MAO’S CAMPAIGN terrorized even the terrorizers like his deputy and main hatchet man, Kang Sheng. Shi Zhe observed that Kang was living in a state of deep fear of Mao in this period. Though Kang had helped concoct the charge of a vast spy ring in the CCP, it could rebound, as Kang himself had a murky background. Where and when he had joined the CCP was a mystery: he had no witness to the event, and the sponsors he named denied his claim. Many letters had reached Mao casting doubts on Kang, some saying he had buckled when arrested by the Nationalists. Most damning of all, Dimitrov (i.e., Stalin) condemned Kang to Mao in December 1943 as “dubious,” saying that Kang was “helping the enemy.” In fact, back in 1940, the Russians had urged that Kang be kept out of the leadership.
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 a hold over subordinates. He kept Kang on as the chief of his KGB, in charge of vetting and condemning others. Kang remained in fear of Mao right up to his death in 1975; one of his last acts was to plead with Mao that he was “clean.”
Mao made full use of Kang’s penchant for persecution and twisted personality. Kang had been in Moscow during the show trials and had participated in Stalin-type purging. He enjoyed watching people being stricken with terror at mass rallies, and liked to play with his victims’ anguish. Like Stalin, who sometimes invited victims to his study for a last talk, Kang savored the pleasure of watching the condemned fall into the abyss at the very moment they thought they were safe. He was a sadist. One story he particularly liked telling was about a landlord in his home district who thrashed his farmhands with a whip made from asses’ penises. Kang was also a voyeur. After one fifteen-year-old girl invented a story of how she had used her body for spying, he had her repeat it all over the region, while he listened again and again. One of Kang’s closest bonds with Mao came from supplying him with erotica, and swapping lewd tales.
Kang later became a scapegoat for the Yenan Terror, but everything he did was on Mao’s orders. Actually, during the campaign, Mao limited his power by making Party bosses in each unit — rather than Kang’s KGB — responsible for designating and taking charge of most victims in their institution. In the future Communist China, there was to be no exact equivalent of the Soviet KGB.
ANOTHER ASSOCIATE who was dealt a tremendous scare in the campaign was Liu Shao-chi. Not only did some of the organizations named as spy outfits come under his domain, but he had also been arrested by the Nationalists — in fact, several times, which qualified him to be a prime suspect as a possible turncoat. If he gave any cause for dissatisfaction, Mao could easily have him condemned as a spymaster. Liu had actually been against the terror campaign when he first came back to Yenan at the end of 1942; but after this brief flutter of distaste, Russian liaison Vladimirov described him as “changing his views rapidly,” and cozying up to Kang Sheng. Thereafter, Liu toed Mao’s line, and played an ignominious role in the campaign. As he was extremely able, Mao picked him to be his second-in-command, a position Liu held until his downfall in the Cultural Revolution in 1966.
TWO WOMEN WHO were to become extremely powerful in the future entered the realm of persecution now: Mao’s wife and the wife of the man who was to be his deputy in the Cultural Revolution, Lin Biao. Both women had come to Yenan through Party organizations that were being condemned as spy centers. One day in 1943, while Lin Biao was in Chongqing, his wife, Ye Qun, was tied onto a horse and dragged off into detention. Luckily for her, Lin Biao was someone who enjoyed a most uncommon crony relationship with Mao. When Lin returned to Yenan in July, he marched into the Party office dealing with his wife’s case. “Fuck you!” he shouted, throwing his whip on the desk. “We fight wars at the front, and you screw my wife in the rear!” His wife was released, and given the all-clear. This brief experience of intense fear was the beginning of the sclerosis of the heart for Ye Qun. When she rose with her husband in the Cultural Revolution, she became a victimizer.
