings, which were initiated by Chen Lifu “to discuss broad out¬lines of strategy.”
One of the reasons for setting up the joint organization was the fact that the two bureaus often handled the same cases. We wanted to concentrate results in a joint organ to make possible cross-checking. Sometimes, of course, du¬plication was necessary; both bureaus were purposely told to handle certain cases. What was the name of the joint organization? There was no name. How many would attend the weekly meetings? The really important people from both bureaus It was primarily a matter of personal relations.21
The joint organ also may have screened some of the individual agency re¬ports, especially when they dealt with matters that Chiang Kai-shek had as¬signed to both sets of agents simultaneously.22
Then and later, the Chen brothers regarded Dai Li’s secret service with a measure of contempt, believing that his men relied too much upon brute force and terror, and too little upon a refined sense of the operating pro¬cedures of the opposition. Chen Lifu routinely recruited college graduates for the Central Statistical Bureau, and he very often employed agents who were former Communists, trained in the Soviet Union, on the grounds that they understood better than anyone else the worldview of the enemy. Dai Li, despite his acquisition later of the newest “scientific” investigative tech¬niques that Frank Yee and others brought back from the United States or that were made available to him via Captain Miles and the Sino-American Cooperative Organization, was never able to shake this image of brutality and heavy-handedness. To others he remained, in Vincent’s words, “the personification of the latter-day repressive tendencies of the Guomindang,” lacking Chen Lifu’s jesuitical reputation for refinement and subtlety.23
Dai Li himself was aware of Chen Lifu’s contempt for him, especially af¬ter his bureau was briefly merged with Central Statistics in the Second De¬partment (Dierchu) under the Central Military Affairs Commission.24 Dai Li never forgave Chen for “looking down upon” (miaoshi) him then, when he presented himself, hat in hand, for inspection, and he nourished re¬sentment and hatred in his heart for years thereafter.25
DENG WENYI AND THE NANCHANG AIRPORT FIRE
A more immediate rival within the group of Whampoa comrades who made up Chiang Kai-shek’s inner circle was Deng Wenyi. As we have seen, Deng was a “mad supporter of Chiang,” who was so rabidly anti-Communist that he became virtually incoherent at times, raving wildly and slavering at the mouth. Within the Whampoa clique, he was regarded as the most fanatical advocate and executor of “purifying the party” (qing dang), and his loyal de¬votion to Chiang after the April 12 coup de main helped get him appointed to the post of secretary of the Generalissimo’s Escort Office (Shicongshi), or Aides-de-Camp (ADC). He was impossible to discourage; and if Chiang were to treat him unkindly, as he sometimes did, Deng was always to be found back at the side of his lingxiu (Leader), slavishly devoted to his mas¬ter. His eagerness to publish Chiang Kai-shek’s writings and essays with funds gathered from other Whampoa students was matched only by his zeal in printing various manuals for extirpating the Communists: The Handbook for Exterminating Bandits ( Jiao fei shouce) and Important Documents for Extermi¬nating Bandits ( Jiao fei zhuyao wenxian).26
Before 1932, Deng Wenyi’s position within the ADC was crucial to his control over anti-Communist espionage. Reports from Dai Li’s organization routinely went to Group Six (Diliu zu) of the ADC, which Deng Wenyi con- trolled.27 After 1932, Deng’s power became based upon command of the In¬vestigation Section (Diaochake) of the Nanchang military headquarters.28 In the summer of 1934, however, Deng Wenyi’s paramountcy was chal¬lenged as a result of the Nanchang airport affair (see chap. 4).
A military aircraft under repair at Nanchang caught fire and the blaze spread to the barracks and nearby buildings, razing the entire airport from whence Chiang had been launching his bombers in repeated attacks upon the Jiangxi Soviet.29 Deng Wenyi’s Diaochake was assigned to look into the matter. Meanwhile, rumors appeared in the Shanghai press that the fire had been set by officials of the Aviation Bureau to cover up traces of their own embezzlement of state funds. Deng’s investigation team, however, found no signs of this and reported so in a cable that was sent to Nanjing, but which was also intercepted and disclosed to reporters.
Shanghai newspapers promptly published excerpts from the leaked document and accused Deng Wenyi of having accepted a bribe from the Aviation Bureau officials in return for whitewashing the entire affair. Al¬though Deng himself claimed that this was all an elaborate plot on the part of competitors for control of the Aviation Bureau, he failed to convince Chiang Kai-shek of his innocence.30 Without further ado, the Generalissimo ordered that the Aviation Bureau officials be fired, and that Deng Wenyi be dismissed from all of his public posts.31 Dai Li swiftly took over Deng’s counterintelligence role, merging his SSD with the Nanchang Investigation
Section and thereby finally enlisting his own men on the regular military payroll.32
EXPANSION OF THE SPECIAL SERVICES DEPARTMENT
By this time Dai Li already had established special services units in twenty- six cities throughout China organized into zones (diqu), provincial stations (zhan), units under a station’s jurisdiction (zhanhaizu), and simple lower- level units (zu).33 There were also special services units in the Nanjing for¬eign concessions, in the Railway Communications Bureau (Tiedao tongxun zu), and in the Investigation Group of the Ministry of Finance (Caizheng michazu).34
After the Nanchang airport fire and Deng Wenyi’s subsequent disgrace, Dai Li not only took over the Investigation Department of the Nanchang garrison; he promptly began to extend the influence of his special services organization throughout each of the security and military police organs of the Chinese army.35 At military police headquarters, for example, he es¬tablished a Political Training Department (Zhengxunchu) under Liang Ganqiao and Zhang Yanyuan. Within individual military police companies he appointed political training officers (zhengzhi xunlianyuan) already in his service. Each provincial Baoanchu or Peace Preservation Department (PPD) was additionally ordered to form an intelligence section (diebaogu), whose chief was concurrently head of the local special services unit in that area.36
Dai Li eventually came to dominate the Capital Police Bureau Inves¬tigative Section (Shoudu jingchating diaochake), which was nominally headed by Zhao Shirui; the Shanghai Songhu Garrison Command Main Detective Brigade (Shanghai Songhu jingbei silingbu zhencha dadui), which he placed under the command of Wu Naixian, Weng Guanghui, and Wang Zhaohuai; the Zhejiang Provincial Public Safety Department Inves¬tigative Division (Zhejiangsheng baoanchu diaochagu), also under Weng Guanghui; the Nanjing-Shanghai-Hangzhou Railroad Bureau Police Office ( Jing-Hu Hu-Hang jiao tieluju jingchashu), under Wu Naixian; and the Se¬cret Investigative Group of the Anti-Opium Surveillance and Investigation Department ( Jinyan duchachu michazu). Moreover, by the late 1930s lead¬ing operatives on the detective squads and in the training sections (xun- lianke) of most provincial public safety departments regarded the Nanjing Special Services Department as their own “headquarters” (zongchu), to which they routinely reported.37
After this crucial formalization of Dai Li’s secret service organization, Deng Wenyi did continue to serve as an assistant secretary (zhuli shuji) for the Fuxingshe, but he lost his opportunity to perform—and perhaps even his flair for—secret police duties. Instead, he turned entirely to propa¬ganda work, reassuming the post of chief secretary (shujizhang) of the Re¬naissance Society once again in 1936 and welcoming the opportunity to become—as he explicitly put it—the Goebbels of the regime to Dai Li’s Himmler. “As far as this kind of special work is concerned, I am after all just an amateur [waihang]. I just don’t do it very well. If we want to have a Himm¬ler, then we only have [Dai] Yunong who has the capacity for that.”38
Dai Li disliked being compared to Himmler. Always a master of theatri¬cality in search of the most appropriate role, he preferred during this phase of his life to think of himself as a kind of master spy and strategist in the tradition of Sunzi, scouting out the road ahead so that the way could be smoothed for the cart of politics—the train of state—to move smoothly along behind him.39 Although he was later to develop a fairly elaborate doctrine of moral service, heavily influenced by Confucian ethics, his guid¬ing principles were merely fourfold in 1934.40 These four points, enun¬ciated in his own handwriting and distributed to his associates, were very simple: 1) adhere to the “ism” (zhuyi) of the Three People’s Principles, 2) use reasoning and be rational, 3) cultivate sentimental ties, and 4) main¬tain discipline.41
DAI LI’S DEVOTION TO HIS LEADER
The mentality that these points were meant to inculcate was supposed to be focused on the person of the Leader, around whom a cult of personal¬ity was rapidly forming after 1932. Like the Nazi Fuhrer, Chiang Kai-shek was greeted with salutes and rhythmic heel clicking both in person and in absentia. “After 1933 and until the end of the Pacific War, every meeting when the name of the chairman[weiyuanzhang] [ofthe MilitaryAffairsCom- mission] was mentioned, the people present would jump up to attention.”42 Dai Li’s special services headquarters thus had its auditorium draped with slogans that emphasized empathetic understanding of the Leader’s bur¬dens and familistic collectivism in his support.
Act on the orders of the Leader. Give sympathetic consideration [tinian] to the pains [kuxin] taken by the Leader.
The group [tuanti] is the household [jiating]. Comrades are brothers [lit¬erally, “hands and feet”].
Needs are truth [xuyao jishi zhenli]. Action is theory [xingdong jishi lilun].43
Dai Li’s instructions thus exhorted his agents to adopt a philosophy of in-dividual activism: “to have the will to die [si de yizhi]; to have the determi¬nation to act [gan de juexin]!” 44 But they also paradoxically counseled pas¬sive acquiescence to the Leader’s will: “Intelligence agents may not have their own political views. They must accept the will of the Leader as their own will.” 45
The notion of the lingxiu (Leader) was critical to Dai Li’s worldview. It embodied several different traditions. On the one hand, there was the ven¬eration that Chiang Kai-shek’s former pupils, the Whampoa cadets, were supposed to reserve for their chancellor (xiaozhang). This devotion ex¬ceeded Confucian bounds, however, in the selflessness demanded of the Generalissimo’s followers. Grafted onto such Confucian cults of loyalty as Zeng Guofan’s “muscular Confucianism” of the late nineteenth century, Chiang Kai-shek’s version of disciplehood was meant to instill the kind of personal self-discipline that he associated with modern military order and revolutionary spirit.46 Chiang held himself up as the exemplar of this sort of discipline, and it was left to his followers to live up to his high standards of rigid self-control and perpetual dedication. They were supposed to find their own personal significance, directly and individually, one by one, in the Leader’s personal approval of their obedience to his cause, of their total im¬mersion in his identity.47
In a speech delivered on September 20, 1933, in Xinzi county, Jiangxi, to cadres on “how to be a member of the revolutionary party,” Chiang Kai- shek identified this “leadership worship” (lingxiu de xinyang) with interna¬tional fascism.48
The most important point about fascism is absolute worship of one competent and outstanding49 Leader. Aside from him, there is absolutely no second leader or second “ism.” There has to be total belief in one man. Therefore, within the organization of this collectivity [tuanti], that there are officers such as cadres, committee members, and secretaries is totally irrelevant. There must be belief in no one else but the single person of the lingxiu. Everything awaits the final decision of the Leader. At this point we must recognize that without one Leader that everyone worships absolutely [juedui xinyang] it will not be possible to reform the country to complete the revolution. Therefore, from now on, all of you must have this awareness. The special characteristic of fascism is there is only the one person of the Leader. Aside from this man, there is no second leader. All power and responsibility rests with the one per¬son of the Leader. Of course, the Leader himself must have great personality and revolutionary spirit to serve as an exemplar to all members of the party. And all members of the party must be able to make sacrifices directly for the Leader and for the collectivity, and indirectly for the society, for the country, and for revolutionary principles. The day that we joined the revolutionary party is the day that we completely entrusted all personal rights, life, freedom and happiness to the collectivity and to the Leader. There absolutely cannot be second thoughts and divided loyalties. We can only become true fascists upon fulfilling these criteria! 50
The last point is the most important point. After you leave here you must all share this understanding with other comrades: revolution in the present day must not be quite so scattered and dissolute as in the past. First of all, you must ask yourself: do you have absolute faith in this Leader? Can you entrust every-thing about yourself to this Leader? Now that you have become a member of this revolutionary party, you must first of all make sure that you can do this. Then there will be hope for our party and for China’s revolution.51
All members of the party must entrust everything about themselves to the Leader. On his part, the Leader must not only assume responsibility for the revolution and the entire collectivity. He must also assume responsibility for all matters concerning the individual members of the party. The Leader must not only assume responsibility for matters that concern the person of the party member; he must also assume responsibility for matters that concern the party member’s family. The Leader is responsible to the party member not only dur¬ing the latter’s lifetime. He will also assume full responsibility after his death to provide for his dependents. To sum it up, if you can have true faith in the leadership, if you are loyal to the collectivity, and dedicate yourself to your rev-olutionary responsibilities, then all other public and private matters will be taken care of by the Leader and by the collectivity! After you have understood this, you will not have anxieties about gain or loss; you will not attach your¬selves to your family and to your spouse; you will not lament over poverty and hardship. You will have no fear that after your sacrifice there will be no one to care for your family and children, that there will be no one to take care of mat¬ters after your death. In short, the personal affairs of a member of the party, whether during his lifetime or after his death, will all be taken care of by the group and the leadership. An individual must not plan for himself; he must totally dedicate himself to the collectivity, to the principles of the revolution, and to the leadership.52
This was the purpose of forging the band of devoted followers into the Li- xingshe in the first place—a tenet never to be forgotten by the special op¬erations units that eventually merged in Dai Li’s Juntong.53
HOUSE RULES
Chiang Kai-shek’s clandestine surrogate was Dai Li, who reigned over his agents like a traditional elite paterfamilias. Emphasizing again and again that the organization was “a large family,” and stressing the importance of group spirit, Dai Li promised to assume personal responsibility for the life and death of his followers in return for their loyalty and devoted service.54 In a brainstorming session of the SSD’s inspectors that was held beside Hangzhou’s West Lake in early January 1935, Dai Li rejected suggestions they adopt the organizational ethos of either the KGB or the Gestapo, al¬though the operational techniques, tradecraft, and models of organization of these organizations were readily accepted. The Chinese secret service, Dai Li stressed, must be built upon Chinese concepts of benevolence, righ¬teousness, loyalty, and filial piety. “Our comrades converge through the prin¬
ciples of benevolence and righteousness; our collective bond is created through mutual loyalty and obligation.” 55
The role of traditional patriarch dictated on the one hand that Dai Li be¬have with the exaggerated courtesy of a gentry host toward his household’s high-status “guests.” Quoting the maxim “a gentleman would rather lose his life than endure humiliation” (shi ke sha, bu ke ru), Dai Li exerted himself to show the greatest kindness and consideration to the elite field agents, high- ranking officers, and attendant scholars with whom he tried to surround himself. But he demanded absolute obedience and total dedication from his own students (which meant anyone who had graduated from a secret service training course) and subordinates, who were subject to the strictest discipline.56
Dai Li dealt out three forms of punishment to those who violated his reg-ulations: verbal reprimands, confinement, and death before a firing squad. In spite of his elaborate courtesies, he was extremely short-tempered and sharp-tongued, perhaps because of the very tension created by the clash be¬tween postured humility and visceral willpower.57 When he lost his temper (which he frequently did), he became verbally aggressive, cursing and scolding his followers for having broken his jiagui, or “household regula¬tions.” 58 These rules represented the patriarch’s orders to his “household,” governing personal behavior and dictating individual attitudes. The most notorious of these orders, one of which forbade gambling and playing ma- jiang, was the ban on marriage during the War of Resistance.59 According to Oliver Caldwell, “Dai Li was strangely jealous of the influence of women on the lives of his men. He had women in his organization, both as secret op¬eratives and to take care of the biological needs of his men, but he objected strongly to marriage or any permanent alliances.” 60 Invoking a phrase in the Dynastic History of the Han (Han shu), “Is personal happiness possible before the extermination of the Huns?” (Xiongnu wei mie, he yijia wei?), Dai Li pro¬hibited Juntong men and women from getting married to anyone inside or outside the bureau until the Japanese had been driven out of the country.61
To enforce his rules, Dai Li built an intricate surveillance system within the special services. A large number of personnel were assigned to internal supervisory and surveillance duties. These inspectors were given overlap¬ping responsibilities within the Inspectorate Office (Duchashi) under Ke Jian’an and reported via a chain of command that was never very clear, although it obviously reached directly to Dai Li himself.62 All evaluations prepared by internal surveillance organs were personally reviewed by Dai Li, regardless of the rank of the officer who wrote the reports. Whenever someone infringed one of the jiagui, scolding was frequently followed by solitary confinement in one of Dai Li’s prisons or concentration camps.63 The jailing was often without time limit, and despite Dai Li’s courtesies to-ward “gentlemen,” no one—not even those of the highest rank in his orga- nization—was safe from punishment.64
THE JUNTONG PRISON SYSTEM
Dai Li’s prisons and concentration camps merit a study unto themselves.
Chiang’s soldiers disarmed and arrested the Fourth Route Army, throwing them into concentration camps (called Labor Camps). For some time, not only the “regular” Chinese secret police under Dai Li (ironically called the Chinese Himmler), but the Guomindang party police have been making ar¬rests. Camps are said to exist in a dozen places and to be filled not only with Communists and with students desirous of reaching the Communist strong¬hold at Yan’an, but with representatives of the so-called “middle parties” be¬tween the Communists and Guomindang, and with persons guilty merely of criticizing the government.65
They were “chock full of tortured, emaciated men and women, including many who had been there for years and should have been released under the terms of the 1937 United Front.” 66 Chen Lifu later told an interviewer:
What proportion of captured suspects were sent to these institutions? Most of them. What do I think of the results? Quite good. I’ll tell you the reason. Most Communists were muddle-headed. Once trapped they could not get out. The Communists used any means: money, girls—to grab hold of [new members]. Most Communists joined the party because they were momentarily muddle-headed, not because they had faith [in Communism]. How did I arrive at this conclusion? From my conversation with you. Communist youth? Not neces-sarily. I saw a lot of leftist youth. This conclusion was not just mine. It was shared by colleagues who questioned [suspects] such as Zhang Daofan. That’s why we used the reform institutions. These were Chinese institutions—the Russians would not use them. Their policy was either to use or kill.67
The most infamous prisons included Yiyang under Warden He Jisheng, Xifeng under Warden Zhou Yanghao,68 the Southeastern Lockup (Dong- nan kanshousuo) at Jian’ou (Yandun) in Fujian under Cao Feihong, and the Northwestern Youth Labor Camp at Xi’an under Jiang Jianren.69
The Northwestern Youth Labor Camp was established by order of the Generalissimo on February 1, 194070 (see appendix A). It was formed from the Special Training Unit (Texun zongdui) of the fourth tuan of the War¬time Cadre Training Corps of the Commission of Military Affairs. The Texun zongdui’s commander, Xiao Zuolin, was replaced by General Jiang Jianren, who was named “dean” ( jiaoyu zhang) of the camp.71 More than three hundred high school and college students arrested by district govern¬ments, by the Thirty-fourth Military District, and by the Shanxi Guomin- dang Office were “enlisted” in three dadui. 72 Their biweekly indoctrination sessions were intended to serve as rebuttals to the viewpoints put forth by the Communists at the University of the War of Resistance (Kangzhan daxue) in Yan’an. For the next three years, the labor camp steadily ex-panded its operations; in 1944 it was reorganized as the Northwestern Youth Training Center (Xibei qingxun zongdui), still under the overall leadership of Hu Zongnan.73
There existed, apart from the labor camps for politically wayward youth, Dai Li’s own internal penal system, which dated from the early years of the SSD, when Shanghai secret police operations were expanding. Both to jail suspected dissidents and to punish unruly followers, Dai Li constructed a special prison in Nanjing at a location never divulged even to his own top field agents.74 Prisoners from Shanghai—virtually all tortured and some partially maimed—were taken to the train station, without handcuffs but with the lower half of their faces wrapped in muslin bandages and wearing sunglasses.75
Usually the captives were made to wear a shoe studded with nails so as to cause them to limp badly as they leaned against one of their two arresting officers. Invariably, they were put on the night express at the very last minute, hustled into a sleeping car deprived of toilet facilities. The trip to Nanjing was harrowing for even the Juntong captors, because they never knew until the last minute if they themselves might be slotted for detention. Upon arrival the secret policemen were met outside the train station, or¬dered to hand over their prisoners, and—if they were lucky — dismissed. Many hapless SSD escorts were arrested on the spot, just as they were hand¬ing over their prisoners to the Juntong welcoming committee; and they went on to spend years in Dai Li’s prison system, where they were expected to gather information from other political prisoners in order to secure their own release.76
High-level MSB backbone cadres such as Zhou Weilong, Yu Lexing, and Xie Ligong were all confined at least once; and some of Dai Li’s very best agents—men like Xu Zhongwu and Lou Zhaoli—were thrown into Jun- tong jails seven or eight times.77 There was also always the risk of Dai Li’s ad¬ministering the dreaded third sanction whenever he wished.78 The death sentence was applied utterly at Dai Li’s discretion. In 1941, for example, out of a total of several hundred deaths within the MSB, more than thirty were executions for flouting the integrity of the bureau’s discipline.79
It is important to understand, however, that Dai Li’s punishments were not arbitrary.80 Within his own organization, which was, after all, partly com¬posed of ambitious and restive adventurers, officers who slipped up ex¬pected to be disciplined.81 They clearly saw the connection between their own errors or malfeasance and Dai Li’s sanctions. Indeed, they knew his sanctions to be part of a larger system of internal discipline and punishment that was ultimately supervised by Chiang Kai-shek himself, but that was from beginning to end implemented by Dai Li in person.82
An example of this was the case of Wang Tianmu, chief of the Tianjin Sta- tion.83 Wang, like most of the experienced gunmen in his operations group (xingdong zu), was from Henan, but his family lived in Beiping, where he also had a residence.84 In the spring of 1934 Wang went to Zhangjiakou on bu¬reau business, so that he was away when a particularly “shocking” ( jingren) homicide case in Beiping was attributed to SSD field agents from the Tian¬jin Station. News of the affair died down after the Beiping Investigation and Apprehension Brigade (Zhenji dui) announced that they had broken the case, but the true details of the homicide remained something of a mystery to the public.85
While Beiping still buzzed with news of the murder, the head of the local SSD station, Chen Gongshu, received a cable from Dai Li in Nanjing order¬ing him to reserve a hotel room without telling anyone of the secret police chief’s presence in the former capital. The evening of Dai’s arrival the two men ordered food from the Central Restaurant (Zhongyang fandian) on East Chang’an Road and took it back to the general’s hotel room for din¬ner. After the two chatted casually at supper, Dai Li questioned Chen Gong- shu at length about Wang Tianmu, who was still in Zhangjiakou. When Chen was about to leave, Dai Li said, “I am going to wait around until Tianmu comes back from Zhangjiakou. I have something to go over with him. I’ll call you up and let you know when I am ready to leave Beiping.” The next day Wang Tianmu returned from Zhangjiakou, and that evening Dai Li informed Chen that he was heading back to Nanjing. Chen went to the railroad station to see him off and was surprised to see that Dai Li had Wang Tianmu in tow.86
Wang Tianmu did not return to his Tianjin post after this.87 Instead, Wang Zixiang was appointed to succeed him as station chief, and about a month later Dai Li sent a telegram ordering the Beiping Station to “escort” the secretary of the Tianjin Station, Wang Tianmu’s former assistant, to Nanjing in order to close the case. With that the Operations Group of Tian¬jin Station was disbanded, and the field agents were either reassigned or given punishment.88
Dai Li wrote a special report to Chiang Kai-shek about this case. Accord¬ing to Dai’s personal secretary, Mao Wanli, the entire dispatch was only a few hundred words long. But Dai Li worked on it for a whole night, from dusk till dawn, writing the report by himself, stroke by stroke. Dai gave a suc¬cinct summary of the event, implicating the former Tianjin station chief, then listed Wang Tianmu’s past merits and accomplishments, and finally made three proposals for Chiang to consider: first, the death sentence; sec¬ond, life imprisonment; or third, giving Wang another chance to redeem himself. Chiang Kai-shek adopted the second proposal. Wang Tianmu was
incarcerated in “Location C” (Bing di), which was set aside for SSD use in the Nanjing Military Prison at Tiger Bridge. “Location C” was reserved for long-term imprisonment, and there Wang Tianmu would remain until Dai Li released him from jail for underground work in Shanghai under Japa¬nese occupation.89
Service in Dai Li’s secret police was, in effect, a lifetime term.90 Once you became a member of the SSD, or what was eventually called the Military Sta¬tistics Bureau, you were never dismissed, nor could you resign from that position. If a person even asked for Dai Li’s permission to retire, he or she risked being clapped into confinement indefinitely.91 Agents told each other, “The comrades [tongzhi] in our organization come in when they’re alive and only leave when they’re sleeping in their coffins.” 92
Chapter 16
Skirts and Sashes
Without money there is no method that is going to work. If you have money, then you can hire the devil to come and work for you. When it comes to playing at politics, who can be without it? In both ancient and modern times, both inside and outside China, it’s always been like this, I’m afraid.
DAI LI, Address to Juntong Agents1
RITUALS AND CEREMONIES
Secret service agents who were killed at Dai Li’s orders—and there were nearly two thousand MSB men and women who died at his command in order to maintain the “discipline” (jilu) of the organization—were posthu¬mously honored by Juntong as “martyrs” (lieshi).2 Dai Li believed that bu¬reau members who were executed in this manner “gave their lives to main¬tain the dignity and integrity of the collective discipline,” having died to perpetuate the purity of Juntong’s “family tradition.” 3 He gave their fami¬lies the same living stipend, tuition, and fees that he handed out to other widows and orphans of the bureau; and this in turn reflected the usual GMD treatment of cadres’ survivors initiated by Chiang Kai-shek in a speech made in 1933 at a funeral ceremony in Fuzhou for soldiers who had died in the suppression campaign.4
After Dai Li became head of Juntong, he held every year on the anniver¬sary of the founding of the Special Services Department a solemn ten-day “April first meeting” (siyi dahui) at MSB headquarters, during which all of the agents who were part of the secret “internal” (neibu) workings of the bu¬reau commemorated these and other martyrs’ sacrifices. Before the convo¬cation began confidential invitations were sent to the “responsible person” in each provincial and municipal Juntong office. The guests were supposed to represent their bureaus, and when they arrived they were ushered into an auditorium with great solemnity to await the arrival of the principal mourner, Chiang Kai-shek himself.5
As the years wore on, these April first meetings became more and more elaborate, and their rituals increasingly dramatic. By the time Juntong head¬quarters had moved to Chongqing an elaborate “mourning hall” (lieshi ling-
Figure 11. Dai Li and children at party, Christmas 1944. Estate of Milton Miles.
tang) had been erected, and the secret agents for the ten-day ceremony were apt to find the auditorium festooned with banners that proclaimed:
Blood shed in a just cause [will last] a thousand autumns [bixue qianqiu]. A noble spirit is imperishable [haoqi changcun].
Continue the glorious history [jixu guangrong lishi]. Carry forward pure family customs [fayang qingbai jiafeng].
Assisted by Dai Li, Chiang Kai-shek made offerings to the spirits of those who had been “killed in the line of duty” (xunnan), those who had been “killed because of illness” (xunzhi), and those who had been “killed because they had broken the law” (xunfa). After the ceremony was over, Chiang made a tour of the hall, inspecting the higher-level secret agents. Once he had left, the rest of the audience presented offerings of money, clothing, and other gifts. The stage was then taken over by Dai Li, who would usually direct his comments toward the various section leaders who had come to at¬tend the meeting, explaining how the MSB had been founded and how much concern and solicitude their supreme Leader had shown for them.6
Once Dai Li concluded his remarks, the guests adjourned to a banquet of more than four hundred tables with food personally selected by Dai Li. Toasts were given, the first to Chiang Kai-shek’s health, the second to Dai Li’s longevity, and the third to everyone else’s well-being. Then, once the duty officer had shouted, “commence!” (kaidong), the secret agents sat down and began eating. The banquets, interspersed with entertainments put on by a theatrical troupe organized within the MSB, went on day after day. The first night the festivities lasted until midnight. The second evening there was another dinner party. On the third day the agents rested before attend¬ing a banquet at Juntong’s administrative offices. Then, beginning on the fourth day, the guests were divided into small groups to discuss work prob¬lems. These discussions generally continued for four or five days. On the very last day, Dai Li usually led Juntong office and division cadres as well as the representatives from each local bureau to the tomb of the “anonymous heroes” (wuming yingxiong), where a flowered wreath was placed before the smooth and unmarked monument, deliberately devoid of personal inscrip¬tion. This marked the completion of the closing ceremonies, which were followed by Dai Li’s taking the MSB provincial representatives to the Cen¬tral Training Unit (Zhongyang xunlian ban) to have a private audience with Chiang Kai-shek. Once that was over, the ten-day ceremony was brought to an end and the representatives returned to work in their individual units.7
Although these ceremonies, especially after 1941, were set to an august Confucian cadence scored by Dai Li’s solemn and uplifting lectures, his re¬marks to his agents before that date were earthier and less high-flown.8 One is struck by the vulgar suppleness of his conversations recorded during the 1930s, conversations that reveal only average literacy but that demonstrate a quick and facile mind, capable of twisting aphorisms around and of easily manipulating spatial relationships.9 His language during that decade was that of someone steeped in the tradition of theRomance of the Three Kingdoms (San guo yanyi). He spoke of the renegade, the bandit, and outlaw, of the “rivers and lakes” ( jianghu). Mao Zedong (to make an obvious comparison) also was steeped in the San guo yanyi, but his language was much more lit¬erary and elegant. Mao spoke like a magistrate in front of his yamen; Dai Li sounded more like a worldly muyou (tent guest or literary scribe). He was certainly a step above the illiterate yamen runner, but his language was still that of the clerk, and not that of one who held a lower degree.10
RIVERS AND LAKES
An event most revealing of Dai Li’s own strategic vision, colored as it was by the romance of feudalism and the wisdom of the marshes, occurred during the spring festival of 1944, when Hu Zongnan gave a banquet at the Maling Mansion in Xi’an. At the end of the meal talk turned to the Three Kingdoms. Hu and his guests — especially Liang Ganqiao, Fan Hanjie, and Jiang Jian- ren—moved easily from the romance to Sunzi’s treatise on war. Dai Li at first hemmed and hawed, pretending he knew nothing about the classic; but then, pressed by the others, he uncharacteristically began to express his own opinion. First, he said he knew little of the commentaries that Fan had cited, nor could he talk about the German strategist von Clausewitz from practical experience, since he was not a battlefield general. But he did have something to say about the chapter “De jian” and dejian wei zhu (acquiring intelligence is the chief matter) in the Sunzi bingfa, the Warring States work on war and military strategy that constituted one of the standard texts in the military academies of this time.11
According to a listener at the banquet, Dai Li talked with unusual en¬thusiasm about the Sunzi bingfa, his voice falling and rising in waves as he spoke of “military espionage” ( junshi jiandie) and “military intelligence” ( junshi qingbao). 12 After all, it was much more important in the long run to attack the hearts and minds of the enemy than to assault his defended walls (gong xin wei shang, gong cheng wei xia). Dai Li’s hero in this respect was Zhuge Liang (Kongming) of the Three Kingdoms, China’s earliest spymaster, who was also close in Dai’s eyes to being a “godlike immortal” (shen xian), as Kongming advised Liu Bei how to conduct the “great enterprise” of recon¬stituting the empire.13
Kongming’s skill as a master magician is revealed most vividly in the novel during his punitive expedition against Wei in 231 C.E., when he confronts General Sima Yi sitting in a battle wagon “wearing a bonnet fastened with a clasp and a robe bestuck with crane feathers, feather fan in hand.” Escorted by twenty-four long-haired unshod men in black led by Guan Xing, and dressed “as the Straw-headed Monster of the Field,” Zhuge Liang escaped the pursuing Wei cavalry by trickery and magic, leaving General Sima to sigh to heaven that “Kongming’s maneuvers are as subtle as those of gods and demons.” 14
In the Mao recension, used by Moss Roberts in his magisterial transla¬tion of Luo’s classic, Zhuge Liang is only said to be “disguised” as a god, but his Merlin-like qualities are present throughout the romance, and these qualities certainly must have accounted for some of the fascination China’s modern spymaster, a wizard of deception himself, felt for “the sleeping dragon.” 15 Indeed, Dai Li told the other banquet guests, somewhat to their surprise, that he intended to write a biography of Zhuge Liang when time permitted.16
Needless to say, Dai Li’s discourses had to take his audiences into ac¬count, and by and large the agents that he recruited before the War of Re¬sistance were not highly educated men and women. Despite the emphasis he placed upon intelligence work in the Sunzi bingfa, espionage and coun¬terintelligence were hardly a reputable occupation during the Republican period.17 Many of the early recruits—the rank and file in particular—were drawn from the lower strata of society: jugglers, wrestlers, itinerant enter¬tainers, journeymen traders, jailers, executioners, thieves, and gangsters.
These agents readily put on the disguises of candy hucksters, porters, street hawkers, restaurant and hotel waiters, domestic servants, newspaper ven¬dors, and ricksha pullers when they were on assignment.18
Moreover, top-ranking agents who were culturally literate did not receive the best higher education of the time. Available information on the service’s officers of the 1930s shows that the majority of these agents received a tra¬ditional education during the early decades of the century in a provincial milieu, insulated from the intellectual ferment of the May Fourth Move¬ment. Dai Li, of course, attended Zhejiang Provincial Normal School, which before 1919 offered a traditional literary curriculum and, given its practice of free tuition, attracted students of lesser social background.19 Other key figures of the secret service, from Deng Wenyi and Zhao Longwen to such middle-ranking cadres as Liu Peichu and Qiao Jiacai, received education in the classics and dynastic histories as children, admired the heroes of Three Kingdoms and The Water Margin, and readily alluded to literature and clas¬sical poetry.20 What separated these men from the college graduates of Shanghai or Beijing was not only their inability to compete successfully in college entrance examinations that stressed competence in English and mathematics, but also their profound ambivalence toward the cultural icon¬oclasm and Westernized urban lifestyle embraced by the educated elite.21
The cultural universe of these officers, as that of Dai Li, was dominated by traditional heroic lore and by historical allegories that in turn shaped the profile of secret service paragons during the Nanjing decade. Dai Li searched for men with special skills such as the ability “to imitate the crow of a rooster, and steal through a hall like a dog” (ji ming gou dao), as de¬scribed in a famous passage in The Records of the Historian (Shi ji); or the abil¬ity “to leap from the roof of one building to another, and walk horizontally on its outer walls” (fei yan zou bi), which was presumed to be a skill of ac¬complished thieves in numerous popular tales of martial valor.22
Dai Li’s willingness to believe in the extraordinary ability of those schooled in traditional martial arts, incidentally, lasted even into the mid- 1940s, when the MSB in Chongqing had transformed itself into a bureau¬cracy of professionally trained code operators and secret agents, equipped with shortwave radios and Thompson submachine guns. Dai Li, after con¬siderable effort, convinced a certain Daoist priest to join his organization. He also invited to the bureau a gongfu master, believed to be the real-life model for the leading hero of the Jianghu qixia zhuan (Legendary heroes of the rivers and lakes), a popular Republican wuxia (martial valor and knight- errant) novel of the time.23 The search for “true men of the rivers and lakes” ( jianghu haohan) also led Juntong to recruit bandits and kidnappers from Sheng county in the central hills of Zhejiang, where so many Shanghai gangsters and racketeers originated.24 In one case a burglar, who was being held in Wuhan Military Jail under sentence of death, was released and given a few months of spy training before he was assigned to duty by the Special Services Department.25 Certainly, one of Dai Li’s major strengths in the Gen¬eralissimo’s eyes must have been his ability to mobilize such unsavory ele¬ments and turn them into tools of the regime.
In his instructions to subordinates during those years, Dai Li emphasized five different words, which were a kind of strategic shorthand: qun (skirt), ban (manage), shi (master), cai (wealth), and gan (make, do).26 His expla¬nations of these terms were both straightforward and axiomatic. The first word, “skirt,” was obvious enough. In “playing at politics” (wan zhengzhi), Dai Li often said, one can never get far from the “skirt and sash relations” (qun- dai guanxi) that exist between men and women.27 Whenever possible, try to discover those relationships—or create them—and then use the sexual connection to your advantage. “Foreign affairs” (waijiao), on the other hand, called for the kind of “persuasive guest” (shuike) who was around in Warring States times and who nowadays served as the head of a warlord’s office (ban- shichu) in Shanghai or Beiping, “managing” (ban) his affairs. People like that had “eyes that could see a thousand li and are able to penetrate ten thou¬sand things.” At the same time, you had to know how to acquaint yourself with and manipulate the stratum of officials (shi) who served as the staff of important leaders. These were the military advisers ( junshi), who, like the Shaoxing private aides of the imperial period, served as the confidential secretaries ( jiyao mishu) and chiefs of staff (canmouzhang) of the army gen¬erals who ran China. If you have these men in your grasp, then everything else follows: “The ether penetrates from top to bottom, and once you pen¬etrate one you penetrate ten thousand” (shangxia tong qi, yi tong wan tong). 28 Wealth (cai) was important because “it’s the thing that holds everything else down in terms of strategic foundations.” As for gan, which simply means “to do,” it’s a matter of doing all of these things at once. “To grasp all of the key five characters at once almost never happens. In order to cross over the passes like breaking bamboo, you need to do it one section at a time. Following that momentum, you’ll pass easily along to do whatever you want to do.” 29
Dai Li’s genius as a secret police chief was in his ability to shift so readily from one role to another, but that in turn depended upon his skill at read¬ing his audience’s expectations of himself, their momentary dramaturge. His understanding of human nature stressed the ignoble qualities of others, qualities that he viewed with equanimity in himself. Yet it was precisely be¬cause he was willing to recognize, and even pander to, his own vices that he felt himself to be such a master of men’s souls. Dai Li’s operational ob¬session with “skirt and sash relations” thus reflected his own predilections as a compulsive womanizer, at least insofar as he was presented as a Lothario by critical biographers who may have been meeting their readers’ expecta¬tions about such wayward behavior by writing from sensational subtexts of their own.30
DAI LI’S WOMEN
According to his detractors, Dai Li not only constantly had affairs with his female agents, such as Zou Zhiying; he was also a continuing threat to his cadres’ wives and sisters, and his disciples quickly learned to spirit their women out of sight once he began to take an interest in them.31 Dai Li was said to be particularly fascinated by contemporary women of action like Shi Jianqiao, who assassinated the warlord Sun Chuanfang in the international settlement of Tianjin in 1934.32 Sun Chuanfang had killed Shi Jianqiao’s fa¬ther, Shi Congbin, who was one of his division commanders (shizhang) in Anhui, so that her assassination was an act of retaliation. Consequently, Shi Jianqiao was a popular celebrity: the classic martial arts maiden and the ar¬chetypal filial daughter combined.33 Contemporaries compared her to the heroine He Yufeng in theyouxia (knight-errant) novel Women Warriors (Ernu yingxiong zhuan), and the public thought—incorrectly, it seems—that she was one of Dai Li’s top agents in the MSB.34
Dai Li was also fascinated by the Japanese spy Kawashima Yoshiko, who cross-dressed like a man and at this time, around 1935, was supposedly commanding collaborationist cavalry against Chinese partisans in Rehe (Je- hol).35 But, if the lurid tales about his womanizing are to be believed, Dai Li found women of almost every variety and age attractive. It did not matter whether the person was a menial servant or his own best student: female agents, women doctors, friends’ wives, unlicensed prostitutes, licensed cour- tesans—all he needed was a glimpse.36 Former Juntong agents claimed that one reason Dai Li had so many safe houses scattered here and there was be¬cause he needed to have places of assignation available to fulfill his errant sexual impulses whenever the whim struck.37
His own marriage was unhappy. His betrothal to Mao Xiucong occurred in the fall of 1915, when Dai Li was 19 sui and a student at Zhejiang Provin¬cial First Normal. Dai Li described his wife as a woman “from the country¬side.” She was said to be stubborn and unyielding, hard-working, frugal, honest, and unambitious, content with a commoner’s lot. Although she suspected that Dai Li was having affairs in the early 1930s, she feared him “like a tiger” and hardly dared quarrel with him. Eventually, because of his extramarital affairs, they lived apart. Typically enough, Dai Li made her brother, Mao Zongliang, his majordomo, giving him appointments in vari¬ous special service training camps and in cooperatives within Juntong that acted as purchasing agents to buy soft drinks, sundries, and the like for the organization. Although he relied upon him considerably, Dai Li treated his brother-in-law shabbily, and Mao Zongliang in turn felt that Dai had caused his sister the worst kind of misfortune. After their estrangement, she fell ill and died in Shanghai in 1939.38
Dai Li’s aides claimed to be embarrassed by his constant womanizing.39 Every time he made an inspection trip by automobile to one or another of his secret service stations, some kind of misalliance was likely to occur, with his lieutenants often forced to act as go-betweens and procurers. “Although I went along with him as an aide four times,” one former secret agent re¬ported, “there wasn’t a single time that a person dared bring up these hu¬miliating sexual activities with him.” 40
Not all the relationships were casual, and as time went on Dai Li seemed to grow steadier in his affections, particularly toward the end of his life. At the height of his prewar activity, he supposedly had two major mistresses, Zhao Ailan and Ye Xiati, and he often traveled with both of them. For ex¬ample, whenever a particularly urgent intelligence report came from one of his field units, Dai Li would personally deliver the message to Chiang Kai- shek in Nanjing, driving overnight from wherever he happened to be at the moment. During those long nighttime drives, conducted by two chauffeurs taking turns at the wheel, Dai Li would ride in the back seat with Zhao Ailan and Ye Xiati, falling asleep close beside one or the other woman.41
Ye Xiati was a graduate of the Special Training Section (Texunban) of the Zhejiang Police Academy. She had caught Dai Li’s eye when she was a clerk (shiwuyuan) in the Sanji Wireless Radio School. Once she became the object of his “infatuation” (chongai), Dai Li decided to have her learn proper manners by living in the household of Yang Hu, commander of the Shang¬hai Garrison. An intimate of the Yang Hu family and a frequent visitor to their house on Huanlong Road, Dai Li was very envious of the Guomindang general’s ability to surround himself with women who were able to handle his social affairs. He was particularly impressed by the willingness of Yang Hu’s concubines to “sacrifice appearances” (xisheng sexiang) and bestow their sexual favors upon important visitors and friends of the general at his be¬hest. After Ye Xiati acquired this same sort of savoir faire, Dai Li arranged for her to study political economy in the United States, and then, when she returned to China, he helped her get a teaching position at Western China University (Huaxi daxue) in Chengdu. Eventually—so one of Dai Li’s least friendly biographers claims—Dai Li gave Ye Xiati in marriage to his best friend, General Hu Zongnan.42
Whether this last story is true or not, Dai Li’s other mistress at the time also became betrothed to one of the spy chief’s friends. Zhao Ailan ended up marrying the chief of the Juntong Communications Office, Wei Da- ming.43 But these alliances did not always end so happily for the woman in question. In 1940 Dai Li seduced his English-language secretary, Yu Shu- heng, even though the young Hunanese woman was engaged to a valued
Figure 12. Dai Li’s Baoan mansion. Photograph by Frederic Wakeman.
Juntong agent.44 Dai Li claimed that he wanted to marry Yu, but within two years he had fallen in love with the movie star Hu Die and promptly aban¬doned the now-pregnant Yu Shuheng, sending her to the United States to study.45
The general’s passion for the actress consumed the last years of Dai Li’s life.46 Butterfly (Hu Die) was already married to a Shanghai businessman named Pan Yousheng when Dai was smitten by her at first sight.47 To cele¬brate their “marriage,” which Dai eventually wanted to make legal, the se¬cret service chief built a pretentiously landscaped “mansion” (gongguan) on adjoining pieces of real estate at Yangjiashan, outside Chongqing, as a token of his worshipful devotion to the cosmopolitan movie star (see fig. 12). Dur¬ing Chongqing’s muggy evenings the general and his mistress would stroll dreamily along a cement pathway inscribed with the characters xi and shou ( joy, long life), winding among the ten thousand silver dollars’ worth of tropical plants and exotic trees that adorned the Grotto of the Immortals (Shenxian dong).48
But it would not do to exaggerate the “skirt and sash relations” that Dai Li enjoyed and employed as head of the military secret service. His intimate relations with the women who served him as private clerks and secretar¬ies formed part of a more general pattern of establishing confidentiality through particularistic ties. These habits were also a way for Dai Li to ensure his own monopolistic control of the gathering and reporting of secret in¬formation at the center of his “internal” network. For he was, above all, jeal¬ous of anyone infringing upon his confidential sources and using them to try to move around him and gain access to his own main source of power, the Generalissimo himself. One of the best examples of this phenomenon was the Weng Guanghui affair.
THE WENG GUANGHUI AFFAIR
In 1932 the French Concession police raided an underground Communist safe house in Shanghai, seizing, among other materials, a CCP report that gave the deployment, equipment, and other military conditions of the Red Army units in Jiangxi province. The chief of the Chinese detective squad in the French police, Fan Guangzhen, was a Green Gang member who was also on Dai Li’s payroll. He therefore passed on a copy of the secret report to his case officer, the head of the Shanghai Special Section, Weng Guanghui. The importance of the document was immediately obvious to Weng, who de¬cided not to convey the information to Dai Li, but rather to go directly to Chiang Kai-shek with what amounted to an intelligence coup of unusual dimensions.
Weng himself was a graduate of the third class at Whampoa who had gone on to captain a warship in the revolutionary navy. Knowing that there was at that time a Chinese warship under repair in the Shanghai shipyards, Weng decided to commandeer the vessel and proceed directly to Jiujiang, whence he would go overland to Lushan and hand in the report personally to the Generalissimo. As soon as the ship left Shanghai, however, one of his underlings in the Special Section informed Dai Li about the venture. Dai— predictably enraged — ordered a plane made ready to fly him posthaste from Nanjing to Jiujiang, where he was waiting with a contingent of special agents when Weng’s boat sailed in. The minute the vessel docked Dai Li went aboard and took Weng Guanghui into custody, seizing the secret re¬port and threatening his Special Section chief with the direst punishment. Miraculously, Weng Guanghui managed to escape death, although he was removed from his position.49
Thereafter Dai Li made sure that each secret service zu (group) had one of his own internal surveillance spies anonymously attached to it so that other agents would not dare to try to go around him to reach the Gener¬alissimo on their own.50 In this way, Dai Li zealously defended his indis¬pensability to Chiang Kai-shek, while simultaneously presenting himself as the arch-guardian of the safety of other leading members of the Chiang regime. Juntong thus took blatant precautions to protect major Nanjing officials who came down to Shanghai on weekends for pleasure. If anybody was seen hanging about their front doors or loitering by their automobiles,
Figure 13. Song Ziwen (T. V. Soong), Chiang Kai-shek’s brother-in-law and minister of foreign affairs. Photograph by Wu Yingping.
then secret service agents would have them arrested on suspicion. Almost invariably these suspects turned out to be perfectly harmless, but they were routinely kept in jail for several months. Their efforts to bribe their way out of captivity during such protracted detention additionally provided wel¬come pocket money for the SSD agents who imprisoned them.51
SECRET SERVICE COUPS
On September 23, 1931, an attempt to assassinate T.V. Soong (Song Ziwen) was made at the Shanghai train station. Soong survived by throwing aside his trademark white panama hat, an easy target, and got away in the crowd, hiding behind a steel girder.52 But his secretary, Tang Yulu, was killed. The murderer escaped. In April 1934 an informant contacted the Shanghai Station of the SSD with a lead to the whereabouts of the assassin. Dai Li instantly dispatched two of his top officers, Shen Zui and Cheng Muyi, to run the lead down. The informant led them to Subei (northern Jiangsu), where the suspected assassin was serving as a brigade commander in the peace preservation core (baoandui) in Yancheng. With the informant’s help they lured the suspect aboard a small boat, where he was seized for interrogation.
Under torture, the man confessed that Soong’s death had been ordered by the “king of assassins,” Wang Yaqiao. He also implicated an accomplice: T. V. Soong’s former chauffeur, now working as a mechanic in Yangzhou, where he was subsequently arrested. After the two men were brought back to Shanghai, Dai Li showed T. V. Soong a photograph of the second man. Soong not only confirmed the chauffeur’s identity; he also tried to give Shen Zui a five-thousand-yuan reward. But Dai Li ordered Shen Zui to re¬turn the check with a note saying that his men were simply carrying out their duty to protect a valued cabinet minister. T. V. Soong as a result felt that he owed Dai Li a considerable debt of gratitude, and later his signature more than once endorsed Juntong requests to the Bank of China for oper¬ating funds once Dai won Chiang Kai-shek’s permission to bypass the Min¬istry of Finance.53
Dai Li’s greatest secret service coups during these years, however, in¬volved the subordination of domestic militarists in the southeast: the sup¬pression of the Fujian rebellion in 1933 and the subversion of the “king of south China” (Huanan wang) in 1936. In November 1933, Li Jishen and Chen Mingshu led the Nineteenth Route Army in a movement to create an independent government in Fujian province, dedicated to the overthrow of Chiang Kai-shek.54 As soon as he realized the gravity of the Fujian rebellion, which constituted one of the most severe threats to Chiang’s power yet to appear, Dai Li went in person to Jian’ou, about eighty kilometers south of Pucheng.55
Dai brought along with him a team of agents headed by his deputy Zheng Jiemin, assisted by Zhang Yanyuan. The team, which was called a cefan zu (group to incite defection), was divided into four action units under Mo Xiong and others, who went into the area controlled by the Fujian People’s Government (Fujian renmin zhengfu) to try to enlist turncoats and subvert the rebel enterprise. Dai Li himself, accompanied by Shen Zui, set up his own headquarters on Gulangyu, the island resort just off of Amoy (Xia¬men), which was dotted with the residences of foreign diplomats, business¬men, and missionaries who sought relief along the seashore from the sum¬mer heat of Fujian. The defection team followed Dai Li’s dictum by trying to win over the shi (masters) of the rebel forces, and succeeded in bribing two key officers in the Nineteenth Route Army: Huang Qiang, one of the commanders; and Fan Hanjie, who was chief of staff (canmou chuzhang). Within days of the inception of the revolt Dai Li’s men had in their hands the code books of the enemy, and the spymaster was able from his perch on Gulangyu to intercept all the battle plans for the deployment of the Nine¬teenth Route Army. In addition, Dai Li also subverted the military com¬mander at Mawei, opening the gateway to Fuzhou, which was handily occu¬pied by Chiang Kai-shek’s army in January 1934, bringing the rebellion to a rapid end and elevating Dai Li’s importance even more in the Generalis¬simo’s eyes.56
The “king of south China” was Chen Jitang, the warlord of Guangdong who, together with Hu Hanmin, led the New Guomindang (Xin Guomin- dang), headquartered in Canton. After Hu Hanmin’s death in May 1935, Chen Jitang joined the Guangxi warlords in a direct challenge to Chiang Kai-shek’s government: armed insurrection in June 1936 against the Nan¬jing regime.57 Once again, Dai Li personally proceeded south with Zheng Jiemin to try to subvert his master’s enemy. Zheng himself went on to Hong Kong with a large sum of money, which he entrusted to another one of Dai Li’s agents, Xing Shan (Xing Senzhou), for the purpose of bribery. A com¬plicated intrigue followed. Using Zhu Jiahua, the Nanjing minister of edu¬cation who had been president of Zhongshan University, Dai Li’s men were able to persuade the dean of the Guangdong Aeronautical School (Hang- kong xuexiao) to make contact with Huang Guangrui, commander of Chen Jitang’s airforce.58
At the same time, Dai Li sent one of his best women agents, the former Cantonese dance hall girl Huang Peizhen, to seduce Huang Guangrui.59 Together, “skirts” and “wealth” did the trick. Xing Shan promised Huang Guangrui twenty thousand yuan for every airplane that he delivered to Chiang Kai-shek’s forces from Chen Jitang’s air corps. On June 30, a wing of seven airplanes took off from Guangdong and surrendered to Chiang Kai-shek.60 Less than three weeks later, on July 18, eighty-two more air¬planes left from Baiyun Airport and field-hopped their way north to Nan- chang. When that contingent of more than 150 pilots and mechanics joined the Nanjing forces, mortally depleting the Guangdong air corps, Chen Ji- tang felt his cause was lost. That same day the “king of south China” an¬nounced his resignation and fled to Hong Kong on an English ferry.61
The Guangdong revolt was over, and Dai Li once again won most of Chiang’s acclaim, which was instantly translated into a more material form, thanks to the SSD’s earlier resolution of the Soong assassination attempt. Henceforth, Dai Li could count on the Generalissimo’s permission to with¬draw funds directly from the Bank of China without recourse to the Min¬istry of Finance, simply on the strength of a note from T. V. Soong or Bei Songsun, director of the Shanghai branch.62
THE XI’AN INCIDENT
If the sole purpose of Dai Li’s activities was to consolidate his relationship with the Generalissimo, then the crucial turning point for him had to have been the pivotal Xi’an Incident of 1936. On December 12, 1936, Chiang Kai-shek was seized in Xi’an by the “Young Marshal,” Zhang Xueliang, and by General Yang Hucheng. While the mutineers attempted to force Chiang to negotiate a united front with the Communists, the Nationalists contem¬plated a counterattack, including bombing the city of Xi’an itself.63 Ma¬dame Chiang forbade bombing and ordered the army units loyal to them not to try to rescue the Generalissimo by invading the Wei River valley from
the garrisons at strategic Tong Pass.64 Instead, she resolved to fly to Xi’an together with her brother, T. V. Soong, president of the Executive Yuan; Chiang’s Australian advisor, W. H. Donald; and—at his own pleading—with General Dai Li.
Chiang’s military intelligence chief was painfully aware of the dangers he courted by placing himself in the hands of the Communists and their al- lies.65 Dai Li, after all, was responsible for the deaths of thousands of un¬derground agents and Communist “reactionaries.” 66 But he was resolved to “share the difficulty” ( funan) of his Leader’s plight, remembering how Chiang Kai-shek himself had “shared the difficulty” of Sun Yat-sen’s peril during the Yongfeng cruiser incident in Canton in 1922.67 Young Chiang’s decision to rush to Sun’s side when the latter was besieged by Chen Jiong- ming had elevated Chiang Kai-shek to the status of one of Sun’s revolution¬ary heirs.68 Dai Li believed now that what was to become known as the Xi’an Incident (Xi’an shibian) would be a similar acid test for loyalty to Chiang’s personal rule, and it was with the Yongfeng incident firmly in mind that he departed the capital.69
Before leaving Nanjing to “devote himself heart and soul” (xiaozhong) to Chiang, Dai Li called together all special services officials above the rank of deputy section chief (keguzhang) in the assembly hall at Caoduxiang. As the officer in charge of the Leader’s safety—the man who had already launched an intelligence effort against Zhang Xueliang that had failed miserably— Dai Li was wracked with remorse for his inability to forestall this crisis. He spoke to his agents in tears, saying, “This trip is fraught with grim possibili¬ties.” And when the flight left Nanjing for Xi’an on December 21, 1936, Dai Li was aboard armed with two revolvers, determined to “share life or death together with the xiaozhang. ” The moment he was ushered into Chiang’s presence after they finally reached Xi’an, he rushed forward, fell to his knees in front of the Generalissimo, grasped his Leader’s legs, and wept bit¬terly, crying out and berating himself for having failed in his duty to protect the lingxiu. 70
Dai Li’s dramatic behavior may have been contrived, but, as it turned out, his presence in Xi’an was crucial in persuading Zhang Xueliang to release Chiang Kai-shek and accompany the Generalissimo back to Nanjing. Ac¬cording to foreign intelligence reports at the time, no one other than Dai Li could have convinced the “Young Marshal” that he would enjoy the pro¬tection of the Nationalist secret service once they were both back in Guo- mindang territory.71 To be sure, the “protection” turned into the longest house arrest in Chinese history, but Zhang Xueliang’s life was spared, whereas Yang Hucheng and his family were eventually killed by Juntong ex- ecutioners.72
Chiang Kai-shek was certainly impressed by Dai Li’s willingness to risk his own life to join him at Xi’an. He mentioned Dai Li’s name several times in the Xi’an banyue ji (Record of fifteen days in Xi’an), his journal of the inci¬dent, and in later years he frequently praised Dai Li in front of other people for his loyalty to the Leader during the crisis.73
At the same time, rivals who failed to come to his side during the Xi’an Incident earned Chiang’s disfavor. Deng Wenyi and He Zhonghan, for in¬stance, had appeared to waver during those two weeks, the Generalissimo believed; and after Chiang got back to Nanjing he saw to it that they and others were reduced in rank and significance.74 Deng Wenyi was given only the job of commander of the first regiment (tuan) of the wartime cadres training unit after the War of Resistance broke out in the summer of 1937. Later he became head of the political section of the Chengdu Military Academy, and after World War II was over he finally became director of the Bureau of Information (Xinwen ju) of the Ministry of Defense. But Deng Wenyi did not recover his former standing with Chiang Kai-shek and the Whampoa clique until he was restored to his position as a secretary in the ADC more than a decade after he had failed to appear alongside Dai Li at Xi’an “in the tiger’s mouth” in 1936.75
Dai Li reaped other benefits from the Xi’an affair. As the man in charge of Zhang Xueliang’s future, he took over such important members of the Young Marshal’s retinue as Chen Xudong, Wu Qian, and Wang Huayi, who all joined Juntong as special services officers. In addition, a number of Manchurian bodyguards, assistants, chefs, servants, and relatives attached to Zhang’s entourage were brought under Dai Li’s sway, which redounded to his profit in years to come. Zhang Xueliang’s younger sister, for example, was married to the son of Chen Lu, who later accepted the portfolio of for¬eign minister in the puppet “Reformed Government” of Liang Hongzhi during the Japanese occupation; and it was through her Manchurian body¬guards that Dai Li’s plot to assassinate the foreign minister spun.76
The Xi’an Incident also brought Dai Li and Madame Chiang closer to¬gether. Not long after he returned to Nanjing from the northwest, Dai Li developed dilatory appendicitis and was operated on in the Hongen yiyuan (Cottage Hospital). After the operation, Song Meiling came to see him in person, conveying Chiang’s wishes for a quick recovery and ordering the hospital staff to look after him with the most careful attention.77 Thereafter Dai Li cultivated greater favor with “Madame” (Furen), presenting her sec¬retaries and servants with presents and money to help him use “the pathway of the skirt” (qundai menlu) to keep on the good side of Chiang Kai-shek.78
Clearly, Xi’an represented a major personal victory for Dai Li, who be¬gan at this time to overshadow decisively his rival, the “CC” clique spy chief Xu Enzeng.79 Dai Li would henceforth be regarded by Chiang as his most trusted protector, and in the eyes of others Dai Li’s organization and its activities would become “virtually indispensable to Chiang’s survival as the Party’s leading political figure.” 80
War with Japan only reinforced the relationship between the two men. As the hostilities unfolded, Dai Li quickly took on a grander national role, commensurate with Chiang Kai-shek’s new stature as the country’s savior. Japan’s attempt to conquer China, after all, represented an opportunity for Dai Li to expand his secret empire even as the nation was under attack. En¬tirely new dimensions of covert activity now existed for the spymaster and his men, who could convert their expertise in terrorism and assassination to patriotic resistance against the enemy who had invaded their land.81
Chapter 17
War and the
Special Movement Corps
You young fellows must love your country and not assist the Japanese or be a traitor. Now in Nandao they are in need of a number of young plainclothes soldiers. If you wish to join us, you must follow me.
SPECIAL MOVEMENT CORPS RECRUITER, September 1937 1
DAI LI AND DU YUESHENG
The War of Resistance against Japan that broke out in the summer of 1937 presented Dai Li with new opportunities for expansion of his secret empire. As his former assistant Shen Zui put it so sarcastically later, “The country’s fate was all for the worse, but the hound’s fortunes were just the reverse.”2 The spread of warfare across the nation drastically hindered Nanjing’s pro¬gram of vertical integration by military and police expansion, and the loss of the coast cut Chiang Kai-shek off from irreplaceable sources of revenue. The patchwork pattern of Japanese military occupation, however, abetted Dai Li’s interstitial expansion into local security and paramilitary forces, and the existence of two contiguous wartime economies afforded the secret police new resources through black markets and transport linkages that Dai Li controlled. The war also brought the secret service chief into closer con¬tact with racketeers like Du Yuesheng and reinforced the dependence of Juntong upon illicit profits from the traffic in narcotics.3
Contemporaries claimed that Dai Li had known Du Yuesheng since his days as a liumang in Shanghai between 1921 and 1923. Their relation¬ship supposedly grew closer in the fall of 1927, when Chiang Kai-shek re¬signed from the Nationalist government and temporarily dissolved his se¬cret investigative unit. Nearly penniless, Dai Li had returned to Shanghai in search of funds and ended up going to his old friend, Du Yuesheng, for help. Du, by now a “big shot” (wenren), twice gave Dai Li fifty dollars to ease him through the crisis. Dai’s penury proved to be short-lived. But long af¬ter Chiang Kai-shek returned to power and reassembled his personal secret service, Dai Li remembered Du’s generosity.4
Meanwhile, Chiang’s regime began to cooperate with Du Yuesheng in
Figure 14. Du Yuesheng, leader of the Green Gang. Xi’erxiao, Jiu Zhongguo ‘jiaofu’ Du Yuesheng [Du Yuesheng: a “godfather” in Old China]. Beijing: Jinri Zhongguo chubanshe, 1994.
monopolizing the Shanghai opium traffic. It was practical to place the opium trade in the hands of a single group, keeping a difficult problem seg¬regated from other national affairs and transferring the stigma to more de¬niable quarters. Indiscriminate competition was eliminated, order and con¬trol were insured, and huge revenues were channeled without too much publicity.5 As soon as the new Nationalist government was established in Nanjing, the Ministry of Finance began to organize an official opium mo¬nopoly, which was extended into the Jiangsu-Zhejiang region on August 20, 1927. Initially, Du Yuesheng opposed the plan because it threatened the profits of his company, Dagongsi, which controlled most of the trade. How¬ever, a modus vivendi was arranged between Du and the Nationalists, who turned over monopoly rights in Shanghai to a subsidiary of the Dagongsi called the Zixin Company in exchange for monthly revenues protected, in effect, by the Nationalist military.6
Dai Li, as we have seen, began to get access to some of these revenues to cover the costs of the Special Services Department within the Blue Shirts. The “CC” clique also enjoyed moneys from the Du Yuesheng connection. To combat the “CC” clique—implementing what one former Blue Shirt de¬scribed as Chiang’s typical policy of “fighting poison with poison”—Dai Li supposedly swore blood brotherhood with Du Yuesheng and began to re¬cruit Red and Green Gang members into the SSD in order to strengthen his ties to the underworld and its traffic in drugs.7
The 1927 arrangement with Du Yuesheng was not altogether stable sim¬ply because the volume of traffic was so high that its profits constituted an overwhelming temptation to both sides of the deal. By 1931, as the world depression began to severely afflict the Chinese economy, China was pro¬ducing about twelve thousand tons of narcotics per year, or more than seven-eighths of the globe’s supply of illegal drugs. Displacing the Near East as the source of opium and its derivatives, China dominated the U.S. mar¬ket. In fact, most of America’s heroin came from laboratories in Shanghai and Tianjin.8 In Shanghai, which contained about 100,000 opium addicts, ten of these refineries were operated by Du Yuesheng and his men; 9 and of these, the two largest earned $40,000 per day. The payoff to the Nationalist government to protect these factories alone amounted to $400,000 per month.10
In May 1931 Du Yuesheng met with Chiang Kai-shek in Nanjing. Chiang offered to pay the racketeer $1 million to throw his Green Gang into the Communist suppression campaign. He also agreed to share the govern¬ment’s national opium monopoly with the gangsters in exchange for a payment of six million yuan from the underworld. However, payment to the Green Gang leaders in the first case was made by Finance Minister T. V. Soong with devalued government bonds.11 Soong also failed to show good faith in administering the secret opium monopoly agreement. Strug¬gling to pay Chiang’s huge military bills for the Communist extermination campaign, the minister of finance cast covetous eyes on the narcotics busi¬ness, planning to use opium seized by the Suppression Bureau to corner the market.12
Although the Nanjing regime issued orders on June 18, 1931, that all officials observe the laws prohibiting the sale of opium, Soong and his sup¬porters continued to try to create a national monopoly in opium, which was expected to raise about $100 million per year in additional government rev¬enues. In a number of provinces sales agencies sprang up, and opium ware¬houses were constructed in Anqing, Datong, and Wuhu to store confiscated supplies of the drug. These warehouses were controlled by Soong’s special tax bureau rather than the Opium Suppression Bureau, to which they sup¬posedly belonged.13
THE SAN SHING COMPANY
In July 1932 the Ministry of Finance introduced a scheme to sell opium on the open market in Jiangsu, where the provincial government was autho¬rized to conduct a public sale of confiscated supplies of the drug the fol¬lowing September 1. Du Yuesheng negotiated with representatives of the provincial government and managed to secure the opium monopoly for Shanghai, a deal that he confirmed at the national level after a meeting in Hankou at which he promised to pay $3 million directly to the Ministry of Finance in exchange for government protection of opium shipments down¬river from Sichuan.14
Du Yuesheng next founded a new wholesale company in Nanshi to pro¬vide the drug to retailers in Shanghai. The San Shing Company (Sanxin gongsi) allegedly disbursed about $200,000 per month to local Chinese au¬thorities and other organs. Part of the goal of this massive drug-marketing scheme was to secure the protection of the special services. This occurred at two levels. Locally, Du Yuesheng coupled his San Shing Company affairs with the Chinese municipal security forces’ corrupt interests. According to an International Settlement police report:
Realizing that armed protection was necessary for the transportation of opium, he succeeded in nominating General Yang Hu as commander of the Shanghai Peace Preservation Corps. A “special service department” was then formed by the corps; this department took over the work of the San Shing Company, which was “wound up.” The special service department was, how¬ever, annexed and incorporated into the Bureau of Public Safety in the middle of December 1932 by the order of mayor Wu Te-chen [Tiecheng].15
At the national level, Du Yuesheng simultaneously joined forces with Dai Li to found the Big Fortune Company (Dayun gongsi) in Shanghai. The Big Fortune Company ran a numbers racket on Jingxiao Hangkong Street and succeeded the San Shing Company as a major opium mart. Dai Li’s profits from the gambling and narcotics sales were used to supplement regular funds for secret service activities.16
Meanwhile, T. V. Soong continued to try to expand the Nanjing govern¬ment’s countrywide opium monopoly. In January 1933 Soong, once again finance minister, brought Hankou’s special tax bureau under Chiang’s gen¬eral headquarters, and the following month complete control of all opium suppression was handed over to Chiang Kai-shek as chairman of the Mili¬tary Affairs Commission.17 During that same year—which saw the Hankou tax bureau collect over $16 million on opium shipments—the Chinese au¬thorities there seized large quantities of morphia.18 The Nationalists had al¬ready commenced the practice of turning confiscated opium over to Du Yuesheng for refinement into heroin.19 Now the International Settlement’s Special Branch discovered that Chiang Kai-shek had decided to have this new batch of morphia refined and sold, ostensibly for medical purposes. In truth, however, “the sum thus raised was intended for the use of the Blue Shirt Society.” 20
Du Yuesheng was given six months to refine the morphine and heroin. During that time, his drug factory in Nanshi was promised the complete protection of the Chinese authorities. Du saw the possibility of considerable profits in this scheme, profits that would help him make the huge payments that he had agreed to hand over to Chiang’s forces in order to preserve his monopoly. By this time he had already fallen nearly a million dollars in debt to Chiang’s government. Thinking that he could now run his narcotics refinery with total impunity, he arranged a secret deal with the brother of General Zhang Xueliang, Zhang Xueming, who was then the chief of the Tianjin police force. They arranged to transport a large quantity of morphia from Zhang Xueming’s stocks in Tianjin and use the Nanshi factory to re-fine it in place of the supply seized by Chiang Kai-shek’s men. According to the Shanghai Municipal Police, Mayor Wu Tiecheng received $10,000 a month “to connive at this deception.” 21
When the six months had elapsed, Mayor Wu applied to Chiang Kai-shek for an extension on the grounds that the market for the drug was at an ebb and refining therefore had to be postponed in order to increase their prof¬its. Chiang approved the application, but in mid-autumn he received infor- mation—perhaps from Dai Li—about the deception.
Chiang Kai-shek was already angered by the open talk in criminal circles about the new government’s complicity with the underworld in the narcot¬ics racket. He immediately sent a detachment of military police from Nan¬jing to raid and occupy the largest of Du’s Nanshi morphia factories, where they confiscated narcotics worth Mex. $1,500,000. As soon as word reached Du Yuesheng of the raid (which he probably attributed to greedy local com¬manders), Du put pressure on the chief adjutant of the Wusong-Shanghai Garrison Command, Wen Jian’gang, to issue instructions to withdraw the troops. The instructions were chopped with the seal of the Shanghai mayor, General Wu Tiecheng. However, instead of prudently withdrawing, the mil¬itary police contingent stayed in place and forwarded Wu’s orders to Chiang Kai-shek, who furiously demanded an explanation.22 “The mayor,” ex¬plained the Shanghai Municipal Police report on this incident, “excused himself by stating that he had no knowledge of the morphia factory and that one of his chops, which was usually kept by the chief adjutant for office use, had been used without his knowledge. Wen Chien-kang [ Jian’gang] was subsequently escorted to Nanchang and subsequently shot. It is not known how Mr. Tu [Du Yuesheng] wriggled out of his own share in the trouble.” 23
By 1934, the annual revenue from opium for the government of China was over $100 million.24 Avid for more revenue, T. V. Soong determined to take advantage of Du Yuesheng’s discomfiture by wresting domination of the Shanghai market from the gangs. Naming himself director of opium suppression in Shanghai, Soong recruited and uniformed a special squad of several hundred crack police to do his bidding. But the effort failed, prob¬ably because Du was willing to up the ante for his stake in what was, after all, Chiang Kai-shek’s game. Not long afterward, Soong’s opium police force was disbanded, and Chiang Kai-shek’s chief secretary, Yang Yongtai, negoti¬ated a new agreement with Du Yuesheng to reopen the Nanshi morphine factories.25 Thereafter Du’s chemists monopolized the final refinement of all crude drugs sent downriver from Chongqing and Yichang.26
In that same year, 1934, Du Yuesheng continued his ascent to respect¬ability, securing such titles as counselor, Command Headquarters of the Army, Navy, and Airforce; Shanghai municipal councilman; chairman, Board of Directors of the Zhonghui Bank; head, Shanghai Municipal Con¬sultative Association; chairman, Chinese Ratepayers’ Association of the French Concession; director, Shanghai Chinese Commercial Silk and Cloth Trade Association; member, Shanghai Stock Exchange; member, supervi¬sory committee of the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce; member, standing committee of the National China Steam Merchants Navigation Company; chairman, boards of directors of Shenbao, China Times, China Evening News, and China Press.27
NATIONAL NARCOTICS CONCERNS
During the following year, 1935, Chiang Kai-shek’s troops entered Guizhou in pursuit of the Communists on their Long March. If Chiang was going to bring the southwest and its political cliques under control, then he was go¬ing to have to undermine their independent opium monopolies. U.S. mili¬tary attaché Joseph Stilwell reported, “By means of secure domination of the opium traffic [Chiang hopes] to increase the political power of the na¬tional government over provinces whose allegiance is doubtful No local
government can exist without a share of the opium revenues. If the central government can control the opium supply of a province, that province can never hope to revolt successfully.” 28 In light of Stilwell’s observation, it is easy to see why Chiang turned his military campaign in Guizhou into an opportunity to create a national government opium monopoly that would keep the drug from being shipped through Guangxi to the south, and in¬stead divert opium supplies to the Yangzi River, where they would merge with the flow via Hankou to Shanghai. Li Zhonggong, a Guizhou native named commissioner of finance after the Nationalists entered the province, was made head of the opium monopoly; and, at the same time, Du Yuesheng and his opium combine were given monopoly exporting rights to carry Guizhou opium out of the province to Hankou and Shanghai. On May 29, 1935, Chiang Kai-shek made sure that the entire opium system came under his own personal purview by abolishing the National Opium Suppression Commission and making himself opium suppression superintendent in its place.29
Chiang’s diversion of Guizhou opium forced the Guangxi clique to turn to Yunnan for alternative supplies. The Nanjing government retaliated by building a highway from Yunnan to the as yet uncompleted Hankou- Guangzhou railway. But even after the highway was inaugurated in the au¬tumn of 1935, the Yunnan opium caravans continued to move through Guangxi because transit taxes were much lower in that province. Neverthe¬less, the Guangxi warlords felt the economic pinch, and Chiang’s own cof¬fers continued to swell with profits from the monopoly arrangements that he had worked out with Du Yuesheng and the Shanghai narcotics market¬ing interests.30
The rub, however, was that the Shanghai refining and retail arrangement was growing ever more rickety as competition between the Chinese and the Japanese in the drug traffic increased. On January 1, 1937, new laws were announced by Chiang Kai-shek to punish users of refined opium deriva¬tives. According to the Shanghai Municipal Police, this was a sally in the war between Japan and China to control the drug traffic. The Chinese govern¬ment did effectively monopolize the opium trade, but the Japanese were be¬coming increasingly dominant in the traffic in morphine and heroin, thanks to huge refineries and the protection of the Japanese military au¬thorities in north China.31
Moreover, drugs and espionage were becoming more intimately con¬nected than ever.32 As the Japanese expanded their influence in the north, their special services units were increasingly linked to narcotics. And, once the Japanese launched their invasion of central China after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in July 1937, they began to take over drug networks in the south, either by co-opting Du Yuesheng’s men, or by introducing their own agents into the traffic.33
THE BATTLE FOR SHANGHAI
As soon as the war broke out in the late summer of 1937, Du Yuesheng took the lead in organizing anti-Japanese resistance by means of the Shanghai Civic Federation, which had been formed during the hostilities in 1932.34 Clearly seeking “a patriot’s halo,” he offered to sink vessels from his Da-Da Steamship Company in the lower Yangzi to impede Japanese warships, and at the same time he offered his bulletproof car to one of the Chinese gen¬erals defending Shanghai.35 These were flamboyant gestures, widely publi¬cized, but not nearly as effective as his covert arrangements with Dai Li to create an underground resistance movement against the Japanese during and after the hard-fought defense of Shanghai.36
Dai Li had turned his attention to Shanghai just as soon as the Marco Polo Bridge Incident erupted. His most important agent in the city was Wang Zhaohuai, head of the Investigation Brigade (Zhencha dadui) of the garrison command and—as a disciple of Du Yuesheng—a member of the Hengshe.37 The resources of the Shanghai Station had until then mostly been devoted to actions against the Communist Party and other domestic enemies of Chiang Kai-shek, so that very little intelligence was being gath¬ered about the Japanese.38 Shen Zui, who was then head of the Hongkou operation of the SSD, had only one primary agent in the Japanese commu¬nity: the owner of a pawnshop on Dongyouheng Road. The rest of his in¬formants in “Little Tokyo” were all double agents who worked for Japanese intelligence officers as collaborators. The SSD could adduce Japanese in¬tentions from the kinds of tasks they assigned to their Chinese agents, so that they at least had some sense of the direction of enemy military am¬bitions. But it was all maddeningly vague—like the report from one agent that his Japanese case officer had gotten drunk a few days after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident and said, “It’s only going to take a few days’ time be¬fore Shanghai is going to be ours. Then your work is going to really get busy all of a sudden.”39
Hostilities did break out in Shanghai a few days later on August 13, 1937, and as Chinese refugees streamed out of the native quarters of the city north of Suzhou Creek, Dai Li realized how poor their military intelligence was. He immediately gave orders to infiltrate teams of agents equipped with ra¬dios into Hongkou, Zhabei, and Wusongkou, but the effort was largely un¬successful because it was easy for the Japanese to spot spies moving against the human tide in the other direction.40 Shen Zui did manage to assemble a team of eight people, including his brother, which set up a single cell in Hongkou. But they were spotted by Japanese counterintelligence within a few weeks and had to scatter. Shen Zui and his radio man, Qiu Shenghu, made their own escape by concealing their transmitter in the baby carriage of Qiu’s one-year old, but they were so shaken by the close call that Shen Zui refused to go back into enemy territory, and for some time there was not a single SSD agent in the Hongkou area.41
Dai Li had images nonetheless of a partisan victory in the bloody block- by-block battle for Zhabei. Through his underworld contacts, the secret service chief encouraged gang and secret society groups to rise in arms against the aggressors.42 At first, these were disorganized units that scattered whenever they encountered regular Japanese military forces, and that botched an attempt to sink the Japanese flagship Suigumo at anchor in the Huangpu River.43 But they soon took on a more formal paramilitary cast, being brought together with army cadres outside Shanghai to form a Spe¬cial Movement Corps (Biedongdui) in the last two weeks of August and the early part of September 1937.44
URBAN GUERRILLAS
According to intelligence reports gathered by the Shanghai Municipal Po¬lice, Chiang Kai-shek’s Military Affairs Commission had decided at the beginning of September to organize an “emergency period service group” ( feichang shiqi fuwutuan) to deal with traitors and spies in Shanghai. Shang¬hai already had a peace preservation corps (baoandui), but its purpose had been mainly to serve as a surrogate police force for the Chinese municipal¬ity after the Japanese withdrew in July 1932.45
In order to fight the Japanese now, both in front of and behind enemy lines, Chiang decided to create an urban guerrilla force. The MAC accord¬ingly set aside $500,000 for this group, which was put under the orders of General Wang Jingjiu, commander of the 87th Nationalist Division. His headquarters at Jiangyin had already been training cadets for intelligence work in a junguan xunlianban (officers training unit) that was also a “pre¬liminary training” (rumen xunlian) course for the Special Services Depart¬ment; and three days after hostilities broke out in Shanghai, 240 of these cadets were sent to Longhua Primary School to serve as special forces.46
General Wang’s deputy commanders of the “emergency period service group” were General Cai Jingjun, chief of the Shanghai Public Safety Bu¬reau who reported directly to Chiang Kai-shek, and Du Yuesheng, who im¬mediately tried to turn the new organization to his own use.
On receiving their appointments and instructions, General Wang Jingjiu and General Cai Jingjun found it inconvenient in their present positions and the work they entailed to actively participate, so left the matter of organizing this new unit in the hands of Mr. Du Yuesheng, deputy commander. In carrying out the organizing of this unit, Mr. Du saw a chance to use his own followers as heads of sections and appointed Mr. Lu Jingshi, Chief Judge of the Military Court at Longhua, and Mr. Zhu Xuefan [chairman of the Shanghai General Labor Union] to those positions.47
However, when Du Yuesheng submitted the names of his lieutenants to the Military Affairs Commission, they were rejected, greatly annoying him and insulting Lu Jingshi and Zhu Xuefan.48
As a result of Du Yuesheng’s momentary indifference, the Shanghai chief of police, General Cai Jingjun, decided to step in and establish a headquar¬ters for the special group within the PSB with the help of the Loyal and Pa¬triotic Association (Zhongyihui), a group described by Shanghai Municipal Police informants as being “composed of Whampoa cadets” and which was led by Pu Fengming. He and General Cai subsequently set up two squads or regiments (tuan): the Defense and Protection Squad (Fanghutuan) and the Special Services Squad (Tewutuan).49
The Defense and Protection Squad performed different functions north and south of Suzhou Creek. In the northern parts of the city, and especially in Hongkou, they formed the so-called Shanghai Snipers Corps, which was composed mainly of “loafers” and unemployed workers given Mauser rifles or pistols to snipe at the Japanese behind enemy lines.50 South of the creek, in Nanshi, the Fanghutuan consisted mainly of residents conscripted to dig bomb shelters. The principal tenant in every house in South City was sup¬posed to supply one member of the household daily for work with the squad, which was commanded by one of General Cai’s lieutenants out of an office in the Wu’an Primary School on Luxiangyuan Road.51 By September more than three hundred persons were serving as conscripts and fifty-seven dugouts had been finished.52
The Special Services Squad had its headquarters in a private school that was part of the Shaoxing guildhall off Liyuan Road in Nanshi.53 It was com¬manded by General Cai’s former Criminal Investigation Department su¬perintendent, Liu Huai. His two deputies in turn were PSB inspector Chen Bannong and a former bus conductor named Zhang Guoquan.54 Regular members of the Tewutuan were recruited mainly from the ranks of unem¬ployed workers. They were promised a wage of $9 a month, plus room and board on the premises of the school, which was built to house about one thousand people. By late September 1937, about four hundred men had enlisted.55
The Special Services Squad also had an investigation section, which con¬sisted of thirty members under a man named Yang Fulin. These men were billeted in the Jingqin Primary School on Xilin Road outside the West Gate. One of them, an elementary school principal named Fu Duoma, reported that he had been assigned by Liu Huai to report on the activities of Japanese plainclothesmen in the International Settlement. He had also been in¬structed to investigate Chinese “traitors,” and, if sufficient evidence could be found, to get the Chinese police to arrest the collaborators and remand them to the custody of the Special Services Squad headquarters for further questioning.56
THE SU-ZHE OPERATIONS COMMITTEE
Dai Li undoubtedly had placed some of his agents within the two groups serving under General Cai, and especially within the investigation section of the Special Services Squad. But the secret police chief concentrated most of his attention on Du Yuesheng’s networks of disciples among the labor unions, in mercantile circles, and within the underworld. It was apparently Dai Li who brought the insulted racketeer and his Green Gang followers back into the orbit of the Military Affairs Commission in late September and early October by persuading Chiang Kai-shek to establish a Jiangsu and Zhejiang Operations Committee ( Junshi weiyuanhui Su-Zhe xingdong wei- yuanhui) in order to transform “gangland” (banghui) members into para¬military cadres.57
The Su-Zhe Operations Committee was chaired by Chiang Kai-shek him¬self, and its members included Du Yuesheng, Huang Jinrong, Wang Xiao- lai, Yu Xiaqing, Zhang Xiaolin, Yang Hu, Mei Guangpei, Xiang Songpo, and Lu Jingshi. The secretary-general (shujizhang) was Dai Li, who set up offices off Shanzhong Road in the French Concession. The committee’s activities were divided by departments (chu) for planning (canmou), political indoc¬trination (zhengxun), intelligence (qingbao), training (xunlian), and general affairs (zongwu). The department chiefs were SSD officers such as Chen Xudong, Wang Zuhua, Xie Ligong, and Yu Lexing.58
The main task at hand was to ready cadres and enroll militiamen. Special classes were opened in Songjiang and Qingpu to train team leaders (zhi- dui). 59 In early October, Dai Li used the authority of the committee to or¬ganize a General Command Headquarters for the Special Action Army (Biedongjun zongzhihuibu).60 The command post of what would become known as the Song-Hu biedong zongdui (Song-Hu Chief Special Movement Corps) was located at No. 1 Shenjiazhai, near Fenglinqiao opposite Route Ghisi in South City. Although it was nominally directed by Du Yuesheng, the organization’s real chief was Dai Li, whom the International Settlement police identified as the “leader of the Blue Shirt Society.” 61 Du Yuesheng’s “foreign affairs” assistant, the old Green Gang warlord from Shandong, Liu Zhilu, was titular deputy-head of the Special Movement Corps.62 But the key department personnel were all Dai Li’s men: Chen Xudong as chief of staff, Fang Chao as staff executive, Zhou Weilong in charge of indoctrination, Zhou Jiali and later Tan Liangfu as chief managers, Zhou Jiwen responsible for general affairs, and Yu Lexing looking after technical matters. Yu was also responsible for the Songjiang and Qingpu training campus, along with Xie Ligong.63
SPECIAL MOVEMENT CORPS (SMC)
The Song-Hu Chief Special Movement Corps was divided into five branch brigades (zhidui) of five hundred to three thousand men each, totaling eight thousand militiamen in all. Branch brigades in turn were broken down into three large brigades (dui), subdivided further into medium (zhong), small (xiao), and district (qu) brigades. All officers, from district brigade com¬manders on up, were either agents of Dai Li’s SSD or backbone cadres from the Hengshe.64
The rank and file were drawn from various social sectors: retail clerks (dianyuan) from the Shanghai Shopkeepers Association, local ruffians (dipi and liumang) from the gangs, routed Guomindang soldiers, laborers thrown out of work by the closing of the factories and shops during the Japanese at¬tack, and organized labor union members.65 Meanwhile, in addition to re¬cruiting new members, the SMC incorporated former units of the peace preservation corps (baoandui) such as the Nanshi brigade, which was reor¬ganized in early September as the fifth section of the Shanghai Special Movement Corps under Colonel Tao Yishan, who had been named by Nan¬jing head of all the Shanghai civic training centers and whose headquarters was in the Wusong-Shanghai Garrison Command.66
Colonel Tao Yishan’s merchant and worker unit was one of several groups provided with khaki uniforms and armed with Mauser rifles and pistols.67 Section Two was barracked at the East Asia Athletic School on Luban Road in Nanshi, where it was ordered to help the police preserve law and order.68 However, according to the testimony of one Yun Huifang, well known to the International Settlement police “for his terrorist activities in 1932,” the pur¬pose of his section of the SMC was “solely to locate traitors [hanjian],” whom they supposedly turned over to the nearest Chinese police bureau.69
Section Three was assigned to Zhu Xuefan, the chairman of the Shang¬hai General Labor Union whose nomination had originally been turned down by the Military Affairs Commission. This section was supposed to maintain labor control.70 Other working-class units included branch teams of postal workers and seamen, under Lu Jingshi, and a longshoremen’s brigade.71
Naysayers later described the SMC as “a motley rabble” (wuhe zhizhong), ineffective against Japanese regulars.72 Nonetheless, Du Yuesheng’s lieu¬tenants, Lu Jingshi and Shui Xiangyun, momentarily threw off their famil¬iar underworld roles as “rats in dark corners” and adorned themselves in flashy uniforms, becoming heroes of the hour.73 Their glory was short-lived. Initially supposed to defend the zone from the south bank of Suzhou Creek along Fanwangdu and Caojiadu across to Rihuigang, the SMC retreated once the Japanese launched a frontal attack across Suzhou Creek.74
Before the Chinese zones of the city fell, Dai Li fled to quarters on Haig Road in the French Concession. He still hoped to rally his own men in a heroic defense of the Nanshi, striving to emulate the feats of regimental commander Xie Jinyuan, whose defense of the Four Banks Depository (Si- hang cangku) in 1932 had already become patriotic lore.75 But many of his agents in Shanghai simply abandoned their commands and sought refuge in the foreign concessions. The head of the Shanghai Station, Zhou Wei- long, promised Dai Li that he would stay behind in the French Concession and set up a sabotage unit in the “underground zone” (qianfuqu) to harass the enemy. Dai Li also ordered his fellow townsman Jiang Shaomo to orga¬nize an underground espionage unit to gather and transmit intelligence af¬ter the Japanese took over.76
For reasons of security, these spy organizations were supposed to remain completely apart from the Special Movement Corps and respond directly to Dai Li through Gong Xianfang, who had been head of the Shanghai SSD personnel office and was now designated as the liaison and principal courier for the Shanghai net. As we shall see, however, these underground intelligence cells were all either compromised and smashed by Japanese counterespionage, or became collaborationist secret service organs work¬ing for the puppet government.77 Moreover, the means to finance these un¬derground operations entangled Dai Li’s organization all the more in the complex web of clandestine Sino-Japanese relations surrounding the drug trade.
As the Japanese troops fought their way into the Chinese portions of Shanghai, the most prominent leaders of the resistance left the city. In November 1937 Mayor Yu Hongjun, T. V. Soong, Qian Xinzhi, and Wang Xiaolai all secretly went to Hong Kong.78 Du Yuesheng joined them there and was soon organizing a clandestine intelligence operation for Chiang Kai-shek, financed in part through a narcotics enterprise called the Gangji Company that he and Dai Li set up.79 Meanwhile, as soon as the Japanese took over the Chinese-administered sections of Shanghai, their special ser¬vice organs (tokumu kikan) began to use the divided city as a point d’appui for their own rapidly expanding drug traffic between what would become Free and Occupied China.80
The Shanghai Special Movement Corps scattered in the face of the Jap¬anese Imperial Army. Most armed units made a dash for the Anhui-Jiangsu border area, and especially for Tunxi and Shexian counties, where they either fell in with warlords like the former Hunanese bandit Chen Shihu and became guerrillas (youjidui) who “wandered but never attacked” (you er bu ji), or else they were later organized by Dai Li into units of the Loyal and Patriotic Army (Zhongyi jiuguo jun) that was eventually armed by the Americans.81
The last batch of SMC militiamen withdrew from Shanghai on Febru¬ary 1, 1938, issuing a farewell letter to the Chinese press that stated they were leaving the concessions “for the safety of the residents of the foreign settlements.” 82 By then Dai Li had escaped from Shanghai to Changsha via Hong Kong, and the Su-Zhe Operations Committee was completely dis- solved.83 The war in Shanghai had become an underground operation, and for the next thirty-four months, until the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, terrorism would be conducted in secrecy from the concessions. Here, too, Dai Li mainly stood to gain
Chapter 18
The Training Camps
Revolutionary youth, quickly prepare,
Be wise, humane, and brave!
Grasp the pulse of this stage.
Stand before this great age.
Neither be moved by dire circumstance
Nor subdued by threat of force!
We will defend our Leader’s safety
And protect our nation’s sovereign soil.
We will ever be thus, unyielding and steady, well ordered and earnest.
Through hardships and labor with one mind we strive on!
We are the great wall of the nation and the vanguard of the race.
Revolutionary youth, quickly prepare,
Be wise, humane, and brave!
Grasp the pulse of this stage.
Stand before this great age.
SONG OF THE LINLI TRAINING CLASS, Military Affairs Commission, Bureau of Investigation and Statistics1
BATTLEFIELD INTELLIGENCE
After the fall of the Chinese municipality of Shanghai in November 1937, Dai Li was recalled to Nanjing. He knew, of course, that the capital was bound to succumb soon to the Japanese armies coming from the north and east, and he immediately began preparations for underground work in the city. Remembering the difficulties that the SSD had encountered in setting up a military intelligence network in Shanghai after hostilities broke out, Dai Li designated Nanjing as a special district, which he put under the com¬mand of one of his most trusted followers, Qian Xinmin, an officer whom he described to Chiang Kai-shek as completely reliable and thus qualified for this sensitive position. Two clandestine radio stations were established inside Nanjing proper, staffed by women radio operators who were left be¬hind to work as underground reporters (baowuyuan) once Nanjing was oc¬cupied by the enemy.2
At the level of national military intelligence gathering, Dai Li’s impor¬tance as head of the Second Bureau increased significantly during the weeks
and months just after the fall of Nanjing. Until then the main mission of Dai Li’s headquarters had been the so-called “static investigation of military af¬fairs” ( junshi jingtai diaocha). In the field this was divided into two different stages of activity: “information gathering” (souji) by one set of field (waiqin) agents, and “investigation and verification” (chazheng) of their reports by an¬other group of Second Bureau personnel.3
The gathering of intelligence was the responsibility of special agents who were usually military staff officers. Their charge was twofold: to acquire in¬telligence on Communist forces in the field, and to report on the state of the military units to which they were assigned. Reports about the Commu¬nists were forwarded to Dai Li’s headquarters, first in Wuhan and later in Chongqing, where they were sorted and sent back down to other agents in the appropriate local Fuxingshe network or in other military affairs or¬gans to be verified before action was taken. Reports about the Nationalists’ individual military formations, including peace preservation constabular¬ies (baoantuan) in the area, contained information on the units’ fighting ability (number of horses, number of weapons, physical condition of the men), the soldiers’ political background and moral quality (whether they gambled, drank, or consorted with prostitutes), and “the state of the of¬ficers’ thought.” These were routinely forwarded to office (neiqin) staff, who kept track of the peacetime and wartime ability of these particular units on a regular basis. However, even though the first kind of report was consid¬ered more urgent than the latter, both were transmitted at a uniformly pre¬scribed speed. Dai Li’s special services system thus maintained a well- deserved reputation for celerity and efficiency of communication. Second Bureau officers boasted that no other military unit could match the rapid¬ity with which messages were received and transmitted between field agents and Dai Li’s headquarters.4
After the war broke out, Dai Li added another focus to this work by pro¬viding Chiang Kai-shek with intelligence reports on military engagements and on the activities of Nationalist generals. He established several battle¬field investigation units (zhandi diaochazu) that were sent out to hot spots like Jiangwan, Luodian, Liuhe, and Yanghang. Each of these groups mini¬mally consisted of a unit chief, who usually operated under the cover of be¬ing the political officer attached to the brigade headquarters, a radio oper¬ator equipped with a small transceiver, a code officer, and an internal affairs clerk—all regular special services personnel from headquarters. Other per¬sonnel were added as needed from a pool of mainly unemployed military officers who had been trained in one of the central military academies and who were introduced by their graduate investigation departments (biyesheng diaochachu). Because of their military backgrounds, these officers were able to function effectively as liaisons to military personnel at the front, where
they were sent whenever there was a battle to be investigated and reported. The battlefield investigation units were also charged with surveillance of military personnel.5
Chiang Kai-shek regarded Dai Li’s daily battlefield reports as the most reliable information he got about conditions at the front. This trust may have been misplaced. Although Dai Li sent special emissaries to Nanjing by train every night with these bulletins so that Chiang could read them the morning after they were compiled, the intelligence was not always based upon first-hand observation. Battlefield investigation unit officers, includ¬ing the chiefs themselves, were sometimes only welcome at the battalion (ying) headquarters level and not allowed to proceed further to the com¬pany or platoon emplacements on the front lines. Shen Zui, who served as battlefield investigation unit chief at Luodian and Liuhe, was several times prevented by a brigade commander from visiting the front lines precisely because the commander wanted to conceal from Nanjing his inability to re¬cover a particular salient from the Japanese.6 Only after the whole line col¬lapsed was Shen able to piece together a reasonably accurate picture of the reasons for the failure from reports of other officers interviewed in the wake of defeat.7
Meanwhile, as the enemy drew nearer to Nanjing, Dai Li removed him¬self to Hankou, where he set up his intelligence headquarters in what had once been a primary school on Nanxiaolu in the former Japanese Conces- sion.8 He would on occasion travel to Hunan, Guizhou, or Chongqing, but he always returned as quickly as possible to Wuhan to monitor reports from agents and secure his own control over the growing wartime espionage net¬work. It was there, in his residence in the French Concession of Hankou, that he learned the details of the massacre at Nanjing. He also learned, to his consternation and fury, of the flight to Japanese-held Shanghai of his Nanjing station chief Qian Xinmin.9
Even before the Japanese surrounded Nanjing, Qian Xinmin had moved his district headquarters across the river to Liuhe. Once the Nationalist cap¬ital surrendered, Qian (and the name lists of secret service personnel for the capital district) fell into the hands of the Japanese secret service (tokumu kikan), which proceeded to round up as many of Juntong’s agents as could be found. In a matter of days all of Dai Li’s efforts to prepare an under¬ground intelligence operation in the occupied city were undone. The Nan¬jing net was completely exposed by Qian, and Dai Li castigated himself for having been “like a blind person, unable to see this man’s true character.” Once again the secret service chief felt terribly chagrined about disap¬pointing his commander, and he told Shen Zui—who had brought the news of Qian’s supposed defection to him in the first place—that he had com-pletely lost face before Chiang Kai-shek for having guaranteed someone who “was completely without conscience.” 10
The fall of Nanjing was followed by a general shake-up in Nationalist Party ranks. On February 4, 1938, Chiang Kai-shek created a Party Mem¬bers’ Supervisory Net (Dangyuan jiancha wang) “to discover whether Party members were really doing the work assigned them.” According to Chen Lifu’s recollection, “Mr. Chiang felt that Party members were useless. Mem¬bers of the Communist Party performed definite functions, but our Party members did not. They were careless and slack in carrying out their orders. Mr. Chiang felt that it was necessary to inspect them, to push them.” 11 At the same time, the Guomindang was put on a wartime footing as more and more military men joined the Party, and provincial government chairmen become members of the Central Executive Committee.12 At the extraor¬dinary Provisional Party Congress of March-April 1938, which was held at Luojiashan in Wuchang, Chiang Kai-shek was unanimously elected Party Leader (zongcai), and the role of the security services was strengthened.13
THE FORMAL ESTABLISHMENT OF JUNTONG
Dai Li’s special services organization was still nominally under the Central Bureau of Investigation and Statistics (Zhongtong), which had been set up by Chen Lifu under the Military Affairs Commission.14 For a brief period that winter, Zhongtong (CSB) was renamed the Fourth Group of the Sixth Division of the Main Headquarters (Dabenying diliubu disizu), and Xu En- zeng was addressed both as major general (zhongjiang) and group head (zuzhang). 15
Then, on March 29, 1938, Chiang announced to the Party Congress that a Central Bureau of Investigation and Statistics—also called Zhongtong— was going to be formed as an office attached to the Central Committee of the Guomindang. This completely new organization (which was origi¬nally the first department of the old joint organ that Chen Lifu nominally chaired) would be headed by Xu Enzeng, and we can safely surmise that most of its members and agents were members of what had been the Orga¬nization Department’s intelligence group. Meanwhile, the office of investi¬gation (originally the second department of the joint organ) that Dai Li headed remained within the Military Affairs Commission as the newly named Military Affairs Commission Bureau of Investigation and Statistics ( Junshi weiyuanhui diaocha tongjiju, or Juntong for short). Thus was Dai Li’s MSB or Juntong finally formally created.16
Because of Dai Li’s shallow history in the Guomindang and his low se¬niority within the Whampoa group (he was, after all, just a member of the sixth class), Chiang Kai-shek feared that other sections would not heed Dai Li if he were appointed the formal bureau chief of Juntong. The Generalis¬simo therefore inaugurated the practice of concurrently appointing his personal chief of staff (the head of the first department of the Escort Office, or Shicong shi, which composed Chiang’s bodyguards) director of the MSB. In name, then, Dai Li was at first only the assistant bureau chief ( fujuzhang) of Juntong.17
In practice, however, he alone commanded the Military Statistics Bu¬reau. The three nominal chiefs during the first two years of the MSB’s exis- tence—He Yaozu, Qian Dajun, and Lin Weiwen—all understood perfectly Chiang Kai-shek’s intention: Dai Li was meant to be entirely in charge of the MSB, and it was not in their province to ask questions about Juntong work, personnel, or finances.18 Once a year, on the occasion of the April 1 dahui (big meeting) held to commemorate the founding of the Special Services Department in 1932, the chief would show up at Juntong headquarters to hear Dai Li’s annual report and then leave. Most of the field agents who served outside headquarters did not even know that there was someone higher up than Dai Li himself. By 1940, in any case, Dai Li had acquired so much real authority that he was finally formally appointed full chief ( juzhang) of the bureau.19
At the time of its establishment, Juntong was not a very large organiza¬tion. When Dai Li took command of the MSB in 1938 there were only four departments (chu) and two large offices (shi). They were staffed by slightly more than one hundred office staff (neiqinrenyuan) and fewer than two thousand men and women in the field (waiqin). Some of these departments overlapped with the old second department of the Blue Shirts. The assistant department chief ( fuchuzhang) of the Special Affairs Department of the Fuxingshe, Zheng Jiemin, was simply made secretary (mishu) of the new MSB, and the various ke, or sections, of the earlier organization were amal¬gamated with the intelligence, operations, legal, and telecommunications departments of Juntong.20
TRADITIONAL “CC” RIVALRY
The reorganization, however, did not eliminate the old animosities that had pitted the Blue Shirts against the “CC” clique three or four years ear- lier.21 And, despite the need for wartime unanimity, these divisions persisted even after the institutions were formally divided and set up independent of one another. According to Chen Lifu:
The Central Bureau of Investigation was concerned with society; the Military Bureau with the army. It was difficult to draw a clear dividing line. Both orga-nizations frequently worked on the same cases. They often met and were en-gaged in conflict. They were like two men groping in the dark and colliding. We were different from the Communist Party, which was one organization; its work was not compartmentalized. The difficult thing was that each bureau could easily invade the other’s territory. Often a militarist army captured
Communists who had used it as a base of operations for their work, but if “the military” claimed it as its territory, you couldn’t get in.22
Although each of the two intelligence agencies wrote reports on the other, the CSB—Zhongtong—did not dare to try to penetrate the MSB.23
Nor did the CSB work directly in army units, even though some militar¬ists were much more frightened of Dai Li than they were of Xu Enzeng and Chen Lifu.24
Did the Central Bureau of Investigation work in army units? No. Its policy was “hands off the army.” Otherwise there would have been complications and conflicts. However, if the Central Bureau got information that a certain per¬son in an army unit was colluding with the Communist Party, and the case was important involving a time element, it made a more detailed investigation. If the results of the investigation confirmed the existence of collusion, it in¬formed Dai Li so that he could take action.25
Presumably, Juntong did not attempt to infiltrate the CSB either—at least at the level of headquarters. At the local level Dai Li often used inves¬tigative organs set up by the CSB, and his men on occasion worked closely with Zhongtong agents in a given unit. Nevertheless, the relationship re¬mained an uneasy one, as did Juntong’s position vis-à-vis the regular politi¬cal commissar system within the military. Chen Lifu’s reminiscences are particularly telling in this regard.
Did [Dai Li’s] agents cooperate with the political training department or the special Party headquarters of the army unit to which he was assigned? Not nec-essarily. There were several different political lines in the army—they did not necessarily converge at any particular point. All information went upwards within each line. This was different from the Soviet system of the Party com-missar in army units. In our case, everything depended upon the people in-volved. Supposing, for instance, I was an agent sent out by Dai Li. You were sent out by the political training department, and somebody else was secretary of the army dangbu [or Party branch] in that particular unit. Ifwe were friends, we knew that each of us had been sent by the central authorities—sometimes it was possible to know this—[and] we might cooperate closely. It all de¬pended on personal relations.26
One area of particularly keen competition between Dai Li and Chen Lifu was communications, and especially control over the telegraph and postal inspection system. Chen Lifu, of course, was especially proud of his contri¬bution to the Nationalists’ Northern Expedition through radio communi¬cations and codes. This technical side of intelligence work conformed with his own vision of Zhongtong as a kind of Chinese FBI.27 But Dai Li coveted this domain too, and during the jostling that went into the creation of the joint organ, the existence of the separate Third Section of the original Mil¬itary Affairs Commission Bureau of Investigation and Statistics must have represented a considerable compromise for both principals.
For, in addition to being charged with the collection of foreign intelli¬gence, Ding Mocun’s Third Section was responsible for postal and telegraph investigations.28 Sometime in 1937, the section’s name was changed to the Special Investigations Department (Tejianchu); and the following year, as each of these units moved inland, Chiang Kai-shek placed the office under the direct control of the chief of staff of the Military Affairs Commission.29 Eventually, as Zhongtong’s control over communications waned during the war, the Special Investigations Department was made to report to Jun- tong. Dai Li thereby gained control of mail censorship and telegraph mon¬itoring, which was an essential pillar of his secret police apparatus during the Chongqing period.30
THE EXPANSION OF JUNTONG
The creation of an independent Juntong under wartime conditions finally provided Dai Li with a long-awaited opportunity to enlarge his secret em- pire.31 Within a few years, and perhaps by the time he was named chief in his own right, Dai Li had expanded the bureau to ten departments and as many corresponding offices, regions, and groups.32 As district offices (qu) were set up after 1941, decision making passed on to regional supervisors (quzhang), who reported directly to Dai Li and whose role in the reorga¬nized MSB became increasingly important.33 The regional supervisors, for example, were placed in charge of personnel, budgets, broadcasting and code equipment, local intelligence, and field operations. Once a regional supervisor received Dai Li’s personal permission for an operation, then every other section had to lend whatever support was necessary for the task at hand. In other words, operations within a region took priority over the various departments’ needs within Juntong headquarters.34
Meanwhile, headquarters staff exceeded a thousand persons, assigned to eight departments, three zones, and several shi (rooms or sections).35 (See appendix B.) Each shi was equal in standing to a department. Section A (Jia shi) was Dai Li’s private secretariat (mishu bangongshi), consisting of some of the secret police chief’s most trusted personnel: Zhang Yifu, He Zhiyuan, and the dispatcher Mao Zongliang. Section B was also called the secretariat (mishushi), but it reported to Dai’s lieutenants, Mao Renfeng and Zheng Jiemin.36 Section C was the office of the auditor ( jiheshi), Zhang Guanfu, who was responsible for internal financial oversight.
Besides these three units, there were two other important shi. The Con¬fidential Section (Jiyaoshi)—originally the Code Translation Section (Yi- dianke)—was headed by the highest-ranking woman officer in Juntong, Jiang Yiying.37 Most of its members were from Jiangshan, the impenetrable dialect of which became the working language of the unit. The workers from Jiangshan were widely regarded as being of “a low cultural level.”38 The Inspectorate (Jichashi), on the other hand, was an elite unit consisting of a relatively small number of headquarters officers under Guo Shouhua (and, later, Liao Huaping) and a much larger group of external “secret in¬spectors” (bimi ducha) who reported directly to both Dai Li and regular cir-cuit inspectors (zhou ducha) on their clandestine surveillance of Juntong personnel throughout the country.39
Consequently, field personnel continued to increase along with the ex¬pansion of headquarters staff.40 Even foreign observers had come to recog¬nize the importance of Dai Li and his secret service.
One organ of the National Military Council [i.e., the Military Affairs Com-mission] about which very little is known is the Central Investigation and Sta-tistics Bureau. Itisasuper-intelligence and counter-intelligence agency which no doubt is represented in every party and government body. This bureau is headed by General (Mr.) Dai Li, who is said to be the only man having access to the Generalissimo at any time or place.41
This enormous expansion in personnel was accomplished primarily through Juntong training camps and spy schools, units that Dai Li increas¬ingly regarded as the key to forming a modern espionage system.42
“XUNLIAN” (TRAINING)
As of the summer of 1935 Dai Li had already created a “special training unit” (tebie xunlian ban) within the Hangzhou Police Officers Academy (Hangzhou jingguan xuexiao).43 The students were mainly drawn from the ranks of the better-educated cadres working for the SSD, and each was as¬signed a position in one of six brigades (dui), of which numbers one to three were for training ordinary secret police or “control” (zhian) officers, num¬ber four was for all-around secret agents (quannengxing de tewu), number five was for automobile drivers, and number six was for radio communica¬tions specialists.44 The term “secret agent” (tewu), by the way, was not Jun- tong officers’ preferred way to refer to themselves. They all understood that the designation was a loan word from the Japanese” tokumu” and much pre¬ferred the phrases used by Soviet agents to identify themselves: people engaged in “revolutionary work” (geming gongzuo), “revolutionary security work” (geming baowei gongzuo), “intelligence work,” or “investigative statisti¬cal work” (diaocha tongji gongzuo).45
The fourth brigade, which was the most prestigious, offered classes on cryptography, detection and surveillance, explosives, photography, driving, pistol marksmanship, politics, and foreign languages (usually English or
Japanese). Graduates underwent a special midnight initiation in a Buddhist temple, where they bowed under dark green lanterns before a portrait of Chiang Kai-shek, swore to be loyal to the Three People’s Principles, and promised to sacrifice themselves if necessary to the Leader. To seal the cer¬emony, the recruits drank the blood of a sacrificed cock together with wine. Many of these graduates went on to become intelligence officers (qingbao- yuan) appointed to SSD (later MSB) stations throughout the country.46
In 1938, “[Dai Li] again and again emphasized that work for Juntong was not something that ordinary people could be qualified for. Therefore, you first had to undergo training [xunlian] and ideological assessment [sixiang kaohe] before they dared to release you for work.” 47 Under his supervision during the next seven years Juntong was to train more than 20,000 basic cadres, 50,000 armed forces (wuzhuang dui), and at least 5,000 telecommu¬nications personnel in more than 100 special services classes.48
Shen Zui recounts an anecdote that is particularly revealing of Dai Li’s obsessionwithcreating—andmonopolizing—secretservicetrainingclasses during the early years of the Sino-Japanese War of Resistance, when a new source of secret service recruits appeared in the form of patriotic students seeking refuge in Free China. Just after Shanghai fell, Shen Zui reported to Dai Li that Liang Ganqiao, the former Communist who had joined the orig¬inal Gang of Ten, was about to establish a training unit (xunlian ban) in Zhengzhou with eight hundred students who were no longer able to attend regular school because their hometowns had been taken over by the Japa¬nese. Liang’s intention to create an elite paramilitary cadre was evident from his requests to General Hu Zongnan to provide him with several hun¬dred rifles and to the military police to loan him personnel to assist in the training.49
Dai Li immediately wrote a high-handed letter to Liang, ordering him to send every one of these educated patriotic youth to Hunan, where the se¬cret service chief was planning to set up a Juntong training school to take advantage of the availability of such attractive new personnel now that coastal China was in Japanese hands.50 When Shen Zui delivered the letter, however, Liang instantly realized that these new human resources were be¬ing taken away from him arbitrarily. He erupted in anger, throwing the let¬ter to the ground and ordering Shen Zui himself to report to the Zhong- zheng Middle School, where the students were being quartered, to serve as an instructor.
Three days later the commander of the Nanjing Capital Police Force Se¬curity Brigade (Shoudu jingchating baojing dadui), Yang Qingzhi, arrived at Liang Ganqiao’s headquarters with yet another letter from Dai Li, even more peremptory than the last. The former Communist knew that he had no choice but to relinquish control of these well-educated and socially pre¬sentable personnel for the military secret service. Liang also realized that by trying personally to train the students for work in Juntong under his direc¬tion, he had sacrificed Dai Li’s trust in him as one of the earliest defectors to come over to the side of Chiang Kai-shek’s special services. After a final confrontation with Shen Zui at the Zhongzheng Middle School (“You can all get lost!” Liang reportedly shouted), Liang Ganqiao quit Dai Li’s ser¬vice and went to work for Hu Zongnan in the northwest. He died later in the war in Yaoxian while still serving as a special adviser (zhuanyuan), expert in “anti-Communist work.”51
THE LINLI TRAINING UNIT
The training unit that Dai Li had been in the process of establishing in Hu¬nan was located in a former county normal school in Linli, outside Chang¬sha. This major Juntong cadre school was, at the time of its formation in March 1938, identified as a “provisional training class” (linxunban).52 When the planning group for the school was activated in 1937, before Juntong was formally founded, Dai Li had invoked the authority of the Military Affairs Commission by calling the unit the Military Affairs Commission special training class ( Junshi weiyuanhui tebie xunlian ban).53 But the MAC’s admin¬istration headquarters refused to issue him a seal of office. He instead used his position as head of the Central Police Academy’s educational affairs committee to change the name of the training group in April 1938 to the Central Police Officers Academy special police personnel training unit (Zhongyang jingguan xuexiao tezhong jingcha renyuan xunlian ban).54
Graduates of this first MSB class were entered on the roster of the Cen¬tral Police Academy, but within the MSB they were simply identified as members of the “special training unit” (texunban).55 The graduates them¬selves, fiercely proud of their status as members of the first class of Juntong’s new agent-training academy, used either the name “provisional training class” (linxunban) or “Linli training class” (Linli xunlian ban) to identify their formation. The parallel with the Whampoa Academy was, of course, quite self-conscious; and it was underscored by Dai Li’s determination to send the best “talents” (rencai) in Juntong to Linli to serve as instructors. After grad¬uating these men and women became the “backbone cadres” (gugan) of other training units, like Liao Huaping, who supervised the Lanzhou spe¬cial training unit; 56 Wu Lang, who ran the Qianyang intelligence course; and Jin Shuyun, who headed the Southeastern xunlian ban.57
The Linli students’ vaunting was to be enhanced by Deputy Director (or Assistant Superintendent) Yu Lexing’s lectures on intelligence work. Yu, a senior and highly seasoned agent, compared their new calling to the vo¬cation of Zhuge Liang (Kongming), hero of Three Kingdoms. “Zhuge Kong- ming was the most accomplished and exceptional organizer and imple- menter of intelligence work in the history of our nation.” 58 Not only did he establish a “scientific intelligence net” throughout the three kingdoms; Kongming also employed the “most talented high-level special work per¬sonnel” while being both a brilliant analyst and singular operational leader himself.59
Although several hundred of the students were recommended by friends and relatives already attached to the secret service, not all of the recruits re¬alized that they were entering Juntong when they first arrived at Linli and were given gray military uniforms along with a monthly stipend of twelve yuan.60 The eight hundred or so youth from Liang Ganqiao’s Zhengzhou program had been told that they were signing up for a training course for “technical personnel in the inspector-general’s section” (zongjian bu jishu renyuan) of the Nationalist forces.61 Many of them had no families to return to, and they were completely unfamiliar with Hunan when they arrived at Linli and pitched in with the teachers to repair the school’s buildings and erect a large auditorium made of bamboo and straw to seat a thousand people. Perhaps the first inkling they had of the real purpose of their train¬ing came when the head of the unit, Yu Lexing, named part of the audito¬rium “rain-peasant dike” (yunong ti), using Dai Li’s other name, Yunong, to flatter Juntong’s chief.62
Yu Lexing was actually assistant superintendent of the training group, as it was Dai Li’s practice to serve nominally as the principal of the class. In fact, the head of instruction, Xie Ligong, was appointed by Dai Li to offset the influence of Yu Lexing over the students, who grew quite restive when they finally realized they had enrolled in a school for spies.63 The realization dawned slowly, as the students initially, from March to June, underwent an orientation period called ruwu xunlian (training to enter the ranks), which consisted of having their political thinking scrutinized, their family back¬ground investigated, and their personal character tested to see for what sort of work they were best suited. But by the time they were “divided into bri¬gades for training” ( fendui xunlian) and saw that they were being schooled in search and arrest techniques, kidnapping methods, ways of conducting assassinations, and so on, many of them got cold feet.64
The most vigorous resistance came from a group of women students whom Dai Li had asked Hu Zongnan to recruit from the number seven campus of the Central Military Academy in Changsha.65 These young women thought that they were putting aside their student brushes to fight the Japanese, and when they learned that they were being trained to be se¬cret agents whose enemies were also the Communists, they demanded to re¬turn to their original campus. Dai Li and Yu Lexing both reacted cautiously. Because they had been recruited by Hu Zongnan, and because they had families nearby in Changsha, the young women were spared outright co¬ercion. Instead Xie Ligong and the political training officer spent a full day talking about the importance of working for Juntong and the possibili- ties for advancement that lay ahead of them. Eventually the young women grudgingly agreed to remain in the program, and under the tutelage of such famous female agents as Wu Yukun, Zhao Shiying, Peng Jiacui, Wu Kuiyuan, Wu Shunhua, and the ferocious brigade leader An Zhanjiang (who shot her own husband once with a pistol when he incurred her anger) they eventu¬ally become key cadres among MSB headquarters and field agents.66 There¬after, all recruits to training units had to sign a form volunteering to partic¬ipate in the Juntong organization. As Dai Li put it, “If you first slip the chain over their neck, then you have got them by the leash.” 67
In the early stages of the six-month Linli training course, considerable effort was put into “ideological education” (sixiang jiaoyu), and— claimed Shen Zui, who was working in the unit’s general affairs department at the time—much of this indoctrination was directed against the Communists.68 The chief political officer, Wang Zuhua, tried to convince the students that the Communists were lying about their victories over the Japanese.69 The students were skeptical of his claims. But he, the political commissars (zheng- zhi zhidaoyuan), and the political instructors (zhengzhi jiaoguan), attached to the seven medium brigades of approximately 140 students each, stolidly maintained that the Communists were secretly engaged in a reactionary war against the Guomindang. It was the Nationalist Party, with its “revolutionary organization” (geming jituan), the Military Statistics Bureau, that was actually carrying out the war against Japan. “Outside the Guomindang there was not a single revolutionary and anti-Japanese party.” 70
The Linli political instructors also devoted a substantial amount of their time to investigating the students’ political behavior, confiscating “progres¬sive” books and periodicals like Xinhua ribao, and censoring their mail. Such snoopiness particularly offended students whose love letters were in¬tercepted, and when they tried to use local shops as postal boxes instead, the merchants were told either to stop cooperating with the students or to turn over their mail to be opened covertly and read by their political instructors.71
Despite the Linli authorities’ efforts to keep the existence of the training unit a secret, it was not long before they discovered that a large number of people knew that a large-scale special services course was being held in the county. Letters, purportedly from former fellow students of the cadets, even began coming in from the Communist Lu Xun Art Institute in Yan’an. In these letters the correspondents pleaded with the students to resign from the training unit before it was too late. Shortly after these letters were dis¬covered, the Linli brigade headquarters built a lockup ( jinbishi) to confine students who broke the rules or who threatened to run away.72
The fear of Communist enticement extended even to the instructors themselves. Lessons on infiltrating the Communist Party were regarded as particularly sensitive sessions because some of the instructors of these courses, such as Liao Huaping who had been a political commissar at the Whampoa Academy, were former Communists themselves (or pantu, “rene¬gades,” as the CCP called them). In their classes they used Communist doc¬uments seized from postal inspections or police raids to teach the students a bit of Marxist jargon so they would be able to pose as “progressives.” At the same time, the instructors were also supposed to employ these teaching materials to calumniate Communist ideology and inoculate the students against Leninist thought. According to Shen Zui, who was working in the headquarters brigade at Linli, this put the teachers in an extremely difficult position. As former Communists, they wanted the students to understand the power of Marxist thought, yet they were frightened that other Juntong colleagues would mistake this for clandestine left-wing indoctrination and turn them in for reeducation. Knowing that Dai Li had placed informants in their ranks hardly helped to allay their fears. When Dai Li paid his first visit to the camp, he casually alluded to Brigade Director Tao Yishan’s habit of playing cards after dinner, causing everyone to realize that he was keep¬ing the unit under fairly close surveillance.73
Dai Li visited the Linli training camp for the first time in the fall of 1938. Yu Lexing wanted to make a good impression, so he sent students as body¬guards to greet Dai Li’s car, while posting members of the two middle bri¬gades as guards every three to five paces. When Dai Li’s automobile came to the edge of the town, a great shout went up, echoing back and forth, to stand to attention. Meanwhile, other armed students were posted at each crossroads to stop any other traffic from coming through. Dai Li had re¬ceived a number of negative reports about Yu Lexing even before coming, and his temper was already on edge. When he reached the center of town and saw how elaborate the honor guard was, he erupted into one of his no¬torious furies. Getting out of the car, he loudly asked Yu Lexing what this fuss was all about. After all, they were not a bunch of feudal warlords! If their Leader, Generalissimo Chiang, found out about this ridiculous posturing, then it would be all over for Mr. Yu. Without permitting Yu to answer, Dai Li continued to harangue him in this manner as they walked into the train¬ing unit, frightening the cadres who witnessed the scene and making them feel that their chief was a man of overweening and fearsome authority.74
The reports that had made Dai Li so angry were from his secret infor¬mants, who had described the excellent job that Yu Lexing was doing as as¬sistant superintendent. Yu’s knowledge of special services work was exten¬sive, which won him the students’ admiration from the very outset. Since he taught the basic espionage course to all of the recruits, he got to know most of them quite well and continued to earn their respect and loyalty. Within the first few months of the training program, Yu had managed to become very close to the students, and this made Dai Li, who wanted to be the pu¬pils’ sole director and master teacher, jealous and resentful.
During the second day of his visit, therefore, Dai Li ran Yu Lexing down in front of the staff and student body, who gathered in the auditorium to hear him give a public talk. Dai Li not only singled out for criticism the as¬sistant superintendent; he also scolded the headquarters brigade comman¬der and denigrated the main instructional officers for spending too much time on liquor and women and too little on the students. He said that there were a number of persons among the teachers and brigade heads who were having illicit sexual relations with female students. He also severely attacked the brigade commander for the drowning of a Henanese woman who could not pass the swimming test, and for the death of another student in hand- to-hand combat with the Korean karate instructor, a certain Mr. Kim. How¬ever, he highly praised former CCP member Liao Huaping for using the po-litical training classes to make the cadets realize that if the “Reds” were not exterminated, then there would not be room enough in all of China to bury the Communists’ future victims.75
On the third day of his visit, Dai Li spoke with individual groups of stu¬dents, telling them that Juntong was the most revolutionary organization in the country and that they had a bright future ahead of them. He also re¬viewed some of “his” students’ records and promoted those he thought de¬serving, while ordering those with the worst reports to be locked up. This assertion of Dai Li’s dominance over the cadets, however, failed to displace Yu Lexing. After Dai Li had returned to Hankou, fresh reports of Yu’s pop¬ularity reached Juntong headquarters. Dai Li consequently decided to re¬call Yu Lexing and put Brigade Commander Tao Yishan in his place. That failed to solve the problem. Although Tao did his best to run the camp dur¬ing May and June of 1938, the teachers and students alike deplored Yu’s ab¬sence. Eventually, in order to restore their morale, Dai Li relented and re¬instated Yu Lexing in late July.76
The entire affair, of course, served as a reminder to the faculty and stu¬dents of Dai Li’s ubiquitous informants. It also heightened their awareness of the dark side of his private autocratic regime, of which they were rapidly becoming lifetime subjects. Concerns about their personal security as fu¬ture secret policemen notwithstanding, the Linli students were nonetheless fascinated by the tradecraft of espionage: learning how to quick-draw and fire a handgun, pick locks and jimmy open handcuffs, or spot and evade shadowers in practice sessions on Changsha’s city streets.77
The students were intrigued in part by the technology of modern spying; they were also lured by the techniques of the traditional martial arts. Dai Li himself was invariably impressed by Chinese boxing experts like the Linli student named Li Kelian, a qigong specialist who had stones broken on his chest with a sledge hammer. Dai Li later made Li Kelian assistant director of Juntong’s special wugong (martial arts) training unit, the Chongqing Art of Attack and Defense Class (Chongqing jiji ban). At the graduation cere- monies for the Linli class, Dai Li was also impressed by the Korean karate expert’s use of a larynx-squeezing technique to render a young teenager unconscious within seconds.78 When he reprimanded the Korean karateka after the demonstration, Dai Li’s officers thought that their chief disap¬proved of using such young boys as guinea pigs, but Dai Li was actually an¬gry because he did not think that such powerful techniques should be re¬vealed publicly.79
TRADECRAFT
Regardless of their later specialized training, all of the students had to study basic espionage tradecraft ( jishu), taught by Assistant Director Yu Lexing in a course called Elementary Knowledge for Special Services Work (Tegong changshi).80 The lectures covered intelligence gathering, evaluation, and analysis; the deployment of secret intelligence organizations and the run¬ning of agents; shadowing and evasion; the transmission of intelligence messages; special operations; reconnaissance work; disguises; investigation of post office materials; and the use of poisons and explosives.81
Once the students had taken this basic course in tradecraft, they were supposed to be able to choose their future specialties. In truth, they were as¬signed to brigades according to their aptitudes, with the best going into elite spy units and the less promising into guerrilla brigades. If one were partic¬ularly smart and alert, he was likely to be chosen to enter the Intelligence Brigade (Qingbao dui). A less intellectual fellow with notable strength and bravery would be directed to the Operations Brigade (Xingdong dui). Ca¬dets who had received military training were appointed to the Military In¬telligence Staff Officer Brigade (Diecan dui). The rest, the rank and file, entered the Guerrilla Warfare Brigade (Junshi dui), in which they learned guerrilla warfare techniques copied from Ye Jianying’s Communist training school at Nanyue in Hunan.82
The women students were at first assigned either to study intelligence work or to become special operations agents. In July 1938 the Linli training class also set up special groups to teach communications and accounting. Thereafter, most women joined these two training groups. A few were se¬lected as “work wives” (gongzuo taitai) to accompany major agents like Fu Shenglan—who ran some of Juntong’s Shanghai underground operations until he defected and became puppet mayor of Hangzhou—into enemy- occupied territory.83
Higher-level courses in the Intelligence Brigade were taught by offi¬cers who had studied in Germany and Italy. There were additional lectures and demonstrations by Liu Shaofu and Huang Linyu on ordnance and ex¬plosives, by Xie Ligong on intelligence gathering, by Shen Zui on trade¬craft, by headquarters telecommunications specialists on wireless transmis- sion and codes, and by expert Juntong photographers on cameras and film development.84
The Operations Brigade instructed its cadets in the use of weapons (con¬cealed knives, pistols, hatchets, poisoned daggers), and the conduct of ar¬rests and assassinations, surveillance, and shadowing. Shen Zui, as an expe¬rienced Shanghai hand who had conducted numerous kidnappings and arrests himself, gave lectures on the practical details of seizing a suspect: what to do if there were three of you and two of them, how to take a “snatch” out of a building several stories tall, why the differing physical abilities of victims make a difference in their reaction to arrest. Special agents were taught that they must first apply disabling pain to suspects, not so much as to cripple them or make it impossible to walk them out of a building, but enough to keep them from having the strength to cry out and resist seizure. Demonstrations of these techniques to the class sometimes resulted in in¬juries when students resisted their instructors’ martial arts. The instructors felt challenged in such cases to maintain their authority and credibility in front of the other students and could not afford to be disgraced. That was why one cadet was actually killed by the Korean martial arts instructor, Mr. Kim.85
The emphasis was on practical, concrete casework. At first, the Opera¬tions Brigade cadets were trained in demolition, but Juntong quickly dis¬covered that to produce an explosives expert required at least six months beyond the regular training period for a secret agent. Also, there were too many accidents in the handling of explosives, and some of them were fatal. It was much more practical to keep the explosives specialists apart, and to have them make bombs and devices for agents in the field, who then only had to be trained in a few basic techniques in order to detonate their charges. The important thing was to teach the students how powerful TNT and dynamite were, and this could be done easily in the countryside outside Linli, although it disturbed peasants living nearby.86
Students were not allowed to take notes in these special operations classes. If they failed to understand a certain point, then they were encour¬aged to ask the instructor to repeat what he had said. The instructors them¬selves were told to direct students to come to them outside class and ask for special help as needed. This was a way for the backbone cadres to spot the zealous in the class who had an aptitude for violence and conspiracy, and whom they—the instructors — could “nourish” (peiyang) into “specialized talents” (zhuanmen rencai) fit for higher-level work.87
The full course of study was supposed to run one year, but Dai Li had a war on his hands and he would sometimes impatiently telephone Linli, or¬dering some of the best cadets into the field right away. He was especially keen to make sure that his own Juntong cadres were placed in the “war zone service organizations” (zhandi fuwu tuanti) or popular resistance units that
might otherwise be dominated by Communists or other “progressive” lead¬ers. Thus, when the war zone expanded in Jiangxi in the summer of 1938, and a woman representing a resistance unit from that area requested help in the form of personnel, Dai Li ordered that a contingent of women pupils be taken out of the training unit and sent off to join the tuanti right away.88 Another hundred students in the guerrilla warfare course were selected from the Fifth and Sixth Brigades and dispatched to the southeast to join the Loyal and Patriotic Army (Zhongyi jiuguo jun) when it stepped up its activities in the Shanghai hinterland against the Japanese.89
THE LOYAL AND PATRIOTIC ARMY
The Loyal and Patriotic Army stemmed from the “special operations brigades” (biedongdui) that had been created under the Su-Zhe Special Op¬erations Committee founded by Dai Li and organized by gang leader Du Yuesheng.90 After these members of the labor movement and elements of the underworld were routed from Shanghai by the Japanese and scattered, Dai Li sent Zhou Kang to try to regroup the forces. Out of the remnants they were able to salvage more than two thousand men who were retrained at Liyang and then moved to Xiuning, where they were expanded to form two “training units” ( jiaodao tuan) under He Xingjian and Tang Yisheng. A third unit was added under Ruan Qingyuan in 1938, and the whole was then named the Loyal and Patriotic Army (LPA) and placed under the com¬mand of Lieutenant General Yu Zuobai (also known as Yu Yize), who es-tablished his command post at Guangde Jinshanli in Anhui.91
Yu Zuobai was a former warlord member of the Guangxi clique whose loyalties were bought by Chiang Kai-shek during the 1928 conflict between the Generalissimo and the Guixi forces.92 Although the LPA, which grew to more than 100,000 soldiers, later acquired a noisome reputation among progressive Chinese for its operations against CCP-led New Fourth Army units, it did manage during the fall of 1938 to wage effective guerrilla raids against the Japanese in the Yangzi delta.93 There were numerous authenti¬cated reports during the summer and fall of 1938 of ambushes of small par¬ties of Japanese traveling by boat or truck in the region’s backcountry. The Japanese forces were able to keep their lines of communication open, but American observers reported that “casualties resulting from guerrilla activ¬ities have been numerous.” And the level of guerrilla activity visibly in¬creased after the Linli cadres joined the LPA in September and October of that same year.94
Meanwhile, of course, the Japanese were closing in upon Wuhan. Dai Li had made several trips to southern Hunan to join Chiang Kai-shek while he convoked the Guomindang Central Committee at Nanyue in the Heng mountains. And before Chiang Kai-shek transferred the headquarters of his
Military Affairs Commission to the wartime capital of Chongqing, Dai Li also went to Sichuan to arrange for his Leader’s safety and to set up his own Juntong office in Customs Lane (Haiguan xiang).95 But once those arrange¬ments were made, Dai Li’s primary personal responsibility was to sabotage the municipal public utilities of Wuhan before the Japanese took over the city. Consequently, another hundred Linli men and women students were selected and taken by Shen Zui to Wuhan, where they were quartered in the Nanxiaolu primary school, outfitted as plainclothesmen, and told by Dai Li that they were to have a special role in the defense of Wuhan. In the days that followed they worked directly under Dai Li’s personal command, mak¬ing sure that the utilities were rendered useless for the Japanese.96
LINLI’S LAST DAYS
Shen Zui himself went back to Linli to continue working with the remain¬ing seven hundred or so students still trying to finish the full twelve-month course. During the last month of the training program in the winter of 1938-39, Dai Li paid a final visit to the Linli camp, coming rather hurriedly from Changsha. His purpose this time was threefold: to attend the gradu¬ating ceremonies, to transfer the training unit to Qianyang in western Hunan, and to remove Yu Lexing for the last time from the directorship of the unit.97
Perhaps because the latter issue was now resolved, Dai Li this time was in quite an affable mood. Everything that he saw and heard seemed to please him. He praised the students and their instructors; he told the graduating cadets what their new assignments would be; and, at the ceremonies them¬selves, although he exhibited anger over the martial arts demonstration, he was obviously pleased by the students’ demonstrations of their newly ac¬quired skills.98
General Dai was even entranced by their somewhat awkward class song (bange), composed by an instructor who had studied in Germany and who had been very impressed by the “Horst Wessel Song.” Dai Li’s ear was caught by the phrase “Revolutionary youth, quickly prepare, / Be wise, humane, and brave!” But he especially liked the lines “We will defend our Leader’s safety / And protect our nation’s sovereign soil.” As a result, he decided to make this the anthem of the entire MSB, ordering that it be sung at every major meeting, including the annual April 1 meeting to commemorate Jun- tong’s founding. It was evident, from his avuncular good cheer, that Dai Li regarded the graduates of Linli as a rather special group of his own disciples who would merit special treatment in the future.99
Each of the seven hundred graduating cadets was given the rank and emoluments of a second lieutenant.100 Those who had been employed be¬fore joining the secret service mainly went back to their original units. A few members of the First Intelligence Brigade with “high cultural levels” were sent to the Chongqing foreign language training unit for further study. The majority of graduates were assigned to the southwest rear areas, with most going to Juntong offices in Sichuan. A small number were held behind to serve as cadres in the second special services class, now on its way to Qianyang.101
BACKBONE CADRES
As the successor to the Linli program, the Qianyang unit was the second of five core regional training units for regular Juntong cadres; the other three were the Xifeng xunlian ban, the Lanzhou training program, and the South¬eastern special services course. Over the course of the war, from 1939 to 1945, these five units produced approximately 13,500 MSB cadres expert in intelligence (qingbao), military intelligence (diebao), operations (xing- dong), telecommunications (dianxun), or guerrilla warfare (dayouji).
An additional set of central training units for Juntong cadres and infor¬mants prepared military staff officers and attachés, communications spe¬cialists, experts on Communist Party organization and tactics, foreign affairs specialists who could use diplomatic cover abroad, and interpreters of Ger¬man, French, English, and Japanese. The most prestigious of these central units in Chongqing put 250 of the best graduates from the Linli, Qianyang, Xifeng, Lanzhou, and Southeastern training programs, plus carefully se¬lected assistant Juntong station chiefs and section heads, through a rigorous six-month program of advanced intelligence techniques taught by Dai Li’s most experienced instructors, along with fifty American enlisted men and officers who belonged to the Sino-American Cooperative Organization un¬der the Office of Strategic Services and the Office of Naval Intelligence. The least exalted of these MSB programs put five hundred specially recom¬mended central government bureaucrats and administrators from all of the important Nationalist ministries through a one-month short course de-signed to train them in the rudiments of intelligence-gathering and liaison work so that they could serve Juntong thereafter as informants. Needless to say, not a few did.
A third set of local training units was created to produce special services detectives and counterespionage experts to combat the Communists in the northwest, as well as to train cadres for work on Taiwan in the event of an American invasion of the island.102 Finally, two overseas training units di¬rectly under Juntong’s control prepared Vietnamese agents to be sent back into Indochina to fight against the Japanese (and in some cases the French), and trained overseas Chinese to go back to their homes in Burma, Malaya, and the Philippines to work as MSB spies.
Until the creation of SACO, however, the core training program re¬mained the Linli-Qianyang-Xifeng-Lanzhou-Southeastern complex that trained basic backbone cadres. These courses were at the heart of Dai Li’s enterprise, and he regarded them as his own classes, always acting nomi¬nally as superintendent, with the actual director in every instance desig¬nated fuzhuren (assistant superintendent).103 In a curious way, the special training units became an integral part of his miniature secret empire. Dur¬ing the early, preparatory days of the core courses, Dai Li would appoint one of his own agents as magistrate of the district in which the unit was lo¬cated, both to prepare for the establishment of the unit and to protect and conceal its existence once it was underway. The units themselves were often housed in the very sorts of normal schools that had produced the stratum of ambitious power seekers to which he, Hu Zongnan, He Zhonghan, and so many others belonged. And when he paid a call upon his training units, as he did every year, the visitation of the “superintendent” was like an im¬perial progress.
During his eight years’ residence in Chongqing, Dai Li annually visited each of his local training camps, participating in staggered graduation cer¬emonies timed to coincide with his arrival. Within Juntong this was called chuxun (going out on patrol or inspection). Two limousines were prepared for the secret service chief, so that he could ride in them alternately. His ret¬inue, which consisted of an aide-de-camp, a secretary, an assisting official, his personal chef, a woman to do his laundry, a radio operator, and a code specialist, plus cadres from personnel, intelligence, operations, training, and police, had vehicles of their own. Two or three trucks were filled with fifty or more plainclothes bodyguards and armed police guards chosen from the command brigade of the Military Statistics Bureau. Like a viceroy, Dai Li would thus descend upon “his” training unit, often located in a county manned by one of “his” magistrates, to assert proprietorship over “his” students.104
We have already seen, in the case of Yu Lexing and the Linli students, how jealous Dai Li could be of instructors whose popularity with the stu¬dents exceeded his own. Indeed, even after he dismissed Yu Lexing for the final time, Dai Li never forgave him for rivaling himself, especially when Linli graduates continued to pay their former assistant superintendent def¬erence, fondness, and respect. Every time Yu Lexing came to Chongqing, at least a hundred Linli alumni would organize a banquet for him and ask him to be the after-dinner speaker. Yu Lexing habitually urged his former pupils to work hard for Juntong and be loyal to Dai Li, but that hardly assuaged his chief, who eventually had Yu Lexing thrown into one of the MSB’s prisons and held for more than a year.105
TRAINING UNIT FACTIONALISM
By so zealously discouraging such teacher-disciple relationships outside his own patronage, Dai Li was seeking to prevent the formation of factions and cliques within his secret service. In theory, the personnel regulations of Jun- tong prohibited persons from appointing their friends to work alongside or under them. In practice it was sometimes difficult to know when a section, department, or office chief’s personnel recommendations were self-inter¬ested. To keep private cabals hostile to him from forming, Dai Li needed to have his own corps of loyalists in place throughout the growing Juntong bu¬reaucracy to keep an eye on potential rivals.106
The reservoir of this corps of Dai Li loyalists was the first class of Linli, or linxunban, graduates. Several became secretaries in Dai Li’s Confidential Office (Jiyao shi), which was also known as Section A (Jia shi) and was a conscious imitation of Chiang Kai-shek’s Shicong shi (Escort Office), ar¬guably the most important government organ during the War of Resistance. A dozen or so were given positions in the Personnel Department (Renshi chu). Others were quickly promoted to division commanders (guzhang) and deputy commanders ( fuguzhang). At headquarters there soon was not a single department, office, or group that did not have a Linli graduate in an important position. And in the field, too, in at least ten counties the heads of the investigation centers ( jicha suo) were Linli alumni who had been quickly promoted to captain (shangwei) or major (shaoxiao) not long after re¬ceiving their first commission.107
Older agents who had many more years of experience than the Linli alumni were very bitter about these promotions. Juntong, they said, had be¬come “a world where nobody looked at you if you weren’t from [Lin]li, and where nobody employed you if you weren’t from [Lin]li” (fei li wu shi, fei li wu yong de shijie le). The Linli alumni in turn let older MSB officers know that they were “Dai Li’s students,” calling the secret service chief “Superin¬tendent Dai” (Dai zhuren) instead of “Mr. Dai” (Dai xiansheng). Quick to in¬form on the service’s old hands, whose ruder and more corrupt lifestyle these young middle-school graduates held in contempt, the Linli graduates never called each other “comrade” (tongzhi) like ordinary Juntong special agents.108 Instead, they addressed each other as “fellow students” (tongxue), and if they happened to encounter former brigade commanders from their linxunban days, then they would call them “teacher” (laoshi) rather than ad¬dressing them with their military ranks.109
Because some of the Qianyang training unit’s students had been with the Linli students at the very end of their course, Qianyang graduates tried to borrow some of the prestige of the Linli class. “Lin Qian bu fen jia,” they in¬sisted: “Lin and Qian are not separate families.” But the Linli cohort tended to remain aloof, forming alliances with fellow members outside the head- quarters circle and maintaining contact through dinner parties thrown whenever a Linli student came into Chongqing from the outer provinces. Moreover, it was plainly part of Dai Li’s grand design to treat each of the core regional training units as a group apart from the others by assigning Linli students to the center in Chongqing, having Qianyang alumni staff sta¬tions in the southwest, and making the Lanzhou Training Unit the main source of cadres for the northwest.110
Gradually, however, some of the old guard, including canny apparatchiks like Mao Renfeng, realized that Lanzhou cadres could be used to counter¬balance the Linli group in Chongqing. As the old guard arranged for the transfer of more and more Lanzhou graduates to Chongqing, a new faction began to form around the Lanzhou graduates, and they became an opposi¬tion force to the linxunban students.111 Later, when the alumni of the three Xifeng training classes were commissioned as Juntong officers, yet another group of opponents arose. Nevertheless, Linli graduates retained their spe¬cial edge as “Dai Li’s students,” and during the eleven years between the for¬mation of the Linli Training Unit and the Nationalists’ defeat in the civil war, no fewer than five Linli alumni were promoted to the rank of major general in the service of Dai Li and his Generalissimo.112
Chapter 19
Codes
Spies fascinate us because their trade promises secret knowledge, and secret knowl¬edge seems power. The promise, though, nearly always is empty. The truly useful wartime intelligence came from breaking German and Japanese codes. Codebreaking and electronic and satellite intelligence remain the principal sources of “hard” intel¬ligence today. The rest—“agent intelligence”—excessively tends toward the penetra¬tion and counterpenetration of other intelligence services.
WILLIAM PFAFF 1
FIRST STEPS
Dai Li’s first secret service communications training group was organized at the Hangzhou (Zhejiang) Police Academy in 1930.2 Its training procedures were drawn from Cheka and KGB manuals, but its technical know-how, based upon the experience of recruits from Shanghai intelligence units, reflected American electronics skills and supplies.3 The Hangzhou telecom¬munications training unit (wuxian dianxun xunlianban), which at first had no wireless equipment, began with twenty to thirty graduates from the sec¬ond class of the regular police academy.4 When these police cadets had completed the course, it quickly became apparent that they had no interest in telecommunications as such; the training unit consequently opened a recruitment office in Shanghai, where recruits were given initial wireless training in order to screen them before they were enrolled in the police academy wireless communications unit in Hangzhou.5
Classes two through five were composed primarily of students from Shanghai’s Number Three Wireless Training School (Sanji wuxiandian xue- xiao) brought to Hangzhou for work in “special operations” (tegong). Class six prepared students to serve in the Nationalist government’s Airforce Commission (Hangweihui) as communications officers at air defense intel¬ligence stations ( fangkong qingbao tai). Classes seven through ten were also composed of students from Yang Yongkui’s Number Three in Shanghai, along with graduates of Beiping’s Tianxing Wireless School (Tianxing wu- xiandian xuexiao) under Liu Xingwu.6
The Hangzhou training unit was but a first step for Dai Li in developing an effective intelligence communications net.7 He was already far behind his civilian rival, Chen Lifu, whose own intelligence unit, the Central Statis¬tics Bureau (CSB), or Zhongtong, was establishing a complex of transmis¬sion stations in major cities throughout China.8 Until 1932 Dai’s Special Services Department had to depend upon the CSB’s network of secret ra¬dio stations to send its own intelligence reports, which took second place to Chen Lifu’s communiqués.9
Zhongtong’s shortwave radio monopoly was broken by the Gu Shun- zhang defection.10 In April 1931 Gu revealed that Chen Lifu’s counterin¬telligence apparatus had been infiltrated by such Communist moles as Li Kenong, Chiang Kai-shek’s personal decoder, who had passed the Nation¬alist leader’s codebook to Zhou Enlai.11 As a result of this intelligence dis¬aster and as part of the formation of a special services force within the Lixingshe, Chiang Kai-shek ordered Wen Yuqing (Y. C. Wen), T. V. Soong’s nephew, to set up a secret group in Chiang’s office to decipher enemy codes.12 Wen’s cryptanalysis group, the Monitoring Research Code Organi¬zation (Zhenshou yanyi xitong), was also supposed to coordinate its activi-ties with other spy agencies through a branch office established within the Military Affairs Commission Special Technical Research Unit (Junweihui tezhong jishu yanjiushi).13
Because his own men were supposed to train with Y. C. Wen, and because Juntong’s radio communications depended upon the CSB’s monitoring equipment, Dai Li grew increasingly frustrated.14 In 1933 he decided, there¬fore, to found his own radio school in Shanghai under Wei Daming, who came to him with the enthusiastic recommendation of Hu Zongnan.15
WEI DAMING
Wei Daming had graduated from the Ministry of Communications telecom-munications technical training course (tongxun jishu xunlian suo).16 Working under Li Yifan, who had taken control of the national commercial radio station, Wei Daming had become the supervisor in charge of all the radio operators (baowuyuan lingban) in both the international and commercial broadcasting studios. Now he was given complete control over the training and administration of Dai Li’s special services communications unit, includ¬ing personnel training and cryptanalysis.
Wei Daming, who drafted the training programs of the radio school and served as the head of the tewuchu’s communications section, saw his co-team as consisting primarily of professionals who focused their interest on the tech¬nical aspects of codes, radios, and cryptanalysis. While field agents were val¬ued for their ability to blend into the local scenery, to cultivate informants and gather intelligence through human interactions, to be alert in reading moods and signs, the training in the code section placed a premium upon self-sufficiency in carrying out tasks that were mainly mechanical in nature.17
Wei Daming was also responsible for research and development, which were particularly pressing needs because the five-watt ground transmitters and fifteen-watt station units were too heavy to be carried conveniently by secret agents. In the late spring of 1933 Wei’s section manufactured instead a small transponder, which, apart from batteries and earphones, was no larger than a couple of binggun (popsicles). The miniature radio was so ef¬fective that Dai Li decided to present Wei Daming to Chiang Kai-shek at Lushan, demonstrate the apparatus, and request that his communications assistant be given a special military reward for his invention. The demon¬stration was a success: the tiny radio could transmit messages outside the mountainous terrain of Lushan, where a regular fifteen-watt set failed to get through. Chiang Kai-shek gave his permission to manufacture the set, and he authorized Dai to have Wei Daming set up a special radio broad¬casting headquarters with eight transmitters at Bailuzhou (White Egret Is¬land), Xishiba (West Stone Embankment), No. 29, Nanjing.18
As the majordomo of Dai Li’s secret service communications, Wei Da- ming (whose wife was one of Dai Li’s former mistresses) became known as his master’s “spirit” (Dai Li de linghun). 19 His importance to Juntong cannot be overemphasized. It was Wei’s cryptanalysts who were to break the Nine¬teenth Route Army’s codes during the Fujian Incident, providing the strate¬gic key to help the Generalissimo bring the rebellious province to heel; and it was the cryptanalysts’ needs that in the end led Dai Li to depend so heav¬ily for technological aid upon alliances with British intelligence and with the Americans.20
In the larger picture, of course, communications intelligence seemed equally important to Chiang Kai-shek, who quickly recognized how crucial it was to the maintenance of his dictatorship. Chiang, in effect, treated se¬cret radio intercepts as a family monopoly. As late as 1939, only three people had regular access to these particular intelligence reports: T. V. Soong, H. H. Kung, and Chiang himself. T. V. Soong—recalling the import of radio intercepts to Chiang’s gaining the upper hand over Li Zongren, Yan Xishan, Feng Yuxiang, Li Jishen, and Cheng Mingshu—later boasted to President Roosevelt that “I have won two civil wars for Chiang Kai-shek by setting up an efficient decoding service which kept him posted about the movement of his enemies.” 21
Chiang’s possessiveness about communications intelligence incited com-petition among his military and secret service chiefs. He Yingqin, Chiang’s chief of staff and minister of war, asked Y. C. Wen for a copy of the daily in¬tercepts, but Chiang refused to release them, thereby indirectly compelling General He to form his own interception office under Wang Jinglu, with or¬ders to begin gathering and decoding Japanese Foreign Ministry commu- nications.22 This put the Chinese army’s chief of staff in direct competition with Chiang’s own unit under Wen Yuqing, who was named division chief of communications under the Ministry of Transportation and ordered on March 1, 1936, to organize an Office for the Inspection and Decoding of Secret Transmissions (Midian jianyisuo), which was responsible to Chiang alone. Within three or four months the office had broken the Japanese For¬eign Ministry code, and by the time Japan went to war with China in July 1937, the Chinese had more than a dozen secret radio stations intercept¬ing Japanese diplomatic communications.23 Nonetheless, Wen Yuqing’s Mi¬dian jianyisuo always held the upper hand. Even though there were monthly intelligence gatherings convened throughout 1937 and 1938 by Xu Enzeng (CSB), Dai Li (MSB), Admiral Yang Xuancheng (Military Intelligence), Wang Pengsheng (Institute of International Studies), and Wen Yuqing, it was always Wen who had the last word, thanks to his superior technical and training facilities.24 As a matter of self-defense, therefore, Dai Li felt that he had to pursue his own code-breaking capacity by searching for scientific ex¬pertise abroad.25
HERBERT YARDLEY
In 1931 Herbert Osborn Yardley published his memoir of his experiences as an American breaker of Japan’s most secret codes. The American Black Chamber was quickly translated by cryptologist Commander Ito Risaburo and published in Japan, where it became a best-seller.26 At the same time, Major Xiao Bo, China’s assistant military attaché in Washington and an agent of Dai Li, had the book translated into Chinese (Hei shi) and sent it to Wei Daming. Wei in turn brought Yardley to Dai Li’s attention as the Amer¬ican who had broken the Japanese diplomatic codes.27
Yardley, the son of a railway telegrapher, was born in 1889 in Worthing¬ton, Indiana. President of his high school class, editor of its newspaper, and captain of the football team, he went to Washington at the age of twenty- three andgotajob as a telegrapher in the State Department, coding and de¬coding cables. To his surprise, he found he was able to decipher a coded message from Colonel House to President Wilson in May 1916. He also re¬alized that these messages traveled over cables passing through England that were routinely monitored by the Royal Navy. Since that made all Amer¬ican traffic equally vulnerable to British interception, he reported the mat¬ter to his superiors, suggesting ways of restoring American invulnerability, and was instantly singled out by the War Department as a remarkably able cryptologist. On June 29, 1917, as a second lieutenant, he was given charge of the eighth section of Military Intelligence (MI8), responsible for all code and cipher work under wartime conditions.28
Yardley worked feverishly to devise new code systems that provided se¬cure communications with U.S. military attachés and intelligence officers around the world. He also established a special cipher subsection that even¬
Figure 15. Xiao Bo, deputy Chinese military attaché and Dai Li’s agent in Washington, D.C. Chung-Mei he tsuo suo chih [Annals of the Sino- American Cooperative Organization].
N.p. [Taipei]: Kuo-fang pu ch’ing pao chủ, 1970.
tually decoded 10,735 messages sent by foreign governments. When the armistice was signed on November 11, 1918, Yardley was in Paris overseeing a code bureau in the Hotel Crillon that handled all encryption for the American commission to the Versailles Conference while eavesdropping on communiqués sent by other delegations.29
With the end of the First World War, the U.S. Radio Communication Act of 1912 came into effect once again.30 It provided that the government would guarantee secrecy of communications by requiring that stations en¬gaged in the transmission of messages only divulge their contents to the person(s) toward whom they were directed. Because Yardley was eventually going to be intercepting the cable communications of other countries, not their radio messages, this act did not apply.31 Nonetheless, after Yardley re¬turned to the United States in April 1919, General Marlborough Churchill, director of U.S. Military Intelligence, recommended that MI8 be trans¬formed into a jointly funded bureau under the War and State Departments. Chief of staff General Peyton March approved, the Radio Communica¬tion Act notwithstanding; and a soi-disant commercial cipher venture, the Code Compilation Company, was thereby opened for business in a four- story New York City brownstone at 3 East 38th Street under the directorship of Herbert Yardley. This Cipher Bureau was to become known as the Black Chamber.32
At first, the Western Union telegraph company refused to provide the government with copies of its telegrams. The Radio Communication Act, af- ter all, threatened any employee who did so with direct personal punish¬ment. General Churchill persuaded Western Union’s president, Newcomb Carlton, to ignore the law in the name of patriotism. Every morning there¬after government couriers would pick up the cables, deliver them to Mili¬tary Intelligence, and return them to Western Union’s Washington office by the close of the same day. A similar agreement was worked out with the company officers of Postal Telegraph; and the All-American Cable Com¬pany, which handled communications between North and South America, consented after being approached on General Churchill’s behalf by W. E. Roosevelt and Robert W. Goelet. Before the end of 1920 the Black Cham¬ber could count upon the illegal cooperation of virtually the entire Ameri¬can cable industry.33
By then, Herbert Yardley, with the help of his brilliant associate Freder¬ick Livesey, had already broken the Japanese Foreign Office codes.34 This clandestine accomplishment turned out to be of critical use to the Ameri¬can delegation headed by Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes dur¬ing the Washington Naval Conference that opened on November 14, 1921. Yardley’s code breakers had been tracking the Japanese preparations for the conference since July, opening up their own daily courier service between Washington and New York. The key issue of the conference was the tonnage of capital ships allowed each major power. Secretary Hughes was willing to accept parity with Great Britain but wished to set a ten to six ratio with Ja¬pan, while the latter would only settle for ten to seven. On November 28, the Black Chamber decoded a telegram from the Gaimusho to the Japanese delegation, indicating that ten to six might be acceptable as a fallback posi¬tion. Knowing Japan’s hold card, the Americans pressed hard and the Japa¬nese folded on December 10, agreeing to the ten to six ratio. Yardley’s code breakers had decisively won the round.35
Despite Yardley’s success, the Black Chamber was vulnerable, dependent as it was upon the State Department for a portion of its secret subsidy. In 1929 Secretary Stinson decided that it was inappropriate for “gentlemen” to read one another’s mail and the Cipher Bureau was closed down, leaving Yardley out of work just as he was passing his fortieth birthday. It was, in fact, his need for cash to support his family and his lover, Edna Ramsaier (who had worked with him in the Black Chamber), that led Yardley to publish the book that brought him to Major Xiao’s attention in the first place.36
Yardley demanded an annual salary of $10,000 to work in China. Major Xiao met that demand, but he refused to grant permission to take along Edna Ramsaier. Nevertheless, Yardley was so excited by the prospect of working in China that he accepted Xiao’s offer anyway and left for the Far East in September 1938, traveling as an exporter of hides under the name Herbert Osborn.37
Yardley arrived in Hong Kong in November 1938 on the very day that air service was discontinued to Hankou, which was about to fall to the Japanese. Dai Li’s Hong Kong agent, a Mr. Ling, received new instructions by radio from his chief (whom Yardley privately called the “Hatchet Man”), and three hours later they had set sail for Haiphong in French Indochina. Again met by an undercover agent, who bribed their way through customs, Yard¬ley and Ling waited three days before taking the twice-weekly train by nar¬row-gauge railroad to Kunming.38
YARDLEY IN CHONGQING
Airplane transport from Kunming to Chongqing was routinely booked at least a month in advance, but Dai Li’s agents got the two men seats on an American-piloted plane carrying high-octane gasoline to Free China’s war¬time capital. Met in Chongqing by other Dai Li agents, Yardley and Ling were driven along a narrow roadway flanked by rickshas, past the western gate to a four-story apartment overlooking the “little river,” which marked the city’s northern boundary.39 There Yardley was put up in a third-floor suite of living rooms and offices, complete with Western-style lavatory and toilet.40
This, however, was only a temporary dwelling. By December 1938, Yard¬ley had moved to a tile-roofed chateau built of stone blocks stolen from temple ruins.
To reach the chateau from the city you take a narrow, muddy side street that branches from the main thoroughfare above the river, pass for half a mile through stinking bamboo slums, and at the dead end climb steps through a stone arch mounted with lions to an old ruined Buddhist temple and on to a stone wall with barred wooden gate on which are written Chinese characters meaning Pleasant Home. You ring a bell by pulling a cord. A Chinese guard looks through a shutter and takes down the bars. You then climb stone steps to a garden with stone walks and stone tea tables shaded by palms and hedges. You pass a spring whose arch says “Sweet Water” and then, after a climb of forty steps, you come to the entrance of the chateau itself.41
The chateau, Yardley was told, had belonged to Chongqing’s mayor, “who was mysteriously and quickly dispossessed just before my coming.”42 Perched on a promontory overlooking the Yangzi and the airfield where Yardley had landed, the chateau was located several hundred yards from the German, French, and English embassies. Beneath the mansion, which was known as the Grotto of Divine Immortals (Shenxian dong), was a cave chis¬eled from rock where Buddhist monks in ancient times supposedly kept young girls. Now it was a bombproof dugout.43
The house itself consisted of twenty skimpily furnished rooms with pine floors. There were no bathrooms, stoves, or fireplaces, except for charcoal
Figure 16. Wartime Chongqing. Imperial War Museum, IB3276c.
ranges used for cooking in the basement. Yardley’s bedroom, which was on the top floor of the east wing, was dimly lighted and infested with large Sichuanese rats.
Only a few days ago a rat killed the new born baby of one of our guards, tear¬ing out his testes before the mother could interfere. Despite traps set at my in-sistence, rats gallop in the attic and scarcely a night passes that I am not awak¬ened by one or two running over me. Though I have had the holes to my quarters plugged, there is a secret entrance I can’t find.44
Time hung heavily on Yardley’s hands. Throughout December, surrounded by “an army of guards and servants,” Yardley tried to put in several hours a day working on ciphers, but he mainly awaited the arrival of a group of stu¬dents from Changsha to commence a full-scale code-breaking operation.45
During this hiatus, Yardley tried in vain to interest his Juntong liaison officers in the use of the “truth serums” scopolamine and sodium amobar¬bital, which were still illegal in the United States though they had been suc¬cessfully tested by the Crime Detection Bureau of Northwestern University. He had better luck with General Zeng, Dai Li’s deputy, who was fascinated by Yardley’s demonstration of incendiary pencils and who ordered their manufacture by chemists in a workshop at the far end of the Chongqing mansion’s garden.46
The “Chinese Black Chamber” expanded mightily with the fall of Wuhan and the loss of control over the central reaches of the Yangzi River.47 The special monitoring unit (zhenchatai) run by Wen Yuqing at Changsha was moved westward to Guilin and Guiyang, and finally to Kunming. Wei Da- ming continued to send Juntong agents to participate in the work of this monitoring station, but he transferred a group of thirty students under Qiu Shenjun to work directly with Yardley in the “secret code training class” (mimi yanyi xunlianban) set up in the Grotto of Divine Immortals that housed the American cryptologist.48
There were other important code units to be sure. The original Hang¬zhou Police Academy training unit had been transferred to Wuchang after war broke out with Japan. After Wuhan fell, it was merged with the Linli training group.49 A separate Wuhan training group, consisting of one hun¬dred students per class, was established under the aegis of the high com¬mand. Its graduates were sent to either the code and radio station of Jun- tong or other regional field stations (zhan). In 1940 this unit was moved to Zunyi, where it continued to operate under the command of Wei Daming.50 Finally, there were two important communications outfits constituted at Jin- hua in central Zhejiang. Both were engaged in training radio and code per¬sonnel from Jiangshan, Dai Li’s native county. Speaking a nearly imper¬vious dialect, these Jiangshan fellow townsmen were schooled in a code section run by cryptanalyst Zhu Limin, or in a “radio-code personnel train¬ing program” (yidian renyuan xunlianban) taught by Mao Wanli. Afterward they were sent to work as code clerks in the communications section of Jun- tong or assigned to “independent stations” behind enemy lines. These ra¬dio operators and code men usually sent their intelligence into Chongqing without making formal contact with other bureau agents in their area.51
Nonetheless, Yardley’s group continued to flourish throughout 1939. About two hundred students were trained altogether, and during that year the Chongqing Black Chamber intercepted more than 200,000 secret radio and telegram communications to the Japanese army. Of these about 20,000 were studied and evaluated. A major breakthrough came in mid-1939 when Yardley and Wei Daming decoded a primary Japanese air force cipher, mak¬ing it possible for the fledgling Chinese air force and Chennault’s Flying Tigers to gain intelligence on Japanese air raids.52
Given these accomplishments, Yardley felt underappreciated and un¬derpaid. Alternating between bouts of heavy drinking and total abstinence, Yardley felt deeply homesick, and he began casting about for ways to make money on the side to either get passage back to the United States or help cover Edna Ramsaier’s living expenses.53 Meanwhile, Major David Barrett, the assistant U.S. military attaché in Chongqing, had heard rumors of Yard¬ley’s activities in the wartime capital. Colonel E. R. W. McCabe, head of G-2 at the War Department, corroborated the rumors; but he warned Barrett to approach Yardley with caution since the Army had already established a secret intercept section that was trying to break the Japanese military and diplomatic codes. Yardley was equally cautious because Dai Li had warned him not to consort with foreigners or Chinese outside his own section.54
Barrett and Yardley met for the first time on February 22, 1940. Yardley told the American attaché that he had decided to stay on in China and that he stood a good chance of being placed in charge of what was to be a new, centralized Chinese Black Chamber. He also discussed the possibility of secretly sharing information on Japanese military traffic with the American War Department. After getting a cautious clearance from Colonel McCabe, on March 8 Barrett met again with Yardley, who promised complete techni¬cal information on breaking the Japanese codes in exchange for an annual payment of $6,000 to Edna Ramsaier, who would keep $2,000 for herself and pass the rest on to him.55
The War Department turned down Yardley’s offer, even though the ex¬patriate code expert gave Major William Mayer, another U.S. military at¬taché, a copy of a memo Yardley had written to Dai Li listing nineteen dif¬ferent Japanese code systems. By then the American intelligence officers were convinced — correctly, as it turned out—that Dai Li was aware of these covert meetings. Indeed, Major Mayer was actually invited by Dai Li to meet with him to discuss Yardley’s work. Mayer was surprised when Dai Li himself offered to share the code breaker’s results with the Americans; but, in June 1940, before any further cooperation took place along these lines, Yardley announced his intention to leave China. In increasingly poor health and dismayed when his store of London gin was destroyed during a Japanese air raid, Yardley had decided to go home. Forty pounds lighter and exhausted from lack of sleep during the nighttime bombings, Yardley left Chongqing on July 13. At the time he did not realize that the Americans’ Signal Intel¬ligence Service was making progress toward solving “Purple,” Japan’s most secret diplomatic code,56 and that Dai Li’s plans for centralizing communi¬cations intelligence in a single office were already well underway, leaving little room for Yardley’s role in the new organization.57
Yardley himself returned to Washington, where he reunited with Edna Ramsaier and worked temporarily for the Signal Corps before joining Can¬ada’s cryptanalysts in their Examination Unit. His tour there was brief, and he came back to Washington to open a luncheonette called Le Rideau at 1308 H St., N.W., near 13th Street, before becoming a ration enforcement officer in the Office of Price Administration.58 In 1945 he coauthored a novel (Crows Are Black Everywhere) about the adventures of a woman jour¬nalist in Chongqing, and twelve years later he wrote a best-seller called The Education of a Poker Player. He died on August 7, 1958, and was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.59
Yardley brought cryptographic genius to Dai Li, but despite his show¬manship he was unable to provide Juntong with the kind of up-to-date equipment and veneer of all-around technical competence that other American- and European-trained communications specialists managed to convey. Dai Li’s efforts to vault over his opponents within Chinese intelli¬gence circles by creating an exclusive Juntong Black Chamber therefore failed initially to bear fruit.
CODE WARS
In the early spring of 1940, Dai Li suggested to Chiang Kai-shek that code breaking be centralized. Chiang agreed. On April 1, 1940, an overarching cryptographic center called the Office of Special Technological Research (Tezhong jishu yanjiushi), or OSTR, was set up. To Dai Li’s dismay, however, Y. C. Wen was put in charge of this new office, with Wei Daming and Mao Qingxiang (Chiang’s confidential secretary) serving as his deputies. A strug¬gle soon broke out between Wei and Wen for control of the OSTR. In early June 1940 Y. C. Wen went to Hong Kong for medical tests and never re¬turned, leaving the way open for Wei Daming—now acting director of the code center—to bring in his own group of Yardley-trained cryptanalysts.60
Y. C. Wen’s flight to Hong Kong en route to Australia precipitated one of Dai Li’s most humiliating experiences: arrest and overnight jailing as a common prisoner by the British police in Hong Kong.61 When Y. C. Wen left for Hong Kong in the first place, General Dai had followed in order to reclaim him. Dai landed at Kai Tak Airport just in time to see the pas¬sengers walking across the tarmac to take the Pan American flight for Ma¬nila. He instantly spotted Y. C. Wen, who at that very moment was shak¬ing hands with the American naval attaché in Chongqing, Marine colonel McHugh. Irate, Dai Li was recognized a moment later by British airport police, thanks to a photo supplied earlier by the wife of one of Dai Li’s double agents. Dai was seized on the spot and hustled off to the main jail in Kowloon.62
A flurry of activity ensued, with various MSB agents informing Chong¬qing that the English had arrested Dai Li at the behest of the Japanese. Chiang Kai-shek’s government summoned all of its diplomatic resources, and by early the next morning Hong Kong’s police commissioner was on hand to guarantee Dai Li’s release and to convey the governor’s invitation that Dai Li be his house guest. However, General Dai resolutely refused to leave jail without the presence of a major Chinese official, in this case a Min¬istry of Defense general flown down from Chongqing to witness Dai’s re¬lease and to accompany him back to Free China. This ordeal completely soured Dai Li against the British and their intelligence services, which vastly facilitated the establishment of an American espionage linkage in the months to come.63
In the meantime, Yardley’s students remained back in Chongqing. Using these experts along with Japanese prisoners of war, Wei Daming claimed to have scored another communications triumph by deciphering some of the Japanese air force codes. Monitoring these military signals supposedly yielded intelligence that the Japanese were planning to attack the Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor. Dai Li was said to have ordered his Washington Jun- tong station chief, Major Xiao Bo, to convey this information to the U.S. Of¬fice of Naval Intelligence via the chief Chinese military attaché, Zheng De¬quan. According to later Chinese accounts, the Americans were evidently amused by the outlandish idea that Wei Daming’s OSTR was capable of such an intelligence coup, and so chose to ignore the information.64
As presented in Chinese Nationalists’ memoirs, the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, bowled over the War Department. Suddenly, the U.S. signals intelligence community, and especially the Office of Naval Intelligence, began to take Dai Li much more seriously; efforts were quickly made to gain Chinese cooperation in sharing Japanese military codes, and the U.S. Navy began actively to cultivate Major Xiao Bo.65
The presumed American turn toward Dai Li after the attack at Pearl Harbor occurred just about the same time that the Chinese secret service chief suffered his own setback within the Nationalist fold. Wei Daming’s em¬ployment of his former students to staff the OSTR had already incited a backlash against Dai Li. Earlier, in March 1941, a group of anti-Juntong intelligence officers sent a petition to Chiang Kai-shek accusing Dai Li of bureaucratic aggressiveness. Angered by Juntong’s pugnacity, Chiang had dismissed Wei Daming and named his former secretary, Mao Qingxiang, di¬rector of OSTR.66
As a political appointee lacking a background in engineering or elec¬tronics, Mao brought with him a cadre of young European-educated law¬yers and humanists. This bred resentment on the part of OSTR’s technical experts, who became openly contemptuous of Mao and his companions af¬ter Pearl Harbor. But when Dai Li sought to make use of this resentment to publicly harass Mao, the Generalissimo sided with his secretary. In January 1942 Chiang Kai-shek commanded, “All those who are from the Bureau of Investigations and Statistics [that is, Juntong] are hereby ordered to with¬draw from the Office of [Special] Technological Research by the end of Feb¬ruary [1942].” 67
This was a harsh blow to Dai Li, who realized more than ever the impor¬tance of obtaining access to American radio technology if he were to gain the upper hand over his adversaries in the civilian and military intelligence organizations reporting to Chiang Kai-shek.68 The situation, as described from a subsequent pro-CCP point of view, was simply the following:
Dai Li, besides hoping that the American imperialists would contribute some of their own wireless radio equipment needed by Juntong at that juncture, wanted even more to get the American imperialists to use the organization and equipment of the Americans’ special decoding unit called the Black Chamber to set up a branch office in Chongqing. This was in order to facili¬tate our studying American resources on the sly while we kept our assets (ben- qian) to ourselves by preventing the American imperialists’ special agents from learning about our own experience intercepting and decoding Japanese air force [signals traffic].69
In short, both sides—Chinese and American—reputedly felt that the time was ripe for close but cautious technical collaboration in securing signals in¬telligence. The stage was thereby set for what was soon to become the Sino- American Cooperative Organization.
Chapter 20
Dai Li, Milton Miles,
and the Foundation of SACO
[Milton Miles] was an unusually sinister and crafty man who was also an old China hand [Zhongguo tong]. During the several years of his “cooperation” with Dai Li, the relations between master [zhuzi] and lackey [nucai] were exceptionally good. The master doted on the lackey, and this made the lackey extremely obedient and submissive. When there was a problem that couldn’t be resolved because [Dai Li] stubbornly held to his own opinion, [Miles] would always perfunctorily use the phrase, “Let me think this over,” and then wait until after he had returned to his office to quickly send a written aide-mémoire to Dai Li. When Dai Li got this sort of memorandum, which was completely opposed to his own ideas, even though at the moment he was ready to burst forth in anger, after a while he would carry out things exactly according to the method proposed by [Miles’s] memorandum, not daring to insist upon his own plans. Because Miles never embarrassed Dai Li in front of his subordinates, Dai Li could often boast to his underlings that Miles sometimes had to obey him. Actually, god knows, in all my years there I never once witnessed a single important case in which Dai Li made himself master and refused to obey Miles’s instructions.
S EN I, Juntong neimu, 266 67
NAVAL CONCERNS
Shen Zui, in his eagerness to depict Dai Li as a subordinate of the Ameri¬cans, misrepresented the relationship between his former master and the American naval officer “Mary” Miles, who was determined to support Dai Li as the undisputed head of their joint Sino-American intelligence operation from its very inception. Miles’s backing not only purported to recognize Chinese sovereign interests in wartime collaboration, but it also confirmed the crucial role of his own naval service in the China theater.1 Indeed, the U.S. military, and especially the OSS and the U.S. Army, took pains to show that the collusion between Dai Li’s MSB and the Americans was, first of all, a Navy affair:
Before Pearl Harbor, the United States Signal Corps was approached [by then
Major Xiao] for assistance in signal communication. The proposition was
held in abeyance. Shortly after Pearl Harbor the Army G-2 was approached
but the negotiations came to no conclusion. Thereafter the OSS and ONI
Figure 17. Rear Admiral Milton Miles at the end of WWII.
Estate of Milton Miles.
were approached. Nothing came out of these contacts because both OSS and ONI had their own plans. Having known Commodore Miles for eight years, Colonel Xiao talked with Commodore Miles at a cocktail party about the for-mation of river raiders along the China coast. Commodore Miles reported these proposals to Admiral Leahy who promptly approved. Acceptance by the Generalissimo was obtained.2
Second, under the terms accepted by Commodore Miles and later rati¬fied by the U.S. government, the Sino-American Cooperative Organization (SACO)—and hence the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—was virtually subordinate to the Chinese secret service chief. As General Donovan told President Roosevelt, “Under [SACO’s] terms we were admitted to China in April 1942, but only as subordinate partners of General Dai Li’s Chinese in¬telligence service For General Dai, SACO was an opportunity to receive
material support and assurance that if OSS must be accepted in China, at least activities would be under his own control and constant surveillance.” 3
The initial steps in the founding of SACO were taken in Washington af¬ter the U.S. went to war with Japan. One of the most immediate concerns of the Navy was plotting weather conditions over the western and central Pacific, a task that required meteorological data from weather stations on the Asian mainland. When Xiao Bo and Milton Miles first discussed the question of Sino-American cooperation over cocktails in a Washington ho¬tel room, the two men conceived of an exchange of communications in¬telligence from the Americans for Nationalist cooperation in the founding of weather observatories in China, including northern and western China, where the meteorological patterns developing over Siberia and the Gobi could best be monitored. After that preliminary meeting Miles sought out his superior officers and obtained their consent for what was originally to have been a relatively modest operation. Xiao Bo, on the other hand, saw far greater possibilities in the arrangement and so informed Juntong in Chongqing. There, after Chiang Kai-shek gave Dai Li permission to pursue the relationship with the Americans, a more formal and higher level round of discussions was held with U.S. embassy military attachés by a team of Chi¬nese officers from the Military Statistics Bureau.4
MILES’S CHINA MISSION
Miles left New York on April 5, 1942, flying to China from west to east. His plane, which also conveyed Edgar Snow and various Army personnel, touched down in Brazil, then crossed the Atlantic to Africa, up to Cairo, across to Karachi, and then down to Bombay, Colombo, and Calcutta. There the group was joined by Marine colonel McHugh, the U.S. naval attaché in Chongqing, and Ambassador C. E. Gauss, who were returning from a meet¬ing in New Delhi with the U.S. High Commissioner.5 Their flight was to have been the very last China National Airways Corporation airplane to fly into Chongqing via Mandalay, but the craft didn’t land in Burma because the Japanese were already in control of the airport. They landed in Kunming before finally reaching Chongqing after a breathtaking flight along the Jia- ling River.6
At the thatched airport customs shed an official drew Miles aside and asked him if he knew Colonel Xiao Bo. Before the man—obviously Dai Li’s agent—could draw him away from the other passengers, Colonel McHugh offered Miles housing in his own quarters. But Miles had already decided to distance himself from the embassy staff and the regular OSS mission un¬der Alghan R. Lusey, and so he went instead with Dai Li’s driver to a local hotel.7
From the moment Miles arrived in Chongqing he was under Juntong sur-veillance. The brown Chevrolet that carried him to and from the embassy, and eventually to pay a call on Admiral Yang Xuancheng (the head of Chi¬nese military intelligence), was an MSB automobile chauffeured by one of Dai Li’s agents. The same car took Miles, Colonel McHugh, and Admiral Yang to one of Dai Li’s hideaways, “a somewhat labyrinthian house” where the admiral turned the Americans over to a Juntong aide and discreetly took his leave, surprising Miles, since Yang was formally Dai Li’s senior in rank.
Led through one narrow passageway after another, they were finally shown into a reception room and asked to await General Dai’s appearance.8
The general kept us waiting less than a minute, and he entered with a smile, showing much gold bridgework. He was a slightly built man, not quite as tall as I—five feet seven, perhaps—and he was dressed in the Sun Yat-sen kind of civilian suit made of khaki whipcord. His jacket, which was buttoned up to the neck, was neatly pressed. It had a high, turned over collar. He looked older, I thought, than he had appeared in the photographs Colonel Xiao had shown me, and no picture I had seen had given even a hint of the lively snap of his wide-open and piercing black eyes. He spoke rapidly, often in a dialect that was meaningless to me and that was unfamiliar even to McHugh. But the in¬terpreter that had come in with the General was entirely competent and our conversation did not lag. I had brought two small gifts with me; one was a little Minox camera from Colonel Xiao and the other was a personal gift from me: a snub-nosed, thirty-eight automatic pistol. It was identical to the one I was wearing and he put it on at once.9
During the meeting, Miles felt as though he were being carefully looked over by Dai Li, who was particularly curious about the American naval of¬ficer’s layover in Colombo, which was the British headquarters of the China- Burma-India Theater of the Allies. Miles later realized that this reflected Dai Li’s concern that the American might be too close to British Intelli¬gence, which was just then being eased out of China.10 Miles evidently reas¬sured his host, especially when he expressed an interest in having the gen¬eral arrange trips for him through Chinese-controlled territory, because Dai Li ended the conversation by promising him a place of his own once the previous occupant had vacated the premises.11
The residence he was assigned a few days later was none other than the Grotto of Divine Immortals, the Chongqing mayor’s mansion formerly oc¬cupied by Yardley and since billeted by the commander of the Chongqing garrison. The day after Miles moved into his “Fairy Cave” (as Liu Zhenfeng, or “Eddie Liu,” translated Shenxian dong) he was invited to attend General Dai’s staff conference, and the formal exchange of weather reports, radio intercepts, and plans for mining inland waterways began in earnest.12
Shortly afterwards Dai Li held the requisite welcoming banquet for Miles, who once again raised the matter of his traveling through Chinese- controlled territory and behind Japanese lines to the coast. Dai Li was most responsive, for he saw this as an opportunity to both impress Miles with the sway of Juntong’s rule and advance the cooperative project in an entirely new direction. General Dai must have been put off by Miles’s request to bring along Al Lusey, the former Globe Wireless reporter in Shanghai who now represented Wild Bill Donovan in Chongqing. In the end, however, he assured Miles that the invitation was extended to Lusey as well, and arrange¬ments were made for Dai Li himself to lead the arduous trek by truck and on foot down through the southeastern mountain scarps to the rocky coast of Fujian province.13
OCCUPIED CHINA
Though Miles was easy to impress, Dai Li outdid himself during this trip into Occupied China. The Japanese may have controlled the major com¬munications routes and large towns by day, but swirling around them, often during the hours of darkness, were armies of smugglers, freebooters, local resisters, and refugees who supplied Juntong with information and support. In most towns and even villages the local law enforcement authorities were ostensibly on the side of the puppet government of Wang Jingwei; but their chief of police as often as not was part of, or knew someone in, the Juntong apparatus, often through the cadre and police training units (ban) that Dai Li had sponsored before the war.14 Moreover, especially in southeastern China, Dai Li had his own units of the Loyal and Patriotic Army (Zhongyi jiuguo jun), whose commanders looked to him for military supplies and equipment. When Japanese troops, alerted by informers about the presence of Nationalist troops and Western observers in the vicinity, prepared to close in, Dai Li was always tipped off in time to get away and move on to the next safe house along their route to the coast.15
The Japanese almost caught up with them in Pucheng in northern Fu¬jian, south of the Xianxia Pass, where Dai Li’s hometown of Baoan lay just across the Zhejiang border. Japanese aircraft began bombing raids on the town, forcing Dai Li’s party to abandon their billets and take refuge in a rice paddy under the cover of darkness. It was there, after the bombers had flown over, that Dai Li turned to Eddie Liu and asked him to address Miles—Mei Shendong (Winter Plum Blossom) in Chinese—with a proposition.16
Tell Mei Shendong that I would like to have him arm 50,000 of my guerrillas and train them to fight the Japanese. Can he do it? . . . The United States wants many things in China—weather reports from the north and west to guide your planes and ships at sea—information about Japanese intentions and op- erations—mines in our channels and harbors—ship watchers on our coast— and radio stations to send this information I have 50,000 good men
They had been chosen from among those who had most reason to hate the Japanese invader, but they are armed only with what they have been able to make or capture and most of them are almost untrained. But if we are able to give you all you ask for, your operations will need to be protected and you can-not bring in enough men for that. So, if my men could be armed and trained, they could not only protect your operations but could work for China too.17 Miles, who refused Dai Li’s offer of a commission in the Chinese army, was intrigued. The proposal amounted to setting up a Chinese guerrilla army, fifty thousand strong, under Sino-American command. Al Lusey was skep¬tical, wanting a go-ahead from Washington before proceeding in this new direction of colluding with the notorious chief of Chiang Kai-shek’s secret police.18 But Miles believed that his orders to “harass the enemy” allowed room for this kind of mutual cooperation, and that Dai Li was neither an assassin nor “the head of a Chinese OGPU with which anyone from the United States would be embarrassed to associate.” Miles consequently de¬cided to go ahead with the plan.19
SINO-AMERICAN TALKS
Although the first contingent of Navy men for Miles’s group reached Chongqing in September 1942, formal talks between Dai Li and Miles were not held until that winter, when the two officers met at Dai Li’s villa at Ciqikou.20 On behalf of Juntong, Dai Li requested communications equip¬ment, American weapons and transport, and training personnel. Miles, who was formally appointed coordinator of the OSS in the Far East on Septem¬ber 22, 1942, accepted, and the two sides brought American meteorolog¬ical personnel and equipment into Chongqing along with weapons (Smith and Wesson revolvers, Colt .45 automatics, Thompson submachine guns) and ample ammunition for Dai’s paramilitary forces.21 Dai Li was very pleased by the speed and generosity (dafang) of the Americans, whom he contrasted favorably with the much stingier British agents. But he also re¬peatedly urged Miles to look after the training of uniformed special service brigades (wuzhuang tewu budui) for Juntong, which also needed communi¬cations and medical equipment.22
On New Year’s Eve, 1942, T. V. Soong, the Chinese foreign minister, ini¬tialed the Miles-Dai Li agreement, which stipulated that SACO's director would be Chinese and the deputy director American, each possessing veto power over the operations of the unit.23 A few days later, in early January 1943, Al Lusey took the preliminary agreement back to Washington, where it languished until Miles returned himself and asked that the agreement be implemented by sending a small Navy task force directly responsible to Ad¬miral King. The Army and OSS questioned this arrangement, leading Gen¬eral Marshall to send a message to Chongqing suggesting that Miles and the Americans be put directly under Stilwell’s command, while Dai Li and the Chinese be under the Generalissimo, who was the nominal theater com-mander in China.24
General Stillwell resisted the dual-chain-of-command concept (at this stage called the “Friendship Project”), believing that the arrangement sim¬ply would not work.25 “We’d get no cooperation from Dai Li that way. Gen- eral Dai is super-secretive and super-suspicious, and would tolerate no one between himself and Miles.” 26 Stillwell recommended, consequently, that Miles be left accountable to the joint chiefs and under Dai Li. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, therefore, issued a separate directive exempting SACO/OSS from theater commander control. Per the preliminary agreement, Dai Li would be in command of SACO with Miles as his deputy, and with each granted veto rights over the operation as a whole.27
In order to implement this arrangement within the American chain of command, Miles would also have to be appointed chief of OSS activities in China. General Donovan initially resisted this outcome, but because Doug¬las MacArthur excluded the OSS from the Pacific Theater, Donovan was forced to maintain a Chinese base for Asian operations, which meant “an unhappy alliance with Miles and Dai Li.” 28 He therefore agreed to this ar¬rangement in January 1943, though “it soon developed that under SACO, even a nominal independence was denied OSS. Dai Li, suspicious of any OSS involvement in internal Chinese affairs, reported the information gathered by his Gestapo directly to Miles, who in turn withheld it from OSS until he was sure it had been cabled to the Navy Department first.”29
By March 1943, the Chinese had come to feel strongly the need for a formally signed “contract” (hetong) between the two sides.30 The term itself signified that what the Americans sometimes called an “agreement” (xie- ding) should be a more formal arrangement concluded on a basis of equal cooperation. Throughout that month Dai Li’s men worked late into the night to prepare a Chinese version, which T. V. Soong went over himself before presenting in draft to the Generalissimo.31 Chiang Kai-shek was amenable to the terms of the contract, and requested his brother-in-law to prepare for a final exchange of signatures in the United States.32
FORMAL ESTABLISHMENT OF SACO
Meanwhile, back in Washington, Miles, along with Admiral William Purnell (who had relieved Admiral Willis A. Lee), Captain Jeff Metzel (an OSS representative), and Colonel Xiao Bo took the draft to General Marshall, who initialed the agreement.33 The chief of staff, Admiral William Leahy, then brought the document to President Roosevelt, who granted his ap- proval.34 The SACO agreement was formally signed on April 15, 1943, by Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox on behalf of the U.S., and by Foreign Min¬ister T. V. Soong on behalf of China.35 General Donovan, Colonel Xiao, and Miles added their names with a space left for Dai Li, who finally affixed his signature on July 4, 1943, in Chongqing (see appendix C).36
The Chinese version of the Sino-American Cooperative Organization agreement called for the United States to supply sufficient weapons to form five special services armed units (tewu wuzhuang budui), along with eighty op- erations units (xingdong zongdui) and operations squads (xingdong dui). Thir¬teen SACO training classes would be organized, plus four intelligence sta¬tions (qingbao zhan) on the southeastern coast, a hydrology station (shuiwen zhan), and a number of weather stations and wireless broadcasting units.37 The American version stated that:
For the purpose of attacking a common enemy along the Chinese coast, in oc-cupied territories in China, and in other areas held by the Japanese, the Sino- American Special Technical Cooperative Organization is organized in China.
Its aim is, by common effort, employing American equipment and technical training and utilizing the Chinese war zones as bases to attack effectively the Japanese navy, the Japanese merchant marine and the Japanese airforces in different territories of the Far East, and to attack the mines, factories, ware-houses, depots and other military establishments in areas under Japanese occupation.38
The U.S. variation was accompanied by a letter from Admiral William D. Leahy, U.S. Navy chief of staff, to Captain Miles:
You are advised that the Joint U.S. Chiefs of Staff take note of the proposed Sino-American Technical Cooperation Agreement for the conduct and sup¬port of special measures in the war effort against Japan, and further of the ex¬change in dispatches between General Stilwell and the chiefs of staff in which General Stilwell expresses approval of the conduct of American participation in these measures by you directly under Chinese command. The Joint Chiefs of Staff approve this arrangement and desire that you cooperate with the responsible designated Chinese authorities in every way practicable for the prosecution of war measures against the Japanese. The president has been in¬formed and has given approval of the plan to place you in direct charge of the American participation as set forth in the agreement.39
Whatever the military value of SACO to either side, Miles’s staunch sup¬port of the Juntong chief, along with the secret but formal agreement as such, gave a tremendous boost to General Dai Li’s standing in the Chinese government. Shen Zui characteristically overstates Dai’s pro-U.S. servility in this regard, but he does accurately reflect the extent to which Dai’s recog¬nition by the Americans enhanced his status within Chiang Kai-shek’s inner circle.
Miles understood Dai Li’s psychology very well. In order to be able to perma-nently use the Military Statistics organization in China to pursue special op-erations activities, Miles—in addition to propagating various legendary tales in America about Dai Li and his role at the side of Chiang Kai-shek, which made Dai Li feel warm and comfortable from head to toe—spared no effort to encourage Dai Li to make a trip to the United States. What really caused Dai Li to feel the most intense excitement and a sense of special favor that he would never forget for the rest of his life was that during the Cairo Conference
President Roosevelt spoke to Chiang Kai-shek of his hope of being able to catch a glimpse of China’s Himmler. After Dai Li heard this, he realized that it was related to Miles’s having lavished praise on him in the United States, which had led in the end to his master’s own master paying so much attention to him. Consequently, he felt all the more that Miles’s connection with his fu¬ture prospects was extremely important, and he was all the more obedient and servile.40
Shen Zui’s exaggeration notwithstanding, Dai Li did have to maintain a cer¬tain distance from the Americans lest he be identified as their running dog. Hence, from the formation of SACO on, Juntong’s chief made certain that he actually retained the upper hand while offering Miles the formal illusion of leadership without substantial control over the field activities of the very guerrilla units that the Americans worked so hard to train, arm, and deploy.
Chapter 21
SACO Training Camps
American boys are exposed to tools, gas engines, electricity, magnets, and radios from babyhood, but these soldiers actually had to start with lessons in the use of tools as simple as a screwdriver. They liked anything that went “Bang!” but they had no faith in incendiaries, for example, despite their usefulness in sabotage. Time pencils, for instance, could start a blaze hours—or even days—after the saboteur had moved on. These men, however, saw little that was satisfying in that, for the result could so rarely be watched.
MILTON E. MILES, A Different Kind of War, 154
COACHING GUERRILLAS
From the Americans’ perspective, the heart of SACO was its training pro¬gram. The twenty-five hundred Americans, most of them in the Navy, who did tours of duty in China with SACO during the three years of its existence believed that their major goal was to train Chinese guerrillas to fight the Japanese. Some, of course, served in remote weather stations in the north¬west or as coastal watchers along China’s southeastern littoral. But the great majority of SACO officers and enlisted men were assigned to the Happy Val¬ley headquarters outside Chongqing or to the fourteen SACO branches established throughout China, where they combined a kind of boy-scout field-training program with instruction in the deadlier arts of assassination, sabotage, and small-group warfare.1
Although SACO training camps only formally graduated 26,794 students, it was claimed that the program “trained” or “equipped” 40,000 to 50,000 of Dai Li’s troops.2 After the war was over, Admiral Miles contended that SACO’s guerrilla army amounted to 97,000 Chinese and 3,000 American personnel. This formidable force, he declared, had killed 71,000 Japanese.3
However dubious these assertions, SACO’s American personnel regarded their mission in China as primarily a guerrilla training effort that would eventually create a maquis-like resistance force to attack the Japanese from the rear when regular U.S. units finally landed on the China coast. Exami¬nation of each of the SACO units ultimately belies the claims of enemy ca¬sualties inflicted, but it certainly does not belittle the heroism of the Amer¬icans who volunteered for this assignment and who have looked back upon their wartime experience with pride and fondness for the men who served under them. Since almost none of the Americans knew much about China, or even spoke the most rudimentary Chinese, their misunderstanding of the situation was at times grotesque. It is fair to say, I believe, that some were shocked or incredulous to learn later that they had been identified with units that trained the most horrendous of the Nationalist regime’s secret police units charged with the persecution—including the kidnapping, tor¬ture, and killing—of “progressive” elements throughout Free China during the years that SACO flourished.
THE CULTURE GAP
Part of the young Americans’ incomprehension stemmed from their well¬meaning and avuncular benevolence toward their physically slighter Chi¬nese trainees, who often seemed childlike and slow moving on one hand, while formidably strong and feral on the other.4 First impressions were also strongly colored by the poor health of the Chinese recruits originally mus¬tered for the SACO camps.5
Guerrilla trainees selected by Dai Li were either men from the Loyal and Patriotic Army or recruits from Japanese-held territory.6 The recruits from Shanghai and the southeast were notably eager because they had suffered under the Japanese Occupation and wanted to fight back.7 But by U.S. stan¬dards, their physical quality was “pitifully low.” The average trainee was 5’6” in height and weighed 140 pounds. The group suffered from hundreds of cases of scabies, conjunctivitis, and ulcerations.8 The vision require¬ment had to be set at 6/15 instead of 20/20 because of the men’s poor eye¬sight. However—and this is where a more positive impression was instantly made—they were endowed with superb physical endurance. As “efficient human machines,” they were capable of making a forced daily march of thirty to thirty-five miles, “climb[ing] mountain trails almost as tirelessly as they followed the level, winding trails among the rice paddies.”9
In their instructors’ eyes Chinese recruits excelled precisely because of their primordial adaptability. SACO trainers frequently remarked upon the “toughness” of Chinese feet, shod in straw sandals rather than leather shoes.10 Their very “peasant-ness” made them good soldiers, just as their feral animality helped them stand out as ferocious nighttime killers, as they were particularly in their element after dark. The Americans were “aston¬ished at the Chinese guerrilla’s incredible ability to see in the dark. He lit¬erally can see at night like a cat.” 11 Described as “eager to learn” and “with [an] expert eye for detail,” the Chinese recruits caught on fast in close com¬bat instruction thanks to their agility at using their hands, feet, and legs to disable an enemy. Again, however, their strengths were attributed to boyish- ness, not to adult proficiency.12 The Chinese, their teachers reported, par¬ticipated in ambush exercises “with the enthusiasm of boys on an American sandlot.” 13
The cultural distance between the young American instructors and their students was enormous. The language barrier was a constant hindrance, es¬pecially because of the shortage of capable interpreters and the profusion of local dialects.14 Many of the trainers thought themselves well liked, but most were merely accepted. The least effective were those who felt they had “to train the Chinese in American military ways.” 15
In good faith, nonetheless, the Americans “taught those being trained every technical skill [they] knew”: individual combat, demolitions, radio communications, photography, medicine, “and even the beginnings of a kind of FBI.” 16 The Chinese were exceptionally good shots, exulting in the use of the new, clean, fast-shooting weapons supplied by the Navy in place of the cast-off German, Czech, and Japanese weapons (not to speak of rusting Chinese copies, along with ancient muzzle-loading flintlocks) with which they were familiar. Although some Americans believed that they should not issue the .45 caliber Thompson submachine gun because it was too heavy for the average Chinese recruit, Miles decided that the students of each training camp should be given a Tommy gun or .30 caliber carbine as a shoulder weapon, or a .38 caliber revolver or .45 caliber Colt Army au¬tomatic as a handgun, once they had graduated from the course.17
Each weapon, of course, represented a fixed percentage of the weight al¬located to SACO for freight flights over the Hump. Dai Li wanted every one of his field agents to have at least one gun. Miles insisted that the guns be issued only after proper training. This continued to be a conflict between the two men throughout the course of the war, no doubt because the Amer¬icans “could never appreciate the significance—both military and emo- tional—of modern arms to China,” while Dai Li’s men shared an “eager, persistent Chinese striving to acquire every possible weapon.” 18
In April 1945 a huge class of trainees graduated from SACO’s Unit Ten. Because the American military commanders were by their own ludicrous admission incapable of telling one Chinese from another, they were afraid of putting their U.S.-made pistols and submachine guns in the hands of soldiers who were not bona fide graduates of the course. Yet how to tell the lined-up Chinese apart, especially when they were in uniform? Lieutenant R. L. Grief, a Navy doctor from Baltimore, came up with the solution:
Why don’t you paint a number on each trainee’s back with some sort of gen¬tian violet? As each man comes down the line for his weapon, take a look at his back. If the proper number is there, you can be sure that he is not a mem¬ber of the Haifeng police force but a battalion soldier we’ve trained.19
But even if their American instructors could be reasonably certain of the affiliation of their current batch of pupils, they were usually oblivious that at least some graduates of previous sessions were being rotated through the training units again and again.20
TRAINING UNITS
The first SACO training camp was Unit One, which was set up in a moun¬tain temple at Shexian a few miles south of the mercantile capital of Huizhou in Anhui (see appendix D). Like Juntong training groups (ban), it was known to its members by its place name, Xiongcun.21 At first there were only six American officers and NCOs under the command of Marine Corps major Bud Masters. Their equipment consisted of arms and ammunition they had brought with them from Chongqing in six trucks. However, there were said to be six thousand Loyal and Patriotic Army soldiers not far away, and two thousand of Dai Li’s “well-trained troops” nearby. Both LPA groups were ostensibly ready to supply trainees but were reportedly short of am¬munition and military equipment.22
It took the SACO instructors six months to prepare to receive a class of 320 students for a course in guerrilla warfare. The initial recruits, however, were disappointingly unfit. According to Miles:
General Dai’s commanders in the region had the job of providing the men, but they, in turn, had to coax their operating colonels into assigning them to this new training program. The result—at first—often was that the men who were sent were those who were least useful as members of the outfits from which they came. It was only after our training camps had proved their worth and been accepted whole-heartedly that the kind of men we really wanted to train were assigned to us.23
But the recruits proved to be excellent smugglers and spies, frequently go¬ing to Shanghai to supply the Americans with gasoline, tires, daily papers, and even flour sacks that Miles’s men used to transport “Aunt Jemima,” a flourlike substance used for explosives.24 The record of the unit was, in the end, spotty, partly because their efforts to rescue American prisoners of war were thwarted when the Japanese moved three hundred captive U.S. Marines out of the region altogether.25
Unit Two—the Hongjiang ban in Hunan —was deliberately erected near the lake region not far from the Chinese Navy Training School’s mine-mak¬ing depot. The Americans planned to use Chinese river sailors and small boat handlers, including pirates, as a naval force. “We never abandoned the idea, though we never developed it either,” Miles later wrote. Part of the problem was that “General Dai knew nothing about boats, and he had no
Figure 18. Nationalist Chinese commando. Imperial War Museum, IB3945c.
control over men of the Chinese navy—even landlocked ones like Camp Two’s near neighbors.” 26
The third SACO training unit—the Linru or Niudong ban—was estab¬lished in Henan, where its guerrillas could harass enemy communications lines. The mountain temple called Fengxue si that housed them was well known to worshipers in the western part of that province, but because of the terrible famine and warfare, it had fallen into hard times. Indeed, while some of the monks moved to other parts of the temple complex, a number of the younger ones joined the SACO training group when it assembled there because they were desperate for food.27
Poorly equipped for battle, the Linru ban guerrillas did not do much to engage the enemy, fleeing westward when the Japanese advanced. But the camp itself illustrated both the distance between the Americans and Chi¬nese, and the extraordinary emphasis placed upon correct political train¬ing by Juntong instructors.28
The American instructors in the Linru training brigade were not of high rank, ranging from sergeant to captain. None of them knew Chinese, and they had to depend entirely upon eight translators who had graduated from the Juntong interpreters class but who were overseas Chinese (huaqiao) barely familiar with the most rudimentary military terminology.29 Conse¬quently, only a handful of the American officers knew about the cadets’ compulsory political training, realized that they were surrounded by Jun- tong agents, or were aware of the standing orders forbidding any Chinese officer from fraternizing with them.30 The Chinese lived in the temple itself, while the Americans had been built a twelve-room Western-style house on a flat spot east of the abbey. Their living conditions were excellent, including European food prepared by a chef, but they were unwitting in¬mates of the complex. During the four months when Zhong Xiangbai served as a political instructor at the Linru camp, he never once talked with the Americans.31
In addition to being prohibited from fraternization with the foreigners, Dai Li’s officers were forbidden all political activity and sternly instructed to refrain from unconventional or unorthodox behavior (biaoxin liyi). 32 Although the Linru training camp was a Nationalist organ, no Guomin- dang associations—especially the Sanqingtuan—were permitted within. Furthermore, every student had to present a detailed written account of his political background, which was carefully discussed with a political coun¬selor (zhengzhi zhidaoyuan), who also casually nosed about trainees’ political views over meals and at other relatively casual moments. Unconventional views or behavior were used to label deviant any who questioned MSB’s ba¬sic tenets: Chiang Kai-shek was the nation’s greatest Leader, Juntong was the “purest” (qingbai de) and “most revolutionary” (zui geming de) element in the country, secret service officers were the Generalissimo’s “eyes and ears” (ermu), and an ideal MSB agent had both to be an anonymous hero and to subscribe to a “revolutionary worldview” (geming de renshengguan). 33
Unit Six—the Huaan Camp—was located near Zhangzhou in Fujian. It was founded in August 1944 after Li Chongshi, SACO chief of staff, ac¬companied Miles to the Fujianese coast, where they were secretly received by the head of the Minnan (Southern Fujian) Station, Chen Dayuan.34 Af¬ter the three officers agreed upon the importance of establishing a train¬ing unit in the area, where pirate and bandit groups abounded, Miles re¬turned to Chongqing and persuaded Dai Li to go in person in July to the old publishing center of Jianyang to meet with Chen Dayuan and the head of the Minbei (Northern Fujian) Station, Wang Tiaoxun.35 Dai Li not only approved the new training unit; he also decided to set up a SACO Southeastern Office (Zhong-Mei suo dongnan banshichu) to oversee the four major intelligence stations (zhan) of Shanghai, Dinghai, Fuzhou, and Zhangzhou.36
Figure 19. Students at Unit Nine learn what to do at the scene of a crime from ex-G-man Lt. Cdr. Caputo. Estate of Milton Miles.
The Huaan Unit was from the very beginning plagued by factional strug¬gles between the brigades controlled by Chen Dayuan and Lei Zhenzhong, who were co-deputy directors, and complicated by the direct personal re¬lationship of one of the column commanders with Dai Li. The training program, despite the enthusiasm of the American instructors, was lax. Al¬though Lei Zhenzhong had received army training, Chen Dayuan was an agricultural specialist with no military knowledge whatsoever.37 There was also considerable resentment among the Chinese Juntong officers over the differential salaries paid to them and their American counterparts: for the former, two hundred yuan a month, and for the latter ten times that amount.38 The four Americans further enjoyed a food allowance roughly equal to the allocation for an entire brigade of 180 Chinese. The fact that the Americans controlled all of the unit’s finances hardly helped mollify Chinese indignation at this extraordinary dietary discrepancy.39
One of the camp’s Chinese officers, who later joined the Communists, claimed that the Huaan Unit botched its attacks on Japanese units during a brief campaign in mid-July 1945. After the Japanese surrendered in August, however, the Huaan Unit took over Amoy; and, by the end of the year, the group had been changed into a Military Affairs Commission Special Oper¬ations Army Temporarily Enrolled Brigade (Biedong jun zhanbian zong- dui), which eventually followed Chen Dayuan to Taiwan.40
There were at least nine additional field units: Xiushui (Jiangxi), Jian’ou (Fujian), Yuhu (Zhejiang), Dongfeng (Fujian), Xifeng (Guizhou), Lin- quan (Anhui), Jiaoling (Guangdong), Gangkou (Zhejiang), and Meixian (Guangdong). But the most important facility of all was the central head¬quarters, Unit Nine of SACO at Happy Valley (Geleshan), a dozen miles up the Jialing River from Chongqing.41
HAPPY VALLEY
Geleshan was a mountainous area, trisected by basins, more than four miles wide and six miles deep.42 At first view it was “a lovely place,” an idyllic site below a range of pine-wooded mountains.43 At right angles to the main range was a series of three valleys, each with a stream lined with small farms.44
Its area extended for thirteen li from Chongqing’s Geleshan to Shaciqu. Flanked by a chain of undulating hills, the broad mountain valley, which was more than twenty li across, enclosed the lands of Zhazidong, Meiyuan, Yang- jiashan, Zaoshichang, Songlinpo, Baigongguan, Wulingguan, Hongluchang, Wangjiayuanzi, Xiaoyanggongqiao, Zhugongguan, Buyunqiao, and Lanya, which all belonged to the “SACO” special district.45
Shrouded in secrecy, the encampments were surrounded with an elec¬trified fence guarded by armed patrols that shot intruders on sight.46 “The villages from Buyunqiao to Geleshan were completely blocked off, and no peasants (laobaixing) were permitted to pass through. Inhabitants of Wu- lingguan were forcibly removed and sent away. Absolutely no one was al¬lowed to enter the perimeters of the special district except for special agents of the Americans and of Chiang [Kai-shek] who had special transit passes.47 If someone came by mistake, he was immediately seized and killed.” 48
During the course of the war Dai Li’s men, with the help of American supplies and funds, transformed the terraced farmlands into a sprawling network of eight hundred buildings.49 The complex included barracks, a parade ground and armory, rifle and pistol ranges, classrooms, police dog kennels, pigeon cotes, radio communications shacks, a prison, and interro¬gation facilities.50 Of the three parallel valleys the southernmost was the largest.51 It housed some of Dai Li’s residences—villas built in Mediterran¬ean style amid the pines on the slopes above the valley—along with the training camps for Juntong agents.52 The central valley housed the Ameri¬cans, who had their own specially sanitized mess hall, Western-style toilet fa¬cilities (Miles had brought one toilet bowl over the Hump to be copied and reproduced in a local pottery plant), auditorium, and dance hall, where Dai Li held holiday banquets hosted by “beautiful, smartly gowned Chinese women.” 53 Finally, the northern valley—the smallest— contained “a grim prison about which unpleasant stories were told.” 54 This, of course, was the dreaded concentration camp and torture chamber known in Hong yan as Bai mansion (Baigongguan).55
In Dai Li’s eyes one of the most important clauses of the SACO agree¬ment was the provision for training Chiang Kai-shek’s special service agents (and especially Juntong’s “criminal police cadres,” or xingshi jingcha ganbu) in American law enforcement methods.56 This Special Police Officer Train¬ing Unit (Tezhong jingcha renyuan xunlianban) would enable Dai Li to form his own investigative unit on a par with rival Chen Lifu’s “Chinese FBI,” the Central Statistics Bureau. Miles realized that in the Chinese gen¬eral’s eyes this was the Americans’ most important quid pro quo in the SACO guerrilla-training program.57
In answer to General Dai’s most earnest wish—a wish so important to him that he was willing to trade almost any service for it—we began a sort of “pilot” FBI school. Lieutenant Commander Charlie Johnston and four hand-picked spe-cialists arrived with plenty of equipment as well as with vast quantities of pep and ideas.58
The band of specialists brought in by Johnston (in civilian life an FBI spe¬cial agent who later served as a legal attaché in Buenos Aires) grew to in¬clude two dozen other former FBI and Secret Service agents, “narcs” from Treasury, veterans of the bomb squad of the New York City Police, fire in¬vestigators, state troopers, and a Mississippi district attorney.59 These “spe¬cialists in mayhem and protection” were assigned the mission of training Dai Li’s higher-ranking Juntong agents in the latest techniques and devices (weapons, lie detectors, police dogs, shackles, truth serum, ballistic kits, and so forth) for surveillance, interrogation, and intelligence evaluation.60
Miles later candidly admitted that at Happy Valley, “We were never able to separate the police activities from guerrilla activities.”61
Our theory was that we would try to train some of these people to do the kind of work that we wanted done, and since Dai Li had set up a police academy in the early thirties and had been five years in charge of it and all the police in Occupied China were technically under his command, then we ought to use them. So we convened a class in Chongqing and we would order the chiefs of police from various parts of Occupied China up there and there would be ses¬sions just about like this.62
He justified this training of secret policemen by arguing that when they re¬turned to Occupied China as puppet police chiefs they played a crucial role in rescuing the hundreds of downed American fliers that might otherwise have fallen into enemy hands.63
But this justification, then and earlier, did not quell the criticisms lev¬elled against Miles and Naval Intelligence for using SACO to train Dai Li’s repressive secret police, and even on occasion perhaps to witness the tor¬ture of prisoners under interrogation.64 Both the State Department and OSS objected to SACO’s organization of an “FBI school” to train Dai Li’s se¬cret police, which seemed “a blatant attempt on the part of Dai Li to secure American sanction of the Guomindang’s internal political repression.”65 In response, General Donovan, through Captain Metzel, ordered Miles to change the name of the training group from “Police Unit” to “Counter¬espionage Unit,” and directed that “the function of this unit should be as far as practicable directed against the enemy’s activities.”66
WEDEMEYER’S CONCERN
General Wedemeyer was particularly distressed by Unit Nine’s secret police training program after he succeeded Joseph Stilwell as the American com¬mander of the China Theater. During a tense conference with Dai Li, We- demeyer said it was his concern “that American personnel and equipment were being used in political organizations.”67
Dai Li responded by making a distinction between the Military Statis¬tics Bureau under the National Military Council, and the Central Statistics
Bureau under the Central Committee of the Guomindang, the latter being primarily concerned with domestic political security and the former en¬gaged in wartime covert activity. Dai said that all of SACO’s assets were be¬ing used against the Japanese, except for the “indirect use” of the “school called the ninth training class under the Navy Group.” 68
But Wedemeyer adamantly insisted he meant to say that “he did not want [any] American personnel or military equipment in [the] China theater to be employed in political organizations.” Wedemeyer and his staff also questioned Dai Li’s assertion that Juntong was devoted to military purposes. Lieutenant Colonel Agnew, representing Wedemeyer’s G-2, asked “whether the killing of traitors would be interpreted as political or military.” General Dai said that it would be military because it directly affected operations against Japan, but Wedemeyer took exception: “It might be political,” he said, “unless [a] clearcut delineation were possible [with respect to] pos¬sible relations to Japs and vis-a-vis Communists.” 69
In other words, unless Dai Li could prove that the Communists killed by Juntong assassins were clearly acting in Japan’s interest, then the terrorism was politically directed against Chiang’s internal enemies. In this particular instance, Wedemeyer made it more than clear that “he did not approve of Americans’ involvement [in] any way with the killing or punishing of Chi¬nese.” Dai Li simply responded that “No Americans would be asked to do that; their job was to train Chinese to do it.” 70
And train them they did, even though Miles knew of the opposition of the State Department.71 In fact, not only did the SACO camps continue to turn out graduates; under Article 17 of the joint agreement, the U.S. Navy agreed to provide transportation, tuition, and expenses for the advanced instruction in the United States of a contingent of forty Juntong students, handpicked by Dai Li.72 Needless to say, this program was not actually im¬plemented until after VJ Day.73
This was one of the first times that American special operations officers trained police for intelligence-gathering purposes only to find themselves accused of connivance with the forces of right-wing dictatorship. To that ex¬tent, whatever the truth of Communist propaganda, the SACO program of training Dai Li’s secret agents exposed wartime American intelligence efforts to outright incrimination.74 “Since Dai’s many functions included that of chief of Chiang’s military intelligence, partial technical cooperation with him may have been unavoidable. SACO, however, appears to have gone far beyond this. Dai was soon making unhindered use of American arms flown to him over the Hump to fight against the New Fourth Army and other patriotic guerrillas. Miles’s men tried to whitewash Dai’s political reputation.” 75
DEMONIZATION
After World War II was over, well-meaning American veterans of SACO— “tigers” of the “rice-paddy navy”—glorified their accomplishments as guer¬rilla instructors in China, traveling to Taiwan as guests of the Nationalists’ Military Intelligence Bureau to commemorate their “Rear Duke and Per¬petual Skipper,” Milton Miles, and his close relationship with “Big Boss Dai Li.” 76 Most were seemingly ignorant of the unit’s dark history played up by progressive journalists during the Pacific War and by Chinese Commu¬nist propagandists later when anti-Americanism dominated the Korean War mobilization movement among the PRC’s civilian population. Just as General MacArthur was demonized in Chinese cartoons during the 1950s as an alien ogre, so were the local SACO training camps portrayed as sites of American aggression into China, peopled by barbarian beasts who raped Chinese women and massacred the best and the brightest of the country’s progressive elements.77
A few miles northeast of the county seat [of Huxian near Xi’an] was the Sino- American training class which was jointly run by Dai Li, China’s Himmler, and the Americans. Since 1945, patriots arrested in Xi’an were taken to this place blindfolded or put into gunny sacks. Peasants can well remember the heart-rending cries of the patriots as they were tortured. The place was heavily guarded all the time. No one dared to go near it. After the town was liberated the people found that all [of the] inmates had been murdered in cold blood by the Guomindang agents who left behind heaps of mutilated corpses.78
The most notorious of these camps was Happy Valley, where the museum later built by the Communists contains a photograph of the pit in which ninety-four bodies were found bound with handcuffs made in Springfield, Massachusetts.79
According to Communist tour guides of the Happy Valley complex, dur¬ing the “trials” of progressives at Happy Valley, Miles sat beside Dai Li in judgment—a judgment based in some cases upon confessions extracted by Americans who operated the polygraphs or injected the truth serum ad¬ministered to the prisoners being questioned.80 The main interrogation center was in a series of caverns (which supposedly contained an acid pool) directly behind the twenty-room mansion said to be the Tang poet Bai Juyi’s home.81 Bai’s mansion was described by one of its sixteen surviving inmates as a Hades where SACO’s hapless prisoners “underwent seven of the forty¬eight tortures” of hell.82
The cave itself, described as a “refuse pit,” had originally been a coal mine. It consisted of seventeen rectangular cells: fifteen for men and two for women. Across the lintel Dai Li’s calligraphers had written, “Your youth will pass, never to return. Think of where you are, and how much time you
Figure 20. One of Dai Li’s prisons at Bai mansion in Happy Valley. Photograph by Joshua Howard.
have.” 83 By way of answer, the prisoners wrote on their cell wall (at least this is what appears in the reconstruction at the museum):
Flaming irons sear our breasts,
Sharp bamboo splinters pierce each finger.
Icy water floods our nostrils,
Electric currents wrack our bodies
In the evil flames of hell
Man is tempered
Until his will
Becomes hard and bright as gold.84
As the Second Field Army of the People’s Liberation Army drew near Chongqing, advancing at a speed none of the Nationalist commanders had anticipated, the jailers at Happy Valley received orders to execute the prison inmates. There had already been regular executions in the Bai Mansion, with prisoners taken downstairs and machine-gunned. On the night of November 27, 1949, while guards burned SACO files in the courtyard, the prisoners were transferred to downstairs cells. According to one of the survivors:
The commandant arrived and soon after soldiers with submachine guns took posts in front of the cell doors. A whistle blew. The soldiers thrust their guns through the square windows in the cell doors and fired. We sang the Interna¬tionale. Some shouted slogans and cursed Chiang Kai-shek. The firing lasted about twenty minutes, ending when the singing and the screaming died away. Then the whistle blew again. The soldiers went around back and fired through the rear windows for some minutes. The commandant shouted ceasefire. Agents came into the cells and shot prisoners in the head. I was in a corner and the submachine fire only wounded me in the leg. The shot on my head missed and I lay quiet. They thought we were all dead but more than thirty were still alive. We got through the cell doors and burst into the courtyard. Some nineteen were killed there but fourteen of us got through a break in the wall.85
Though by then SACO had formally ceased to exist, its legacy was perpetu¬ated in Communist tales of Happy Valley’s final massacre. “The end was blood and fire. On November 27, 1949, the eve of the arrival of the People’s Liberation Army, police trained and armed by SACO executed the inmates of the two prisons, which were burned along with the SACO files.” 86 As a Shanghai newspaper put it at the height of the anti-American campaign during the Korean War, “SACO, headquarters of [the] fascist secret agent organization jointly run by M. E. Miles of the U.S. Navy and the Chinese Himmler Dai Li, was known for its horrible American originated tortures and massacres.” 87
The SACO training program also established a sinister precedent for similar secret service activities later under the auspices of the Central In¬telligence Agency. The modus operandi of the CIA, after all, was to train secret policemen throughout the world, and especially in Latin America during the 1960s.88 At a minimum, some of the public security training pro¬gram carried out under the auspices of the Agency for International Devel¬opment in the Panama Canal Zone and the School of the Americas hear¬kened back to America’s wartime experience with SACO’s “rice-paddy navy.” 89
Chapter 22
Spying
But there was also an adventure far to the right which smelled bad from the begin¬ning and which I believe Americans will be ashamed of for years to come. This was the SACO (Sino-American Cooperation Group), headed on the U.S. side by Captain (later Rear Admiral) Milton Miles of the Naval Intelligence SACO had the job
of infiltrating the Japanese side of the regular front, gathering information, orga¬nizing a system of coast watching to report on enemy ship movements, and prepar¬ing for future U.S. landings. All these functions were of course legitimate and nec¬essary. SACO’s evil side, which later perverted it completely, lay in its organization. Its overall commander was General Dai Li, the hated Himmler of the Kuomintang Gestapo, butcher of everything progressive in Chinese life, grand master of the quis¬ling Trojan horses that had been sent into the Japanese camp.
ISRAEL E S EIN, Unfinished Revolution in China, 349 501
SACO CLAIMS
As soon as the Pacific War was over, Miles and some of the most enthusias¬tic American veterans of SACO made exuberant claims about the organiza¬tion’s success in the China Theater.2 These exploits were hailed trium¬phantly by Tillman Durdin in the New York Times a month after VJ Day.
The Americans taught the Chinese new skills in guerrilla warfare and gave them new weapons Chinese units that originally had the mission of pro¬
tecting the Americans and their weather and radio intelligence stations were developed into a large-scale guerrilla organization. With their American instructors and advisors they ranged widely through the Yangtse valley and southeast China, raiding small Japanese garrisons, tearing up communica¬tions, blowing up enemy coastal and river ships and gathering information
The Chinese and Americans in SACO moved ceaselessly around Japanese gar¬risons and kept a strikingly complete check on everything the Japanese in China were doing. Coast watchers who reported the movements of enemy shipping were responsible for the sinking of dozens of Japanese vessels by American submarines and provided the intelligence that figured vitally in some of the most important fleet engagements of the war.3
The coast watchers were indeed effective, rightfully claiming respon¬sibility for helping American submarines sink dozens of Japanese vessels. SACO agents also provided intelligence to the Fourteenth Air Force, which subsequently bombed supply dumps, ships, trucks, trains, and troops, while also dropping aerial mines to force Japanese ships into sea-lanes where they were vulnerable to U.S. naval attacks.4 SACO’s weather reports were indis¬pensable as well to the Navy’s Pacific campaigns, enabling, for example, Task Force Fifty-Eight to mount the first full-scale attack on the Japanese homeland.5
The effectiveness of SACO as a guerrilla-training unit and intelligence¬gathering organization, however, remained in question. There was no doubt about SACO’s success in the eyes of its admirers:
Japanese food patrols were attacked so frequently and effectively that many garrisons suffered severely from the lack of rations. In many parts of the coun¬try the Japanese were confined almost completely to garrison areas, not dar¬ing to venture into the countryside. SACO units from June 1944 to July 1945 killed 23,000 Japanese, wounded 9,000, captured nearly 300, destroyed 209 bridges, 84 locomotives, 141 ships and 97 depots and warehouses.6
Miles himself referred frequently to select examples of SACO derring-do: the young Chinese agent who planted explosives on a Japanese ship in Hai¬phong harbor loading rice for Nagasaki; Unit One’s daring exploits in Sep¬tember 1943 in Jiangsu, including the assassination of the governor and a raid on Shanghai that cost the Japanese nine airplanes; Ensign John “Tar¬zan” Mattmiller’s frogman attack on the Amoy docks that blew up a Japanese freighter; and so on.7 Moreover, Dai Li himself was seen as an arch-protec¬tor of the Americans serving in China, ensuring their survival thanks to his ubiquitous secret agents and ferociously martial guerrillas.8
JUNTONG REALITIES
In fact, few Americans participated in SACO guerrilla raids, heeding the MSB officers’ warning that they would stand out in Occupied China like a sore thumb. As a result, SACO had no field (waiqin) units of its own and had to rely instead upon the operations brigades (xingdong dui) of Juntong. Commands to these lower-level local units were supposedly issued by the Military Warfare Unit (Junshi zuozhan zu) within SACO, which was jointly staffed by Americans and Chinese and completely dominated on the latter side by regular Juntong agents.9
All of the military plans that were made by this group had first to be discussed and settled with Juntong before they could be issued. Even so, the heads of each local uniformed special services [unit] were still not ready to accept [the orders] and continued to use their own direct link with Juntong to request in¬structions. But in order to get the American imperialists’ weapons, ammu¬nition, and equipment, all casualties, military victories, and losses each time they fought with the Japanese had to be reported to SACO along with requests for replenishments. Most of these figures were routinely inflated or even com¬pletely fabricated, and more often than not there was a discrepancy with what was reported to Juntong.10 Yet the American side put extraordinary emphasis on these statistics and regularly replenished the weapons and ammunition for these units; also, they could use these cooked up “accomplishments” to ask the American government for supplies.11
As for simple intelligence gathering, which was, after all, supposed to be SACO’s most critical mission in China, the public record was even less ex- emplary.12 Miles was initially disappointed by the quality of the intelligence that the Office of Naval Intelligence was getting from Juntong, which may have been one of the reasons he was unwilling to share this information with the G-2 members of Generals Stilwell and Chennault’s staffs.13 After he complained both orally and in writing to Dai Li, however, Juntong used its contact with “traitors” (hanjian) in occupied areas to place special oper¬ations units in Shanghai, Nanjing, and other parts of southeastern China where SACO agents could assemble radio transmitting stations to supple-ment MSB communications with their own reports on Japanese troop activ- ities.14 By 1944 the number of SACO intelligence officers had doubled to forty, and Dai Li felt it necessary to appoint one of Juntong’s section heads, Wang Yixin (who had conducted covert operations with CCP agents under Pan Hannian), to oversee allied intelligence work.15
PRC accounts later claimed that SACO had produced very good intelli¬gence, especially on USSR and Chinese Communist Party activities.16 But, just after the war, Communist writers belittled Dai Li’s accomplishments in this regard and presented Miles as the doddering head of an “idiotic navy” ( fantong haijun) that misconstrued Japan’s Ichigo Offensive in northern Henan as either just another “foraging operation” or as a “training cam¬paign” for green troops.17
Dai Li himself valued SACO’s contributions highly, partly because he was impressed by some of the spy gadgetry that Miles provided along with car¬bines, pistols, and submachine guns. Stanley Lovell, OSS’s wizard inventor, recalled that Dai Li and Miles wanted him to manufacture a toxin for Chi¬nese prostitutes to use against high-ranking Japanese officers. Eventually, he and the OSS bacteriologists confected a tiny gelatin capsule, no big¬ger than the head of a pin, containing botulinus toxin to be slipped into drinks or a serving of food. The pills were taken back to Chongqing by a Navy doctor, Cecil Coggins, who supplied them to “the Chinese school of assassination and sabotage under General Dai Li.” 18 Other camouflaged weapons—pancake flour that exploded, guns disguised as harmless cam- eras—were also made available by Miles, whose largess included gifts of watches, clothes, chocolates, and cigarettes individually bestowed upon Chi¬nese members of SACO’s staff.19
Figure 21. Pan Hannian’s underground CCP head¬quarters in Shanghai. Zhong gong Shanghai shi wei- dang shi ziliao zhengji weiyuanhui, eds., Shanghai geming shi huace. Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chu- banshe, 1989, p. 216.
Dai Li was also impressed with SACO’s assistance that improved Juntong’s communications capability.20 By the time Miles arrived in China, Dai Li’s obsession with electronics had reached new heights. The Chinese secret service chief had concealed a top-secret laboratory in a dilapidated farm¬house surrounded by rice paddies about ten miles from Chongqing. An en¬tire section of the laboratory was concerned with secret writing. Fruit juice was used to write on tiny rolls of photographic gelatin, which, if developed, looked to be perfectly ordinary snapshots. A number of devices had been ingeniously designed to turn ordinary commercial radio receivers into transmitters: a telegrapher’s key hidden in a fountain pen, an antenna de¬signed as a Shanghai-made umbrella, and so forth. Copies of Minox minia¬ture cameras were manufactured for Juntong’s field agents, while the lab also disguised incendiary materials as soaps or pharmaceutical goods.21 Miles’s mission supplied more powerful radio transmitters and fresh radio intercept expertise. Shortly after reaching Happy Valley, Miles’s men set up a field portable transmitter-receiver that required a steady 120 volts from either a generator or Chongqing’s notoriously labile electric power supply.22 After May 1943, radio intercept work was put under the direct su¬pervision of U.S. Marine Lieutenant Colonel B. T. “Banks” Holcomb, who taught SACO technicians how to use radio direction finders to track down collaborators reporting on the flight of Chennault’s planes from Kunming to Japanese targets.23
Radio direction finders were also arranged around Chiang Kai-shek’s military headquarters in order to spot enemy transmission stations. These were operated by graduates of Wei Daming’s Shanghai training group, the Sanji wuxiandian xuexiao.24 As we have seen, of course, Dai Li already had a highly competent communications staff, and reports from the MSB’s code breakers giving advance warning of Japanese bombing raids on Chongqing almost invariably turned out to be reliable. The English, in fact, were so im¬pressed by Nationalist China’s early warning system that their ambassador asked Chiang Kai-shek for permission to establish a special intelligence unit composed of English and Chinese operatives.25 The result was the foun¬dation of the Sino-British Special Technical Cooperative Unit (Zhong-Ying tezhong jishu hezuo suo), headed by Zhou Weilong.26
SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE
Nonetheless, other British intelligence units in the China-Burma-India Theater, and especially the director of military intelligence in Melbourne, were reluctant to share signals intelligence with Dai Li for fear of its falling into enemy hands.27 On June 11, 1943, the director of military intelligence signaled the British military attaché in Chongqing of his suspicions. The fol¬lowing July 1, the War Office ciphered Melbourne that “Insecurity of pass¬ing information to Chinese [is] fully appreciated. India, Machin [military attaché, China], and we realize that anything given to Chinese is potentially available to Japanese through one means or another Machin does not
repeat not automatically pass information he receives to the Chinese. We refer most secret matters to him, which we should on no account wish Chi¬nese to know.” 28
Six months later allied intelligence had settled upon a general policy of only giving military information to the Chinese that “will assist the Chinese to resist Japan in the immediate prosecution of the war.” 29 However, this policy appeared to have been founded entirely on suspicions that can only be termed racist in origin. “There is little concrete evidence of leakage in respect of information given to the Chinese,” MI2 acknowledged, adding that, “There is, however, grave suspicion that much leakage occurs, based mainly on experience of the average Chinese mentality.” 30
On June 23, 1944, Machin sent a secret message to the British War Office saying that Zheng Jiemin, director of military intelligence for the Chinese, had given him a letter from He Yingqin to General Carton de Wiart sug¬gesting that a joint office be established under Chinese direction to ex¬change intelligence concerning the order of battle of the Japanese. This of¬fice might also collect intelligence and disseminate radio intercepts while also bringing together SIS (Secret Intelligence Service) and SOE (Special Operations Executive) agents conducting activities in the China Theater.31 Machin had explained to Zheng that the latter union was not feasible, but he did suggest sticking with the first option, though that raised the prob¬lematic issue of the role of the Americans, who might import their “inter¬necine jealousies” if they were brought aboard.32
The India Theater commander in chief’s headquarters reminded the War Office of previous strong opposition to such a merging of intelligence activities because it would offer the Chinese access to American and British signals intelligence. Given British Military Intelligence’s suspicion of the constant leakage of information to the Japanese by Nationalist Military In¬telligence, this union seemed an extremely hazardous venture to both the India Theater commander in chief and to Whitehall.33
Yet the British were loath to turn down the Chinese altogether.34 White¬hall’s Joint Intelligence Committee decided that a flat refusal would dam¬age Sino-British relations, and it recommended a counterproposal for a combined Chinese and British collecting agency “from which the order of battle is excluded.” 35 Once Supreme Allied Command, Southeast Asia (SACSEA), made it clear, on July 28, 1944, that the British were not going to share Sigint (that is, signals intelligence), the Chinese began to lose in¬terest in collaboration. Nevertheless, SACSEA did draft a charter for a joint Chinese-British intelligence collection and exchange bureau to be set up in Chongqing, reporting on the British side to the English ambassador.36
The Americans did not take news of this draft charter well. On August 3, the U.S. director of military intelligence, General Bissell, told SACSEA that “American clandestine agencies would never come clean” in the event of such an agreement. Moreover, he argued, the British would be making a mistake by entering into a joint intelligence operation with the Chinese half-heartedly, especially since this might lead the Nationalists to try to use the United States against the British, and vice versa. By no means, Bissell in¬sisted, should the Chinese be allowed to see the draft. The following day, August 4, 1944, the British complied with the Americans. Whitehall told SACSEA to inform the Chinese director of military intelligence, Zheng Jie- min (who was then observing British intelligence operations in India), that at this stage of the war it would not be efficacious to set up a new collection agency. Instead, the two sides should simply increase the exchange of infor¬mation along the lines of cooperation already practiced by British and Chi¬nese intelligence in China. General Zheng was so informed on August 22: “He received [the] news with no outward appearance of dissatisfaction.”37
“SAVING THE NATION IN A DEVIOUS WAY”
Allied suspicions of the wartime loyalty of Dai Li’s secret service were fueled by Juntong’s engagement with Wang Jingwei’s puppet secret service. At the time, this was known as the Nationalist intelligence services’ strategy of quxian jiuguo (“saving the nation in a devious way”): that is, of both overtly working with the enemy’s intelligence services and covertly infiltrating thousands of lower-ranking double agents into the puppet Special Work or- ganization.38 This policy of entwinement, according to mainland Chinese sources, had been secretly adopted by Chiang Kai-shek and Dai Li some¬time between March 30, 1940, when Wang Jingwei was formally installed as the leader of a unified puppet government, and January 1941, when the New Fourth Army Incident occurred in southern Anhui.39
One of the key figures implementing the “devious way” of entwinement was Cheng Kexiang, head of Juntong’s Nanjing Intelligence Group (Qing- bao zu). While Wang Jingwei’s “Peace Party” was negotiating with Colonel Kagesa Sadaaki, Inukai Ken, and other Plum Blossom Agency members dur¬ing the fall of 1939 in Wang’s fortified Shanghai residence at Lane 1136, Yuyuan Road, Cheng began to cement relations with Zhou Fohai (secre¬tary-general of the political committee and future puppet minister of fi¬nance and of police administration) and his brother-in-law Yang Xinghua (future director of the general affairs department of the puppet ministry of finance).40 Through them, Cheng Kexiang managed to bring about the de¬fection of Zhou Fohai’s trusted follower, Luo Junqiang (future chief of Wing Jingwei’s tax police [shuijing], puppet governor of Anhui, and the Nanjing regime’s minister ofjustice), along with Xiong Jiandong (future deputy chief of the tax police).41 Cheng also was able to persuade Zhou Fohai to employ Peng Shengmu (Juntong’s deputy head of the Nanjing Intelligence Group) as his confidential secretary, which provided Cheng with complete access to
Figure 22. Zhou Fohai, president of the puppet government’s Executive Yuan. Huang Renwen, ed., Wang Jingwei yu Wang Wei zhengfu, vol. 2. Hong Kong: Commercial Press, 1994. Plate 19.
the top secret negotiations Wang Jingwei was holding with his Japanese han- dlers.42 After the puppet government was established on March 29, 1940, in Nanjing, Peng Shengmu went on to become a counselor in the Ministry of Finance, continuing to supply the MSB with inside economic intelligence of the most confidential kind.43
Entwinement, needless to say, entailed a certain exchange of informa¬tion between both parties, confirming Allied suspicions that Dai Li was trad¬ing secrets with Japanese intelligence.44 As a result the Nationalist regime was kept in the dark with respect to the most important secret of the war, namely that the Americans and British had broken the Ultra and Purple codes. China’s standing was also eroded among the Big Four at Cairo and afterwards when leaders from Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States met at Teheran.
General Donovan, who had come along to advise President Roosevelt about the situation in Yugoslavia, had his first taste of the China “problem” at the Cairo Conference, where Generals Claire Chennault and Joseph Stilwell were also on hand to debate the pros and cons of the Friendship Project.45 In late October 1943 Roosevelt had already ordered Donovan to gather political intelligence in Communist-controlled areas. On the eve of the Cairo Conference, Donovan briefed the president on the Chinese in¬telligence situation. “We cannot do our job as an American intelligence ser¬vice unless we operate as an entirely independent one, independent of the Chinese and of our other allies.” Roosevelt agreed and authorized Donovan to tell the Generalissimo “that we must be permitted independence of operations.” 46
DONOVAN’S VISIT
Dai Li was by then encountering troubles of his own. A combination of events—the discovery of some of Kang Sheng’s moles within the National¬ist secret police apparatus, the ousting of the Special Operations Executive commando mission from China, and growing grumbles in Washington that Juntong was using Gestapo methods—had distanced T. V. Soong and Ma¬dame Chiang from the Generalissimo’s spymaster.47 Consequently, when “Wild Bill” Donovan arrived in Chongqing on December 2, 1943, the OSS chief found Dai Li in a less than impregnable position.48 Nonetheless, Donovan was greeted with grand ceremony, including a reception in Chongqing’s Police Union ballroom replete with Juntong hostesses skilled in English and dancing.49 The reception was followed by a banquet at Dai Li’s residence. Donovan took great pains to remain sober, but he com¬pletely underestimated his adversary, whom he took to be a “mediocre po¬liceman with medieval ideas of intelligence work.”50
With characteristic bluntness, Donovan told the Chinese secret service chief that if the OSS could not secure Dai Li’s cooperation, then it would work on its own in China. General Dai flared up in response, saying that he would execute any OSS agents operating outside SACO on Chinese soil.51 Donovan hit the table in return, shouting, “For every one of our agents you kill, we will kill one of your generals!” “You can’t talk to me like that,” Dai Li shouted back. “I am talking to you like that,” Donovan responded. Yet some¬how, once Donovan had spoken his mind, thinking little of the real conse¬quences to the OSS program in China, Dai Li calmed down and the two men were suddenly all smiles.52
The day after the banquet General Donovan met with Chiang Kai-shek. There is no extant record of the conversation that followed, but Captain Miles did glean the gist of the conversation from Eddie Liu, who served as Donovan’s interpreter. According to Liu, the Generalissimo told the OSS chief that:
You are a high representative of a foreign and friendly country, and you are now operating in a country both foreign and friendly to you, in a war of allies against a common enemy. We Chinese are a sovereign nation and expect you to recognize that. We expect you Americans to behave in the same manner as you would expect allies to behave in your country. You do not expect a secret service from another country to go into the United States and start opera¬tions. You would object seriously. Likewise, we Chinese object to a foreign se¬cret service or an intelligence service coming into China and working without
Figure 23. Fragment of a letter from General Dai Li to General William Donovan, director, Office of Strategic Services. Dated May 9, 1945, it reads: “I want to take this occasion to offer you by letter my gratitude and my con¬gratulations for the victory of your na¬tion’s army in Europe. Of course, we cannot foretell when we will meet again. Sincerely yours, Dai Li.” (Gen¬eral Donovan’s Office Files, OSS.) General William J. Donovan. Selected OSS Documents, 1941-45. Microfilm, Record Group 226.
the knowledge of the Chinese. Remember that this is a sovereign country and please conduct yourselves accordingly.53
At that point Donovan had no choice but to agree to leave formal OSS mat¬ters temporarily in Miles’s hands.54
Simultaneously, however, the OSS chief began to explore other possibil¬ities of establishing a separate intelligence operation in China beyond Miles’s and Dai Li’s purview. Within SACO, the regular OSS contingent of several dozen men was placed under Colonel John Coughlin, while Miles continued as commander of the navy wing (hence earning a promotion to rear admiral by the end of the war).55 Outside SACO, Donovan and William Langer (the head of OSS’s intelligence research division) met with General Chennault in December 1943 to discuss the possibility of forming a special Fourteenth Air Force unit to gather tactical intelligence in order to pin¬point enemy targets.
AGFRTS
The following April, the OSS and the Fourteenth Air Force created an or¬ganization with the unwieldy name of the 5,329th Air and Ground Forces Resources and Technical Staff, or AGFRTS. More popularly known as “Ag- farts,” the organization included a large contingent of OSS agents selected to conduct independent intelligence operations in China.56
AGFRTS succeeded where SACO had failed, and its results were almost im-mediately apparent. OSS agents infiltrated behind the lines constituted a wide clandestine network which supplied both air force headquarters and the Pacific fleet with daily weather and meteorological data. On-the-spot radio coverage of Yangzi River traffic and coastal and rail shipping enabled Chen- nault’s flyers to hit “hot” targets with maximum efficiency, and R&A target analysis and assessment of bomb damage aided Chennault greatly in planning future attacks.57
OSS/AGFRTS operatives mainly collected files on targets in Japanese-occu¬pied China, while also interrogating enemy prisoners of war.58
In his reports to President Roosevelt, Donovan tried to make as much as he could of the group’s covert activities in the field (blowing up a couple of planes at Canton’s Baiyun airport, demolishing several bridges during the Japanese drive toward Guilin, destroying a Guangdong coal mine, gather¬ing a few coastal watchers’ reports, and so forth); but these were by no means achievements comparable to OSS activities in Western and Central Europe.59 There were, to be sure, several highly successful deep cover op¬erations (Starr and Clam) that even escaped Dai Li’s surveillance.60 But most OSS engagements were completely transparent to the Chinese secret service authorities, who may have actually killed some of their own coun¬trymen working for the Americans.61
Eventually Donovan made sure that Dai Li was officially notified of the OSS’s involvement in AGFRTS.62 But this did not remove the sting of the af¬front, especially since OSS was thereby fielding some of Chennault’s best in¬telligence officers, who typically were born in China as missionary children or at least knew the language well and could live off the land. Lieutenant Colonel Wolferd Smith, for instance, had learned Chinese before English, and had earned a PhD in Oriental History from the University of Michigan before the war broke out. Captain Charles Stelle was born and educated in Beiping and held a professorship in Oriental Studies at Harvard before he was dispatched as an intelligence officer to Chongqing, where he became an important link to the Chinese Communists.63
Although Dai Li appreciated the training functions of the OSS, he dis¬approved ofDonovan’s men because oftheir Communist links, because they sometimes engaged in separate guerrilla warfare against the Japanese with¬out his permission, and because he was increasingly suspicious of high-level OSS agents (whom Miles and his SACO lieutenants called “duffs”) sent to China on missions of their own.64 In the provinces there was a virtual “range war” between OSS and SACO, while across the Hump in India a “secret war” raged between the OSS and Dai Li’s agents.65 By November 1944, General Donovan was able to report to President Roosevelt that, as far as OSS was concerned, “No intelligence or operations of any consequence have come out of SACO. This may have been the result of lack of Hump tonnage, but the main reason is that they were under the operational control of men de¬termined to not permit them to produce intelligence.” 66
This overall verdict is shared by most historians of SACO. “In the final analysis,” Shen Yu writes, “the Allied war effort did not benefit much from this joint endeavor. The war ended just when SACO began to get ready to convert its focus from training to operation[s].” 67 Yet, if the Allied war ef¬fort gained little from these combined Sino-American covert activities, Dai Li’s own clandestine empire benefited considerably, enabling the Chinese secret service chief to emerge from the Second World War much stronger than when the Japanese invasion was first launched. As Major Carl Hoff¬mann reported to General Donovan in July 1944:
This secret police network is a tribute to Dai’s genius for organization, his re-sourcefulness, his craft, cunning, and enormous personal courage and charm. Of this personal magnetism he has no little, and many who have met him have attested to his striking attractiveness; this in spite of the fact that he has a slit of a mouth, definitely suggesting cruelty, close set and penetrating eyes, and an imperious manner. He is in his middle forties, of medium height, power¬fully built, military bearing, and has an unmistakable air of authority. Socially, he can be ingratiating, pleasant, and cooperative. Although merciless in the performance of his duties as he travels the length and breadth of China, his own private life is said to be above reproach. His far-famed craft and cunning are regarded with mixed admiration and fear. Although he is a legendary figure in contemporary China, even though a photograph of him is never seen, his appearances at any function are rare in the extreme, and his name is seldom mentioned above a whisper; all this in deference to the anonymity he insists on. All factions are aware that he knows, or can learn, their public and private sins of graft, corruption, inefficiency, or stupidity, and that on a nod from him, disgrace, ostracism, or death can follow, regardless of clique or political influence.68
By 1945, in sum, the spymaster had reached the pinnacle of his public political power, an edifice erected on the covert economic structures of war¬time China.
Chapter 23
Dai Li’s Wartime
Smuggling Networks
Opium and other narcotics were transported into the area from Manchukuo [Manzhouguo] and Chahar where the cultivation of poppies was encouraged by Jap¬anese authorities. The trafficking was in the hands of Japanese and Korean ronin (hoodlums) who became an offensive addition to the local scene after 1935. Smug¬gling silver out of China through East Hopei [Hebei] reached such levels that it se¬riously undermined the efforts of the Nanking government to stabilize its monetary system.1 In addition, to deny the Nanking government the revenues that it desper¬ately needed and in order to bolster Japan’s own sagging export market, Japanese au¬thorities connived with the Tongchou [Tongzhou puppet] authorities to look the other way as a veritable flood of goods funneled from Japan through East Hopei to mar¬kets in North China untaxed and unregulated.2 When goods did pass through the customs barriers established by the East Hopei authorities they were taxed at rates far below those charged by the China Maritime Customs. Reliable statistics are difficult to obtain,3 but some indication of the scale of the smuggling can be seen in the strong protests delivered to Japan by countries whose loans and indemnities were secured by Chinese customs receipts.
BOYLE, China and Japan at War, 40
NATIONAL SMUGGLING NETWORKS
Wartime China, supposedly divided between the free and occupied zones, was crisscrossed with smugglers’ routes that linked the two realms through freebooters’ entrepôts.4 Jieshou was just such a contraband bazaar at the junction of Henan and Anhui provinces:
This was the frontier, but it did not feel like life under the guns of the enemy. The place bristled with men bent on making what money they could while they could: profiteers such as could only be seen in a country at war. Every other man you met there seemed to be a dealer or an agent for something. People came from the coast, from the inland regions across the Yellow River and the Yangtze. The town was unbelievably prosperous.5
Dai Li thus paid a personal visit to Jieshou because he coveted some of the enormous “take” that General Tang Enbo was exacting from the smuggling traffic. After his visit, Dai reputedly advised General Tang that it would be healthier to devote less time to trade and more to military pursuits.6
Elsewhere—in the cotton areas for example—raw textiles were ex¬changed for manufactured goods from Occupied China, such as radio tubes and other necessities.7 Eastern Hebei’s prodigious smuggling operations, on the other hand, centered on the narcotics trade.8 Dalian, a center of smuggling since the fall of the northeast to the Japanese, also combined narcotics operations with other contraband traffic, sending forth shallow draft boats that made landings up and down the northern China coast.9
The networks were truly national in scope, though regionally diversi- fied.10 Just as Jieshou linked Anhui and Henan, so did Yichang, at the foot of the Yangzi gorges, connect Sichuan with Hunan and other downriver provinces that could supply the former with the medicine, cotton thread, and dyes that were otherwise unavailable upstream.11 The same was true for upriver ports such as Wanxian and Badong, which funneled salt, wood oil, bristles, and Chinese herbs downstream to be exchanged for cotton yarn, piece goods, sewing materials, and household hardware items.12
Jiangxi was an especially important point of origin because, in addi¬tion to rich supplies of rare minerals (wolfram, antimony, tin, manganese, molybdenum, and silver), it produced a surplus of rice and other agricul¬tural products (tea, ramie fiber, rape seed oil), along with luxury porcelains from the former imperial kilns at Jingdezhen, which the Japanese army oc- cupied.13 In addition to serving as transshipment ports for Jiangxi goods, Zhejiang coastal cities such as Ningbo and Wenzhou shipped inland large quantities of transportation wares (motor cars, trucks, tires, tools, and gaso¬line); 14 while less bulky goods came down into central China from the northwest on freight cars of the Beiping-Suiyuan Railway via Baotou, Lan¬zhou, and Shaanxi.15
SMUGGLING AND INTELLIGENCE WORK
The Japanese justified this smuggling in part as a way of infiltrating their Chinese secret agents, disguised as merchants, into Nationalist-occupied territory.16 These agents, whose very service to the Japanese was tendered on the condition that they would be able to trade across enemy lines, were under orders both to penetrate the Chinese secret service and to convey dis¬information to Juntong and Zhongtong (Central Statistics Bureau) counter¬intelligence officers.17
The Chinese, naturally, did the same in the opposite direction, while re¬lying even more heavily than the Japanese on the profits from smuggling to provide government revenues, despite fear of exposing official entangle¬ment in the heroin trade.18 Hence wartime conditions in themselves, by preventing open trade between Japanese-controlled areas and the inland, made it possible for the secret services on both sides to make colossal profits from illegal commerce, which they could justify in terms of either acquiring needed goods (peasant products and local manufactures for the Japanese, medicine and tires for the Chinese) or procuring intelligence assets.19 The ultimate latitude, then, was afforded the secret services to strengthen their sources of income, which also provided well-connected individuals and speculators with a chance to make a great deal of money.20
Major Guomindang officials became profiteers through the various com¬panies that were set up as fronts for the goods transport offices that were controlled by Chinese intelligence. That is, wartime bureaucratic capitalism led to private gains while simultaneously affording China’s spymasters— and especially General Dai Li, head of military intelligence—with the pros¬pect of building a huge illicit empire that stretched from Burma and Assam to Yunnan, Guangdong, and Fujian; 21 and that employed more than half a million men solely engaged in smuggling gasoline into Free China.22
THE SMUGGLING POLICE
Dai Li’s smuggling empire was built upon a system of revenue collection en-forcement that went back to the formation of a taxation police force during the early 1930s.23 When Song Ziwen (T. V. Soong) was minister of finance in the winter of 1931-32, the Nationalist regime had established a Tax Po¬lice Force (Shuijing zongtuan) under the command of Wang Geng.24 Dur¬ing the January 28 Incident Wang Geng was arrested by the Japanese army in Shanghai, and their intelligence officers discovered he was carrying mil¬itary maps that revealed the deployment of the Nineteenth Route Army, in¬formation that helped the Japanese defeat the defenders of Shanghai after the amphibious landing at Liuhe.25
Wang Geng lost his job as a result, and the badly compromised Tax Police was supplemented with a body of cadets from the Military Academy ( Jiangwu tang) of Zhang Xueliang’s Northeastern Army. In 1936 the Tax Police was transferred to the command of Huang Jie, who lost that job in turn when his forces were routed by the Japanese army during the Battle of Shanghai in August 1937. After Shanghai fell, those members of the Tax Po¬lice who survived were transferred to Baoji for retraining under a new com¬mander, Sun Liren.26
The Tax Police’s major rival was the army’s Communications Inspection Bureau ( Jiaotong jiancha ju), which was then under the thumb of Feng Ti, commander of the Nationalist garrison at Changsha. On October 15, 1938, a disastrous fire broke out at Changsha, disgracing Feng Ti and provoking Chiang Kai-shek to order Feng’s execution by a firing squad.27 The dead officer’s Communications Inspection Bureau was immediately taken over by Dai Li, who later prompted the formation of the Wartime Goods Transport Management Bureau (Zhanshi huoyun guanli ju), also known as the Trans¬port Control Bureau (Yunshu tongzhi ju). General He Yingqin was made chief of the bureau while Dai Li took charge of the Supervisory Office ( Jiancha chu) that actually wielded power within the unit by means of more than eighty inspection control points ( jiancha suozhan) throughout Free China.28
This office was covertly designated to conduct the smuggling trade with the enemy and provide another source of financial support for Juntong.29 Dai Li’s agents established in each of the provinces goods transport man¬agement offices (huoyun guanli chu), and these offices in turn managed a network of goods transport management stations (huoyun guanli zhan) that operated under the cover of local businesses (the Xinglong zhuang, Zhen- xing zhuang, Xiechang zhuang, and so forth) in collusion with Chinese puppet businesses run by the Japanese special services organs.30
The Nationalists themselves used American printing presses owned by the Central Bank to counterfeit northern Japanese military scrip and Wang Jingwei-regime notes to buy goods in Occupied China. Units of the Loyal and Patriotic Army, along with employees of the various transport manage¬ment stations, then smuggled the commodities back into the interior, where they were sold at a considerable profit.31
CUTOUTS
The Nationalist smuggling operation depended upon a complex network of more than twenty major import and export merchants operating across en¬emy lines out of Chun’an.32 In 1942-43 the companies banded together to organize a Joint Guild of Import and Export Merchants ( Jinchukou shang lianhehui), which was headed by the former mayor of Hangzhou, Zhao Zhi- you, and Wang Lieyan, the banker who handled much of the business of the Sino-American Cooperative Organization (SACO). Acting as a cartel, the guild monopolized commerce in husked rice, soybeans, tung oil, hog bris¬tles, rosin, ramie, bamboo, and lumber, which they traded for cotton cloth, tobacco, rubber tires, medicine, hardware goods, and items for daily use sold by counterpart firms organized by the Japanese and puppet secret ser¬vices: the Lingnan gongsi, a Plum Organ asset; the Jijizhuang, another Jap¬anese secret service front; the Liancheng gongsi, run by Wang Jingwei’s Political Guards Bureau (Zhengzhi baowei ju); and the Dongnan maoyi gongsi, a commercial branch of the Wang regime’s Special Operations Headquarters (Tegong zongbu).33
The Nationalist companies worked hand in glove with Dai Li’s transport comptrollers.34 The Meifeng gongsi, for instance, was actually founded by Zhang Xingbai, the director of the Transport Goods Control Office for the Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Anhui Border Zone (Su Zhe Wan bianqu huoyun guanli chu).35 In 1943 Zhang, who was also head of the SACO administra¬tive office in Chun’an, invested one million yuan of his own in a new Mei- feng gongsi joint venture with the Zhenlie gongsi (managed by Wang Lie- yan under the aegis of the Bank of Zhejiang), capitalized at eleven million yuan to monopolize the trade in ramie, rosin, and tung oil.36
In the same fashion Zhao Shirui, director of the Eastern Zhejiang Trans¬port Goods Control Office, together with his deputies in charge of local sur¬veillance offices, organized the firm called Xinglong zhuang, which traded southern Zhejiang wood, rosin, hog bristles, husked rice, yellow beans, and tung oil, stored in Zhao’s three major warehouses, for cigarettes, fine cloth, hardware, Western medicine, and rubber tires handled by puppet firms.37 The products were smuggled in and out of Free China by units of the LPA and by Special Action Brigades in the Pudong area under Colonel Zhang Huifang and his elder brother Lieutenant Colonel Zhang Junliang, and along the eastern Zhejiang seacoast under Lu Anshi.38
Zhao Shirui made a fortune from the Zhejiang smuggling trade until word of his undeclared profits was carried back to Dai Li by Juntong infor¬mants. General Dai was furious, and in 1945 he had Zhao seized and confined in the American military guesthouse in the Huilong Temple at Jianyang (Fujian). While fourteen Dodge trucks carted off Zhao’s confis¬cated goods, worth more than forty million yuan at the time, a military court sentenced Zhao to five years in prison—a term he never served because Dai Li’s successor, Mao Renfeng, had Zhao released from jail in 1946.39
SMUGGLING PREVENTION
The Transport Goods Control Office was an army unit, answering ultimately to the Military Affairs Commission of Chiang Kai-shek’s government. But what about the civilian organs charged with restricting and seizing contra¬band, which was, after all, potentially such a lucrative source of revenue for the Ministry of Finance? During 1940-41, British advisers had counseled the Generalissimo to increase the government’s income by establishing bet¬ter smuggling controls.40
Chiang Kai-shek accordingly inaugurated a Smuggling Prevention Office ( Jisi shu) under the Ministry of Finance employing sixty thousand men and directed by Dai Li himself.41 Offices to Control Smuggling were set up in each of the districts ruled by the Guomindang, and these offices in turn su¬pervised inspection and control guard posts (chaji suoshao).42 For the time being this gave Dai Li complete control of the national government’s clan¬destine smuggling apparatus.43
Smuggling control in China (apart from levying of duties, which was done by the Customs) was vested in the secret police under Dai Li. In practice, Dai’s organization came to “control” a large part of the growing trade with the en¬emy as its own monopoly, other operators only being allowed to participate if they paid a cut. While many Dai men got rich, the organization itself collected hundreds of millions of dollars, which it used to finance and extend its sinis¬ter network. The “trade” became its chief source of funds, which were so great that in 1944 it was estimated that Dai had 500,000 officers, agents, and in¬formers on his payroll.44
Dai Li’s control over the Smuggling Prevention Office did not go un¬challenged. His primary agent assigned to take over the office was Jin Run- sheng, who was put in command of the Inspection Unit (Dianyan tuan) and of the Command Unit (Zongtuan) of the Tax Police (Shuijing). However, Sun Liren was unwilling to forfeit his own authority over this key office, and he maneuvered to have the unit placed under the Thirty-Eighth Army, which Sun led. Dai Li responded by establishing a countervailing organiza¬tion in the first unit of the Tax Police, which was then garrisoned in Sichuan and which was expanded to form a new headquarters along with four sepa¬rate major brigades (zongtuan) under Dai Li’s appointees.45
An even more telling—and, in the end, more damaging — challenge came from Chiang Kai-shek’s in-laws, whose own private engagement in wartime smuggling was exposed to the Generalissimo by Dai Li’s Smuggling Prevention Office. The revelation occurred in the course of pursuing what came to be known as the Lin Shiliang Case.46
THE LIN SHILIANG CASE
Lin Shiliang was a confidential assistant of H. H. Kung (Kong Xiangxi), Chiang Kai-shek’s brother-in-law and onetime minister of finance. Lin originally came to H. H. Kung via underworld contacts arranged through the Shanghai network of Green Gang social clubs.47 Appointed head of the Office for Saving and Transportation (Zhongyang yinhang chuyun chu) in the Central Bank’s Trust Bureau (Zhongyang yinhang xintuo ju), Lin Shi- liang was assigned the task of purchasing military goods abroad and arrang¬ing for their importation via Hong Kong.48 The manager of the Trust Bu¬reau in the Crown Colony was Kong Lingkan (David Kung, H. H. Kung’s eldest son), who used Lin Shiliang to “manage” the transportation of goods over the recently completed Burma Road.49
The actual case involved a group of speculators and war profiteers affili¬ated with the Dacheng gongsi, which commissioned Lin Shiliang’s assistant, Wang Jifang, to transport tires and hardware across the Burma Road to Chongqing. Part of the profits of this multimillion-yuan deal was assigned by Lin Shiliang to Kong Lingkan and his notorious sister, the transvestite
Figure 24. Kong Xiangxi (H. H. Kung), minister of finance. Kuo Jung-shen, Min kuo Kung Yung-chih hsien sheng hsiang-hsi nien p’u. Taipei: Taiwan shang-wu yin shu kuan ku fen you hsien kung ssu, 1988.
Miss Kong Lingjun. Also involved in the deal were H. H. Kung’s eldest daughter, Kong Lingyi, and her husband, Chen Jisi. The shipment was di¬vided into several lots, two of which were seized by agents of the Smuggling Prevention Office.50
When Dai Li telephoned Chiang Kai-shek with news of the case, the Gen-eralissimo was outraged, believing that Lin Shiliang had been using his brother-in-law’s name to conduct the smuggling operation entirely on his own. Lin was subsequently arrested at Chiang’s orders and sentenced to ten years in Chongqing’s Tuqiao Prison.51 But Dai Li was implacable. His men continued to investigate the case and produced evidence that Lin had been spending vast amounts of money—public and private—on whoring, drink¬ing, and gambling. The Generalissimo erupted when he was told of this de¬bauchery and promptly changed Lin Shiliang’s sentence to execution by firing squad.52
Lin Shiliang refused to take the rap for H. H. Kung’s family and openly attributed the smuggling scheme to David Kung, who took the entire mat- ter—at his father’s urging—to H. H. Kung’s sister-in-law, Madame Chiang Kai-shek (Song Meiling), for arbitration. Dai Li thus found himself up against the entire array of Kongs and Songs, who insisted that the Generalis¬simo settle the episode in their favor.53 Chiang Kai-shek was caught there¬fore between familial claims (the private interests of the “bureaucratic cap¬italists,” represented in the public’s eyes by the Four Great Families) and General Dai’s representation of the issue as an affront to the authority of the military regime that now oversaw what had originally been under the au¬thority of T. V. Soong and H. H. Kung as Nationalist ministers of finance.54
Chiang Kai-shek came down on the side of family, especially since the frequently estranged Songs and Kongs were now united by their common enemy, Dai Li. In addition to executing Lin Shiliang, the Generalissimo ac¬cused General Dai of overstepping his authority by acting out of resentment and a personal grudge. In July 1943 Dai was removed from his command of the Jisi shu (Smuggling Prevention Office), which was turned over to Xuan Tiewu, one of H. H. Kung’s men and an “irreconcilable enemy” (bugong dai- tian) of Dai Li.55 At the same time, the leadership of the office’s provincial control bureaus was shifted and all Juntong personnel were dismissed.56
Dai Li’s removal from the directorship of the Jisi shu (Smuggling Pre¬vention Office) was misinterpreted by China’s American allies as a much broader attack against the excesses of the Military Statistics Bureau. The U.S. embassy in Chongqing reported to the secretary of state that it was widely believed that “the notorious Dai Li, head of the Generalissimo’s prin¬cipal secret political and military police and intelligence organization,” had been relieved of his post as a result of 1) “the accumulative effect of ar¬bitrary kidnappings, executions, etc., of agents and employees of highly placed persons, including the execution in the autumn of 1942 of Ling Hsu Liang [sic], head of the Transportation Department of the Central Trust, who instead of using his trucks to evacuate Government supplies from Burma to China, allegedly employed them to bring in ‘luxury’ goods for high placed persons”; 2) conflict with the “corrupt interests” of “high placed persons” arriving from the “organization’s corrupt ‘smuggling prevention’ activities”; 3) “bitter rivalry engendered in the Kuomintang’s secret police, whose main function is the overlapping field of ‘dangerous thoughts’”; 4) the breakdown of Dai Li’s intelligence organization in the occupied zone due to successful Japanese counterespionage; and 5) criticism of Dai Li and his “Gestapo,” which Madame Chiang had heard on tour in the United States and which gave her the impression that “Americans believed that Dai Li rather than Generalissimo actually controlled China through his ruthless utilization of Nazi and Japanese political police methods.”57
DAI LI’S DEFENSIVE MEASURES
But the loss of control of the Smuggling Prevention Office to civilian au¬thorities hardly crimped Dai Li’s operations. To begin, he quickly made sure that his trump card—military exigency—would prevail over H. H. Kung’s reliance upon civilian Ministry of Finance supervision of wartime smug¬gling. During that same month, July 1943, General Dai placed the head¬quarters of the Tax Police directly under the Military Affairs Commission and had it renamed the Special Operations Army (Biedong jun), which formed eleven special services columns (zongdui) distributed among each of the war zones of the Guomindang-controlled areas of Free China and as¬signed especially to supervise all ground transportation.58
Second, Dai Li reorganized the transportation and communications arms of the Nationalist military into a single unified command responsible for ground patrols, regional inspection stations, radio and postal links, and even aircraft communications. That same July the Military Affairs Commis¬sion’s Inspection Division of the Bureau of Transport Control (Yunshu tongzhi ju jiancha chu) was first revamped as the Water and Land Commu¬nications Unified Inspection Office (Shuilu jiaotong tongyi jiancha chu), and then reorganized as the MAC’s Communications Inspectorate ( Jiao¬tong xuncha chu) under a Dai Li man, Lieutenant General Ji Zhangjian.59 Later, in 1945, the Communications Inspectorate was expanded to cover telecommunications (the purview of the former Third Section of Dai Li’s Juntong) and air traffic under a special Postal and Aviation Inspection Of¬fice (Youhang jiancha chu) directed by Lieutenant General Liu Fan.60
Finally, Dai Li shored up his defenses against H. H. Kung and the civil¬ians eager to take over the supervision of smuggling “prevention” by ex¬panding the activities of the Sino-American Cooperative Organization within the Ministry of Finance. During 1944 the head of the transportation office in the Wartime Freight Transportation Bureau of the Ministry of Fi¬nance was Huang Ronghua. Huang, who had lived for many years in the United States, was also simultaneously head of the communications and transport section of SACO. His job was to look after the fleet of approxi¬mately one thousand trucks then in operation all over south China convey¬ing weapons to the guerrillas at the front and returning loaded down with goods purchased from puppet firms in Occupied China.61
By 1944-45 the lading of these vehicles was completely at the discretion of Dai Li, who actually held the position of director of the Freight Trans¬portation Bureau in the Ministry of Finance.62 As Miles explained it:
Every motor truck had to have a bill of lading showing exactly what was being carried, and, at every barrier, the bill of lading had to be shown and the truck inspected. Hitchhiking was such a prevalent form of graft for truck drivers that it was referred to as “transporting yellow fish”—an expensive delicacy— and General Dai himself was responsible for the controls that were supposed to prevent—and which certainly limited—smuggling and spying.63
SACO’s own American leader was thus aware, and even appreciative, of Dai Li’s smuggling empire, which was by VJ Day constructed upon a unique foundation of prewar narcotics traffic and wartime U.S. supply and trans¬portation sources. The momentary economic returns of this smuggling em¬pire were enormous, but the social elements that fed off these revenues were either part of an inflationary process of elite corruption that befouled
the Nationalist regime or of an equally insidious program of secret service coercion that undermined the legitimacy of the government on the eve of civil war. Many years later historians were quick to recognize the linkage be¬tween contraband and clandestine operations, especially because of the connection between the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency and il¬licit narcotics traffic during the Vietnam War. But the forces that forged this nexus in Southeast Asia existed well before American covert warriors sup¬ported Li Mi’s 93rd Nationalist Division in the opium trade’s Golden Trian¬gle. They coalesced for the first time under Dai Li’s aegis in China proper during the heyday of SACO’s guerrilla war against Japan.
Chapter 24
Juntong in Wartime Chongqing
Unlike Hitler, who used his iron-tight control over the bureaucracy to monopolize the youth organizations, the trade unions, the church, and every other aspect of the people’s economic and social life, and used the Gestapo to deal with occasional po¬litical dissidents, Chiang’s régime during the war was reduced to almost total re¬liance on his secret service, because he could exert little organizational control over the society and the government.
HSI-SHENG CH’I, Nationalist China at War, 225
TAKING OVER SICHUAN
During the Nanjing decade Sichuan had remained apart from Nationalist rule, riven by warlord interests roughly allied under the banner of the prov¬ince’s most powerful militarist, Liu Xiang.1 As war with Japan loomed dur¬ing the mid-1930s, however, Chiang Kai-shek began to look toward the fortress province—the “Riverlands” of the Three Kingdoms—as a future bas¬tion for the Guomindang regime. By September 1935, the Generalissimo had set up a new mobile garrison in Sichuan, renaming this “bandit ex¬termination” ( jiaofei) unit under Gu Zhutong the Chongqing Mobile Garri¬son (Chongqing xingying). Within it Chiang’s spymaster, Dai Li, set up the Chongqing Number Three Class (Yusanke) of Juntong, nominally under his directorship but actually run by the deputy class director ( fukezhang), Chen Shaoping, along with Inspector Ye Daoxin.2 The Number Three Class, which was housed in the old military yamen on Citang Street, was charged with making preparations for taking over Chongqing proper in the event of a Nationalist retreat there.3
By the time the Nationalists had pulled back from Nanjing to Wuhan, Liu Xiang—the hegemon of Sichuan—realized that the province he and an assorted constellation of warlords controlled was now under Chiang Kai- shek’s gun.4 Liu himself was recuperating from an acute case of gastritis in Hankou’s Wanguo Hospital. It was from his hospital bed, consequently, that Liu Xiang tried to effect a tripartite alliance with First Army Group (Ji- tuanjun) commander Song Zheyuan, who controlled Xinxiang and Puyang in southern Henan; and Third Army Group commander Han Fuju, the for¬mer Shandong warlord who was garrisoned in Nanyang (Henan), Xiang- yang (Hubei), and Hanzhong (Shaanxi). Liu’s plan was to use this phalanx to arrange a cordon around Sichuan, which, with Japanese military help, would be closed off to Chiang Kai-shek.
Already suspecting the worst of Liu Xiang, Dai Li had suborned one of the Sichuan warlord’s army commanders, Fan Shaozeng, to spy on Liu. Fan reported that Liu had been sending coded instructions to his lieutenants, ordering them to bring troops to Yichang (Hubei) to link up with Han Fuju in opposition to Chiang Kai-shek. Liu was also in direct radio communica¬tion with Han himself, but Juntong had so far been unable to break their coded transmissions. Fan Shaozeng, however, supplied Dai Li’s commu¬nications specialists with a copy of an earlier telegram that gave the code breakers the key they needed to decipher the message, which in turn pro¬vided Juntong with all the proof it needed to convince Chiang Kai-shek of the two warlords’ perfidy. The Generalissimo struck quickly. On Janu¬ary 11, 1938, Chiang went to Kaifeng in person to hold a meeting of the Military Affairs Commission, thereby enticing General Han to Henan’s capital, where he was arrested by Dai Li’s men, taken to Hankou, court- martialed, and executed by shooting squad on January 24.5 At the same time, Juntong bribed Liu Xiang’s nurse to replace the Sichuan warlord’s gastritis medicine with a toxic potion. General Liu died by poison in his Wanguo Hospital bed shortly thereafter.6
It is important to realize what Dai Li managed to wreak in Sichuan dur¬ing these first six months of the Sino-Japanese War. He and his organization rapidly seized control of local warlord garrisons at the orders of Chiang Kai- shek himself, who commanded that each post ( jingbei chu) come under the jurisdiction of checkpoints ( jicha chu) in the grip of his secret police. Every checkpoint had a superintendent (duchazhang) in charge of the inspection posts ( jiancha suo) that were quickly established in every conceivable public facility: railroad stations, steamship wharves, bus stops, hotels, tea shops, restaurants, movie houses, public baths, and theaters. In principle, no one was to be spared from secret police observation.7
The very compass of Dai Li’s clandestine dominion forces us to consider whether he was a prime centralizer in the Guomindang effort to exert more control over the national regime, or whether his secretive administration constituted a shadow government that eventually crippled formal consoli¬dation of the Republic’s twenty-two years of unified jurisdiction. For ex¬ample, when Dai Li erected customs barriers answering to central com¬mand, was he reasserting Chinese authority over extraterritorial privileges? Or was it a simple looting of the national stand as long as it stood erect?
CHONGQING’S FORMAL JUNTONG APPARATUS
Juntong’s main administrative headquarters was located in Luojiawan; No. Nineteen was the A ( jia) Office of Dai Li’s Confidential Secretariat ( Jiyao- shi), where he had his own private bureau. However, the “public” head¬quarters of the Chongqing MSB was housed in the Hunan Guildhall at Wanglongmen, where the MSB had its own Secretariat (Wenshuke), Ar¬chives Division (Dang’angu), and Secret Letter Division (Mihangu).8 The regular Secretariat oversaw most of the field (waiqin) units of Juntong, which were operationally responsible to the Investigations Department of the Chongqing Garrison Command (Weishu zongsiling bu jichachu).9
As far as control of Chongqing was concerned, the largest and most im¬portant special services organization was Juntong’s Investigations Depart¬ment, which was in charge of thirteen districts.10 Although it had only a little more than five hundred men, each of its field agents had anywhere from twenty to several hundred people working for him.11 Founded in 1939 by Juntong as part of the Wuhan Garrison Command, the department was transferred to Chongqing as a nominal unit of the latter’s garrison. Its au¬thority actually emanated from Dai Li, and behind him the Generalissimo himself. Consequently, neither of the successive Chongqing Garrison com¬manders, Liu Zhi and Wang Zanxu, dared interfere with its activities.12
The Investigations Department was for Dai Li a place where his back¬bone cadres could be tested (kaocha) and steeled (duanlian). 13 The depart¬ment head was invariably a Juntong officer who had already served a term as deputy chief ( fuchuzhang): Tao Yishan succeeding Zhao Shirui, Liao Gongshao succeeding Tao, Shen Zui succeeding Liao, He Longqing suc¬ceeding Shen.14 Since everyone knew that they were being tested by Dai Li for higher office, competition was keen among the various deputy inspec- tors-general and the unit’s work style was exceedingly intense. Investigations Department personnel would do anything they could to please Dai Li, in¬cluding reporting their slightest accomplishments to him and trying always to be on hand if he had an inquiry to make, even if that meant staying off the banquet circuit and remaining at the office long after regular working hours were over. Shen Zui, who eventually served as head of the depart¬ment, was especially aware of General Dai’s “nervous temperament” and took pains to commit the details of all pending cases to memory so that he could respond instantly to his superior’s midnight questions without having to consult a single dossier. It was perhaps for this reason that Shen Zui was chosen by Dai Li to become head of the General Affairs Department (Zong- wuchu) when he was barely twenty years old.15
The Chongqing Investigations Department was divided into four sec¬tions (ke). Section One was in charge of general affairs: administration, per¬sonnel, and documents.16 Section Two was responsible for intelligence op¬erations, detective work, and the inspection of airplanes.17 Section Three was in some senses the most important, being devoted to telecommuni¬cations. This department was staffed by more than forty specialists who had gone through Wei Daming’s central communications office.18 (Section
Three was also charged with managing all of the purchasing requests for the Chongqing military district, which took a tremendous amount of bureau¬cratic time, but their main task was much more manifold: to monitor all transmissions in and out of Chongqing. The Communists’ transmitters at the CCP office and at Xinhua ribao were especially targeted.) 19
Section Four was the Judiciary Section (Sifake) under Xu Zhongqi and Hu Zao. Xu was Dai Li’s fellow townsman and hence reported directly to his leader, whatever the issue. This section was also in charge of the dreaded Juntong lockup in Chongqing.20 The Chongqing station’s lockup (kanshou- suo) at Wanglongmen was a notoriously cruel prison. Most of the political prisoners were detained on the flimsiest of charges, ranging from an over¬heard comment considered radical to a public complaint about low salaries and the high price of goods. These prisoners were also totally at the mercy of the old jail hands (lao fanren), who had formed three prison gangs under “bosses” (toumu) living off extortion euphemistically termed “filial piety and reverence” (xiaojing). 21
Wanglongmen officers, needless to say, provoked fear wherever they went in wartime Chongqing. If a Juntong agent on external duty infringed upon the law and was challenged by the regular authorities, all he had to say with a sneer was “Wanglongmen de” (I’m with Wanglongmen). Once identi¬fied in that fashion, the agent no longer bought theater tickets, paid for train or boat passage, or settled his vice bills in the city’s bordellos and opium dens.22
Section Four’s office, which was directly connected with Juntong’s Politi¬cal Intelligence Department (Dangzheng qinqbaochu), mainly directed a contingent of outside agents who infiltrated Chongqing student groups. But the major task of this group—which was directed by a Party and Po¬litical Investigation Group (Dangzheng shenchazu)—was to maintain sur¬veillance over the Chinese Communist administrative offices of the Eighth Route Army office, Xinhua ribao, and Zhou Enlai’s own residence.23 At this they were less than totally successful.24
The Foreign Affairs Investigation Group (Waishi zhencha zu), or FAIG, was ostensibly under the Garrison Command in Chongqing. It was actually under the direct control of Juntong, which determined its budget and ac¬tivities. Its directors, Kong Jie and Wu Runsun, were more or less concur¬rently heads of the waishi ke (foreign affairs section) of the Chongqing po¬lice force, thanks to Dai Li’s insistence that all foreign affairs work in the city be unified under a single command. At the same time it was terribly secre¬tive: one could only get into the office through a back door that bypassed the police’s regular investigation office.25
The main job of the Foreign Affairs Investigation Group was to maintain surveillance over the Soviet embassy and Tass office, as well as the Soviet trade delegation in Chongqing.26 Informants (tongxunyuan) were directly controlled by higher case officers and considered extremely valuable assets. They were also shared with the International Propaganda Office’s Wei Jing- meng and with the head of the Juntong Passport Section, Zeng Guangxun.27
The Investigations Department also had its own separate Group Three called the Social Investigation Group (Shehui zhencha zu), which was headed by Qi Yulin and which operated without much direct supervision from Juntong headquarters. Its mandate was to promote “social order” (she- hui zhian) by dealing with felonies such as robbery. Unlike other sections, Group Three had its men on call at all times. Personnel consisted in part of “hooligan” (liumang) or “gang” (banghui) elements, many of whom had been recruited in Wuhan. Since a large contingent of Wuhan’s pickpockets and thieves had migrated upriver with the Nationalist forces when theyretreated to Chongqing, Group Three’s own former gangsters were much more ef¬fective in dealing with this underworld element than the regular detective brigade (zhenji dui) of the police department, which had its own gangland contacts among Chongqing criminals. There consequently developed a typ¬ical wartime phenomenon: “upriver” crooks working closely with the regu¬lar detective squad while “downriver” criminals connived with the Social In¬vestigation Group.28
Finally, the Investigations Office Department oversaw more than ten in-vestigation centers (suo) and more than thirty investigation posts (shao). Its “external” powers were considerable. Agents of the Jicha suo (Investigation Centers) could at their will search any residence or hotel, often just to go through a suspect’s luggage.29 And, although vehicle investigation was os¬tensibly consolidated under the Unified Inspection Department for Water and Land Communications (Shuilu jiaotong tongyi jiancha chu), they could also detain any car or boat they wished. This was a considerable source of il¬legal income to Jicha suo agents stationed at the Sugar Guild Hall (Tangye gonghui lou) near the Chaotian Gate. Being responsible for river traffic, they set up a checkpoint of their own to monitor lumber barges and other freight vessels coming downstream. It was obvious to each boat captain that if Jicha suo officers insisted, they would have to unload their entire cargo for inspection. Far better to pay a bribe that amounted to an illegal customs fee.30
THE CHONGQING POLICE DETECTIVE BRIGADE
Although the Investigation Department competed with the Unified Inspec¬tion Department, its major rival was the Main Detective Brigade (Zhenji dadui) of the regular Chongqing police force.31 The post of chief of police rotated between Xu Zhongqi (who had a direct connection to Chiang Kai- shek and curried favor with H. H. Kung via his second daughter, Kong Ling- jun) and Tang Yi (who, though not a member of Juntong, was close to Dai Li).32 When Dai Li wished to expand the regular detective brigade (zhenji dui) in October 1941, he simply sent a personal letter to Chief Tang urging the appointment of Shen Zui, who had been head of the Investigations De¬partment of the Changde Garrison Command. Tang Yi promptly invited Shen to take over the squad; the appointment was formally approved by Feng Yukun, the former Berkeley student who was General Dai’s agent in the Ministry of Interior; and Shen Zui took steps to transform the brigade (dui) into a major brigade (dadui).33
The Main Brigade had a roster of 179 detectives. With the additional “runners” the brigade totaled more than one thousand people. There were only about ten basic cadres from Juntong among the regular agents, who were primarily criminal investigation detectives on easy terms with their in¬formers and underworld perpetrators. Interrogations, which never involved torture, were conducted in gangster neihang hua (insiders’ talk) that regu¬lar MSB secret servicemen could not comprehend; and many meetings took place in a teahouse just outside the squad headquarters in Lailong Lane at Fuzichi.34 Overall, the regular detectives had a remarkable record of success when it came to dealing with the criminal elements of Chongqing.35
From Shen Zui’s perspective, however, the detectives were hopelessly in-competent when it came to clandestine surveillance and political policing. Leaving regular police duties in the hands of deputy brigade head Shen Xifeng, the new commander proceeded to transfer a small number of de¬tectives with higher than average cultural backgrounds into a special bri¬gade devoted solely to gathering political intelligence (dangzheng qingbao). This meant depriving the new members of their “grease” from various forms of extortion, but Shen Zui made up for it by providing the political intelli¬gence agents with cash rewards for their special Juntong duties.36
Ironically, it was the Main Detective Brigade’s more familiar sphere of ac¬tivities that led to Shen Zui’s resignation from the post. When Chief Tang Yi had some of his goods stolen by thieves, he ordered Shen Zui to recover them at once. Since theywere nottobe found in the brigade’s regular stolen property office, Shen lit a fire under his section chiefs, and within three days two thieves had confessed to the crime. The property was recovered, and Shen Zui somewhat perversely sent a formal notice to Chief Tang telling him to pick up his goods at the brigade headquarters like any other Chongqing citizen. Tang Yi, furious at the slight, sent one of his lieutenants to Shen Zui’s office. When the underling reached into his pocket to pull out Chief Tang’s calling card, Shen thought he was reaching for a gun. He drew his own pistol instead and beat the man senseless. Shen Zui then instantly went to Dai Li and told him what had happened. General Dai listened to the story and immediately ordered Shen Zui transferred out of the police de- partment and into the Garrison Command’s Investigations Department, move the local newspapers mistook as a reward for the fine job Shen had done as head of the Zhenji dadui.37
INFORMAL FRONTS AND “OUTER DUTIES”
Dai Li’s informal Chongqing apparatus ranged from a chain of “grain stores to enrich the populace” (yumin midian), which were actually outlets for hoarded rice, to photo development shops such as the Flying Rainbow Pho¬tographic Studio (Feihong zhaoxiangguan) out at Shanhuba Airport, which also took clandestine photographs of travelers suspected of anti-Chiang ac- tivities.38 Although most restaurant owners in the wartime capital had in¬formal connections with Juntong, some of the largest establishments were actually owned and managed by MSB officers. The Huanghou fandian be¬longed to Agent Xu Zhongwu, who also operated a big dance hall on Da¬tong street; the Xinweiyu on Zourong Road and the Weiyu canting on Min¬sheng Road were owned by Deputy Detective Brigade Commander Shen Xifeng; and the Kaigegui was operated by Whampoa graduate Li Yueyang, who turned the cafe into a Juntong hangout. In addition, most hotel staff members—and especially the servants working in Chongqing’s major hos-telry, the Shengli dasha—were Juntong paoerpai (runners) controlled by special agents.39
These informal fronts and subagents fell under the auspices of the Chongqing Special Zone (Chongqing tequ, also known as the Yu tequ), which was in charge of “outer duties” (waiqin) and whose field staff reported directly to the Investigations Department. The Yu (the classical name for the city of Chongqing) Special Zone was commanded by Jiang Shaomo from his headquarters at 32 Old Street (Laojie), which had been the office of the Second Department of the Southwestern Military Headquarters be¬fore the war began and was now the center of the “hideous web,” “the huge invisible network,” of Juntong’s local operations.40 The office had forty to fifty high-level intelligence agents who ran Juntong’s assets throughout the city, including members of the democratic parties and a few “renegades” (pantu) who had defected from the CCP. The zone itself was divided into five geographical groups, of which the most important was the western sub¬urbs office in charge of surveillance over the Communists’ Red Crag out¬post and the offices of Xinhua ribao. Because of the western suburbs office’s inability to gather information about the CCP at Red Crag, Zone Comman¬der Jiang suggested to Shen Zui that his agents be issued side arms (nor¬mally, undercover waiqin personnel did not carry guns) in order to provoke the Communists into firing on them. After such a melee, he reasoned, MSB personnel could rush into the CCP outpost and search the premises.41
When Shen Zui broached the plan to his boss, Dai Li was incensed, call¬ing Jiang a “fathead” and upbraiding Shen for subscribing to such a poten¬tially embarrassing scheme. “You’re making trouble [Ni zai hunao]! If our struggle with the Communist Party depends upon these methods, will we be able to attain our goal? If somebody is shot to death, then it will be consid¬ered that he died in vain. If he’s wounded, then he deserves it! You are not permitted to make a decision along the lines you’ve just laid out.”42
Thus, when it came to actual political surveillance by regular Juntong agents, Dai Li’s headquarters exercised relatively tight control. But the MSB displayed much less constraint where “peripheral elements” (waiwei fenzi) were active. This included almost the entire city of Chongqing, which was blanketed with informants and spies eager to uncover suspected “progres¬sives” in order to protect their meager salaries as Juntong paoerpai. Not only did these utterly undisciplined monitors use their somewhat remote con¬nections with the MSB for purposes of extortion; they also knew that un¬less they came up with at least one or two leads a year, then they would be dropped from the books. Consequently, ordinary citizens lived in con-stant fear of denunciation, knowing that they were frequently tailed the moment they left their homes and that, at the very least, nosy neighbors might finger them to higher secret police authorities when they visited friends and relatives. Meanwhile, letters, telegrams, and telephone calls were all monitored.43
CHONGQING ASSASSINATIONS
Juntong’s assassination operations extended well beyond Chongqing, and they had an unintended impact on China’s war effort that Dai Li himself could not have foreseen. Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon was the botched effort to murder Wang Jingwei after he fled Chongqing and took asylum in Hanoi, which was then still under the French colonial au¬thorities in Indochina.
The story is a familiar one to students of modern Chinese history. As¬sassins stole into the Hanoi residence of Wang Jingwei on the night of March 21, 1939. At first glance, the commando raid was successful. The Juntong agents broke into Wang’s bedroom, sprayed the room with subma¬chine gun bullets that fatally punctured the inhabitant’s sleeping body, and fled. However, for unknown reasons that night Wang had traded rooms with his private secretary, Mr. Zeng Zhongming, who died in his place.
At the time Nationalist authorities denied any complicity in the act, and many years later Chiang loyalists continued to claim that the Generalissimo had no knowledge of the matter. Chen Lifu insisted, for example, that even Dai Li was not involved:
Who killed Zeng Zhongming? I don’t know. People outside said that Dai Li killed him. I doubt this. If it was Dai Li, how could he have done such a thing on his own authority? He should not have! Who can tell who may have di¬rected him. I doubt that it was Dai Li. Have I any proof? Mr. Chiang seldom— never—wanted to kill anyone. Never? I cannot recall that he ever did.44
But Dai Li did command the operation.45 And the effect of the botched murder was at the very least to drive Wang Jingwei into the arms of the Jap¬anese, eventually leading to the formation of a puppet regime in Nanjing.
In Chongqing itself, assassination was part of a general pattern of “disap-pearance” that literally erased dissidence in China’s wartime capital. For¬eigners, even astute journalists like Israel Epstein, were hardly aware of this selective terrorism, though now and then they sought diplomatic interven¬tion to save Chinese who came to them for protection from the secret po- lice.46 However, the foreign community, and especially General Wedemeyer and the U.S. State Department, were quite familiar with one of the most in¬famous cases of Juntong kidnapping: the disappearance of Fei Gong.47
In the spring of 1944, Professor Fei Gong of Zhejiang University (which had relocated itself in Guizhou’s Meitan during the war with Japan) ac¬cepted an invitation from Fudan University to teach in Chongqing. A histo¬rian educated in the United States, Fei had earlier endorsed a statement by Chinese intellectuals deploring the tyrannical dictatorship that ruled “Free China.” Now that he was in the wartime capital, just under the noses of the secret police, he came to fear for his own safety and lived virtually in seclu¬sion. Early on the morning of March 5, 1945, however, Professor Fei left his home in the company of a Fudan student escort to attend a conference at Beipei Hot Springs, a short distance by boat from Chongqing. While they were waiting to board the ferry at Qiansimen, the student clambered up the wharf to buy some breakfast. When he returned, Professor Fei had disappeared.48
After Fei Gong failed to show up at the conference, Fudan University authorities reported his disappearance to the Garrison Command, who responded by hauling in the hapless student for questioning. During the following week, rumors began to multiply about Fei’s disappearance. Had he simply fallen off the dock by mistake or had he been kidnapped by Dai Li’s agents and whisked off to a secret detention camp? Government spokes¬men vehemently repudiated the latter, but both the general public and the American embassy discounted these denials.49
In educational circles, Fei Gong’s disappearance crystallized the insecu¬rity that haunted many intellectuals who were fearful of their fate in the hands of Chiang Kai-shek’s secret police. Forty other professors who had studied with Professor Fei in the United States signed a letter of protest ad- dressed to General Wedemeyer, who consequently expressed official Amer¬ican concern to the Generalissimo himself.50
Chiang had already asked Dai Li to look into the matter, and General Dai had subsequently held a meeting with Ye Xiufeng, the head of Zhongtong, and Zhang Zhen, the commander of the Military Police.51 Neither of them, Dai claimed, had arrested Fei Gong. In the meantime, Wedemeyer had or¬dered Milton Miles to investigate the case personally. Miles reported this as¬signment to Dai Li; and while Miles called upon Lieutenant Commander Clark, a former New York police detective, for help, Dai assigned Shen Zui (who was identified to the Americans as a well-known Shanghai detective) as Juntong liaison.52
The investigation team followed a number of fruitless leads. Zhu Kezhen, the president of Zhejiang University, suggested they check the roster of all government jails and lockups. But when they did so, with Fei Gong’s photo¬graph in hand, they were told no such person had been seen. A survey of police records yielded the same negative result. Because a Zhejiang Univer¬sity student claimed to have seen Professor Fei in a Buddhist monk’s attire in Wushan county, the detectives spent two weeks visiting twelve different mountain monasteries in that district, without finding a trace of the missing professor. Clark and Shen Zui even went downriver to examine ten “float¬ers” that had washed up on the tributary’s banks, but none of the bloated corpses resembled Fei Gong in the slightest. In the end, rumor had it that Professor Fei had been killed at Chongqing’s SACO prison and his body dis¬solved in a pool of nitric acid. Shen Zui never explicitly refuted this rumor. But, writing under a Communist regime that would have welcomed such a grisly indictment of the Nationalist secret police, he did maintain long after Fei Gong’s disappearance that the mystery would remain forever unsolved.53
COMMUNIST ACTIVITIES IN SICHUAN
The range of Communist opposition to Nationalist rule was different from location to location. Chengdu, for example, was a much more active seat of CCP activities than Chongqing. During the fall of 1940 the Chengdu region endured poor harvests because of the previous spring’s drought. The usual rice hoarding followed, along with attendant food riots. Whether the CCP instigated them or not, Dai Li promptly classified these as Communist dis¬turbances, which gave him carte blanche to order his men in the Investiga¬tions Department of the Chengdu field headquarters to round up as many CCP members as they could.54 This dragnet yielded Luo Shiwen, who was in charge of the Chengdu administrative branch of the Eighth Route Army and senior editor of Xinhua ribao, along with a key leader of the Chengdu branch of the Communist Party, Che Yaoxian. Both men were savagely tor- tured but refused to submit. They were eventually remanded to Chongqing. The remaining captured Communist leaders, more than ten of them, were buried alive by Liu Chongpu, head of the Chuankang district brigade of Juntong.55
The Chengdu roundup constituted an early coup for Juntong in Si¬chuan, supposedly manifesting MSB’s far-reaching effectiveness through¬out wartime China.56 Yet in Chongqing proper, Dai Li’s organization seemed to be less than entirely competent when it came to keeping track of under¬ground Communists in the wartime Nationalist capital.57 According to Shen Zui (who, for political reasons of his own, consistently deprecated Juntong’s effectiveness vis-à-vis the ever-alert CCP), the Investigations Department of Juntong’s Chongqing headquarters was hamstrung from the very beginning because all it had to rely upon for intelligence were “shady characters” from the lower reaches of society plus a few middle- or lower-level members of the various democratic parties. How was the MSB going to keep some sense of control over the activities of figures such as Guo Moruo, Tian Han, and Cao Yu? All that Juntong could really hope for was to mount competent sur¬veillance operations and have their agents periodically check ( fucha) on the public reports of these socially much higher-ranking figures.58
This is not to say that there were no successes in Juntong’s ongoing fight against the CCP, the Second United Front notwithstanding. As the head of the Chongqing Garrison detective squad (zhenji dui), Shen Zui was ever eager to capture Communist Party members; and when he did so, as hap¬pened during a raid on a small iron factory on the North River, his success was well rewarded.59 But as often as not false rumors of purported Commu¬nist activity either ended in clumsy but vicious incriminations of innocent parties—as in the Qi River case during the winter of 1940, when Juntong interrogators mutilated or killed more than five hundred suspects under torture60—or in a flurry of orders from the presidential palace that ended with the determination no subversion had taken place at all.61
The major target of Juntong scrutiny was CCP headquarters at Red Crag next to Hualongqiao. The MSB established a special investigations office nearby under Duan Chutian, but Dai Li’s men found it difficult to sort out just who was visiting the Communist lair under their noses.62 Later the melo¬dramatic novel and movie Red Crag (Hong yan) made much of the National¬ist secret service’s ineptitude, while paradoxically portraying MSB (or its successor, the Bureau to Preserve Secrets) as a cruel and redoubtable en¬emy organization responsible for numerous victims’ deaths.63
Part of the message of Red Crag was the exposure of Juntong’s U.S. back¬ers, embodied in the ominous presence of the American “Special Advisor,” who stood behind the scenes of torture as a figure determined “to squeeze fat out of human bones.” 64 That anti-American message in turn blended with a conviction of indomitable Communist victory, consonant with the Korean War fever of the early 1950s. As the novel’s hero, Xu Yunfeng, tells Mao Renfeng, “Armed with Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought, the invincible Chinese people and the Communist Party will wipe out all re¬actionaries, including your pack of Yankee-nurtured secret agents!”65
COMMUNIST SECURITY
The government-run arsenals were under special scrutiny by the MSB, which controlled the Guard and Investigation Department (Jingwei jicha- chu) of the army’s ordnance section.66 Consequently, underground Com¬munist activists devised elaborate recognition devices and codes—similar to secret society cues—to maintain communication with one other. Trian¬gular handkerchiefs, square pieces of cloth folded into three, white bands under wristwatches, and special greetings (clasping the left elbow with one hand while extending the right to form the symbol for eight, touching the nape of one’s neck or the lobe of the ear, and so forth) were all used by CCP supporters to inspire each other to “fight to the death, never be taken pris¬oner . . . , not consider your parents, simply follow the public duty.” 67
These were all weapons of the weak under Chiang’s sprawling police state. But as much as CCP members conscientiously formed cells within the factories of Free China, the Communists’ highest authorities were far more interested in targeting the state military and security services of the GMD regime. By January 1942, Zhou Enlai—with his Chongqing office open un¬der the Second United Front—claimed to have placed more than five thou¬sand secret agents in Sichuan, Yunnan, and Guizhou.68 He and Kang Sheng had also managed to infiltrate Chiang’s intelligence and counterespionage units at the highest level.69 Nationalist lieutenant general Yan Baohang, at the head of his own espionage ring under Zhou and Kang, was a chief mil¬itary strategist for Chiang Kai-shek.70 General Yan provided Moscow with details of Hitler’s Barbarossa Operation; he filmed the Chinese military’s entire battle of order of the Japanese in Manchuria; and he informed Stalin of Japan’s impending attack upon Pearl Harbor.71
In another stunning penetration, Zhang Luping’s infiltration of Juntong communications exposed hundreds of radio stations and thousands of Jun- tong operators to the CCP—a debacle that at the time may even have pro¬pelled Dai Li toward an alliance with the Americans in search of better counterespionage measures.72 One of the most notable cases of infiltration occurred later, during the final stage of the Civil War. At the time of the Huaihai Campaign, the Anhui station of Juntong (now renamed the Baomiju) was directed by Tang Yukun.73 One of the chief units under his command was the Juntong office at Zhengyangguan, where its supervisor, Liu Huisheng, was engaged in bringing together local peace preservation corps and miscellaneous military units to form the 110th Army under the control of Liao Yunsheng, a Whampoa graduate.74
Tang suspected Liao might be disloyal and so ordered Liu Huisheng to keep a close watch over him. Liu promptly informed Liao Yunsheng of Jun- tong’s surveillance. At the same time, Liu Huisheng himself was approached by a Communist intelligence officer, Zhang Gongxia, who induced Liu to switch sides and persuade Liao Yunsheng to secretly defect.75 Thereafter, Liu Huisheng regularly provided Juntong intelligence reports to CCP un¬derground agents, transferred radio equipment to insurgent mountain guerrillas, and through Liao Yunsheng managed to keep the 110th Army out of armed conflict with Communist forces.76
CHIANG KAI-SHEK’S DOMESTIC FOES
Dai Li and his men were thus wary of conspiracies within the regime itself. The most dramatic of these occurred in December 1943, when the Gener¬alissimo was in Cairo. A group of young generals plotted not only to over¬throw Chiang but to depose He Yingqin, Dai Li, H. H. Kung, the Chen brothers, and senior officials particularly known for their corruption and ineptitude. Dai Li’s agents got wind of the scheme before the cabal could act. The collusion was said to involve between two and six hundred officers. Sixteen generals were consequently executed.77
At the height of his power in 1944, Dai Li—in addition to being full di¬rector of the Military Statistics Bureau — controlled the following organs: the Second Department (Di’er ting) of the Garrison Command ( Junling bu); the Sixth Group (Diliu zu) of the President’s Escort Office (Shicong- shi); the Guards Group (Jingwei zu); the Special Inspection Department (Tejianchu) of the Military Affairs Commission; the Unified Control De¬partment of Water and Land Communications (Shuilu jiaotong tongyi jian- cha chu) of the MAC; the Police Guards Control Department ( Jingwei jicha chu) of the Ordnance Office (Binggong shu); the Special Operations Army (Biedong jun) of the MAC; the Loyal and Patriotic Army of the MAC; the police stations, police training units, and checkpoints of each province, city, and locale throughout “Free China”; the Southwestern Transport Police Department (Xi’nan yunshu jingwu chu) of the MAC; military attachés and assistant military attachés attached to each embassy; and the Chinese Police Study Association (Zhongguo jingcha xuehui).78
By the spring of 1944 Dai Li was not only anticipating civil war with the Communists; he was actively making preparations to reassert central gov¬ernment authority in north China by recruiting puppet officials to fight against the CCP once the Japanese were defeated.79 According to the U.S.
State Department, “General Dai is reliably quoted as stating that the com¬munist question is of more importance than that of Japan insofar as China is concerned.” 80
As far as the American military authorities were aware, the most worri¬some aspect of Dai’s determination was the possibility that Miles’s SACO arms were being used against the Communists. This concern was supported by a growing awareness in Chongqing that Miles had coupled his personal feud against the OSS with Dai Li’s claim that the Office of Strategic Services was collaborating with the CCP. In July, for example, Miles accused the OSS of air-dropping submachine guns to “Communist plainclothesmen” in Shanghai.81 He also insisted that a perusal of Dai Li’s intelligence files proved that American Foreign Service officers such as John Carter Vincent “were sacrificing the Chinese Nationalists and were not acting in the best in¬terests of . . . the United States.” 82
This concern about SACO intervention in China’s imminent civil war was also fueled by Yan’an’s complaints that the Nationalists were turning lend- lease arms against them.
Before late summer 1944 [the Communists’] complaints [that the U.S. was turning lend-lease arms against them] were almost certainly pure invention intended to forestall any such diversion of lendlease. But by late summer 1944, Navy Group, China, benefitting by the increased flow of tonnage over the hump, began to receive several tons a month of hump tonnage Navy
Group, China, worked closely with General Dai Li’s secret police, and Wede- meyer believed they had issued supplies without accounting for them.83
According to the official U.S. Army history of the war:
In June 1945 the Communists again complained about the misuse of lend- lease. Ambassador Hurley thought that Yan’an was mischievously trying to stir up civil war, but Wedemeyer’s G5 believed otherwise, persuading their com-mander to investigate the possibility “that Navy Group, China, had joined in the emerging Chinese civil war.” 84 General Wedemeyer subsequently ap¬pointed a board of representatives of G1, G2, G3, and Navy Group, China, un¬der the chairmanship of G5.85
The board reported on August 22 that there was no “satisfactory evi¬dence” that Navy Group, China, personnel had been deployed alongside Nationalist or “loyal patriotic troops” against the Communists, though they “may [have been] used in engagements if the Communists interfered with operations of the units against the Japanese.” 86 The board went on to note, however, that American equipment had been used “at least defensively” against the Communists, that equipment had been furnished to Dai Li un¬der other than lend-lease procedures, and that no adequate record cur¬rently existed of the transfers made.87
SECRET SERVICE REPRESSION IN SOUTHWESTERN CHINA
A series of demonstrations and riots erupted throughout February1945 in Chongqing. Dai Li and the Chen brothers were determined to suppress them ruthlessly. Nationalist secret police forces raided CCP headquarters, disrupted meetings held to celebrate the work of the People’s Political Con¬sultative Conference, and physically assaulted members of the liberal Chi¬nese Democratic League (Zhongguo minzhu tongmeng).88
In the eyes of Democratic League leaders like Luo Longji, Dai Li’s forces were pitted against the rising force of civil society. “The struggle of the Chi¬nese people to free themselves of secret police, local corruption and op¬pression, and impositions on their right to freedom of speech, assembly, press, etc., will be a long and hard one Organizations for safeguarding
civil liberties are now springing up in many of the large cities of China
Organizations such as these will undoubtedly grow more widespread through the country as time goes on, but the secret police may simultane¬ously grow more daring and ruthless. The reactionaries and their secret po¬lice are now beginning their last stand, but in the end they will be swept away by the irresistible forces of history and the people’s will.”89
One of the most prominent members of the Chinese Democratic League was Li Gongpu, who had been a passionate supporter of the “seven gentle¬men” (qi junzi) arrested on November 22, 1936, for opposing Chiang Kai- shek’s annei rangwai policy. Li had continued his anti-Chiang activities in Kunming during the war and was regarded by the right wing of the Guo- mindang as a “left-wing trouble-making element” (zuoqing de daoluan fenzi). Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, was by 1945-46 a hotbed of rad¬ical student activism because warlord Long Yun refused to obey Chiang’s di¬rectives to crack down on the liberals, because the Democratic League was unusually strong in Yunnan, and because there was an unusually large num¬ber of students attending the four universities in exile there that made up Southwest United University (Xinan lianda). The reaction of the liberals, therefore, was explosive when, on the evening of July 11, 1946, gunmen shot down Li Gongpu on the streets of Kunming.90
CHIANG’S LOSS OF LEGITIMACY
As protests spread throughout the province, and indeed all over China, the regime prepared to transfer the Second Army from Dali to help Huo Kaizhang (commander of the Yunnan garrison) put down the movement. The wisest counsel would have been to attempt to assuage the liberal left, and Chiang Kai-shek maywell have contemplated that course of action from his summer retreat on Lushan. But by now Dai Li would be dead, and the various branches of his roguish secret services increasingly out of control. At one o’clock on the afternoon of July 15, a funeral ceremony was held for Li Gongpu in the main auditorium of Yunnan University. The major or¬ganizer of the mournful commemoration was Wen Yiduo, poet, professor, and deputy of the Democratic League. After the ceremony was over, Wen Yiduo held a press conference at the offices of Minzhu zhoukan (Democratic Weekly). There he openly accused Chiang Kai-shek of plotting the assassi¬nation himself.91
A little after five P.M. Wen Yiduo and his son, Wen Lihe, left the press conference to return to their home in the Southwest University teachers’ residential compound at Xicangpo. By the gateway to the complex four men lurking in ambush shot Wen Yiduo in the head. His son threw himself across the poet’s body, and he too was hit by a bullet. The assailants fled in a jeep parked nearby.92
The nation was shocked. Perhaps no other single postwar incident did more to galvanize elite public opinion against Chiang Kai-shek’s regime than Wen Yiduo’s heinous murder, the repercussions of which extended even to the U.S. Navy, which was accused of supplying Dai Li’s onetime thugs with specially silenced weapons.93 Even Chiang Kai-shek realized that his as¬sassins had gone too far, which is why within days he began sending senior military figures into Kunming to conduct damage control.94
The key investigators were Juntong officials themselves: Tang Zong, chief of the General Department of Police Affairs (Juntong ju jingcha zongshu shuzhang); and Cheng Yiming, head of the Investigation Department (Ji- chachu) of the Song-Hu Garrison Command’s police division. From the very start of the investigation Tang Zong made it clear to Cheng Yiming that he was not to look into the assassination of Li Gongpu, which strongly sug¬gests that Chiang Kai-shek had ordered that killing himself.95
The key to the investigation was the jeep, which had left at the murder scene tire impressions and at least one witness who had noted the number of its license plate. Cheng Yiming quickly determined that the assassination had been perpetrated by four agents from the Investigation Department ( Jichachu) of the Yunnan Garrison Command. The team chief was an agent named Xiong Guangfu, and he had been acting under the direct or¬ders of the garrison commander, Huo Kuizhang.96
Cheng Yiming dutifully reported his conclusions to Tang Zong in a meet¬ing at the Juntong (now the Baomiju) guesthouse. Tang remained lost in thought for some time, then finally asked, “What do you think I ought to do about this case?” Cheng suggested two courses of action. First, the “old man” (lao xiansheng) should be told that the case had been broken, and that the four assassins were all soldiers. Hence the proceeding should be assigned to the military police for investigation and prosecution. Second, since Tang Zong was both a fellow townsman and a Whampoa classmate of Huo Kuizhang, he should ask General Huo to report his involvement directly to Chiang via the Baomiju transmitting station.97
Once the case was in the hands of the military police it fell under MP commander Zhang Zhen’s purview. General Zhang agreed to assume full responsibility for the matter and suggested the following cover story. Two military policemen whose duty it was to protect the Generalissimo had at¬tended Li Gongpu’s funeral and the ensuing press conference. They were supposedly so outraged when they heard Wen Yiduo attack the guojia yuan- shou (head of state) in person that they followed Professor Wen home, drew their pistols, and shot him. Chief of Staff Gu Zhutong was asked to commu¬nicate with Chiang at Lushan and get his permission for this ruse. When the Generalissimo agreed, the military police released the names of two of their soldiers, Li Wenshan and Tang Shiliang, as the assassins, and called for their public trial.98
This was the story that was released to the public by the Central News Agency on August 25 and that led to the execution of the two MPs for Wen Yiduo’s murder. Ultimately, however, Chiang Kai-shek failed tobe reassured by this deception, fearing that the conspiracy might ultimately unravel and unmask his role. To forestall exposure, the real murderers were placed un¬der house arrest, Huo Kuizhang was dismissed as Yunnan garrison com¬mander, and Kunming police chief Gong Shaoxia was forced to retire.99 Yet all of this backing and filling failed to erase the public memory of Wen Yiduo’s martyrdom by a cruel and tyrannical regime, illegitimately ruled by secret policemen whom the Generalissimo could barely restrain.100
Chapter 25
Falling Star
Seasoned plans and master moves;
All’s divinely done.
LUO GUANZHONG, Three Kingdoms, 11
FEAR AND PARANOIA
Diana Lary has singled out the ubiquitous sense of personal insecurity as a primary cause of political instability in Republican China.
In his fumbling way, Chiang Kai-shek identified internal insecurity as China’s key problem, hence his insistence on going after the Communists. He failed, however, to identify the key cause of insecurity—not Communist agitation, but an uncontrolled and unpredictable military. His failure to change the cli¬mate of insecurity . . . kept much of the Chinese population hostages to fear.1
The fascinating but chilling dread of wartime espionage, when added onto the many-layered foundation of covert conflict between the Nationalists and Communists during the Nanjing decade, created a legacy of fear and suspicion that approached paranoia. Indeed, it is difficult to comprehend how plausible the tales of Nationalist intrigue were during the Great Pro¬letarian Cultural Revolution of 1966-76—when so many were detained, beaten, and even killed as enemy “spies”—without visualizing the long back¬ground of espionage and counterespionage that engrossed the Chinese during the 1930s and 1940s.2
The police dog played a persistent role in the imaginary of terror and counterterror.3 ItwasDaiLi, a “hound and horse” himself, who first brought American-trained German shepherd police dogs into China, and the image of the snarling canine thereafter infiltrated cinema and television portray¬als of the secret police. In a movie about the Communist underground in Jiangxi during the 1930s, the Ganzhou secret police chief uses an attack dog to try to track down two CCP agents responsible for killing a Guomindang stool pigeon. The police dog is allowed to sniff the dagger used in the mur¬der before it is taken into a bathhouse where the Communist agent man¬ages to smother his scent by bathing in a steam room and later soaking him¬self in wine. And in a segment from “Four Generations under One Roof” (Si shi tong tang), the Lao She television drama popular in the 1980s, the Japa¬nese kempeitai (military police) in Beijing use a police dog to arrest a resis¬tance hero. The dog is shown viciously attacking the patriotic resister.
To the Communists in Yan’an, the campaigns against subversion were both a legitimate response to Dai Li’s persecution and an effective vehicle for mass compliance and party unification within the CCP itself.4 Chairman Mao's rectification campaign of 1942-43 was stimulated by the trauma of the case of Wang Shiwei, who was accused of being an enemy agent. As the campaign spread within the party’s lower ranks and eventually spilled over into the public, common citizens came to believe that they existed in a world peopled with spies and secret agents, including even themselves. That is, more than 90 percent of the individuals who initially confessed their guilt at mass counterespionage rallies during the Yan’an campaign were—and this is according to the Communists themselves—innocent of the charges.5
DAI LI AND THE DIXIE MISSION
Fear of conspiracies infected U.S. policies in wartime China as well. During the last year of the war the OSS submitted a plan to General Donovan to arm Yan’an’s Chinese Communist guerrillas to fight the Japanese.6 Colonel David Barrett was ordered to present the Army’s proposal to Mao.7 Richard Heppner, head of the OSS in China, assigned his deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Willis Bird, to take the plan to Yan’an, where he and Barrett arrived on December 15, 1944, as commanders of the “Dixie Mission.” Shortly afterwards Dai Li got wind of the plan, and Miles was ready to brief Hur¬ley about this clandestine contact when the American ambassador visited Happy Valley in January 1945.8
During Hurley’s visit to SACO headquarters, where the ambassador was greeted with pomp and circumstance while being entertained at dinner by Dai Li, Miles persuaded the Oklahoma oilman that a massive conspiracy was being undertaken by U.S. State Department officers to send American troops and weapons to the Communists.9 Miles also offered the ambassador the use of SACO’s Navy radio communications link with Washington in order to bypass the American embassy in Chongqing, which was presum¬ably infiltrated by fellow travelers determined to defeat Chiang Kai-shek. On January 15, 1945, Hurley reported to President Roosevelt that he had learned from SACO and Dai Li that there was a plan to use U.S. para¬troopers to lead Communist guerrillas.10 In the ambassador’s opinion this amounted to recognition of the Communists and approval of their objec¬tive to destroy the Nationalist regime.11 Hurley’s further denunciation of the Foreign Service “China hands” who argued for a more even-handed policy toward the two sides thus presaged the Cold War to come.12 According to Robert Smith, historian of the OSS:
The Generalissimo congratulated Hurley on having “purged the United States headquarters of the conspirators.” And a purge did follow. Colonel Barrett was denied a promotion to brigadier general. State Department officers John Davies and John Service were soon “Hurleyed” out of China. Only OSS emerged unscathed, perhaps because General Donovan reached the Chinese capital in time to mollify the angry Hurley.13
General Wedemeyer, in the meantime, ordered all officers in the China Theater not to assist, negotiate, or collaborate with Chinese political parties in any way whatsoever.14
AFTER THE JAPANESE SURRENDER
On the eve of the Japanese surrender Dai Li and Miles left Chongqing for Zhejiang, where they set up an advanced SACO headquarters at Chun’an under Mao Sen.15 Dai Li’s practice in Zhejiang was to use puppet troops to maintain order in the province.16 He did this by employing the authority of the Military Affairs Commission to appoint former collaborators such as Ding Mocun (governor of Zhejiang under the Wang Jingwei regime), Zhou Fohai (vice president of the puppet executive yuan), and Li Junlong (mayor of Shanghai) officers responsible for maintaining “local law and order” (di¬fang zhian) in the province.17 At the same time,
the American side agreed with the Military Statistics Bureau to move all of the special services armed military units to the southeastern region and then rush to seize major cities such as Hangzhou, Shanghai, and Nanjing. The students then in the special police training courses of SACO were to be concentrated in Beiping and Shanghai, and changed into special police units[tejingban]
The special services armed military units belonging to SACO were divided up and redesignated communications police troops [jiaojing budui], which later participated in the Civil War.18
SACO military elements under Wang Lepo, Chen Anglin, and Ruan Qing- yuan were poised to enter Hangzhou and Shanghai the moment the enemy surrendered.19
Once Japan capitulated, these units, along with forces under the Chong- ming pirate Zhang Guifeng, moved into Shanghai to “sanitize” the city.20 The advanced SACO headquarters was thereupon moved to 7 Avenue Dou- mer in the former French Concession and put under the nominal command of Dai Li and the actual control of his deputy Li Chongshi. This entrench¬ment took place just as Nationalist general Tang Enbo’s Third Army con¬solidated its formal occupation of China’s largest city.21
The same general pattern occurred in north China, where Dai Li moved quickly to prevent units of the Eighth Route Army and the New Fourth Army from accepting the surrender of Japanese troops.22 Juntong officials in the Huabei MSB such as Wen Qiang, Zhang Zhenwu, and Chen Xianzhou were given the power to appoint puppet military commanders to special posi¬tions to take over territory from the Japanese and preserve local order.23 Dai Li also met the Nationalist minister of communications, banker Zhang Jia'ao, in Beiping on December 3-4, 1945, to plan for the reorganization of twenty-five thousand members of his Loyal and Patriotic Army into rail¬road police to monitor and control the communications network of the northeast.24
THE NORTHEASTERN DEPARTMENT
Early in 1946 Wen Qiang was assigned to serve as chief of the Northeastern Administrative Department (Dongbei banshichu) of Juntong, which oper¬ated under the cover of the Northeastern Field Headquarters Inspectorate (Dongbei xingyuan duchachu).25 As a core group, it worked closely with Li Zongren, who was then serving as chief of the Chinese Nationalist War Zone headquarters in Beiping.26 The Northeastern Department’s jurisdiction ex¬tended from Beiping and Shanhaiguan all the way to Jinzhou and Xin- cheng. This was a particularly critical post because both Nationalist and Communist military commanders were racing to seize Chengde in order to take over Shenyang.27 The Guomindang won that particular contest, and once Shenyang was theirs Dai Li proceeded to set up a branch of the North¬eastern Department under the public rubric of the Oriental Cultural Re¬search Society, which was ostensibly headed by a former president of North¬eastern Zhongzheng University but directly controlled by Wen Qiang.28 All Japanese defectors to Juntong reported to this unit, which provided them with identity cards, passports, and travel documents.29
The Shenyang branch office of the MSB also controlled a secret com-munications unit—the Special Research Society (Teyanhui)—that em¬ployed more than twenty Japanese cryptanalysts who had served in the Imperial Army’s expeditionary headquarters monitoring Communist com¬munications from Yan’an.30 Captured in Beiping, they were transferred to Shenyang and housed behind the old East Asia Cigarette Factory (Dongya yancao gongchang) on Heping Road.31 Their radio antenna on the north side of Zhongshan Park was tuned to Yan’an, yet they were in the end un¬able to break the PLA codes, despite their interception of hundreds of wire¬less transmissions. Wen Qiang (who was temporarily recalled to Beiping in June 1946 after Dai Li’s death) eventually ordered the unit closed down, and he sent the Japanese cryptographers back to their home islands.32
Though a fair portion of the Northeast Department’s energy was devoted to countering the Communists, most of their effort was directed toward re¬cruiting Japanese residents and prisoners of war in Manchuria as intelli¬gence agents.33 The Japanese Management (Ri guan) office, which was part of the Japanese and Korean Affairs Group (Ri-Han zu) within the Northeast Department, was ostensibly a repatriation office. However, it encompassed a secret service organ headed by Liu Zhize and Zhang Rui, who had man¬aged to entice out of hiding the chief Japanese intelligence officer in Man¬churia, Fukuda Tokujiro.34
At the time, it was believed that as many as 100,000 members of the Kwantung Army were ensconced in the Changbai Mountains; and a spe¬cial office, the Japanese Army Surrender Unit (Ri jun zhaoxiang zu), was opened in Baoan to repatriate them. Under its aegis General Fukuda orga¬nized a Japanese work team that actually went into the hills in search of errant Japanese military units whom they hoped to persuade to surrender. In October 1946 Wen Qiang also formed a vanguard military liaison group composed of intelligence teams from Juntong, Zhongtong, Sanqingtuan (Three People’s Principles Youth Corps), and the Guoji wenti yanjiusuo (International Research Center). This liaison group not only supervised a Japanese special services team that supplemented General Fukuda’s work in the Changbai Mountains; it also arranged for a number of Japanese war criminals to be released to work on the side of Nationalist intelligence.35
A key figure in this arrangement was Niizato Ichiro, who was contacted by Zhang Rui in Shenyang. Niizato was the Manchurian representative of the Imperial Family Alliance, a royalist group dominated by the emperor’s younger brother and claiming the allegiance of many members of the Kwan- tung Army who remained in hiding in the Changbai Mountains. Niizato not only made known to Wen Qiang some of the units’ locations; he also enter¬tained with him the possibility of using surrendered Japanese troops against the Communists in Manchuria.36
A final element in the plan to establish close connections with the Japa¬nese was to found a Tokyo branch of the Nationalist Party (Riben Guomin- dang). In July 1946 Juntong sent a number of Japanese agents back to Tokyo to form an Oriental Cultural Research Association (Toho bunka kenkyujo) as a front for this operation. Ultimately, the MSB hoped to establish its own Chinese Liaison Office in Occupied Japan with Zhang Rui serving as its mil¬itary attaché. Because of the Nationalist defeat in the Civil War, these plans came to naught.37
EXONERATION
As early as January 1944 the Chongqing government hinted that “in exten¬uating circumstances” members of the Wang Jingwei regime might receive a pardon.38 The most salient example of this clemency was Chiang Kai-shek’s sparing Zhou Fohai’s life by changing his death sentence to life imprison¬ment on March 26, 1947. Zhou died less than a year later in Nanjing’s Tiger Bridge (Laohuqiao) Prison, but he had earned those extra eleven months of existence by dint of having helped Dai Li during the war while also main¬taining order in the lower Yangzi region once the Japanese surrendered.39
During the initial settlement of wartime debts, Dai Li personally exoner¬ated a number of prominent collaborators, including several notorious se¬cret agents who had served the puppet intelligence service.40 In some cases, such as the incarcerated Manchukuo movie star Li Xianglan, he simply treated them with “tenderness” by granting them special privileges.41 In other instances, he used SACO to fly them into exile in America.42 One of his most notorious interventions involved the Cantonese hanjian (traitors) associated with Wang Jingwei’s widow, Chen Bijun. These collaborators, all local senators, had been incarcerated by He Yingqin at the behest of other Guangdong legislators who exposed their treachery.43 Claiming that they were “underground heroes” (dixia yingxiong) who had made “signal contri¬butions” ( feng gong weiji) to the secret war of resistance, Dai Li transferred the hanjian to a Juntong guesthouse where they were “jailed” in luxurious surroundings and were neither tried nor punished.44 In the end, about 2,720 civilian and military leaders of the Wang Jingwei regime were exe¬cuted. Another 2,300 were sentenced to life imprisonment.45
DAI LI, MILES, AND THE COLD WAR
SACO was formally dissolved on March 1, 1946, by an agreement between Pan Qiwu and the American chief of staff. All materiel was to be turned over to Juntong, while the Americans also promised to transport MSB armed units as quickly as possible to the southeastern station in order to occupy Shanghai and northern Zhejiang. The Americans also consented to ship three thousand tons of military equipment from Okinawa to Qinhuangdao while conveying graduates of SACO’s police training units to staff the Nan¬jing, Tianjin, and Beiping police forces. As Miles supposedly said to Dai Li, “The Japanese enemy is finished, but we still want to help China win a vic¬tory over yet another vicious enemy,” that is, the Communists.46
Dai Li, meanwhile, was very jaundiced when it came to the peace talks being led by General Marshall. The crucial question in the end, he said, was relative military strength. Yan’an knew this as well as Chongqing, and the Americans were naive to believe otherwise. In that respect the Communists were at an advantage because they were better able to soft-soap their posi¬tion vis-à-vis foreigners. “The Communist Party’s soft skills [ruangongfu] are stronger than their hard skills [yinggongfu],” which meant that they were better able to influence foreign public opinion.47
Nevertheless, the American public was coming increasingly to champion Chiang Kai-shek as “Free China’s” last best hope, his domestic slippage not-withstanding. When the Cold War intensified, the participation of Navy Group, China in Dai Li’s anti-Communist activities became a badge of honor, and Milton Miles began to sound more and more like a character out of Terry and the Pirates.
Writing ten years after the Korean War truce, Roy Stratton described pur¬ported leaflets (none of which seems to have survived) circulated through¬out Asia during the struggle with Japan offering “a million dollars—dead or alive” to officials, police, and underworld elements to track down SACO’s leaders, who were the enemies of both Communism and the Japanese:
The hunters were the Japanese Army and Chinese Communist forces. The hunted were Lieutenant General Dai Li, chief of Nationalist China’s secret po-lice, and his Yankee deputy, Captain (later Vice Admiral, Retired) Milton E. Miles Between them with a hundred thousand guerrillas, twenty-five thou¬sand pirates, and three thousand American technicians and instructors, the Chinese general and the American captain were giving the Japanese and Chi¬nese Communists a rough time. Along with General Claire Chennault, they headed the list of those condemned to death by Tojo and Mao Zedong.48
POSITIONING
During the spring of 1946 rumors of Dai Li’s plans abounded. Some be¬lieved that he would continue to be a loyal servitor of Chiang Kai-shek. Oth¬ers thought he might retire to his home in Zhejiang to satisfy his mother. Yet a third rumor held that he would undertake his favorite extracareer in¬terest by heading a project to dredge the Yellow River.49 None of these ru¬mors would ever be verified. What was certain, however, was that Chiang Kai-shek was planning to hold a conference of his secret service chiefs to sort out the postwar roles and functions of each of the government’s clan¬destine branches. Dai Li, who had on more than one occasion come close to being “allowed” to commit suicide by the Generalissimo, fell into a deep depression at this prospect.50 Dai was convinced that Chiang meant to use the meeting to abolish Juntong.51 As Dai told one of his closest associates, “ban jun ru ban hu” (companying with a prince is like companying with a tiger).52
Hence, in anticipation of this summit meeting of Chiang and his intel¬ligence directors, Dai Li launched a hurried campaign to muster allies throughout the country and even abroad. On February 12, 1946, General Dai took off from Chongqing in a C-47 to fly to Shanghai, Suzhou, Nanjing, Beiping, Ji’nan, and Qingdao, ostensibly to “purge traitors” (sujian) but ac¬tually in order to drum up support from key military figures such as He Yingqin for the showdown to come.53
The U.S. Navy constituted his main foreign support, of course.54 In fact, some of the Navy’s leading staff officers wished to promote Dai Li’s candi¬dacy for the chief of the Chinese admiralty.55 Admiral Cook of the Seventh Fleet more or less said as much when he was greeted by Dai Li in Beiping in March 1946.56 Dai Li consequently expended a great deal of effort on Cook’s visit, ordering his officers to arrange for special Chinese naval uni¬forms (dutifully turned out by Shanghai tailors), a guided tour of the For¬bidden City, and parties hostessed by attractive dancing partners fluent in English.57
Yet even as these preparations were underway in early March, Dai Li received a telegram from Chiang Kai-shek, forwarded by Mao Renfeng, formally enclosing the guest list of the forthcoming meeting: Xuan Tiewu, Li Shizhen, Huang Zhenwu, Chen Zhuo, Ye Xiufeng, Zheng Jiemin, Tang Zong, and Dai Li himself. Of the seven other invitees, three—Xuan Tiewu, Li Shizhen, and Huang Zhenwu—were longtime rivals of General Dai.58 Moreover, there was also a notation on the back of the telegram stating that during the Chongqing meeting, Xuan Tiewu, Li Shizhen, and Huang Zhenwu would “pummel the devil” (daogui). The note was signed “Yi Yan,” one of Mao Renfeng’s noms de guerre.59
Why was Li Shizhen’s name listed before Dai Li’s? Was not Xuan Tiewu an absolutely irreconcilable (bugong daitian) enemy of Dai’s? And were not Li, Xuan, and Huang all “elder brothers” (lao dage), being graduates of the first or second class of Whampoa, whereas Dai was their junior as a mem¬ber of the sixth class? These questions plagued Dai Li as he called for his aide, Wen Qiang, to join him at his Beiping residence for a special evening meeting.60
Wen Qiang found his boss in a state of fury. Dai Li showed Wen the telegram and then, beating his breast, he shouted:
I have toiled and labored outside, hard and bitterly, with all my heart [de¬voted] to the country and to the xiaozhang [chancellor]. I never would have thought that there would be people taking advantage of this to pummel the devil out of me, dropping stones on me when I have fallen into a well, plan¬ning to cook my goose. Family members drawing swords on each other—this is really a hell of a bamboozle. Please prepare a cable in response from me. Tell [Chiang Kai-shek] I’m in the midst of settling cases of purging traitors in the [Bei]ping, [Tian]jin, and Ning-Hu [Nanjing and Shanghai] areas. The sit¬uation is critical and no one can do it in my stead. Please extend the time limit by half a month before our return to Yu [Chongqing].61
Calming down, Dai went on to tell Wen Qiang, “At the same time, it needs to convey the opinion that if Xuan Tiewu, Li Shizhen, and Huang Zhenwu are [conspiring to] pummel the devil they’ll have to expose themselves [as conspirators to Chiang Kai-shek, who continually inveighed against fac¬tions]. But couch it in words that are tactful and mild. Don’t reveal any trace of the extent of our struggle with the others.” 62 Then Dai Li asked Wen Qiang to show him a draft of the message before it was sent off, and ordered him not to tell anyone else in Juntong about these events.63
As Wen Qiang took down Dai Li’s dictation he pondered the significance of the Generalissimo’s telegram. These were redoubtable enemies, not only of Dai Li but also potentially of Chiang himself. Was Chiang even capable of withstanding the three “elder brothers” along with Chen Zhuo, who had been more or less an equal of Chiang Kai-shek until the latter forged ahead after Sun Yat-sen’s death? And why were Zheng Jiemin and Tang Zong not informed about this matter of “pummeling the devil”? Was Mao Renfeng, Dai Li’s fellow townsman from Jiangshan, deliberately keeping them out of the loop so that he and Dai could draw together into a defensive circle? 64
Wen did not dare voice these thoughts to Dai, but he did feel embold¬ened to say that the only way to get through this kind of crisis was “to retreat in order to advance.” Dai Li asked him what he meant by this, and Wen Qiang answered by saying that the Generalissimo had thrice chosen this tac¬tic when he “went into the wilds” (xiaye) by strategically retiring from office in order to weather a crisis (nanguan). There were various ways for Dai Li to accomplish the same goal, especially since a civil war was about to erupt. If Dai were to take a trip to the United States, and the Americans were to prove to be unreliable allies in the event of an armed struggle with the Commu¬nists, then Chiang would have to ask Dai Li back, his value to the regime having increased ten- or a hundredfold.65
As Wen Qiang spoke, Dai Li gradually broke into a smile. When Wen had finished and was being escorted out of the general’s residence, Dai said, “My brother [laoxiong] has spoken well and this deserves to be taken into con-sideration, but don’t mention this to anyone else.” Wen answered by saying that if Dai Li did plan to leave the country, he hoped the general would not forget to take him along. Dai Li laughed loudly but did not answer.66
THE DEATH OF DAI LI
Dai Li may well have taken Wen Qiang’s suggestion into consideration, but not only was there insufficient time for a trip to America before the pro¬jected meeting in Chongqing; 67 Dai was eager to hurry back to Shanghai to see if his mistress Hu Die’s divorce certificate had been filed so that he and the movie star could marry.68 He also planned to fly from Shanghai to Chongqing to strip Li Shizhen of his power over the Central Police Officers Academy and to prepare to preside over the first postwar commemoration of the founding of Juntong on April 1. On March 16, Dai Li took Aero¬nautics Commission Flight 222 from Beiping to Tianjin, where he spent the night.69 The next day, however, the weather turned bad. Ignoring his pilot’s misgivings, Dai Li insisted they pump on extra fuel at Qingdao and take off for Shanghai.70 If the weather there was inclement they would proceed on to Nanjing and, if necessary, all the way to Chongqing. In addition to Dai Li and the crew there were eight other people aboard: Gong Xianhang, the head of Juntong’s Personnel Department; 71 Jin Yupo, a graduate of the General Staff School now assigned to the MSB; Ma Peiheng, a translator who had studied literature at Hong Kong University; three bodyguards; one code clerk; and a friend of Dai Li’s named Huang Shunbo. Flight 222 took off from Qingdao at 9:45 the morning of March 17, 1946.72
By the time they were airborne, the pilot, who was flying without radar, learned that Shanghai airport was socked in with a big rainstorm. He changed course for Nanjing, but the heavy rain and lightning front had reached there as well. The air force sent four planes up to try to guide him in, but the cloud cover was so low that the rescuers failed to locate Flight 222. The pilot managed to send two more messages that were picked up by the Aeronautical Commission’s radio receiver: first, that Flight 222 was turning back, and second, that it was going to attempt a landing at Nanjing after all. At 1 : 13 PM the plane transmitted that they were commencing their descent. Then the radio went dead.73
The village of Daishan nestles in the shadows of Ma’anshan (Horse Saddle Mountain) in Jiangning county about twenty li from Banqiao zhen, southwest of Nanjing. Early on the afternoon of March 17 the rain-streaked sky was bleak and gloomy, with dark clouds scudding across the forested hills. Shortly after lunch the villagers of Daishan heard the sound of an air¬plane flying much lower than usual across an area where the trees stood about ten meters (san zhang) tall. Moments later nearby inhabitants saw the aircraft crash into a tree, careen another two hundred meters, and explode against the top of the mountain with a huge boom as it burst into flames.74
There was evidently no way for the Daishan villagers to report the acci¬dent immediately to Nanjing. Nevertheless, the authorities there suspected the worst. As soon as the weather began to clear, the Aeronautics Commis¬sion, China Airways, and the American Navy all sent up airplanes to make a coordinated search. It was the American aircraft that spotted the wreckage of Flight 222 near Daishan at 8 PM.75 The Juntong team that arrived at Dai- shan later that evening easily found the remnants of the airplane at Horse Saddle Mountain, but there were no survivors.76
News of the accident was hushed up for five days. Not until March 22, after Li Chongshi, Juntong’s chief of staff, had a chance to investigate the scene of the crash, was Dai Li’s possible death announced. Dagongbao was particularly cautious about drawing a definite conclusion:
In regard to the army plane which took off from Qingdao on the 17th instant and which was found to have been crashed near Nanjing, Li Chongshi, chief of staff of the Investigation and Statistics Bureau of the National Military Council, arrived here [in Nanjing] from Shanghai yesterday [March 21] to in¬vestigate the condition regarding the doomed plane. It was learned that Gen¬eral Dai Li was also in that plane. Thus, a close concern is being felt among all quarters about his safety, but what happened to him has not yet been confirmed by concerned quarters.77
Shenbao was less tentative:
As a result of an investigation conducted by a reporter, it was learned that aboard a plane bound for Shanghai from Beiping via Qingdao, which subse-quently hit the top of the Ma’anshan hill on the southwestern outskirts of Nanjing and crashed, General Dai Li, director of the Investigation and Statis¬tics Bureau of the National Military Council, was killed. His charred body was already identified and was coffined on the 22nd, it was learned.78
In spite of this announcement of Dai Li’s accidental death, rumors in¬stantly began to spread to the contrary. There were those who believed, first of all, that his death was no accident.79 Central Daily (Zhongyang ribao) re¬ported on March 24 that “According to information released by concerned quarters, General Ye Ting, an important leader of the Communist Party who was released not long ago, was also in the plane.” During the course of the flight, Ye Ting and Dai Li supposedly got into an argument, drew their pis¬tols, and with the ensuing exchange of shots set the plane on fire.80
Others claimed that the plane crash was a case of Communist sabotage.81 Yet another speculation was that the American OSS had planted a bomb aboard the aircraft.82 According to this theory a barometric fuse or “ane- rometer” was set to go off at five thousand feet of altitude.83 Although he erred in such critical details as the place of origin of Flight 222, Stanley Lovell, inventor of many of the OSS’s spy gadgets, firmly believed that Dai Li had been assassinated in this way.
The most hated man in Chiang Kai-shek’s government was General Dai Li, the ruthless chief of the secret police, whom even the Chinese called “the Himm¬ler of China.” Assassinations and executions were so common that his name was something to be whispered. When Japan surrendered Dai Li and his staff in Chongqing boarded his plane to fly to Beiping where a great purge of all Chinese who were even rumored to have collaborated with the Japanese was to be organized. Everyone felt this would be a bloodbath without justice. Dai Li’s plane, I was later told, had risen about five thousand feet when the tail sec¬tion exploded.84
But by far the most common rumor was that Dai Li had never been aboard the plane at all that day, and thus had faked his own death in order to thwart his enemies.85
Lester Walker, in an article in Harper’s that introduced Dai Li as “China’s master spy” to the American public, wrote about the accounts of Dai Li’s death:
It was a good story, but no one believed it. The news dispatch was datelined April 1, All Fools’ Day. Just ask any Chinese his opinion today and he just laughs. “There is no way,” he says, meaning that the Chinese believe it is im- possible—that the world’s greatest spy master still bears a charmed life and cannot be killed.86
But the evidence was overwhelming that the charred remains, missing the right hand and leg in the wreck, were the corpse of Dai Li. Juntong’s own investigators confirmed their chief’s identity through a distinctive dental plate, woolen underwear shreds, and the thirty-eight caliber snub-nosed automatic pistol that Miles had given him back in Chongqing four years ear- lier.87 As Shen Zui advised General Hu Zongnan, who had suspiciously heeded the public rumors, “We told him that every angle had been investi¬gated and that we had confirmed there hadn’t been any kind of a murder plot carried out against him by anyone. It was all because of the weather and the pilot recklessly flying into the mountain and crashing.” 88
AFTERMATH
Reactions to the death of Dai Li, “trusted lieutenant of Generalissimo Chiang,” were mixed, though most responded with stunned alarm. Some felt that his passing was a great loss to China; others believed that the acci¬dent was heaven’s revenge against a man who had established concentration camps ( jizhongying) as harsh and cruel as Himmler’s worst prisons.89 While the Central Press Agency published a number of pieces extolling Dai Li’s ac¬complishments on behalf of China during the War of Resistance, other ed¬itorial writers pointed out that Dai had extended his terrorist attacks upon the Communists to the people at large.90
Chiang Kai-shek was said to have wept when he heard the news. But “lib¬eral and left-wing circles, [while] regretting the death of the patriot and anti-Japanese fighter,” hoped that the government would take advantage of this circumstance to abolish or liberalize Juntong, “which has generally been referred to as the Chinese Gestapo.” 91 As public demands to “over¬throw the secret service” (dadao tewu) were trumpeted by the left, the Shang¬hai journal Xin wenhua (New Culture) celebrated a future in which China would return to the rule of the people and an era of peaceful democracy once Dai Li’s surviving minions realized that the time had come to lay down their murderous swords and fulfill Buddhahood by glorifying individual freedom instead of suppressing it.92
Figure 25. Zheng Jiemin, Dai Li’s succes¬sor as director of Juntong. Chung-Mei he tsuo suo chih [Annals of the Sino-American Cooperative Organization]. N.p. [Taipei]: Kuo-fang pu ch,ing pao chủ, 1970.
Such pious wishes notwithstanding, Dai Li’s lieutenants were even then beginning to jockey with one another over the spoils of their master’s clan¬destine empire.93 There was a formal succession, of course. Chiang Kai-shek appointed Zheng Jiemin director of Juntong, with Mao Renfeng and Tang Zong serving as his deputy directors.94 But Dai Li was virtually irreplaceable because he had been unwilling to delegate his authority, taking such a per¬sonal involvement in so many different areas of responsibility throughout the MSB that no single one of his deputies could step into his shoes. More¬over, Juntong had grown into such a sprawling conglomerate that its indi¬vidual organizational components—and above all its economic units—had become so decentralized that even Dai Li, with his indefatigable energy, could barely hold them together by war’s end.95
The deterioration of Dai Li’s domination of these armies of the night was manifested in his agents’ abusive carpetbaggery.96 General Li Zongren de¬scribed the occupation of Beiping in 1946:
One of the most intolerable injustices foisted upon the local populace was the terrorism purposely created by the secret servicemen through their free and casual use of the term “traitor.” Their intention in doing this was to squeeze money out of innocent people. Any citizen, whether a shopkeeper or a uni¬versity professor, could be arrested at a moment’s notice merely by being charged with having been a “traitor” who had collaborated with either the Jap¬anese or the puppet government.97
After Dai’s death other secret services such as Zhongtong rushed to in¬crease their own strength and influence by taking over individual Juntong organs, especially in communications intelligence.98 At the same time, the MSB found itself forced to disaggregate many of its commercial activities. Juntong continued directly to maintain public order (zhian) and to leash political activities (minzheng), but a special “self-support plan” (ziji jihua) as¬signed economic enterprises to a large number of new business firms that were set up by MSB officers. The officers hoped to exploit their secret po¬lice connections to cow competitors for personal profit or to confiscate the corporate assets of suspected wartime collaborators.99
However, these profiteers, and even higher-up Juntong leaders with ex¬tensive field experience who claimed top-ranking perquisites, lacked the personal connections to reknit Dai Li’s ties with the underworld allies who had always abetted the secret police’s clandestine economic activities.100 The racketeers in turn lost a powerful friend and patron.101 By the time Du Yuesheng attended Dai’s memorial service as a representative of the Shang¬hai city council, land association, and chamber of commerce, the Green Gang chieftain had already forfeited his political underpinnings. When Du finally left Shanghai in 1949 for Hong Kong it was to save himself and not just “to recuperate his health.”102
THE BREAKUP OF JUNTONG
As victory over Japan had drawn near, Juntong had already begun to break down into factions.103 One major line of cleavage was the old training camp division, especially between the Linxunban and everyone else. Former stu¬dents of this first MSB class, the “special training unit” first established at Linli in Hunan, regarded themselves as the elite of the secret service (“god’s favorite ones,” tian zhi jiaozi), and thus were prepared for even more im¬portant positions after the war was over.104 But Dai Li’s death in March 1946 left them vulnerable to attack by outsiders, who dropped a number of them from the ranks when Juntong was reduced in force just as postwar inflation was overheating.105
In self-protection, Zhang Mingxuan, Wu Jusheng, and Li Baochu con¬vened a group of twenty-odd Linxunban graduates that autumn in Chongqing and founded the Lakeside Alumni Club (Binhu tongxue hui). Liu Benqin and Deng Yifu recruited another two or three hundred alumni in Nanjing.106 Although some funds were provided by Shen Zui, whom they wanted to head the club, the graduates’ economic survival depended upon their secret police jobs. Shen Zui thus recommended Li Baochu to Mao Renfeng for a position as personnel section chief; Liu Benqin as head of personnel to Tang Zong, chief of the Ministry of Defense’s Preserve the Peace Bureau (Baoanju); and Liu Ziying to the same position in the Com¬munications Police.107
Meanwhile, at the very top of what had been a unified Juntong, three provincial factions emerged: a Zhejiang clique headed by Mao Renfeng; a Guangdong faction under Zheng Jiemin, vice minister of defense; and a Hunanese group behind Tang Zong, chief of the Central Police Headquar¬ters ( Jingcha zongshu) of the Ministry of Interior.108 The three competitors could at least agree upon the need to “get a grip on cadres” (zhua ganbu) by forbidding other training unit graduates from forming their own alumni clubs. But even though Mao Renfeng formally ordered that there be estab¬lished a single “unified alumni association” (tongyi tongxuehui), he continued to serve as a “patron” (kaoshan) of the Lakeside Alumni Club by appointing former Linxunban students as provincial station chiefs: Qian Jilin for Gui¬zhou, Lu Shikun for Chongqing, Dong Shili for Xikang, and so forth.109
In any case, Juntong’s days were numbered. After losing the mainland, the Nationalist regime reshuffled the secret services. Chiang Kai-shek, after all, had substituted covert and clandestine controls for straightforward rule. Originally under the Military Affairs Commission, Zhongtong had already been renamed the Bureau of Investigation of the Ministry of the Interior (Neizhengbu diaochaju).110 Once on Taiwan, it was designated the Bureau of Investigation of the Judicial Administration (Sifa xingzhengbu diaochaju, or Sidiaoju for short), directed first by Zhang Qing’en and then later by Shen Zhiyue and Ruan Chengzhang. Juntong, on the other hand, was turned over to Mao Renfeng after VJ Day and in the summer of 1946 was renamed the Bureau to Preserve Secrets of the Ministry of Defense (Guo- fangbu baomiju).111 Relocated in Taibei, it became the Bureau of Intelli¬gence of the Ministry of Defense (Guofangbu qingbaoju), headed succes¬sively by Zhang Yanyuan, Ye Xiangzhi, Wang Jingxu, and Zhang Shiqi.112
FAMILY REMNANTS
Dai Li’s heirs fared worse. His brother, Yunlin (or Chunbang), had always been a problem sibling. A whoremaster and gambler with a vicious temper like their father, Yunlin worked as an apprentice, shop clerk, and bathhouse assistant in Jiangshan until his brother became a man of great influence. In 1936 Dai Li took Yunlin to Xi’an, where he introduced him to the chief of police, Ma Zhichao, who arranged for his appointment as head of the lo¬cal tax collection bureau. At that time, Dai Yunlin routinely “requisitioned” comely woman from the female reformatory ( jiliangsuo) to become his ser¬vants (yatou) and sexual playthings.113 After the Xi’an Incident, Dai Yunlin fled to Gansu, where he served for three months as the magistrate of Jing- tai county before peasant rebels drove him out. Once again through his
brother, he managed to gain admission to the Central Military School’s higher educational training unit, the Zhongyang junxiao gaojiaoban. Once graduated, he became head of the administrative office of Lanzhou’s Juntong.
When war broke out with Japan that summer, Yunlin fled back to the family home in Baoan; once again, through his brother’s influence, he was made a major in the Loyal and Patriotic Army. His service during the war was spotty, but he survived the turmoil handily enough to become a local police chief, style himself “Er Laoban” (Number Two Boss), and expropri¬ate enough local land (five hundred mu) to create the Yunong nongchang (Yunong Farming Estates) and become a manorial landlord.114
Dai Li’s only son, Zangyi, was said by many to resemble his father not only in mannerisms and as a calligrapher, but also as a young gambler, womanizer, and dandy (huahua gongzi). Perhaps this was why they got on so poorly together, even though Dai Zangyi depended heavily upon his fa¬ther’s support.115 The two of them had a grave falling-out over Zangyi’s mar- riage.116 In order to strengthen his connections with the League of Ten, Dai Li wanted his son to wed the daughter of Wang Tianmu. When Zangyi re¬fused, General Dai placed his son under house arrest in Nanjing and forced him to study English with Yuan Yunli, a teacher from the Hangzhou Police Academy. Madame Dai, the general’s mother, interceded and tearfully per¬suaded Dai Li to let his son return to Baoan, where Zangyi married a young Quzhou (Wangcun) woman named Zheng Xiying.117 Terrified by his fa¬ther’s temper, Zangyi dared not at first to leave Baoan, and he thereafter opened an elementary school (Shude xiaoxue, “EstablishingVirtuePrimary School”), of which he was the principal.118
The outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War slightly expanded Zangyi’s hori¬zon. Shanghai’s Zhaohe Middle School was moved out of the zone of hos¬tilities to a town called Sanqingkou, about twenty-eight Chinese li from Baoan. Soon thereafter the middle school invited him to run a theatrical troupe for its students, and Zangyi began to spend most of his time hanging around his opera company at Sanqingkou or consorting with faculty and students at the Jianguo Vocational School in nearby Xiakou. For income he mainly relied upon sinecures acquired through his father’s influence with the Jiangshan county consultative body (canyihui), the local communica¬tions police, and the board of directors of the Jiangshan Bank.119
Dai Zangyi joined in the unseemly family squabble over his father’s estate after the plane crash outside Nanjing. Zangyi greatly coveted the Packard and Buick motorcars, along with the Western-style house and garden on Pé- tain Road that General Dai had owned in Shanghai’s former French Con¬cession. The Packard fell into the hands of the Nanjing MSB station chief, but Zangyi did manage to get the keys to the Buick and the title to his fa¬ther’s villa, while preventing his maternal uncle, Colonel Mao Zongliang, from seizing one hundred gold bars that the collaborator Zhou Fohai had once presented to Dai Li as a bribe.120
Meanwhile, a more dignified opportunity appeared in the form of a $10,000 gift by Chiang Kai-shek, T. V. Soong, H. H. Kung, and Milton Miles to establish a Yunong middle school in Dai Li’s honor in a former Nation¬alist air force dormitory at Quzhou. Miles, Hu Zongnan, Tang Enbo, Yang Hu, and Jiang Shaomo all joined the board of directors, while Dai Zangyi was appointed head of school affairs, a post he used to bilk an additional $50,000 yuan out of the manager of the Hangzhou branch of the Bank of China.121
Dai Zangyi not only wished to honor his father’s memory but also to per¬petuate his father’s mission by organizing anti-Communist militia during the Civil War. For this he needed weapons. In 1946 Zangyi asked Zhang Weihan, commander of the Zhejiang branch of the Baomiju, to provide him with two hundred rifles and more than ten carbines to arm the Baoan spe¬cial services brigade, which he led with his uncle Dai Yunlin and which was equipped with a wireless and several trucks. When the tide of battle turned and the People’s Liberation Army began to move into Jiangshan, Dai Zangyi tried to escape into Fujian. The road was blocked by Communist forces, however, and he barely managed to make it back to Baoan, where he and his uncle organized a brigade of about one thousand men, many of them local bandits. The brigade divided into two forces that broke the blockade, but Dai Zangyi was run down and captured at Liujiashan near Daxitan xiang on September 9, 1949; Dai Yunlin was arrested on December 28 at Guangfeng Aofeng xiang in Jiangxi. Dai Li’s brother and son were then brought back to Jiangshan’s Sanqingkou, tried before a mass meeting, and executed.122
DAI LI’S TOMB
In early August of 1946, Chiang Kai-shek came to pay his last respects to Dai Li at his temporary resting place, the Zizhi gongdian. The Generalissimo brought Song Meiling with him, and after asking Mao Renfeng if a suitable burial place had been found, he and his wife began to walk up to the Linggu Temple. Madame Chiang Kai-shek could not finish the walk because she was wearing high-heeled sandals, and so they turned back.
Chiang personally selected his follower’s last resting place two weeks later, inspecting the Tomb of the Martyr (Lieshi gongmu) behind Sun Yat- sen’s mausoleum outside Nanjing and then climbing down the mountain with Mao Renfeng to seek out the best possible site for Dai Li’s burial. Mao and the accompanying retinue were astonished when Chiang, who was thought to be a Bible-carrying Christian, stopped and with perfectly accu¬rate geomantic knowledge explained why a particular niche east of Sun’s tomb was most propitious for housing Dai Li’s coffin.123
Milton Miles requested permission to attend Dai Li’s funeral, but Gen¬eral George C. Marshall, mindful of the looming civil war between the Na¬tionalists and Communists, forbade him to do so in an official guise.124 In¬stead, Miles took the train up from Shanghai to Nanjing in civilian clothes to witness his friend’s entombment.125 Afterwards, he wrote a letter to Dai Li’s mother expressing the “deepest of sorrow” on hearing of the death of “my elder brother, General Dai Li”:
He displayed in his writing, as well as in the hundreds of lectures I have heard him give to his colleagues, a combination of the leadership, firmness and ad-vanced thinking that is essential in the truly great leaders of a democratic country He showed at all times to me a great reverence for three people: President Sun Yat-sen, the Generalissimo, and yourself He was an out-standing leader I, who was your son’s younger brother [had wanted to at¬
tend the funeral in Baoan, but it was] impossible at this time from a practica¬ble standpoint.126
Miles concluded by offering, together with his wife Emma, to be responsible for the education of General Dai’s adopted daughter Shuzhi in America.127
Admiral Miles paid his last respects to his “elder brother” when he visited Dai Li’s tomb on March 26, 1947. That day he solemnly planted two Mei- hua trees at the entrance to the massive mausoleum, but these were up¬rooted when the tomb was despoiled and Dai Li’s remains were destroyed by Communist forces in 1949.128 Four years later, Pan Qiwu, Dai Li’s former lieutenant, wrote Miles from Taiwan that “to remember our late leader, we have a memorial hall set up on the hillside not far from Taipei. At its en¬trance I have planted two Meihua trees for you.”129
FINAL PLUMMET
In the spring of 1989 — forty-three years to the day after Dai Li’s air¬plane crashed outside Nanjing—several hundred of his former intelligence agents met in Taibei to form the San shiqi lianyihui (March 17 Joint Friend¬ship Society). True to their master’s memory, they declared the purpose of their “joint friendship” was to “attack all counterrevolutionary forces” (daji fan’geming shili). All of the society’s members were men with security back¬grounds who were convened by the former Taiwan director of intelligence, Ye Xiangzhi, and whose leader was General Dai’s onetime chief inspector, Qiao Jiacai.130
There were thus two entirely converse dimensions to the historical per¬sona of the late Dai Li. For the Communists on the mainland of China he was the very symbol of evil, a devil incarnate. For at least some of the Na¬tionalists on Taiwan he remained a heroic figure, the spymaster who might have saved China from its worst enemies. A less bifurcated perspective might better expose his complexity, but, as a Chinese friend neutrally asked when this book was drawing near to a close, “was he after all a good or a bad man?”
Dai Li was far too smoky a rogue to be captured so handily. He was at once a simulacrum of fascist terrorism, an embodiment of the modern po¬lice state, an enforcer of stern Confucian ideals, and, in his restless dreams, the fiercely ambitious heir of storied medieval strategists who traditionally emerged when Chinese empires quivered and fell. In all these guises, Dai Li was much a man of his mixed times, poised tangentially on the political cusp of tradition and modernity, certain he could seize the day and hour, but ul¬timately prey to the caprice of destiny. Remembering Dai’s own adulation of Zhuge Liang, the central and most ambiguous subject of Three King¬doms, one cannot help but recall Kongming’s ruminations when he died in 234 C.E., as he reflected upon his own efforts during an age of disorder to suppress the rebellion against Han. “Everything depends on what Heaven decrees,” Zhuge Liang resignedly said as the Northern Dipper slipped in the sky. “I have tried my best to return the heartland to Han rule. But Heaven’s wishes rule us all.” 131 Kongming’s magical charms could not save him now, and as his guiding star toppled and the enemy armies of Wei stirred nearby, the Sleeping Dragon perished in his tent. Six centuries later the poet Du Fu wrote, “The star that dropped last night upon his camp / Announced to all the master fell this day.” 132 Zhuge Liang was fifty- four, Dai Li but forty-nine.
Afterword
Daemons
I began this study of Dai Li and the Nationalist secret service more than a decade go. Off and on during those years, I could not help but ask myself why I was devoting so much effort to fathoming such a protean figure. For, if Dai Li was not wholly monstrous, then he was at best cunningly ambigu¬ous. One could admire him for his courage and competence, or respect his ability to navigate the perilous shoals of Chiang Kai-shek’s fractious court while commanding the awe and deference of his followers. But he forever remained morally equivocal, an enigma, perhaps, even to the Generalis¬simo himself.
Was it simple curiosity, then, that held my gaze so fixedly? Observing Dai Li through his contemporaries’ eyes was like watching a cobra just a room away. Gradually, I was obliged to realize that I was indirectly in the presence of a force, a daemon, who, like some Daoist magician, was capable of har¬nessing the luan (disorder) endemic to Chinese society, past and present.
And that forced me in turn to recognize that so much of my attention to Chinese history has been directed toward exposing, and hence compre¬hending and resisting, the viper’s hypnotic stare. “Social Disorder,” “Con¬flict and Control,” the reconstruction of imperial order, “Policing Shang¬hai,” Chairman Mao’s titanic will: the choice of those topics now makes perfect sense to me. In ways I still do not entirely understand, writing about the dragon’s gaze affords me the illusion of countering it.
In the end, then, I fear I find myself one of Dai Li’s unintended objects of prey. This safely distant conceit means also, of course, that by writing about Dai Li I can somehow imagine myself repulsing the daemon’s indif¬ferent glance. Thus do historians quell their remote nightmares and mute the horrors of the past. But do we sleep the better for it?
APPENDIX A
Organization of the
General Unit of Special Training
(later the Northwestern Youth
Labor Camp) in Late 1939
Headquarters (zongdui) Commander: Lieutenant General Xiao Zuolin. Head-quarters were staffed by General Xiao’s former subor¬dinates from Henan. Ninety percent of those above the rank of lieutenant (zhongwei) were members of the Fu- xingshe.
Regiment (dadui) (2) Each regiment was staffed by captains (duizhang) and first lieutenants (duifu) responsible for political and military training.1
Company (zhongdui) (5) The first, second, and third companies were under the First Regiment, the fourth and fifth companies under the Second Regiment. Each company was commanded by a captain, a political first lieutenant, and a military first lieutenant.
Platoon (qudui) (15) There were three platoons under each company. The majority of platoon commanders (quduizhang) were graduates of the fourteenth class of the Central Mili-tary Academy.
Squad (ban) (45) There were three squads under each platoon. Squad leaders (banzhang) were selected from among the stu-dents. These included “renegades” from Resistance University (Kangzhan daxue) in Yan’an, that is, former United Front “progressive” or Communist students who had filled out student investigation forms (xue- sheng diaocha biao) and “forms [showing] clues to fellow party members” (tong dang xiansuo biao) and who sub¬scribed to the doctrine of “one party, one government, one leader.” Members also included those with special political connections. The selection of squad leaders
369
was decided by the chief political instructor (zhengzhi zong jiaoguan) and the political first lieutenant.
There were also four reception centers (zhaodai suo) established to help with re-cruitment. The centers were located at Tongguan (Shanxi); in Nancun in Mianchi county (Henan), by the ferry across the Yellow River; in Lanzhou (Gansu); and in Luoyang (Henan). Each center was headed by one director (zhuren) and two secre-taries (ganshi). Many of the latter were former Kangda students turned renegades. Students were also recruited in Xi’an, and by Guomindang provincial and district branches throughout Shanxi. More than five hundred students were enrolled be-tween August 1939 and January 1940.
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