Kang Sheng

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Kang Sheng (Chinese: 康生; pinyin: Kāng Shēng; 1898–December 16, 1975), Communist Party of China (CCP) official, was the head of the People's Republic of China's security and intelligence apparatus at various points until his death, and was subsequently accused along with the Gang of Four of being responsible for persecutions during the Cultural Revolution. ^[1] He was named to the Politburo Standing Committee at the 1969 9th National Party Congress and was subsequently accused along with the Gang of Four of being responsible for persecutions during the Cultural Revolution. In his epic account of the origins of the Cultural Revolution, Roderick MacFarquar wrote:

"Kang Sheng was a sinister and shadowy figure even to his colleagues, sinister because of his activities in the Soviet Union and Yan'an prior to 1949, shadowy because for the first six years after the CCP's conquest of power he had been almost invisible, apparently ill. Nevertheless, he was evidently a man of considerable ability; Tian Jiaying regarded him with great respect and referred to him as 'the sage of the Eastern Sea' (donghai shengren)."^[2]

Contents 1 Origins 2 At Yan'an 3 After 1949 4 See also 5 References 5.1 Notes

[edit] Origins

Kang Sheng’s (康生) early life is documented as if relating to different people. He was born in Shandong to a gentry family and named Zhao Rong in 1903,^[3] or as Zhang Zongke,^[4] perhaps in 1893,^[5] 1898,^[6] or 1899.^[7] Kang studied at Shanghai University and joined the party, both in 1924-25. In 1920, Kang took preparatory courses at Qinghua University, then taught in a rural school in Zhujiang, Shandong (1921-23) before resuming studies in Shanghai.^[8] He joined the CCP in 1924 or 1925 in Shanghai, where he worked as a labor organizer under different alias such as Zhang Shaoqing and Zhao Rong, and took part in the unsuccessful Communist uprising in 1927. As a Shanghai district CCP leader, he participated in uprisings in that city under the leadership of Zhou Enlai (1926-27); when the uprising was put down by Kuomintang, Kang escaped from Shanghai. He was briefly a CCP department chief in the Jiangsu Provincial Committee in 1928^[8] and then joined the surviving Communist cadres in the rural areas, and in 1930.

One report has Kang as CCP Central Committee Organization Department Director (1930-31), politburo member (from 1931) and Central Committee secretary (1931-33) before being sent as a permanent member of the CCP delegation to the Comintern Executive in Moscow.^[9] Other reports say that he studied in Moscow from as early as 1930, and remained there until 1937, working in the Comintern under Wang Ming and, at least at times, alongside Chen Yun. According to MacFarquhar, drawing on numerous Chinese sources,

"[b[y the early 1930s, Kang had attached himself to Wang Ming, the leader of the '28 Bolsheviks,' the group of Chinese communists who had been trained in the Soviet Union and brought back to China by their patron, Pavel Mif, to run the CCP. Under Wang's aegis, Kang Sheng became a member of the CC [Central Committee] and director of its Organization Department in 1931, and a member of the Politburo in 1934. From 1933 to 1937, Kang served in Moscow and Wang Ming's deputy in the leadership of the Chinese delegation to the Comintern, able to observe Stalin's great purge at close quarters and, allegedly, to try out some of its techniques against the emigre community there."^[10]

Kang Sheng returned to China in 1937.^[11]

[edit] At Yan'an

Kang arrived in Mao Zedong's base at Yan'an (Yenan) in late November 1937 as part of Wang Ming's entourage, with the latest inside information on Moscow’s thinking, and was appointed to the CCP CC Secretariat in 1938. He may have already realized that Wang Ming was falling out of favor, and Zhang Guotao was originally selected by the Comintern to replace Wang. Kang Sheng allied himself with Mao to destroy Wang's faction within the party, seeing Wang as the greatest enemy at the time.

MacFarquhar writes of Kang's arrival in Yan'an as follows:

"Kang Sheng 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 suporters. He was au fait with Moscow politics and police 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 the patina of a theorist, and he was a fluent writer."^[12]

At Yan'an, Kang became a close friend of Jiang Qing, who may have been Kang's maid during his youth in Shandong, and who became a second-rate young actress in Shanghai and a newly converted Communist. He introduced her to Mao Zedong, who later married her.

In June 1942, Kang was said to have been spending all his time with Mao.^[13] There are conflicting reports about his role, or fate during the 1942 Rectification Campaign(Zheng feng): One source says he was criticized, and then replaced Li Weihan as head of the CCP Party School,^[14] while another says he was responsible for turning Mao’s innocent effort to educate newly arrived cadres into a violent purge.^[4] In his August 1943 speech,^[15] Kang explained how he and his colleagues used rectification to expose spies and trick anti-Party elements into revealing themselves. The strategy calls to mind the 1950s Hundred Flowers Movement and its aftermath.

During the 1946-49 Chinese Civil War, Kang was named to CCP chief of Shandong Province and second Deputy General Secretary of the party’s East China Bureau.

[edit] After 1949

Kang played no visible public role in the early years of the PRC: it is said that the enmity of President Liu Shaoqi and Premier Zhou Enlai kept his role to a minimum. He resurfaced in the mid- 1950s following his active role in the purge of military leader Peng Dehuai, and apparently resumed control of the CPC security apparatus. He became Mao's personal agent in the intra-Party struggles that began with the "Anti-Rightist Campaign" of 1959 and culminated in the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution. As a close associate of Jiang Qing, he became a member of the Party Secretariat under Deng Xiaoping in 1962. MacFarquhar writes:

"By 1962, the reason for Kang Sheng's seat on the Politburo may have been a mystery to the 80 percent of the CCP's 17 million plus members who joined after 1949. Kang had been almost invisible during the early years of the PRC. Apparently angered at being assigned the leadership only of the Shandong region rather than the whole of East China under the new regime, he took to his bed pleading illness, spending years in hospital, baffling doctors who found themselves unable to offer a diagnosis. He surfaced in public only in the mid-1950s after the man who had been assigned to the East China Bureau, Rao Shushi, was disgraced along with Gao Gang. Such malingering would have been punishable by dismissal in many political cultures, but although Kang's ranking fluctuated oddly in the run-up to the 8th Congress in 1956, he survived in the Politburo, albeit reduced from full to alternate membership. He was the beneficiary of Mao's practice of preserving and protecting those who he trusted and relied upon, and for who he foresaw a future use. Kang Sheng immediately confirmed his value to Mao by using his ideological expertise to boost the Chairman's ideas and cult, and by indiscriminately backing both his 'rightist' policies in 1957 and his leftist policies during the GLF [Great Leap Forward]. He was given a number of appointments which he exploited to the full: deputy head of the CC's Cultural and Education Small Group in March 1957; deputy head of the editorial committee for Mao's Selected Works in March 1959; and later in 1959 he assumed responsibility for the Central Party School."^[16]

Kang was an important enabler of Mao's efforts to launch the Cultural Revolution, which the Chairman created in order to increase his personal power and rank within the CPC. In 1962, Kang used the publication of a novel about Liu Zhidan, a CCP member killed in battle against the Kuomintang in 1936, as the basis for reviving the Gao Gang affair and attacking Mao's rivals in the CCP leadership, many of whom were unhappy with a range of policies including Mao's refusal to rehabilitate Marshal Peng Dehuai, the former Defense Minister and outspoken critic of the Great Leap Forward. For his efforts in the Liu Zhidan affair, MacFarquhar writes:

"Kang Sheng's reward was promotion to the CC's secretariat at the 10th plenum. Two months later, he moved into the Diaoyutai guest complex in the capital to mastermind a team of ideologues for the campaign against Soviet revisionism. The most cynical hit-man of Mao's Cultural Revolution swat team was now an agent in place, helping to initiate the domestic and foreign policies that were the prelude to that cataclysm."^[17]

Kang was closely involved in the Cultural Revolution purges which resulted in the downfall of Peng Dehuai, Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, Marshal Lin Biao, Marshal He Long, and many other leading CPC figures. His position in the CPC rose with the fall of each of these high-ranking leaders. Kang's campaigns of state terror reached as far as Inner Mongolia, where he instigated a deadly witchhunt for members of the defunct Inner Mongolian People's Party, which had once existed as a separatist party but was disbanded and absorbed by the CPC long before; and Yunnan Province, where thousands were killed. In this wave of persecution, Kang Sheng adopted a different tactics than those of Yan'an: learning from his misfortune in the Zheng Feng movement more than two decades earlier, Kang Sheng cleverly stayed in the background this time, and encouraged the Red Guards and the general populace to eliminate the class enemy, as well as fighting each other, hence shifted the responsibility ostensably away from himself and Mao. As a result, Mao was pleased with Kang Sheng for achieving the elimination of the so-called class enemy while shifting the responsibility to others (including those already died in the infights between different sects of Red Guards), and Kang Sheng's position was further strengthened in the Cultural Revolution.

Kang also left a lasting imprint on China's foreign policy. As MacFarquhar writes, "[t]he dual role of Kang Sheng in Mao's campaign against revisionism at home and abroad symbolized the close relationship between Chinese domestic and foreign policy."^[18] While the mainstream of the CPC leadership cultivated Prince Norodom Sihanouk as Cambodia's anti-Western and anti-imperialist leader, Kang argued that Khmer Rouge guerrilla leader Pol Pot was the real revolutionary leader in the Southeast Asian nation. As a result, Pol Pot became the recipient of Chinese aid for years to come. Kang Sheng's backing of Pol Pot was an effort to back his own cause within the CCP, as his touting of Pol Pot as the true voice of the Cambodian revolution was in large part an attack on the Chinese Foreign Ministry, whose pragmatic support for Prince Sihanouk's regime was thereby presented as reactionary.^[19]

At the apex of his power, Kang ranked fourth behind Mao, Lin Biao, and Zhou Enlai. His last service to Mao was the 1976 campaign to criticise "rightist deviationism," which was aimed at Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping, though Kang died of cancer in late 1975 before it was launched. Even before drawing his last breath, Kang had called Mao's English interpreters and proteges Nancy Tang and Wang Hairong to his hospital, accusing Jiang Qing of having betrayed the CPC to the KMT before the Communist victory. Kang may have forecasted Jiang's fall, or he may merely have been speculating as to her fate.

[edit] See also

Red Team (CCP)(上海赤衛隊)

[edit] References

For those who don't read Chinese, Kang's career is covered in the books The Chinese Secret Service by Roger Faligot and Remi Kauffer, translated from the French by Christine Donougher (Paris: Laffont 1987; Translation London: Headline 1989; ISBN:0-7472-0089-0) and The Claws of the Dragon - Kang Sheng, The Evil Genius Behind Mao and His Legacy of Terror in People's China by John Byron and Robert Pack (New York: Simon & Schuster 1992; ISBN:0-671-69537-1)

[edit] Notes

Preceded by Li Weihan	President of the Central Party School 1938 – 1939	Succeeded by Deng Fa
Preceded by '	Secretary of the CPC Shandong Committee 1949	Succeeded by Fu Qiutao
Preceded by None	Governor of Shandong 1949 – 1955	Succeeded by Zhao Jianmin