Chapter 71 arrest the communists

The prowess of the communists should not be exaggerated to outright downplay the occasionally devastating successes of the secret police, although one of our main sources of data, the revelry of the "renegades," published after the reform of the People's Republic of China, leads us to conclude that this impression. For example, in May 1933 KMT secret agents picked up information about a secret date of poet and children's story writer Ying Xiuren (who had spent several years in the Soviet Union and had been doing underground work for the Communist Party after returning to China).When the writer, a member of the Left League, went to a building near Kunshan on a secret mission, armed police were waiting for him to show up.In the ensuing struggle, he was thrown through a window and fell to his death.Ying Xiuren was the seventh person in Shanghai's left-wing cultural circle to be illegally killed by the secret police.

But generally speaking, the more the Shanghai station agents deal with the underground agents of the Communist Party, the more afraid they are to approach or arrest them.These agents are justified in their caution.Former Communist agents sometimes found themselves in danger of being beaten or killed as traitors when they attempted to befriend former Communists.Wang Kequan, the deputy head of the action team at the Shanghai Station, once met two people who used to work under him in the Pudong factory area.In order to persuade them to join him in the Secret Service, Wang took them to a secluded place, tried to persuade them, but they shot them half to death with their own guns, until the patrolling police came and scared the two away.From then on, Wang Kequan, like many other "traitors", never dared to contact the Communist Party members he knew before in order to protect himself.

Shen Zui himself began to realize the danger of fighting the underground party of the Communist Party in an incident of arresting Communists.It was one night in the summer of 1935. He led a dozen special agents to the Jiangwan area to arrest a group of Communists who held a secret meeting there.They were spotted as they approached the meeting place.The group of Communists dispersed immediately, and only one man stood behind the secret police with a gun.After a shootout, Drunk was shot in the chest by the Communist.Although the gunshot wound was healed, Shen Zui has been carrying this scar for life.

After Shen Zui recovered, he brought two special agents to Caojiadu to arrest a writer who was suspected of being a communist party in the winter of that year.Since the suspect was a man of letters, he did not appear to be threatening, and everyone was very relaxed when they entered his room with the assistance of the landlord.The writer asked them to allow him to get dressed, and was about to leave when he suddenly picked up a hat, pulled out a grenade from it, and pulled out its safety catch.At this time, no one dared to draw a gun.At the same time the writer approached the door and suddenly turned off the light.Then came a bang.The agents were sure that he had dropped the grenade, so they got down on the ground to avoid it, but no explosion was seen.When they turned on the light, they found that the writer had disappeared and they were locked in the room.When Shen Zui and his agents finally broke through the door, the nearby factory was changing shifts, and this man could no longer be found in the crowd.

It was much safer for Shanghai Station personnel to detain a "progressive" student distributing anti-Japanese propaganda or to raid a bookstore selling pro-Soviet literature than to arrest a well-known Communist.According to Shen Zui’s account, during his years in the communication team at Shanghai Station from 1932 to 1935, none of the more than 30 “directly affiliated correspondents” were Communist Party cadres, and only two of them were merely members of peripheral organizations of the Communist Party. .Shen Zui said that during his six years in Shanghai, he did not know of any successful infiltration into Communist Party organizations.

The failure of the military command Shanghai station constantly stimulated Dai Li.Once, when he summoned the head, secretary and team leader of the Shanghai station to have dinner at the Xinghualou on Fourth Road, he lost his temper and said: "If we continue like this, our work will collapse. Why can't you even break into a Communist Party organization?" Dai Li's accusations clearly reflected Chiang Kai-shek's discontent, although the Kuomintang secret police had been very successful in forcing some key Communist figures to defect.Later, neither of them would forget that by 1931, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China had completely moved from the French Concession to the high mountains in Jiangxi, but Shanghai Station knew nothing about it.It was a colossal failure in intelligence work, even if they were unable to make up for the wave of kidnappings and assassinations by suspected enemies of the Kuomintang regime later on.

Ironically, however, the success of KMT counterintelligence inadvertently adjusted the power structure within the Communist Party, thus laying the groundwork for Mao Zedong's rise to supremacy after the Zunyi Conference in 1935.This is because Chiang Kai-shek’s secret police cut off the telecommunications between the Shanghai Bureau of the Comintern and the Standing Committee of the Comintern in Moscow. Influence. When this isolation lasted until the Seventh Congress of the Communist International in 1936, which decided the development strategy and tactics of the Communist Party and the Workers’ Party, it even showed greater significance.” Although Wang Ming explained to the Congress that China must end Mao was able to go his own way, gather strength, and formulate a new rural strategy that would eventually give him victory over Chiang Kai-shek and Chiang's followers in Shanghai and beyond.