Chapter 103 military prison system

It is worth studying Dai Li's prison and concentration camp. Chiang's soldiers disarmed the New Fourth Army and arrested them and put them in concentration camps (called labor camps).For a while, not only the "regular" secret police of Dai Li (who was derided as China's Himmler), but even the Kuomintang police were arresting people.There are said to be more than a dozen concentration camps, and they were used not only to imprison Communist Party members and students who attempted to go to the Communist base in Yan'an, but also to hold representatives of the so-called "intermediate parties" between the Communist Party and the Nationalist Party, and those who had criticized the government .

These prisons were "cages filled with tortured men and women dying, some of whom had been there for years and who should have been released under the United Front regulations of 1937".Later Chen Lifu said to an interviewer: The most dangerous prisons include Yiyang Prison managed by Warden He Jisheng, Xifeng Prison run by Warden Zhou Yanghao, the "Southeast Detention Center" in Jian'ou, Fujian Province under the care of Cao Feihong, and the "Northeast Youth Labor Camp" run by Jiang Jianren in Xi'an. The Northeast Youth Labor Camp was established by the order of the Commander-in-Chief on February 1, 1940 (see Appendix 1).It comes from the establishment of the special training column of the Fourth Regiment of the War Cadre Training Army of the Military Commission.The captain of the special training column was Xiao Zuolin, who was later replaced by General Jiang Jianren, who was named the "chief education officer" of the concentration camp.More than 300 high school and college students were arrested by the local government, the 34th Army, and Shanxi Kuomintang agencies, and were included in the three "brigades".Their bi-weekly political training sessions were aimed at refuting the Communist Party's anti-Japanese propaganda in Yan'an.Over the next three years, the labor camp continued to expand with various functions. In 1944 it was formed into the Northwest Youth Training Column, but it was still under the overall leadership of Hu Zongnan.

Concentration camps do exist.In addition to dealing with politically wayward youths, they were part of Dai Li's internal punishment system that had begun as early as the establishment of the Secret Service (when the Shanghai Secret Service Station began to expand).To imprison suspected dissidents and disobedient subordinates, Dai Li set up a special prison in Nanking at a secret location unknown even to his top spies.Prisoners in Shanghai were sent to the train station without handcuffs, but the lower half of their faces were covered with cotton gauze masks and sunglasses.Almost all of them were tortured, and some were even disabled for life.

Often, one of the captured men's shoes was riddled with spikes, causing them to stagger as they walked against one of the two agents in charge of escorting them.They were never caught on the night bus at the last minute and then stuffed into sleeping cars without toilets while driving.The escorts of the military all the way to Nanjing were very nervous, because even they didn't know whether they themselves would be sent to jail.Once at the location, meet the secret police outside the station, hand over the prisoners they are escorting, and then, if they are lucky, leave.And many unlucky juntong agents were themselves arrested precisely when they handed over the prisoners to the juntong reception committee, and then they stayed in Dai Li's prison system for many years. The situation of political prisoners is collected in the prison.

Senior military leaders like Zhou Weilong, Yu Lexing or Xie Ligong have been imprisoned at least once.Some of Dai Li's most capable spies, such as Xu Zhongwu and Lou Zhaoli, were even imprisoned eight times.As long as Dai Li is willing, he can impose the third sanction at any time.Dai Li can sentence anyone to death at will.Dai Li himself may have faced this danger.His leader was famously murderous, especially when he was young, and it was whispered that "he loved to kill."For example, in 1941, among the hundreds of people executed by the military command, more than 30 people were executed for violating the discipline of the military command.

But it must be understood that Dai Li's punishment was not random. Within his own organization (which was, after all, a group of ambitious and unruly risk-takers), those who erred knew they would be disciplined.They obviously understand the relationship between their mistakes or violations of discipline and Dai Li's sanctions.In fact, they knew it was part of an internal disciplinary system supervised by Chiang Kai-shek himself, but this system was personally enforced by Dai Li from beginning to end.Wang Tianmu, station master of Tianjin Station, is one of the examples.Like the other experienced gunmen in the operation, Wang was from Henan, but his family lived in Peiping, where he also had a residence. In 1934 Wang went to Zhangjiakou on a bureaucratic matter, so he wasn't there when the "amazing" murders in Peking were thought to be the work of Tianjin station agents.Later, after the Beiping Detective Team announced that it had solved the case, the news about the incident subsided, but the truth and details of the murder case remained a mystery to the public.

When Peiping was still dazed by the news about the case, Chen Gongshu, head of the Beiping Station of the Secret Service, received a telegram from Dai Li from Nanjing, asking him to rent a hotel room in Peiping for the spy chief, and not let anyone know about it.On the night of Dai Li's arrival, the two of them bought takeaway food from the Central Hotel on East Chang'an Avenue and brought them to General Dai's room for dinner.After a casual chat at dinner, Dai Li asked Chen Gongshu in detail about Wang Tianmu, who was still in Zhangjiakou at the time.When Chen was about to leave, Dai Li said: "I am here waiting for Tianmu to come back from Zhangjiakou. I have something to talk to him about. I will call you when I am about to leave Beiping." Wang Tianmu left Zhangjiakou the next day After returning, Dai Li informed Chen that he was going back to Nanjing that night.When Chen went to the train station to see him off, he was surprised to find that he had already arrested Wang Tianmu.

Wang Tianmu did not return to his post in Tianjin after this.Instead, Wang Zixiang was named to replace Wang Tianmu's station chief.A month later, Dai Li sent a telegram ordering Beiping station to "escort" the Tianjin station secretary and Wang Tianmu's former assistant back to Nanjing to close the case.In this way, the Tianjin station action team was disbanded, and other field agents either resigned or were punished. Dai Li wrote a special report on this case to Chiang Kai-shek.According to Mao Wanli, Dai Li's personal secretary, the entire report was only a few hundred words long.But Dai Li spent a whole night for this, from evening to dawn, writing this report stroke by stroke.Dai Li gave a brief account of the incident, implicitly accused the former head of the Tianjin station, then listed Wang Tianmu's previous achievements and achievements, and finally suggested three points to Jiang: first, death penalty; second, life imprisonment; third, give him an atonement Opportunity.Chiang adopted the second suggestion.Wang Tianmu was then imprisoned in the "Cdi" military prison in Tiger Bridge for the Secret Service. "Cingdi" was used to detain long-term prisoners, and Wang Tianmu was kept there until Dai Li released him when the enemy fell, and sent him to Shanghai to do underground work.

Dai Li's secret police job was practically lifelong.Once you become a member of the Secret Service or later the Military Command Bureau, you will never be dismissed, nor can you resign.Anyone who asked Dai Li for permission to retire risked long prison terms. The spies said to each other: "The comrades in our organization can only come in alive and sleep in coffins."