2020: Deteriorating Sino-Soviet Relations and Chinese Intelligence

[I have been having fun lately exploring machine translation. Here, although I have forgotten most of the first year Russian I learned 20 years ago, I find that using DeepL, the Russian search engine yandex.ru to find articles and online Russian dictionaries, and sometimes Google Translate to check dubious parts of the DeepL translation (using the DeepL Chrome browser extension as well as the DeepL application software on my PC) I am able to do a surprisingly plausible imitation of a good translation from the Russian. Not as good as done by someone who knows the Russian language well, but surprisingly better than one would think.

When I come to puzzlingly Russian acronyms and abbreviations, a search on Yandex.ru turns up some dictionaries of Russian abbreviations that have saved the day — the machine translation often translates words but leave the abbreviations in Russian or the corresponding romanization of the Cyrillic abbreviation. I expect GPT3 language model engine would help too since it does do well with Chinese as long as I enter the text a paragraph at a time. Otherwise it goes off on a tangent introducing its own materials in the remarkably fluent output. All these machine tools have their characteristic strengths and weaknesses — like any tool stay aware of those and you will do better. I discussed machine translation in more detail in another posting Tools for Building Specialized and Technical Vocabulary for Chinese Language Learners ]

The All-Seeing Eye of Beijing

by Dmitry Vedeneev. Historian at Lugansk [PhD in History, retired from the Security Service of Ukraine]

Chinese secret service officers monitor the border with the Soviet Union

The winding down of intelligence cooperation with the Soviet Union was no accident. In its relations with Moscow and the West, the Chinese leadership has always taken a flexible and pragmatic (if not self-serving) approach. As Mao Zedong wrote back in 1940, “Our tactical principles are still to exploit the contradictions (between the great powers – Auth.), to win the majority, to fight against the minority, to defeat the enemy one by one.

FAILED VISIT TO WASHINGTON

These principles also formed the basis of political intelligence tactics – it focused on a thorough study and analysis of the situation in a particular country, its political course, various factions in its ruling circles, attracting influential people to its side, acquiring agents of influence and creating a favorable image of the PRC.

The beginning of “informal” contacts with the United States was initiated by Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai (and with the participation of CCP intelligence) in the summer of 1936. At that time, an American journalist, Edgar Snow, organized a trip to the liberated base area of China. Upon his return, the journalist published his acclaimed book Red Star Over China, which helped shape a positive image of the communist resistance movement and of Mao Zedong personally. Tellingly, Snow was put in touch with Deng Fa, head of the CPC’s Political Security Department. Later on, the journalist, who became Mao’s confidant, was used to promote politico-military information beneficial to the Chinese ruling circles in the United States (on the “Chineseization of Marxism,” a special position vis-à-vis the Comintern and the USSR, and a “special path of development. China).

In 1937, a group of journalists and intelligence agents from the United States visited the Communist Party of China headquarters. President F. Roosevelt said in 1941 – “you can see from ten thousand miles away that the Chinese Communists in our country would be called socialists“. The CCP intelligence office in Chongqing (the “capital” of the Kuomintang) and its head, Zhou Enlai, made efforts to establish contacts with representatives of the U.S. Embassy. As a result, in mid-1943, the diplomats submitted a secret memorandum to the State Department: “In their policies and practices, the Chinese Communists have moved far away from orthodox Communism,” but China needed a sensible policy to avoid alliances with the USSR. Finally, in the summer of 1944, a mission led by Colonel D. Barrett, a staff intelligence officer and aide to the U.S. Defense Attaché in China, arrived in the Special (Soviet) Region of China by agreement with the CCP. Of its 25 members, only one was a “pure” diplomat.

The colonel himself, recalled Soviet military advisor V. Chuikov, was “an old, experienced intelligence officer, a specialist in the Far East, had spent more than ten years in China. Chuikov had an excellent command of the Chinese language, established extensive connections among Chinese industrialists and military,” was well-versed in both political intricacies and the games of the Chinese stock market and black market. The arrival of the “Allied Observer Group” allowed U.S. intelligence to establish direct contact with the CCP leadership. Mao Zedong, in turn, convinced the U.S. that it was his power that would hold power in China, and sought a visit to Washington, D.C.. The U.S. is the final arbiter in the Far East, he flattered the representatives of the great power on the eve of the outbreak of the Cold War. The CCP leader insistently urged the Yankees to land their troops in China, and resolutely denied any relations with the USSR, as reported by American diplomat John S. Service.

It is interesting that the Communist spies over two years (1942-1944) managed to “shoehorn” the British emissary, Foreign Office informant W. Bond, who reported that “the Chinese Communists created their own type of Communism” that was not under the control of the Soviet leadership. We have already written that Mao’s policy was dominated by Chinese traditionalism of a Confucianist and great-power character, but the West had no cause to rejoice about this – as the processes of recent years confirm.

However, Mao’s flirtation with America had failed by April 2, 1945 – U.S. Ambassador Patrick Hurley publicly announced his country’s rejection of contacts with the CCP. The United States preferred an alliance with the Kuomintang and provided it with enormous military and technical aid, the benefit of Chiang Kai-shek’s anti-Soviet stance being assuredly unquestionable.

COLLAPSE OF THE STRATEGIC ALLIANCE

Much has been written about the long-term negative consequences of the deterioration of Soviet-Chinese relations after 1956, which eventually led to direct confrontation and armed clashes in the Far East and the Turkestan section of the border in the second half of the 1960s. Khrushchev’s criticism of Stalin’s policies, which he said Mao Zedong respected, is often cited as the main reason for breaking the alliance, which could fundamentally change the balance of power on the world stage.

His version of the quarrel with China as a “geopolitical crime” was put forward by the late Orientalist Professor Grigoriy Lvovitch Bondarevsky (one of the developers of special information and psychological operations of Soviet intelligence, an adviser on Chinese issues to the Soviet political leadership).

According to the scholar, it was not the Chinese side that initiated the rupture – it took a pragmatic position, and Chinese Prime Minister Zhou Enlai offered Khrushchev and the Politburo of the CPSU Central Committee his plan for building bilateral relations.

However, against the backdrop of warmer relations with the USSR, the United States tried to impose its own scenario on the Kremlin (Bondarevsky was a participant in these meetings with Party functionaries, diplomats, and intelligence officers). The Yankees persuaded the Soviet side: it was necessary to create a “predictable world”, a kind of “New Yalta”, to coordinate policy in regions of the world, while the USSR should give up its influence on China. After the resolution of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the opinion of the Khrushchev leadership finally tilted in favor of “stable” relations with the United States, even if at the price of renouncing the alliance with the PRC.

Moscow, in the opinion of the orientalist, broke its own strategic partnership with Beijing, which predetermined its defeat in the Third World War (which in reality was the “cold war”). A powerful Eurasian geopolitical reality collapsed. The terms of aid to Indochina became much more difficult. Military clashes began in the Far East, where it was necessary to strengthen Soviet troop deployments, to introduce the 39th Army in Mongolia, to create a huge defensive “Brezhnev Line” along the borders with China, and to lay the Baikal-Amur Mainline. China itself fell into exhausting campaigns of the “cultural revolution”, and China, weakened by its long striving for “breakthroughs”, went for a rapprochement with the United States in 1972, which, naturally, did not strengthen the USSR’s position in the world. In 1977 the position of the USSR as enemy number 1 was enshrined by the XI Congress of the Communist Party of China in 1978 this “status” was added to the Constitution of the PRC.

YOU CAN FEED A NATIONALIST AS MUCH AS YOU WANT…

Of course, it is difficult to disagree with many of Professor Bondarevsky’s conclusions. However, we believe that the rupture of relations with Moscow also had deep reasons in the very political practice of China, which has its origins in ideas of itself as “a Middle Empire surrounded by barbarians worthy only of being the emperor’s vassals. It seems that everything was much more complicated than the scholar presents – Mao’s attitude to “use the past to serve the present” was and remains one of the leading elements in the ideological and political life of the PRC.

According to researchers, even in the 1930s Mao Zedong was skeptical of the USSR. Mao saw the USSR as having a secondary role in the world communist movement (even though the then USSR did not have great power status). Mao dreamed of a large-scale military conflict between Moscow and Tokyo (or a Soviet-KMT conflict) that would pave the way to a Chinese revolution. He believed that the USSR had not provided sufficient assistance (!) to China’s communists (despite the fact that all the weapons captured from the million-strong Kwantung Army had been donated to the PLA, not counting other military aid in 1920-1949).

Against the backdrop of an almost cult-like campaign in the spirit of “the Russian and the Chinese are brothers forever”, the Soviet people, in the spirit of Orthodox universalism with a hint of proletarian internationalism, who sincerely respected “the brotherly Chinese people”, concealed the actual Sovietophobia and Russophobia that had spread even during the “honeymoon period” of Soviet-Chinese relations. As it was noted in a secret report of the Soviet representative in Harbin (June 1946), the Chinese are “universally hostile” to the Russians, not only common people, but also soldiers of the 8th PLA Army, who had spilled seas of Japanese blood. People’s government bodies were formed mainly from Russophobes, people who wanted to learn Russian were expelled from the Party apparatus, Soviet institutions and property are seized. “Russians must be expelled from China, as this is Chinese soil and there is nothing for white-faced foreigners to do here.”

In the late 1940s, there was no unanimity among the CPC’s top brass on friendship with the USSR, with many of the decision-makers taking nationalist positions in the ancient spirit of “the superiority of the Middle Kingdom over the surrounding barbarians. The security authorities “shielded” the Chinese from contact with Soviet citizens. Not wanting to lose Soviet assistance, these sentiments were suppressed for the time being.

It was not until 1973 that Zhou Enlai, speaking to a French correspondent, conveyed the sentiments of the time: as a result of the Yalta Agreement, the USSR and the United States divided the world into spheres of influence and prevented the Chinese themselves from realizing the results of their victory over the Japanese (a joint victory, to say the least – author’s note), and only later did they manage to restore sovereignty and to get both the Americans and Russians out of China. “The Russians are just as imperialistic as the Americans,” Comrade Zhou told a dumbfounded Jean Marin just as the “correct” maps were being printed in China for the “restoration of China’s historical territory,” “just like all the others, all imperialists are equally bad. Cooperation with the USSR would inevitably prevent the PRC from becoming independent.

Mao Zedong held a wait-and-see attitude for a long time, finally bending to the viewpoint of the Liu Shaoqi group and the need to focus on the USSR for pragmatic military-strategic reasons. This was a time in bilateral relations when, in exchange for towels and fountain pens, China was getting everything – from qualified personnel and industrial new buildings to missile weapons and licenses for the production of advanced weapons. In June 1949, Mao, in an article entitled “ON THE PEOPLE’S DEMOCRATIC DICTATORSHIP,” declared the USSR the head of an “anti-imperialist front” and urged it to seek “real friendly help” on its side.

Friendship was commanded not for fear but for conscience. It got to the point that on July 9, 1949, Mao gave instructions to meet Soviet comrades more often, to show up exactly on time, to be courteous and not to offend the hosts: they would offer them wine, so Chinese comrades who could drink should drink in good faith, and those who could not drink should explain the reason.

At the same time, Chinese intelligence continued to seek informal contacts between the CCP leadership and the U.S. and British governments. The wishes for “normal, equal and mutually beneficial relations with the Western powers” were conveyed to these countries through informal channels. At a meeting in 1949 with the aforementioned Colonel D. Barrett, Zhou Enlai even discussed China’s possible position in the event of war between the United States and the Soviet Union. However, when asked directly about the possibility of U.S. troops landing in China, the CCP leader answered with a firm “no”.

AGAINST YESTERDAY’S ALLY

After the 9th CPC Congress (April 1969), which proclaimed anti-Sovietism as the state policy, Chinese intelligence intensified its work against the recent ally. A month before, the famous bloody conflict over Damansky Island [Zhenbao Island] took place.

Already in the first half of the 1960s, the Chinese Embassy in Moscow became the “headquarters” of intelligence and subversive activities against the USSR, where cadres of the secret intelligence officers worked under the guise of diplomats, foreign trade workers, journalists, employees of cultural missions. Chinese spies were particularly interested in Central Asia, the Far East, the Caucasus, and the Baltic States (as early as 1952, the Kashgar Department of CPC intelligence was assigned to organize surveillance over Soviet Turkestan and Central Asia).

Intelligence and subversive activities of the PRC also spread to the countries of the socialist commonwealth – in the GDR, Bulgaria and Hungary. In Warsaw, Polish counterintelligence agents uncovered an underground group with links to the embassies of the PRC and Albania – during a search they found more than 200,000 copies of anti-government brochures.

TIBETAN WANDERER

…In March 1959 the head of the Tibetan government and spiritual authority of the Buddhists, the Dalai Lama XIV, fled to India with his immediate circle, relatives and a caravan of several hundred mules (by 1950 in Tibet there were 2138 monasteries with 150 thousand monks that owned 40% of the scarce arable land, on October 30, 1950 the PRC declared that Tibet is part of China and began active Chineseization of the region).

China immediately accused India of “kidnapping” the Supreme Lama and “organizing subversive activities” against the PRC. The Chinese authorities eliminated the self-government bodies of Tibet, during the suppression of the uprising in Lhasa on March 19-22 and the subsequent repression of several tens of thousands of Tibetans were killed. In August, armed clashes broke out on the border between Chinese and Indian troops. By that time a 300,000-strong PLA group was stationed in Tibet and up to 2 million Han migrants were living there.

Over time, it became clear that the Dalai Lama had been deliberately provoked into fleeing. He was deliberately insulted and intimidated by military authorities. China’s intelligence services began to instigate mass unrest by spreading rumors of the Dalai Lama’s imminent arrest… for “organizing unrest. When the lama asked the National Assembly of Tibet for advice to leave, mortars were fired at the assembly hall “for persuasion” – the assembly, which was inundated with PRC intelligence agents, voted the high priest out. When his caravan set out for the kingdom of Bhutan, all the bridges along the route were blown up. On the way to India, however, they did not encounter a single Chinese soldier!

According to experts, China’s special services implemented a multi-pronged operation in Tibet, which made it possible:

• Decapitate the Tibetan resistance movement;
• Find an excuse and physically crush local opposition forces;
• Definitively eliminate Tibetan autonomy and monastic ownership;
• Provoke a kind of battlefield exploration of India amid growing territorial claims against its neighbors;
• Get a many intelligence agents to India under the guise of refugees (up to 85,000 Tibetans have fled to India in total).

It was a kind of testing of the mechanism of a special operation to introduce agents into the territory of a potential enemy, as the events of 1962-1963 on the Soviet-Chinese border showed.

CHINESE “RELATIVES” FROM XINJIANG

By 1962 on the territory of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (overrun by China during a century of bloody wars and adjacent to the Soviet Kazakhstan) there were only 2 million Chinese out of a population of 5 million. Up to 120 thousand migrants from Russia, who received Soviet citizenship in 1945-1946 lived there (21 thousand had not left for the USSR by 1962). Since the late 1950s, an active Chineseization of the region and suppression of “local nationalism” began.

It was announced that Soviet subjects were being made into PRC citizenship. Mass arbitrary arrests with detention in special “labor camps” with a 14-hour workday began. In the province. Severe food supply restrictions provoked a famine.

Psychological and physical pressure, the announcement of the cessation of migration to the USSR pushed the population to illegal migration. The situation was deliberately inflamed to the limit. On May 29, 1962 the indignant crowd in Kuldja went to the Party Committee for explanations. However on the square they were fired at with machine guns. Several dozen people were killed, including children. The authorities imposed martial law, Soviet institutions were blocked by troops, arrests began of members of the Society of Soviet Citizens in Kuldja, atrocities against Soviet representatives, all Soviet trade missions were closed (similar hostile actions took place all over the PRC as well).

As a result, in April-May 1962 about 68,000 people, including many ethnic Chinese, spontaneously moved to the Soviet Union with their belongings and livestock. From October 15, 1962 to May 1, 1963, 46 thousand people were additionally repatriated to the USSR. The PRC counterintelligence agencies, under threat, forced the repatriates to put Chinese “relatives” in their documents.

Thus, the Chinese special services conducted a strategic intelligence operation from Xinjiang. It allowed PRC intelligence agencies to comprehensively solve a number of far-reaching tasks:

– “Set the stage” for a full-scale deterioration of relations with the USSR, its propagandistic discrediting before the Chinese people, and the planting of a psychosis around “Soviet revisionists and imperialists;

– Finally “integrate” Xinjiang into China through ethnic cleansing and strengthening the military-administrative presence, to get rid of the pro-Soviet part of its population;

– Minimize Soviet official presence and influence in China (including as a cover base for the activities of Soviet special services);

– Conduct a mass withdrawal of agents to the USSR through repatriation and spontaneous flight;

– Exacerbate the situation on the border, to find its vulnerabilities.

Analysis of counterintelligence cases of the NKGB-KGB USSR on the facts of Chinese espionage (1945-1983) showed that 43% of them were conducted on individuals who were in the USSR in 1962-1963. According to estimates of the KGB of the USSR, in 1962 – 1963 through channels of emigration, the Chinese security services brought into the USSR up to 30,000 agents, including up to 2,000 agents of the “special period” for subversion and terrorist acts in case of war. Agents were tasked to settle near important military and transport facilities, to determine the combat readiness of the Soviet Army, to penetrate into the intelligence apparatus of the KGB and GRU GSh, to create positions within the “old” Chinese diaspora. A significant portion of the agents were identified and turned over by the state security organs.

 Tags: dmitry vedeneev secrets of special services

 September 7, 2020