Chapter 56 Peking Activities

In April 1934, Liu Jianqun was transferred to Nanjing as the general secretary of the Fuxing Society.Zeng Kuoqing took over his position as head of the Beiping Political Training Department, and at that time Zeng had also become the leader of the local organization of the Fuxing Society.The political situation in the city was found to be unusually complex, especially with regard to the various police agencies in the capital.The chairman of the Beiping Political Affairs Committee of the Executive Yuan is none other than Huang Yu, who was in the Tanggu armistice negotiations.The mayor is Yuan Liang, Huang Yu's hometown in Zhejiang, and graduated from Waseda University in Japan.Yuan Liang worked as a police officer in Toyota and Shanghai, and served as the director of the Shanghai Public Security Bureau before coming to Beiping to take over the position of mayor.Both of them are authoritative political figures, but neither of them can do anything to control the city police chief Yu Jinhe.Yu is also from Zhejiang. He studied in Japan at the same time as Huang Yu, but he was a student at the Tokyo Gendarmerie Training Academy.

Yu Jinhe, who first served as the director of customs in Qingdao and then the director of public security there, is also a member of the Japanese-Chinese joint venture Luda Coal Mine Company. He has close ties to the Japanese and has a brave personality. Many of the people vying for the power and authority of the criminal police originally belonged to Jiang Xiaoxian, the leader of the gendarmerie.Shao Wenkai, Chiang's superior, who, as the commander of the Gendarmerie Command, had ultimate responsibility for the Gendarmerie Department, complained about this violation of his authority, but he and Liao Huaping, the special secretary of the Gendarmerie Command who was second only to Dai Li, disagreed. Both Yu Jinhe's overbearing feel powerless.

Fortunately for Zeng Kuoqing (he had to control his secret operations from Fuxingshe) Liao Huaiping was from Sichuan.When the gendarmes were ever needed to help arrest suspected members of the Fuxing Society, he could turn to Yu Liao, who was usually willing to cooperate with him. Cooperation with "external enemies" is another matter entirely.During Zeng Kuoqing's tenure in Peiping from 1934 to 1935, he knew nothing about Japanese intelligence.The work in this area was all done by two people Dai Li sent to North China as his intelligence and security representatives: Lou Zhaoyuan and Lu Qixun.Although the two were seconded to the Political Training Office, they came and left whenever they wanted, and they did not report to anyone in the local Blue Shirts organization about their anti-Japanese work or the surveillance of military personnel in the Beiping area.Now that it was assumed that they only reported their intelligence to Dai Li, Lou and Lu simply created a palpable aura of terror around them, so that the "heads" of the local military units were terrified and wary of them.

The Japanese naturally learned about the activities of the Political Training Office through detectives. On June 10, 1935, when He Yingqin was negotiating with Lieutenant General Yoshijiro Umezu (commander of the Japanese Army in North China), he had to make various concessions to Japan. Withdrew from Hebei, abolished the Kuomintang organs in North China, and agreed to dissolve the Blue Shirts Society, and closed the Political Training Office and Gendarmerie Department in Beiping.Dai Li's men hid behind the scenes, while Zeng Kuoqing and Fuxingshe stopped their activities.After reporting to Chiang Kai-shek in Chengdu, Zeng moved his political training office, together with many personnel from Peiping, to Xi'an to carry out anti-communist activities under the young commander.

While Dai Li was mysteriously carrying out espionage activities within the Fuxing Society in Beiping, he also gradually established his own watertight intelligence network in the extremely active Blue Shirts Society organization in Henan in the south.The success of the Fuxingshe in Henan depended in large part on the support of Governor Liu Zhi, a former instructor at Whampoa and one of the generals who received Chiang Kai-shek's highest award.