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73-404: [REDACTED] Kang Sheng [REDACTED] Chen Boda [REDACTED] Jiang Qing [REDACTED] Zhang Chunqiao [REDACTED] Xie Fuzhi The February Countercurrent ( Chinese : 二月逆流 ; pinyin : Èryuè nìliú ), also known as the February Adverse Current , refers to the joint efforts by a group of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) veterans to oppose the radicalism at

146-801: A close associate of Mao during the Second Sino-Japanese War , the Chinese Civil War , and after. He remained at or near the pinnacle of power in the People's Republic of China from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1975. After the death of Mao and the subsequent arrest of the Gang of Four , Kang Sheng was accused of sharing responsibility with the Gang for the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and in 1980 he

219-666: A guerrilla war", and even taunted that Chen Yi's faction could take a try to bring Wang Ming , Zhang Guotao and even the United States and the Soviet Union to support them. Kang Sheng later said he had never seen the Chairman so angry. Mao declared that the group was merely expressing its views and it was part of the intra-party life. Mao required, however, that Tan Zhenlin, Chen Yi and Xu Xiangqian "request leaves of absence to carry out self-criticism ." Because Yu Qiuli

292-603: A man "trained by one of the world's greatest experts in the abuse of human bodies and minds: the head of the Soviet NKVD, Nikolai Yezhov " As Mitter explains, Kang Sheng was the mastermind behind the "pain and friction" that underlay the Rectification process. He used a classic Soviet technique of accusing loyal party members of being Nationalist spies. Once they had confessed under torture, their confessions could then set off an avalanche of accusations and arrests. As

365-414: A meeting at his home with leaders who dealt with industry and transportation, including some CCP Politburo members. Li's focus was to discuss "grasping revolution and promoting production" despite the contentious political climate of the Cultural Revolution. The meeting turned to criticizing the Cultural Revolution and the damage it had caused to the social order and established leadership. Chen and Tan were

438-752: A meeting of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference in Beijing. As Byron and Pack write The challenges that Kang faced during the early months of 1956 underscored the dangers he would have risked by continuing his retreat. As soon as he reappeared, Kang encountered serious problems that caused his position in the hierarchy to fluctuate dramatically. After the purge of Gao Gang and Rao Shushi in 1954, he had ranked sixth, below Chairman Mao, Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De and Chen Yun. But in February 1956, just weeks after his return to public life, he

511-566: A multiple game. On the one hand he was humoring Stalin, but at the same time he was betraying his confidence. Similarly, he had made contact with the Trotskyists , and had considered joining their movement, but he had also taken steps to infiltrate and sabotage their Fourth International… Tito made these comments to Hua Guofeng on his only visit to China, in 1977 after Kang was dead, and certainly had his own agenda in doing so, but as Faligot and Kauffer remark, "in any case, Tito certainly got

584-585: A number of historic matters, including the February Countercurrent. In March 1979, the Central Committee issued a Notice of Open Rehabilitation and repudiated the allegations made by the Gang of Four during the "Yang, Yu, Fu Incident." The Central Committee resolved that the accusations were slanderous, officially restored the reputations of those targeted in the incident, and paid compensation for those who were injured or killed as

657-457: A perfect excuse for the rival, yet parallel, states [in Chongqing, Nanjing and Yan'an] to use similar techniques, from blackmail to bombing, to achieve their ends, and mute the criticisms of their opponents. If each of them paid tribute to Sun Yat-sen in public, they also each paid court to the thinking and techniques of Stalin in private. In the person of Kang Sheng, Mao had at his disposal

730-463: A result. Kang Sheng Kang Sheng ( Chinese : 康 生 ; pinyin : Kāng Shēng ; 4 November 1898 – 16 December 1975), born Zhang Zongke ( simplified Chinese : 张宗可 ; traditional Chinese : 張宗可 ; pinyin : Zhāng Zōngkě ), was a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official, best known for having overseen the work of the CCP's internal security and intelligence apparatus during

803-485: A severe reversal of fortune at the Central Committee plenum that followed the first session of the CCP's Eighth Congress, when he was demoted to alternate, nonvoting membership of the Politburo. Roderick MacFarquhar writes: The reasons for Kang Sheng's reduction to alternate membership of the Politburo are not clear. … The immediate reason for his demotion may have been the general revulsion against secret police within

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876-511: A sudden attack. The report was issued on April 25, 1964, and read by Mao Zedong the next month. This evaluation prompted Mao to advocate for the creation of a heavy industrial zone as a safe haven for retreat in the event of foreign invasion during State Planning Meetings, consistent with his view of the necessity for building constructing the Third Front . In March 1968, Lin Biao and

949-665: Is a cruel and tragic irony that the break with the Stalinist pattern of socioeconomic development was not accompanied by a break with Stalinist methods in political and intellectual life. The latter was precluded by the suppression of the critics who had briefly "bloomed and contended" in May and June 1957. Yang Chengwu Yang Chengwu ( simplified Chinese : 杨成武 ; traditional Chinese : 楊成武 ; pinyin : Yáng Chéngwǔ ; October 27, 1914 – February 14, 2004 ), alias Yang Nengjun (Chinese: 杨能俊 ; pinyin: Yáng Néngjùn )

1022-690: The 28 Bolsheviks , who took control of the Party Politburo at the Fourth Plenum of the Sixth Central Committee on January 13, 1931. Kang allegedly demonstrated his loyalty to Wang Ming by betraying to the Kuomintang secret police a meeting convened on January 17, 1931, by He Mengxiong , who had been strongly opposed to Li Lisan and was disgruntled by Pavel Mif's high-handed role in securing the ascendancy of Wang within

1095-808: The Anti-Rightist Campaign that followed, marked a profound turning point in the history of the People's Republic of China. As Maurice Meisner wrote The period of the Hundred Flowers was the time when the Chinese abandoned the Soviet model of development and embarked on a distinctively Chinese road to socialism. It was the time that China announced its ideological and social autonomy from the Soviet Union and its Stalinist heritage. It

1168-596: The Marco Polo Bridge Incident and the Japanese invasion of China, Stalin dispatched Wang and Kang to Yan'an on a specially provided Soviet plane. Kang had played a wily game in the complex and murky world of Stalin's Moscow, earning the following comment from Josip Broz Tito , who had met Kang in Moscow in 1935: It can be said without any shadow of a doubt that at that time Kang Sheng was playing

1241-745: The Soviet Union , used Kang during this period as a valuable source of information about Soviet affairs. Mao was also suspicious of the Russians and, soon after aligning himself with Mao, Kang also began to speak out against the Soviet Union and its agents in China. Peter Vladimirov , the Comintern agent sent to Yan'an, recorded that Kang kept him under constant surveillance and even forced Wang Ming to avoid meeting him. Vladimirov also believed that Kang delivered biased reports of Soviet affairs to Mao. When Stalin shifted his support from Wang Ming to Mao Zedong,

1314-604: The 1930s. Some sources give his year of birth as being as early as 1893, but it has also been variously given as 1898, 1899 and 1903. Kang received his elementary education at the Guanhai school for boys and later at the German School in Qingdao. As a teenager, he entered into an arranged marriage with Chen Yi, in 1915, with whom he had two children, a daughter, Zhang Yuying, and a son, Zhang Zishi. After graduating from

1387-691: The CCP Politburo assigned Kang to inspect land reform in his home province of Shandong. Early in 1948, he was appointed deputy chief of the Party's East China Bureau , under Rao Shushi . Some commentators speculate that the private humiliation of being placed under a former subordinate may be one reason why Kang "fell ill" and largely disappeared from view until after Rao's fall in 1954. Of course, Kang may really have been ill. Mao's personal physician, Li Zhisui , later recorded that doctors responsible for Kang's treatment at Beijing Hospital told him that Kang

1460-512: The Chinese Communist Party. On the night of February 7, 1931, He Mengxiong and 22 others were executed by the Kuomintang police at Longhua, Shanghai. Among those murdered were five aspiring writers and poets, including Hu Yepin , lover of Ding Ling and father of her child, later canonized as a martyr by the Party. The April 1931 arrest and defection to the Kuomintang of Gu Shunzhang, former Green Gang gangster and member of

1533-455: The Chinese in Moscow had fallen victim to purges. Soviet authorities had made numerous arrests at Moscow Sun Yat-sen University during the late 1920s; students disappeared into the night, never to be seen again. But Kang worked his own variation: in the past, the Chinese had been purged by the Soviets; now, under Kang, they were liquidated by their fellow Chinese. Stalin was more tolerant of

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1606-521: The Chinese in Moscow than he was of other foreign Communists, who were purged along with their Soviet comrades. This may have been motivated by a concern about the potential threat of a Japanese invasion of the Soviet Far East. In any case, at this time Stalin began to promote the idea of a united front of the Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang against the Japanese, a policy that Wang Ming and Kang quickly endorsed. In November 1937, following

1679-500: The Comintern, returning to China in 1937. While in Moscow, Kang was elected a member of the Politburo of the CCP, perhaps as early as 1931 but more probably in January 1934. As Byron and Pack put it, "Kang had no cause to regret working with Wang in Moscow. His own prestige and power grew ever greater, and his cocoon of privilege insulated him from the irritations of daily life. But being in Moscow also excluded Kang and Wang Ming from

1752-840: The Communist base in Jiangxi Province in August 1931, he left Kang in charge of the Special Work Committee, a position he held for two years. In this role, Kang was "in charge of the entire Communist security and espionage apparatus, not only in Shanghai but throughout KMT China." In July 1931, Wang Ming removed himself to Moscow and assumed the position of chief Chinese representative on the Comintern. Kang and his wife Cao Yi'ou followed two years later. Kang remained in Moscow for four years, acting as Wang's deputy on

1825-607: The ECCI Personnel Department memorandum] as his foes. He even tried to defend Kang Sheng in one of his letters to [Georgii] Dimitrov. "Kon Sin [Kang Sheng]," Mao wrote, "is reliable." While in Yan'an, Kang oversaw intelligence operations against the Party's two principal enemies, the Japanese and the Kuomintang, as well as potential opponents of Mao within the Party, including the campaign against Trotskyites. Chang and Halliday write that " Shi Zhe observed that Kang

1898-575: The Gang of Four accused Yang Chengwu , Yu Lijian (second secretary of the Party Committee of the Air Force), and Fu Chongbi (commander of the Beijing garrison) of "overturning the case of the February Countercurrent." This event became known as the "Yang, Yu, Fu Incident." Based on allegations later deemed by the Party to be false, the Gang of Four and their allies contended that Yang, Yu, and Fu sought to had sought to seize power with respect to

1971-635: The German School, Kang taught in a rural school in Zhucheng, Shandong in the early 1920s before leaving, possibly for a sojourn in Germany and France, and ultimately for Shanghai, where he arrived in 1924. After arriving in Shanghai , Kang enrolled in Shanghai University , an institution under the control of the CCP and the intellectual leadership of Qu Qiubai . After about six months at

2044-580: The Japanese army. This directive, which Kang later denied even existed, was resisted by some Manchurian leaders and later criticized by Mao Zedong as evidence of Wang Ming having stifled Manchuria's revolutionary potential. Following the assassination of Sergei Kirov in December 1934, Joseph Stalin commenced his great purges of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union . Following this example, and with Wang Ming's support, Kang established in 1936

2117-599: The March 1927 worker's insurrection alongside Gu Shunzhang and under the leadership of Zhao Shiyan , Luo Yinong, Wang Shouhua and Zhou Enlai . When the uprising was put down by the Kuomintang with the crucial assistance of Du Yuesheng 's Green Gang in the Shanghai massacre of April 12, 1927, Kang was able to escape into hiding. Also in 1927, Kang married a Shanghai University student and fellow Shandong native, Cao Yi'ou  [ zh ] (born Cao Shuqing), who

2190-644: The Office for the Elimination of Counterrevolutionaries and worked closely with the Soviet secret police, the NKVD , in purging perhaps hundreds of Chinese then in Moscow. As Byron and Pack put it: Kang gained great power from the Elimination Office, which he used to silence opponents and witnesses to any embarrassing episodes in his past, especially his arrest in Shanghai. … This was not the first time

2263-405: The Party's Intelligence Cell, led to serious breaches in Party security and the arrest and execution of Xiang Zhongfa , the Party's General Secretary. In response, Zhou Enlai created a Special Work Committee to oversee the Party's intelligence and security operations. Chaired by Zhou personally, the committee included Chen Yun, Pan Hannian , Guang Huian and Kang Sheng. When Zhou left Shanghai for

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2336-647: The Personnel Department of the executive committee of the Comintern (the "ECCI") included Kang's name on a list of CCP cadres who should not be included in the leadership. According to Pantsov and Levine, Once again, the ECCI and, standing behind it, Stalin himself, helped Mao to consolidate his power. This time they even overdid it. Mao did not view Kang Sheng, who had already openly switched to his side, nor several of these other party officials [named in

2409-780: The Propaganda Department at the CCP's Sixth Congress, which for security reasons and proximity to the Comintern's congress was held outside Moscow in mid-1928. Several months after the Sixth Congress, Kang was named director of the Organization Department of the Jiangsu Provincial Committee, which controlled personnel matters. In 1930, while in Shanghai, Kang was arrested along with several other Communists, including Ding Jishi, and later released. Ding's uncle Ding Weifen,

2482-611: The Seventh Party Congress did not protect them permanently against Kang. During the Cultural Revolution, he searched many of them out, arrested them and charged them again with being traitors or renegades. A standard item of evidence used against them was a record of their arrest in Yan'an during the Rectification Movement—;phony charges from the 1940s appeared twenty years later as "proof" of an individual's disloyalty. After his fall from

2555-488: The age of 90. As deputy chief in early 1964, Yang commissioned a report which evaluated how prepared the national economy was for a sudden attack by foreign foes. The report evaluated the distribution of Chinese industry, noted that they were primarily concentrated in 14 major coastal cities which were vulnerable to nuclear attack or air raids, and recommended that the General Staff research measures to guard against

2628-425: The air force and the Beijing garrison. Yang, Yu, and Fu were persecuted and some of their allies attacked and even killed. In March 1979, the Central Committee issued a Notice of Open Rehabilitation and repudiated the allegations made by the Gang of Four during the "Yang, Yu, Fu Incident." The Central Committee resolved that the accusations were slanderous, officially restored the reputations of those targeted in

2701-506: The air force and the Beijing garrison. Yang, Yu, and Fu were persecuted and some of their allies attacked and even killed. The post-Mao CCP reversed the judgment of the February Countercurrent, particularly following the downfall of the Gang of Four . On November 25, 1978, Hua Guofeng announced at a meeting of the Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Central Committee that the Politburo would openly and thoroughly redress

2774-631: The attendees who most vocally criticized the course of the Cultural Revolution. Eventually, a brawl broke out between members of the Cultural Revolution Group and the generals. An account detailed one of the confrontations, which involved the Marshal Ye Jianying slamming the table so hard, he broke several fingers. As one of the leaders of the Weberian -oriented People's Liberation Army (PLA) military commanders in

2847-627: The beginning of the Cultural Revolution . The February Countercurrent occurred in February 1967, as senior generals and the Cultural Revolution Group became embroiled in a conflict over the direction of the country. The conflict pitted Communist revolutionary generals Tan Zhenlin (the vice Premier), Marshal Chen Yi , Li Xiannian , Yu Qiuli , and others against Maoist radicals led by Lin Biao , Kang Sheng , Jiang Qing , and Zhang Chunqiao . Li Fuchun hosted

2920-466: The beginning of the end of international Communism." While Kang remained a member of the Politburo, he had no concrete role and no power base, which led him to take on a series of diverse assignments and to align himself as closely as possible with Mao, who was devising his response to de-Stalinization and its effects within the leadership of the CCP. His responses, in the Hundred Flowers and

2993-406: The charges against Jiang Qing. Invoking his background as head of the Organization Department and as an expert on security and espionage matters, Kang vouched for Jiang Qing. She was a Party member in good standing, he declared, and had no affiliations that would bar marriage to Mao. Kang's personal knowledge of Jiang Qing's past was fragmentary and certainly insufficient to allow him to prove that she

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3066-420: The communist bloc after Khrushchev's Secret Speech . Kang Sheng's emergence during the cultural revolution as one of the most important Maoist stalwarts suggests that…it is not unlikely that at the 8th Congress Mao saved Kang from even greater humiliation. Mao's own position was weakening, as evidenced by the decision of the CCP's Eighth Congress to delete the phrase "guided by the thought of Mao Zedong" from

3139-799: The discussion panel, he accused the Cultural Revolution Group of undermining the military, specifically the incitement of radical insurgency against the troops. Mao called a meeting on February 18 including Zhou Enlai, Ye Jianying, Ye Qun, Kang Sheng and others to express his support for Lin Biao and the radical Red Guards , saying "If someone opposes the Central Cultural Revolution Group I will resolutely oppose him," "The Central Cultural Revolution Group [...] errors amount to one, two, maybe three percent, while it's been correct up to ninety-seven percent", "If this Great Cultural Revolution fails, Comrade Lin Biao and I will withdraw from Beijing and go back to Well Ridge Mountain to fight

3212-607: The drama that was unfolding in China at the time." That "drama" included the epic retreat of the Communists from Jiangxi Province to Yan'an , which became known to history as the Long March , and the ever-growing power within the CCP of Mao Zedong . As the French military historian Jacques Guillermaz observed, The Long March helped the Chinese Communist Party to achieve a greater independence of Moscow. Everything tended in

3285-473: The early 1940s and again at the height of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A member of the CCP from the early 1920s, he spent time in Moscow during the early 1930s, where he learned the methods of the Soviet NKVD and became a supporter of Wang Ming for leadership of the CCP. After returning to China in the late 1930s, Kang Sheng switched his allegiance to Mao Zedong and became

3358-445: The injustices and insults they had suffered, both real and imagined, at the hands of "the landlord bullies." Often these meetings would end with the masses, led by the land reform teams, shouting "Shoot him! Shoot him!" or "Kill! Kill! Kill!" The cadre in charge of proceedings would rule that the landlords had committed serious crimes, sentence them to death, and order that they be taken away and eliminated immediately. In November 1947,

3431-502: The measure of Kang's psychology: a multifaceted game of mirrors was certainly his style, even in the 1930s." When Kang Sheng arrived in the Party's redoubt at Yan'an in late November 1937 as part of Wang Ming's entourage, he may have already realized that Wang Ming was falling out of favor, but he initially supported Wang and the Comintern's efforts to guide the Chinese Communists back into line with Soviet policy, especially

3504-562: The need to align with the Kuomintang against the Japanese. Kang also brought Stalin's obsession with Trotskyism to play in helping Wang defeat the efforts of Zhou Enlai and Dong Biwu to bring Chen Duxiu —then the informal leader of Trotskyists in China—;back into the Party. After assessing the situation on the ground in Yan'an, however, in 1938 Kang decided to re-align himself with Mao Zedong. Kang's motives are easy to imagine. For Mao's part, as MacFarquhar put it, Kang Sheng

3577-544: The new Party constitution and by re-establishing the role of General Secretary, abolished in 1937. The dangers of exalting a single leader and the desirability of collective leadership had been perhaps the most direct point of Khrushchev's Secret Speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (the "CPSU") in February 1956, in which he condemned Stalin, Stalin's methods and his cult of personality and which, according to Archie Brown, "was

3650-506: The patina of a theorist, and he was a fluent writer. At Yan'an, Kang was close to Jiang Qing , who may have been Kang's mistress when he visited Shandong in 1931. In Yan'an, Jiang became the lover of Mao Zedong, who later married her. In 1938, Kang earned Mao and Jiang's gratitude by supporting their liaison against the opposition of more socially conservative cadres, who were aware of her past and uncomfortable with it. Byron and Pack assert that Kang acted decisively to protect Mao and rebut

3723-486: The peasants to settle scores by killing landlords and rich peasants." In March 1947, Kang put his methods into practice in Lin County, Shanxi Province. These methods included special scrutiny and persecution of landlords known to have Communist sympathies and investigation of the backgrounds of the Party's land reform teams themselves. In April 1948, Mao singled out Kang for praise in his handling of land reform, with

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3796-538: The rest of the Gang of Four accused Yang, Yu Lijian (second secretary of the Party Committee of the Air Force), and Fu Chongbi (commander of the Beijing garrison) of "overturning the case of the February Countercurrent ." This event became known as the "Yang, Yu, Fu Incident." Based on allegations later deemed by the Party to be false, the Gang of Four and their allies contended that Yang, Yu, and Fu sought to had sought to seize power with respect to

3869-404: The result that Agrarian reform cut a bloody swath through much of rural China. Squads of Communist enforcers were sent to the most remote villages to organize the local petty thieves and bandits into so-called land reform teams, which inflamed the poor peasants and hired laborers against the rich. When resentment reached fever pitch, peasants at staged "grievance meetings" were encouraged to relate

3942-408: The roles of backstage bosses and instigated the masses to fight the masses" and those who proposed that, in state organs, all cadres above the department director level should be "baked" or thrown out, paralyzing the numerous states organs in the process. Chen Boda contended that the February Countercurrent was an attempt "to subvert the dictatorship of the proletariat ." In March 1968, Lin Biao and

4015-549: The same direction—Mao Zedong's appointment as Chairman of the Party, happening as it did in unusual conditions, practical difficulties in maintaining contact, the Comintern's tendency to remain in the background to help the creation of popular fronts, under cover of patriotism or anti-fascism. In fact, after the Zunyi Conference , the Russians seem to have had less and less influence in the Chinese Communist Party's internal affairs. In light of more recent history, this

4088-469: The security posts, in December 1946 Kang was assigned by Mao Zedong, Zhu De and Liu Shaoqi to review the Party's land reform project in Longdong, Gansu Province. He returned after five weeks with the view that land reform needed to be more severe and that there could be no compromise with landlords. "Kang whipped up hatred for the landlords and their retainers. In the name of social justice, he encouraged

4161-529: The university, he joined the Communist Party Youth League. Kang then joined the Party itself. At the direction of the Party, Kang worked underground as a labor organizer. He helped organize the February 1925 strike against Japanese companies that culminated in the May 30th Movement, a huge Communist-led demonstration, and brought Kang into close contact with Party leaders Liu Shaoqi , Li Lisan and Zhang Guotao . Kang participated in

4234-425: The war worsened in 1943, and the Communist area become more isolated, Kang stepped up the speed and ferocity of the purges. Kang was sufficiently brutal in his methods to arouse the opposition of senior cadres, including Zhou Enlai, Nie Rongzhen and Ye Jianying . At the same time, Mao was not keen to have a single man in such a position of power. Accordingly, following the CCP's Seventh Congress in April 1945, Kang

4307-448: Was a Communist Chinese revolutionary and general of the People's Liberation Army . He was the Deputy Chief of General Staff of the People's Liberation Army from 1954-1965 and 1974–1980. He was named Acting Chief of General Staff in 1966 after Luo Ruiqing was purged at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution . Yang was born in Changting County , Fujian Province of China on October 8, 1914. He died on February 14, 2004, in Beijing, at

4380-414: Was a valuable catch for Mao as he strove to consolidate the power he had won at the Zunyi Conference in January 1935. Kang could betray all the secrets of Wang Ming and his supporters. He was au fait with Moscow politics and police/terror methods, and sufficiently fluent in Russian to act as a major contact with Soviet visitors. He had absorbed sufficient Marxism-Leninism and Stalinist polemicizing to affect

4453-424: Was behind, at Mao's behest, the attempt by Li Fuchun and Jin Maoyao to murder Wang Ming by means of mercury poisoning, although this claim remains controversial. Kang was deeply involved with the Yan'an Rectification Movement launched by Mao in February 1942, which was "central to Mao's mission of a thorough reinvention of Chinese society." As Rana Mitter writes, China's wartime existential crisis provided

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4526-435: Was expelled posthumously from the CCP. Kang Sheng was born in Dataizhuang (大臺莊, administered under Jiaonan County since 1946), Zhucheng County to the northwest of Qingdao in Shandong Province to a landowning family, some of whom had been Confucian scholars. Kang was born Zhang Zongke but he adopted a number of pseudonyms—most notably Zhao Rong, but also (for his painting) Li Jushi—before settling on Kang Sheng in

4599-406: Was head of the Kuomintang Central Party School in Nanjing , where he worked with Chen Lifu , head of the Kuomintang's secret service. Kang later denied he had ever been arrested, as the circumstances of his release suggested that he had, as Lu Futan alleged in 1933, "sold out his comrades" in order to secure his freedom. As Byron and Pack note, however, "Kang's arrest in itself is no proof that he

4672-450: Was listed below Peng Zhen . By the end of April he was reported in tenth place, even below Luo Fu , the only member of the 28 Bolsheviks who still held a Politburo seat. Yet on May Day of 1956—the international socialist celebration—Kang was suddenly back in sixth place. His position, at least going by public reports and official bulletins, remained unchanged from then until the Eighth Congress four months later. Kang suffered

4745-419: Was living in a state of deep fear of Mao in this period" because of his murky past, which had been raised with Mao in many letters from cadres and by the Russians, yet "[f]ar from being put off by Kang's murky past, Mao positively relished it. Like Stalin, who employed ex- Mensheviks like Vyshinsky , Mao used people's vulnerability as a way of giving himself hold over subordinates." Vladimirov believed that Kang

4818-448: Was mainly based on political calculation. Kang's familiarity with Wang Ming enabled him to provide Mao with valuable information about Wang's subservience to the Soviets. Although cadres such as Chen Yun , who had been in Moscow with Wang and Kang, were aware of Kang's previous slavish support for Wang, Kang strenuously sought to change that history and obscure previous affiliations. In addition, Mao, who in these years had not yet visited

4891-570: Was not a KMT agent, but he doctored her record, destroyed adverse material, discouraged hostile witnesses, and coached her on how to answer the probing questions of high-level interrogators who hoped to discredit Mao. This episode is believed by many to have been key to Kang's future success, which depended not only on his considerable talents but also on his relationship with Mao. In addition to politics, Kang and Mao also shared an interest in classical culture, including poetry, painting and calligraphy. Mao's relationship with Kang, in Yan'an and later,

4964-428: Was not as senior as the other officials involved in the February Countercurrent, he was permitted to retain his position. He nonetheless became the target of Red Guards in Beijing who subjected him to many struggle sessions. The generals were denounced by Lin Biao as a "serious anti-party act". Lin, who was designated as Mao's successor in April 1969, denounced the countercurrent by describing them as those who "assumed

5037-421: Was perhaps one of the major consequences of the Long March. Wang Ming's influence over the main Communist forces was minimal after Mao Zedong's emergence from the Zunyi Conference of January 1935 as the undisputed head of the Party. From Moscow, Wang and Kang did seek to maintain control over Communist forces in Manchuria , which were ordered by them to conserve their strength and avoid direct confrontation with

5110-449: Was replaced as head of both the Social Affairs Department and the Military Intelligence Department. Byron and Pack write that "In spite of Kang's decline, his influence on the security and intelligence system was visible for decades to come. The methods he popularized in Yan'an shaped public security work through the Cultural Revolution and beyond." Moreover, [f]or many victims of Rectification, release and rehabilitation in 1945 after

5183-621: Was suffering from schizophrenia . Writing before Li's book was published, Byron and Pack offered other possible diagnoses based on symptoms Kang seems to have displayed, including manic-depressive psychosis and temporal lobe epilepsy. Kang's re-emergence on the political stage in the mid-1950s occurred at roughly at the same time as the Gao Gang -Rao Shushi Affair and the affair of Yu Bingbo . Faligot and Kauffer see these affairs as each showing signs of involvement by Kang Sheng, who they believe used them as means to return to power. In January 1956, Kang made his first public appearance in years at

5256-453: Was to become a lifelong political ally. He entered the employment of Yu Qiaqing , a wealthy businessman with strong Kuomintang sympathies, as Yu's personal secretary. At the same time, Kang remained an active but secret Party organizer, and was named to the Party's new Jiangsu Provincial Committee in June 1927. In the late 1920s, Kang worked closely with Li Lisan, who had been made head of

5329-417: Was turned by his captors or forced into long-term cooperation with them. KMT [Kuomintang] prisons were notoriously chaotic and corrupt." After Li Lisan's adventurism and the failed Changsha operation of June 1930 lost Li the support of the Party, Kang moved adroitly to align himself with the Comintern's new favorite, Wang Ming , and Pavel Mif 's young students from Sun Yat-sen University , later known as

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