Chapter 119 Zhongtong

The Bureau of Investigation and Statistics of the Central Executive Committee of the Chinese Kuomintang, referred to as "Zhongtong"; is a national spy organization controlled by the leaders of the Kuomintang's CC Department, Chen Guofu and Chen Lifu.The Zhongtong is a secret service agency controlled by the party affairs department of the Kuomintang. It is also known as the two major secret service organizations of the Kuomintang together with the Military Command. In addition to the CCP, the targets of "Central Unification" include Wang Puppet and other hostile political forces of Chiang Kai-shek.The predecessor of Zhongtong was the Party Affairs Investigation Section of the Central Organization Department of the Kuomintang in 1927, which was formed by CC members. In 1937, the Party Affairs Investigation Office was merged into the First Division of the Investigation and Statistics Bureau of the Military Commission, and Xu En, a member of the CC Department, served as the director. In March 1938, at the KMT Provisional National Congress, proposed by Chiang Kai-shek, based on the first Bureau of Investigation and Statistics of the Military Commission, the Bureau of Investigation and Statistics of the Central Executive Committee of the Chinese Kuomintang was established, and the Central Unity was formally formed.The director of the Central Statistics Bureau is concurrently held by the secretary-general of the Central Committee of the Kuomintang, while the deputy director is actually responsible.Chen Lifu, Zhang Lisheng, and Zhu Jiahua successively served as directors, and Xu Enzeng, Ye Xiufeng, Gu Jianzhong, Zou Xuejun, and Ji Yuanpu successively served as deputy directors. In February 1949, it was renamed the Investigation Bureau of the Ministry of the Interior, and it is still customarily called CC or Zhongtong.After the Kuomintang government retreated to Taiwan in October 1954, it was reorganized as the Investigation Bureau of the Ministry of Justice and Administration. After 1949, all hidden secret agents of the Central Committee in the mainland were severely suppressed.

Due to Dai Li's superficial qualifications in the Kuomintang and his low-level status in the Whampoa circle (after all, he was only a student of the sixth phase of Whampoa), Chiang Kai-shek was afraid that other departments would not be convinced if he was appointed as the official director of the military command.So the commander-in-chief temporarily appointed the head of his attendant room (the attendant room is mainly composed of Chiang Kai-shek's guards) as the director of the Military Control Bureau.In name, Dai Li was only the deputy director of the military command. In fact, Dai Li has absolute command over the army.He Yaozu, Qian Dajun, and Lin Weiwen, the nominal directors of the military command in the first two years after its establishment, all understood Chiang Kai-shek's meaning very well: Dai Li should be fully in charge of the military command, and they should not intervene in the military command's work, personnel or financial issues.Every year on April 1st to commemorate the founding day of the Secret Service, the director would come to the military command headquarters to listen to Dai Li's annual report, and then leave.Most of the field agents who worked outside the headquarters didn't even know that there was someone higher than Dai Li in the bureau.In short, in 1940, Dai Li was in power and was finally appointed as the director general.

When the military system was first established, it was not a very large organization.When Dai Li gained military power in 1938, it had only four "offices" and two "rooms", with a total of a little over 100 "internal staff" and less than 2,000 male and female "outside staff".Some of them overlap with the second place of the original Blue Shirts Club.Zheng Jiemin, deputy director of the Secret Service of the Fuxing Society, only served as secretary in the newly established military system.The earlier sections or units were merged into the Intelligence, Operations, Judicial and Telecommunications Departments of the Military Command.