Commentary
For Americans, the Ukraine war seems far away, yet at any moment China may officially declare its support for the sanctioned Russian economy and deliver the military and non-military goods to win the Ukraine war decisively. What is to stop this Eurasian monster? The European Union indeed spends a lot of taxpayer money on defense and they can spend a whole lot more. But without the United States, Europe may become overpowered and then absorbed into a super-Eurasia which threatens the existence of America. North Korea may attack the US naval base in Guam and the grandfather of the current dictator there had been an officer of the Red Army and Stalin’s puppet. The true command structures of North Korea are secret and the most likely scenario is that Moscow is still pulling the strings and delivers the tech needed for the nuclear program.
Already we can see the Russian propaganda in the West shifting towards a pact with the communist Chinese. Xi Jinping supposedly wants to shake up his regime and ditch the remnants of Maoism. Especially conservative Americans are asked to make a pact with the devil in order to win against an international leftwing conspiracy. The Chinese, despite the communist program of internationalism, kept a strong ethno-centric nationalism and exceptionalism. If you buy into their garbage, they are the greatest empire that goes back throusands of years further than anybody else. In Russia, a slavic heritage and the language are an absolute must. Ever since prince Alexander Nevski drove back the Teutonic order and the Swedes 700 years ago, the main enemy was always white non-slavic folks from Northern and Central Europe. Sometimes they call themselves Teutonic Order, sometimes National Socialists and today’s Angloamerican elites look exactly the same. So when Russia talks about “Nazis” they really mean white, non-slavic folks.
So forget about the fantasy that there is a christian-conservative, better superpower out there where the grass is greener and happy families frolick around. It’s just the Soviet Union without Marxism-Leninism. The ruling KGB structure (which they don’t really divulge) carbon copied the plundering we saw during the European middle ages, where monarchs and aristocrats stole everything they could and put family members in all kinds of lucrative positions. Eventually the aristocrats hid their money behind a flurry of offshore front corporations, stock holdings and other vehicles. The KGB did the very same thing, declared the empire to be the “3rd Rome” and built outragious palaces. The United States also models itself after ancient Rome, with more economic freedom (which means more tax revenue), more personal freedom (which keeps the serfs busy and entertained) and the political choice between tightly controlled parties and outdated ideologies. In Russia you go to prison when you complain about the leadership. In the USA you are encouraged to complain about the political opponent and be a silly lapdog to your own political group. Every few years the ruling party changed and this strings the people along.
Russian propaganda keeps playing into the fears of conservatives in the West, but socialism in reality is just over-regulation and over-taxation, which are attributes of just about every empire that ever existed. The KGB learned its intimidation and spy techniques from the older tasrist intelligence who learned it from the British colonial empire.
A Russian revolution in China
China’s communist revolution is part of the state cult. Mao is considered the founding father and his “Long March” a blazing myth. Ultimately, however, it was an operation planned, financed and monitored by Russia over a long period of time. All major Chinese communists had been educated in Stalin’s institutions. Anyone who secretly expressed no loyalty to Moscow was immediately eliminated and replaced. Mao’s tough program was copied verbatim from Stalin. Just as the USSR took Eastern Europe, they took China and then, for strategic reasons, made it appear that the two communist “brother states” went their separate ways.
The book “Kang Sheng and the Chinese Secret Service” provides some important information: Before there was even a proper communist party, many so-called “youth corps” formed across the country and talent scouts recruited young men like Sheng. As in other countries, no significant communist movement would have emerged without professional guidance from established Russian circles. The Russian Sergei Dalin arrived at the first joint congress of the Chinese Socialist Youth Corps with a forged passport, identified by French counterintelligence in China as an agent of the Russian secret service GPU, a forerunner of the KGB. Special commands were set up by the GPU with Chinese communists. Two people were also present on behalf of Moscow when the Chinese Communist Party was founded in a small circle. After returning home, Wang Jinmei and Deng Enming reported to Kang Sheng about the founding congress. In 1922, Deng and Wang went to Moscow to attend an important event attended not only by Chinese communists but also by members of the nationalist Kuomintang.
Moscow’s Sun Yat-sen University was one of several training camps for the Chinese Communists, as well as for the Kuomintang nationalists. The first rector was Karl Radek, who had become a member of the Central Committee of the CPSU but was thrown out of the party in 1927 and exiled to Siberia.
There was also the “Communist University of the Working People of the East” which was supposed to educate Asian cadres. On behalf of Lenin, Mikhail Borodin established a military academy on a small island near Canton in order to have new officers trained by Soviet military advisers for the Chinese communists and nationalists. Kang Sheng was tasked with “special affairs” for “political security”, which meant counterintelligence and counterintelligence, i.e. obtaining cover addresses, shielding meeting points, establishing dead mailboxes and recruiting informants. Chinese were frequenting the Soviet consulate in Shanghai, where GRU agents such as Chusov and Koyenikov were based. The two Russians were in charge of the Chinese Communist Party’s combat departments. The necessary money flowed through the Soviet Dalbank, a front organization of the Soviet secret service GPU. Moscow sent Sergei Dalin, who had been observing the Congress of Communist Youth Corps years earlier, and GPU agent Sidorkin. The Kremlin ordered that the Chinese communists had to work with the nationalist Kuomintang for the time being.
Russian agent Borodin sought out the most capable people and put Gu Shunzhang in touch with the GPU, who then referred him to a training facility in Vladivostok, where he received thorough training in espionage and armed insurgency. He even made it to Zhou Enlai’s deputy, but was arrested by the Kuomintang and betrayed some of his comrades, which is said to have led Enlai to kill Shunzhang’s family members. Kang Sheng is said to have gone through the GPU training and then built up appropriate intelligence structures for the Chinese Communist Party. He distributed a pamphlet to a select few, which was essentially a copy of the GPU manual for the basic training of new cadres. Of course, the Russians only needed to pass on part of their intelligence expertise, and only as much as the Chinese absolutely needed to carry out their tasks.
The followers of the Chinese Communist Party were soon disappointed by the party leadership, which “was ready at any time to go to battle at the slightest sign from Moscow, regardless of the consequences”. Some hasty and failed operations were due to the power struggle in Moscow and St. Petersburg, because Stalin was not yet the undisputed dictator and even dismissed his own intelligence chiefs in droves. During the ruthless actions in China, communist officials allowed themselves to be tested to see whether they were consistently implementing orders from Russia, without any hesitation or complaints. Distrusting one another and living in paranoia, China’s communist leaders were exactly what the Kremlin wanted to insure against the project slipping away. Each was interchangeable and theoretically could be eliminated at any time. Anyone who criticized the Russians in private with another comrade and harbored any ideas of locking out Russia after the planned revolution ran the risk of being reported as unreliable. Any bodyguards, cooks, domestic servants or women could actually be Soviet agents, and anyone could carry out an assassination. If you messed with the Kremlin, your own wives and children would also be in danger. The Sixth Congress of the CCP was held outside Moscow in a GPU sanatorium that was thoroughly bugged. The Chinese communists were supposed to set up their “own” secret service and did so in accordance with their Soviet training. The Soviets also largely determined the CCP’s Politburo members. Stalin especially relied on Li Lisan.
Lisan considered himself the Lenin of China and Bolsheviked the party on the Russian model. His comrades were constantly being hunted down by the French, British, mafia gangs, the Kuomintang and Chinese authorities. The spy chief of the Soviet Union’s Red Army sent infamous agent Richard Sorge to China to set up an intelligence network. Sorge came from Germany and was considered a companion of Karl Marx. Disguised as a journalist and correspondent for the “Deutsche Getreide Zeitung” and representative of the German-Chinese society, he acted under the alias “Johnsen”. Various organizations were used as camouflage, such as the Soviet Merchant Navy. Kang Sheng may have worked directly for Sorge. Money came from the Metropolitan Trading Company, among others, but Stalin tied the money to specific conditions. Ursula Hamburger (alias “Sonja”), who later worked against the Nazis and transported information crucial to the war to Russia, was also involved in China. Sorge had recruited her for the GRU. The so-called “28 Bolsheviks” arrived in China; all graduates of the Soviet Russian Su Yat Sen University. Wang Ming, who was only 25 years old and extremely arrogant, was considered the new star in the sky, Moscow’s favorite, modeled after the Russian model. Later, in 1941, he refused the self-incrimination and declaration of loyalty demanded by Mao. Soon after, he became seriously ill. In his later book, 50 Years of the CCP and the Betrayal of Mao Zedong, Wang claims that Mao tried to have him poisoned. In 1956, Wang went to the Soviet Union for medical treatment and never returned to China until his death. Soviet functionary Pavel Mif pulled the strings and came to Shanghai to personally oversee what was happening and ensure the CCP was brought into line. Surrounded by snipers there was a meeting where all decisions were made. In 1937 Mif was arrested by the Soviet Russian secret service and he was executed two years later. He Mengxiong and his people wanted to resist the co-ordination and convene a party congress, but were brutally wiped out by a hit squad. A comrade is not just a comrade. The British and French were able to unmask dramatically and thus weaken the CCP to such an extent that the urban territory became too hot for them and they had to switch to the strategy of gaining a foothold in rural areas. Kang Sheng went back to Moscow to Secret Service headquarters to take stock and pick up his new orders.
The Soviet Russian hotbeds were like factories that continued to churn out new workers for China on an assembly line. Just as the British had perfected long ago, the Russians applied a whole series of attitude and reliability tests to the young Chinese subjects. Even girls were used to test whether the students cared more about showing off or maintaining secrecy. As in every sect, envy and resentment were fueled because there was no real loyalty and friendship among each other. One who betrayed his fellow students hanged himself out of guilt. Stoyanov from the GRU selected the suitable Chinese who corresponded to his ideas. The most elite of the cadre schools was in Moscow and was attached to the Comintern’s International Relations Department. Guys like Zhou Enlai, Chen Yun, Peng Zhen and Kang Sheng had special status and were trained directly by the GPU secret service. Koreans, Mongolians and Japanese were also educated at the Chinese Kitayskaya University. Even the terms used by Chinese agents are from Russian. Various troops were assembled in Russia under Kang’s leadership, which would then join Mao’s guerrilla forces. Kang and Mao remained fairly close allies for decades. It is well known and well documented that Stalin surreptitiously betrayed socialists abroad who were not in line with Moscow. Why should he deal differently with the socialists in China? Mao is said to have been significantly more independent of Moscow, and relatively early on as a guerrilla leader. As early as 1929 he suffered from depression and various physical symptoms of illness.
Stalin and his secret services must have been sure that they could control Mao, and at the same time Mao would have been the right figure to later stage a break with Moscow. Mao had the credit of being a leader in the guerrilla struggle, but he lacked the successes and the backing for his methods at the Comintern. The real expertise was provided by the German military adviser Otto Braun, who had been trained at the “General Military Academy of the Russian Armed Forces” and was sent to Mao as a minder. The so-called “Long March” was a retreat that was later turned into a heroic myth. So Mao was the ideal functionary for Moscow in several respects, because he didn’t seem to have any real talent for military and intelligence matters.
Tasked with conducting counterintelligence around Mao, Kang Sheng was in a key position to plant agents working for a Soviet service. One could have poisoned Mao at Moscow’s request, laying false leads to blame some dissenting Chinese socialists who were not aligned with Moscow, or alternatively spread the word that Kuomintang spies were behind it. Mao was totally replaceable and there were more than enough other communists ready to take his place. Mao was permanently dependent on Soviet military equipment and diplomatic cover, and none of his Chinese comrades could have guessed when this relationship of dependency would ever end. Even if Mao did dare a real break with the Soviet Union after the revolution, he would have been in a very weak position. Not only did the Russians want to control China’s territory, but also the well-known European powers like Britain and France would have mercilessly exploited any weakness of Mao’s new state. Under General Joseph Stilwell, the USA wanted to set up an American-Chinese secret service (Operation Dragon). Donovan from the OSS secret service created yet another such organization and was allowed to use the network of the British SIS (Operation CLAM). Assisting was OSS agent Cornelius Vander Starr, who had extensive commercial and financial contacts. The company he (or possibly OSS) founded later became the largest insurance company in the world. After the Japanese defeat in World War II, Stalin gave the Chinese communists a bunch of weapons that were also badly needed. On October 1, 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic of China at the Tiananmen Gate and was now the paper dictator of a country in ruins without modern economy and technology.
Russia, on the other hand, already had an automobile industry, an oil industry, modern power plants and a steel industry thanks to American companies. Mao’s health was in poor health and he ruled mainly from his bed in the bedroom. Mao’s only visit to Russia is consistently cited by historians as evidence of the great rupture between the two countries. But rather than charting his own course, Mao adapted Stalin’s approach of decades past, using massive purges and detention camps to dispossess landowners, enforce rapid collectivization, and destroy private companies en masse. This is exactly what one would have expected from someone who unconditionally implements Stalin’s wishes. But because Mao was allegedly given the cold shoulder during his visit to Russia and was parked in a country house, ordinary historians ignore all relevant context and perpetuate the legend of the rupture. In and of itself, socialism could have been introduced much more humanely and elegantly under Mao, which would not have alienated international companies and investors. What is the use of controlling more and more parts of an economy that produces little of value and cannot generate profits from sales abroad? Even after Stalin died in 1953, there continued to be significant Soviet support for China. The new Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, publicly wooed China’s sympathies, but this time it was Mao who theatrically gave the cold shoulder. In 1955, just two years after Stalin’s death, there was an agreement whereby Soviet Russia supplied the Chinese with an experimental nuclear reactor and allowed 100 Chinese technicians to undergo training in the USSR. Chinese top scientists, i
Those who had gone to the USA were brought home. In 1959, sentiment between Russia and China had hit rock bottom, and Moscow canceled the nuclear deal and ordered technicians home. But enough alternative experts were made available from the GDR and Eastern Europe, such as Klaus Fuchs, who originally worked on the American Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb. Fuchs came very close to being inducted into the Royal Society, but the FBI caught him, and he chanted the usual lyric of a caught spy that he only wanted to keep the peace by helping to establish a balance of power. Oddly enough, in 1959 he was pardoned, went to the GDR and then helped the Chinese with the atomic bomb. Various Soviet consulates in China were closed and Kang Sheng, who owed his career to the Soviet secret service, had raids carried out and two dozen KGB spies arrested.
Nikita Khrushchev said in his memoirs that the Chinese officer Gao Gang had always thoroughly informed the Soviet Russian intelligence chief Beria, which Chinese revolutionary leader thought how. Kang Sheng had been Beria’s student. Sheng had also traveled to the middle of the Spanish Civil War to hunt down dissident left-wing anarchists on behalf of Moscow. Gao was sawed off and Kang Sheng gave the impression that he no longer danced to the tune of the Soviets, but lived in Beijing, very close to the Russian embassy. Peng Dehuai was still attending the Soviet Military Academy in 1957 and wanted to renew the Chinese military. He didn’t believe in Mao’s nonsense, complained to Khrushchev and was then sawed off. Apparently he wasn’t privileged enough to be privy to the staged rupture between the two countries. Sheng, Zhou Enlai and Liu Xiao attended the CPSU National Congress in Moscow, where they theatrically emitted a bunch of shouting, which had the sole purpose of deceiving world public opinion. Not only Sheng, as a trained secret service agent, had enough brains in his head to know that differences of opinion with the Russians could be settled privately and that it would have made strategic sense to be on good terms with the Russians, regardless of whether you had your own plans followed or not. Right-wing circles in the US were skeptical; such as James Jesus Angleton of CIA counterintelligence, who feared the obvious scenario that the Chinese and Russians covertly form a single communist bloc trying to win international concessions and trade ties. Under US President Nixon and under Henry Kissinger, it was adamantly argued that aid to China would provide a counterweight to the USSR, while at the same time Kissinger had been involved in organizations such as the Bilderberg Group, which represented major corporations that exported technology to the Soviets sold. American media entrepreneur Henry Luce was convinced that Mao was totally dependent on Stalin. Luce was close to the Republicans and knew John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State, and his brother Allen Dulles, who was CIA director. The CIA and its predecessor OSS went back to the Skull & Bones secret society and Yale University, which were organs of the British colonial empire and the Welf, Reginare and Wettin high nobility.
Why, then, did not an ordinary historian systematically pursue the question of whether China was a Russian colony? The Soviet news agency TASS became the main source of information in China and the Sino-Soviet Friendship Society, with 120,000 locations, became something of a Masonic lodge system, just as the colonial power Britain once established Freemasonry along with sister organizations or front organizations in its colonies. As the Korean War began, the presence of Russian troops and equipment in China increased. The Soviets provided the tanks, the military experts, the puppet Kim Il-sung, and whatever else was needed to invade South Korea. Fighting took place in the worst possible conditions, and Mao willingly sacrificed hundreds of thousands of soldiers, some of whom fell victim to the cold of minus 30 degrees Celsius and malnutrition. They didn’t have properly lined boots or shoes. The extra cost was passed on to Chinese peasants, who had to give up grain as taxes, as in the ancient Roman Empire or medieval Europe, to pay for the standing army. One’s status in the party hierarchy determined the quantity and quality of food one received, tobacco, stationery, and health care. Leading cadres had personal doctors and sent their children to Moscow. In the countryside, families whose heads belonged to the Communist Party, such as rich farmers and landowners, hired farmers, charged farmers high interest rates, and even engaged in speculative transactions. More and more millions of farmers were living at or below the subsistence level in terms of calorie intake. The state only accumulated more debt and became even more dependent on the Soviets, which were also not really productive on the bottom line. The next stage of land reform was so blatant that it amounted to a kind of declaration of war on the peasants. After Stalin’s death in 1953, Mao was said to have been liberated from Soviet influence, according to ordinary historians, which is quite absurd.
No one was more Stalinist than Mao, no one copied Stalin like Mao, no one else acted in China like Stalin and the Kremlin set the agenda for everything. Like Hitler, he eschewed a regular routine and left the myriad tedious details to a bevy of party princes and their subordinate hordes of administrators. Kang Sheng, who had been trained by the Soviet secret service, hunted down suspected traitors to the communist cause on behalf of Liu Shaoqui, who had gone to the Soviet Union in 1921 and became the second highest official under Mao.
The “Chairman” himself was already quite a wreck, addicted to pills, mentally ill, plagued by irregular sleep and severe mood swings. If he suddenly developed cancer, suffered a heart attack, or had a stroke, he could easily have been replaced. Had he become a problem for Moscow, he could have been subtly poisoned. The state and the security apparatus had become far too complex for Mao to have even the slightest overview. Liu Shaoqui believed that one should take time to establish a complete socialist system. Any idiot should have known that forced collectivization in the Soviet Union had been a non-starter while the United States was awash in prosperity, produced more war hardware during World War II than all other veterans combined, and ordinary citizens drove spacious, high-horsepower cars. Mao called for full socialism, right now: destroying the last few companies, forced collectivization of the peasantry, and a brainwashing called “thought reform.” In essence, Mao restored civilization in China to what it was like in a European colonial empire before the 1800s, where serfdom prevailed, where there was a population class of complete slaves (in the colonies), and where scores of people died unnecessarily over and over again. In Europe, a series of wars between principalities and kingdoms decimated the citizens. In China it was the war between the state and classes of so called backwards imperialists and spies. A few percent of the Chinese ended up in Laogai labor camps and were thus slaves with a high mortality rate, just like the African slaves of the European colonial powers. Only over the course of several decades were the conditions in China gradually relaxed and a kind of middle class was allowed to exist alongside rudimentary capitalism away from the key industries.
Similarly, conditions in Europe were relaxed in the 1800s and capitalist structures were allowed to develop. Perhaps this tiered model worked so well for the most successful noble houses (Guelphs, Wettins, and Reginares) that it was repeated in the Soviet Union and then in China. The Chinese Laogai system was a copy of the Soviet gulag and a human as well as an economic catastrophe. In the USA, with manageable personnel costs and the latest machines, many more construction projects were achieved than China was able to achieve with millions of slaves. The communists pretended to do everything new and different from the traditional capitalist-imperialist aristocratic colonial empires in Europe and North America. But in reality the communists copied practically everything that the nobility had tried successfully in the past.
