Kang in Yan'an
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 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 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 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 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.
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 & Pack assert that
Kang acted decisively to protect Mao and rebut 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 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, 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 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. Pyotr 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.
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. Chang and Halliday write that “Shi Zhe observed that Kang 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 "Far 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 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. According to Byron and Pack, “Kang’s conduct of the Yan'an Rectification Movement introduced a new element into Chinese politics: an emphasis on eliciting false confessions.” 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 Seventh Party Congress in April 1945, Kang 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,
or many victims of Rectification, release and rehabilitation in 1945 after 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.
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