Chapter 23 Chapter 5 "Practice Operation" - Chiang's Freemasonry

The Lixing Operation Society, or Lixingshe, was so secret that few people knew of its existence between 1932 and 1937.It was always confused with its front organization as members of the "Blue Shirts", and its activities were often intrinsically linked to the propaganda camouflage and intelligence work of Chiang Kai-shek's secret service.However, the Lixing Society was the most important political organization in the so-called "Whampoa circle". Its members formed a military group that advocated fascism and was committed to implementing Sun Yat-sen's "Three People's Principles" under the leadership of the supreme leader Chiang Kai-shek.

Although its existence has been hidden for more than forty years, in its heyday, Lixingshe controlled a well-thought-out organization with more than half a million people; Training programs and high school summer camps secretly mobilize millions.Now, thanks to memoirs published in Taiwan over the past two decades, the importance of the Lixingshe is publicly recognized, and its political role during Manchukuo and the Marco Polo Bridge incident is fully recognized. The founding of the Lixingshe was actually the result of the political crisis that erupted in the summer and autumn of 1931, which eventually led Chiang Kai-shek to relinquish his government position and temporarily retire to Zhejiang. In 1930, after Feng Yuxiang, Wang Jingwei, and Yan Xishan's "Enlarged Conference Movement" failed, the Nationalist Government decided to adopt part of the appeals of the defeated rebels by convening a National Assembly and promulgating a provisional constitution.Hu Hanmin, as chairman of the Legislative Yuan, followed Sun Yat-sen's view that one-party dictatorship was the basis of political guardianship, and refused to support this proposal, which was supported by the newly elected "President" Chiang Kai-shek.Announcing this position, Hu resigned from his presidency on February 28, 1931.Chiang immediately ordered him to be placed under house arrest, and after this shocking step he was taken to Tangshan, near Nanking, for further detention.

The elders of the Kuomintang were outraged by Chiang's illegal actions. On April 30, four senior members of the Kuomintang Central Supervisory Commission—Lin Sen, Gu Yingfen, Xiao Focheng, and Deng Zeru—impeached the new president of the Nationalist Government.Four weeks later, these and other opponents of Chiang's arbitrary dictatorship—important among them were Wang Jingwei, Sun Ke, Tang Shaoyi, Chen Youren, and Li Zongren—under the protection of "Southern King" Chen Jitang, on May 28, 1931, Declared their own national government in Canton.For the next three months in the summer of 1931, the Yangtze River basin flooded, the country was politically divided in half, and war between North and South seemed imminent.Chiang Kai-shek himself believed that he and his cause were seriously threatened.His closest followers, such as Teng Jie and He Zhonghan, had to agree with this.

Teng Jie later became the first secretary-general of the Lixing Society and was an experienced student activist.He was the son of a landlord in Funing, Jiangsu. When the "May 30th Movement" broke out in 1925, he was the president of the student union of the American Protestant Vocational School in Nantong.As is the case with most missionary schools, it is there that the young are most staunchly opposed to Western cultural imperialism.When student delegations from other schools came to the school to "tandem", Teng Jie found that his own leadership was being challenged by radicals who wanted to attack the school's management.In the end, he decided, the American school should be disbanded.So that summer he chaired a meeting that resulted in the withdrawal of all the students.After securing admission to other schools, he left Nantong at 18 to enroll in the sociology department at Shanghai University.

In the autumn of 1925, Shanghai University was the enrollment center of the Whampoa Military Academy in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River.The influence of the Communist Party is very large, and Shi Cuntong is the head of the Department of Sociology.Teng Jie admired Sun Yat-sen very much, and he studied Sun's "Three People's Principles" in Nantong.Although Shi Cuntong compared Marx and the Three People's Principles in class and belittled the latter, Teng Jie joined the Kuomintang shortly after arriving in Shanghai.Teng Jie hated the Communist Party students very much, thinking that they were timid and hypocritical. In his view, their united front activities were fake.He firmly believed that the Kuomintang was not as secretive as the Communist Party, which was not good for it to organize students. After he was admitted to the Whampoa Military Academy quietly, he left Shanghai with this view and went to the south to participate in military training there.

During the Northern Expedition, Teng Jie studied at the Whampoa Military Academy in Guangzhou for a period of time. After receiving a period of military training in the central region, he went to Japan to study.This was part of Chiang Kai-shek's plan in 1928 to systematically send Whampoa graduates to Japan for further education after he first left public office.Chiang personally selected five students from the first six classes in Whampoa.Another 30 students were selected and sent a year later.So in the summer of 1931, more than 60 Whampoa children of the "principal" entered the Imperial Japanese Military Academy and various other schools, including the Army Non-commissioned Officer Academy (the West Point Military Academy in Japan, where Chiang studied), Waseda, Artillery and Cavalry School.Teng Jie was sent to Meiji University, which has a political and economics department for Chinese students.After studying hard for two years, Teng Jie spent most of it in the Ueno library. After that, he returned to China in late July 1931. At that time, the border between China and North Korea was tense due to the Wanbaoshan incident, which made it possible for the Sino-Japanese war to be full-scale. break out.Before returning home, Teng Jie hoped that the possibility of war with Japan would unite all of China.Instead, he found the nation torn apart, politics as corrupt as before he left, and politicians bent on self-interest.To mobilize the people, a new organization is needed to form a really strong party, which should have the ability to gain popular support.Thinking of the successful example of the Communist Party's underground command of student organizations during the May 30th Movement, Teng Jie drew up a plan to build a top-secret organization using Whampoa graduates as the backbone.This new organization will use the principle of "democratic centralization (to) unite a powerful organization with a unified will, iron discipline, clear division of labor, and the ability to voluntarily act" to unite outstanding youths among the military and civilians.

With this plan in mind, Teng Jie went to see his friend Zeng Kuan.Once assigned to the military department of the Nanjing Central Party Headquarters, I was very excited after hearing this idea.As a first step in this plan, he invited nine friends to dinner.All the guests are graduates of Whampoa, and two of them, Feng Ti and Deng Wenyi, who came from Hunan, are graduates of the first batch.Their Hunan identities are no small matter.The Whampoa cadets from Hunan were fully aware of their hometown's tradition of producing military strategists like Zeng Guofan and Zuo Zongtang, so they felt that they should especially take a leading role in the cause of saving the nation.With the assistance of Feng Ti and Deng Wenyi, the plan was unanimously approved, and everyone also agreed to hold a second dinner, and then each would bring another person.When they gathered for the third time, there were more than 40 people present, including He Zhonghan, an official who was in charge of the anti-communist "bandit suppression" propaganda campaign in Nanchang.