According to the conventional view, Russia and China are separate empires that cooperate only to a limited extent. For example, it is claimed the government in Beijing was only informed weeks in advance about Russia’s attack on Ukraine. The continuous artillery fire and multiple rocket launchers depleted Russia’s arsenals, and Putin is said to have actually believed the illusion that he could take a country the size of France with only 200,000 ill-motivated soldiers and minimal air force operations. NATO is trying to prop Ukraine up long enough for some sort of peace deal, plus get some sort of deal where China doesn’t interfere with Ukraine while leaving Taiwan alone. Some US Republicans and related media are already telling conservative target audiences that they should sacrifice Ukraine because they need Russia as a partner against the communist Chinese.
But what if Russia and China were already coordinating and planning years ago with regard to an upcoming Ukraine war? What if the Ukraine war is just part of a multi-stage plan to involve NATO in multiple theaters of war around the world at the same time? Any attempt by NATO to pit Russia and China against one another, or to make concessions to the two empires, would make things worse. China could bring hundreds of thousands of troops and lots of equipment to Ukraine via the trade route infrastructure it created. Alternatively they could move hundreds of thousands of North Korean soldiers by train to Ukraine.
During the Cold War, communism was, on the surface, the unifying element and at the same time the trigger for tensions between Russia and China. The Western world wondered: Is Russia dominating the Chinese Communist Party? Will China tolerate this? For whom does the communist ideology play which role in the face of serious efficiency problems? Do the partners grow apart over time? Would one partner betray the other? Are the Chinese simply too different from the Russians with their ethnicity and their multi-thousand-year-old culture? These doubts repeatedly led to the USA in particular selling important technology to the Eastern Bloc and intensifying further trade relations; each with the explanation that they wanted to promote the Chinese as a counterweight to Soviet Russia and vice versa. The end of the Soviet Union seemed to drive Russia and China even further apart.
Some conservatives and Soviet defectors warned against a long-term Communist strategy during the Cold War; that at some point they will strike the West together. But even those voices were weak because even they didn’t really understand how close the Russians and the Chinese were at the top.
After KGB agent Anatoliy Golitsyn defected to the West, he published a book purporting to reveal the unfiltered truth, entitled NEW LIES FOR OLD – The Communist Strategy of Deception and Disinformation. Notorious CIA counterintelligence director James Angleton considered Golitsyn “the most valuable defector that ever reached the West” and Britain awarded him the “Order of the British Empire”. He may have provided valuable information on KGB agents and operations, but on the subject of China, which is so important to us today, he seems to be promoting rather than debunking a dangerous myth. He reveals only what one could piece together anyway, namely that Soviet Russia and communist China at times deliberately lamented their differences publicly for strategic reasons, instead of constantly projecting the image of harmonious, unshakable communist brotherhood to the outside world. Nevertheless, Golitsyn presents the situation as if the two empires had indeed separated very early on and would only cooperate with each other. However, a plethora of information from various sources reveals a tremendous degree of Moscow control over the Chinese Communists from the start; even before the revolution under Mao. The Chinese went through Russian training institutions and were constantly tested for their loyalty to Moscow and, if necessary, exchanged. The money came from Russia, the crucial war equipment and the military advisors. After a successful revolution, China was sovietized exactly according to Stalin’s wishes; just as Eastern European states had been completely taken over by Moscow. According to strict imperial and secret intelligence logic, Russia would have aimed for maximum control and maintained it permanently through secret intelligence saturation. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe relaxed, but in China and North Korea (where Beria and Stalin themselves installed Kim Il Sung as a puppet) there was no liberation from the dictatorships.
Why should China have been allowed independence, including nuclear weapons? Why is the possibility that Moscow has completely controlled China since Mao never been specifically addressed and investigated publicly? Why is the lame assessment of KGB defector Anatoliy Golitsyn considered the best possible? One must have read the major defectors, but at the same time be aware that those never had access to the highest levels of secrecy, could only see part of the operations at their level, and that after the defection the the info was filtered by Western secret services and only selected bits of information were allowed to end up in the publisehd books. What we expect from real revelations is that actual secrets are revealed and we get genuinely new perspectives.
Golitsyn merely “reveals” things that were barely veiled:
For example, in June 1944, Stalin told Averell Harriman, then US ambassador to Moscow, that the Chinese communists were not real communists, but "margarine" communists. In August 1944, Molotov, then Soviet Foreign Minister, Patrick Hurley and Donald Nelson, President Roosevelt's two personal representatives in Chungking, told President Roosevelt that many of the so-called Chinese Communists were simply desperate poor people who would forget this political inclination when their economic situation improved. In the summer of 1945, Stalin said that Chinese Communism was not good for much.Further fake assurances that Chinese communists were not real communists were made by the Soviet leadership in Potsdam in July 1945 and in Moscow in September 1945. At the same time, Mao publicly lied that he received too little help from Soviet Russia.
The author [Golitsyn] learned of a Soviet decision, made after secret negotiations with a high-level CCP delegation in Moscow in the fall of 1946, to increase Soviet military aid to the CCP; The Soviet General Staff, military intelligence and the Ministry of Transport were all ordered to give priority to the Chinese Communist Army.It was child’s play for Western intelligence services to see through the public statements of Stalin and Mao. Golitsyn reveals nothing special at all and also spreads a devastating misconception:
Mao was told by Stalin that all Soviet intelligence work in China had ceased and that the names of former Soviet agents in China would be disclosed to Chinese intelligence.Russia only gave up a few agents in an attempt to appear to release China into some sort of independence. Likewise, Golitsyn reveals only a few trivia bits to appear to be honestly describing the relationship between Russia and China:
It would be completely wrong to think of China as a Soviet satellite at the time. The extent of Soviet infiltration and control over the Chinese party and government was small compared to that over the Eastern European satellites; it was largely confined to Sinkiang and Manchuria.Why should it have been small? First, it contradicts countless facts, and second, it contradicts basic imperial and intelligence logic. According to Golitsyn, Moscow would have taken a huge risk without securing its own investment. Completely foreign Asians, from a completely foreign culture, with a foreign economic and social tradition and starting position, were brought to power in a country that was gigantic in terms of area and population, in the hope that they would not, after a very short time, ignore communism and only do what is useful for their new empire. Golitsyn “reveals” that Stalin was not entirely honest and kept a few agents and front addresses in China instead of withdrawing and/or exposing them to the Chinese.
The gravest of all disagreements arose over the Korean War, which Stalin launched without taking Mao's full confidence.It is not a simple “disagreement” when Stalin starts a war on China’s doorstep, pulls the strings with the North Koreans, and then demands that China provide hundreds of thousands of valuable troops at its own expense and risk losing them altogether. We now know that Mao was in line with the Soviet leadership (as usual) and dutifully mobilized the soldiers. It is unclear whether, prior to the Korean War, Stalin really believed American claims that the US had no interest in meddling in Asia. Either way, Stalin was responsible and Chinese troops were crucial. Data from official Chinese sources reported that the Chinese had 114,000 combat deaths, 34,000 non-combat deaths, 340,000 wounded and 7,600 missing during the war. Golitsyn delivers a manipulative account:
The Soviets suggested that the Chinese send troops to help the North Koreans. Unsurprisingly, the Chinese initially refused. Only after massive Soviet pressure was exerted, culminating in a secret and personal letter from Stalin to Mao, did the Chinese agree to send "volunteers" to Korea. Soviet economic and military aid to China increased. On January 17, 1955, the Soviet government announced that it would support China in setting up nuclear research facilities. Later, the USSR committed to building a nuclear reactor in China, which should be operational by March 1958.While there were significant concerns among Chinese generals, Golitsyn here perpetuates the legend that Russia and China were vastly separate empires that were not at all enthusiastic about cooperating with each other, and that Russia had to use carrots and sticks extensively.
The earlier decision to disclose all former Soviet agents in China to the Chinese has been fully enforced with no exceptions.Completely without exceptions? How can Golitsyn be so sure? He was just a major in the KGB. There are many indications that Russia only exposed a few of its own agents as a symbolic gesture.
Thereafter, at Chinese request, Soviet intelligence dispatched a number of its leading experts on such subjects as scientific reconnaissance, penetrating Western embassies in Moscow, physical protection of nuclear and missile facilities, manufacturing audio surveillance equipment, and conducting sabotage and assassination operations . The status and functions of Soviet advisers, including intelligence and security advisers, were settled to Chinese satisfaction.How can the former KGB claim to be so sure? Why should China have been given special status at eye level while states in Eastern Europe were completely under control? It is well known how many purges took place under Mao’s rule and how virtually all major Chinese revolutionaries had gone through Russian training camps. It would have been perfectly natural for Moscow to infest the Chinese government apparatus with agents who knew nothing about each other. In this way, traitors to Moscow’s interests could be quickly identified and eliminated. Golitsyn does not expose a Russian-Chinese deception, but knowingly or unknowingly participates in a Russian-Chinese deception.
The role of the advisers was limited to advice and coordination. Interference in the internal administrative affairs of the Chinese services was ruled out. The Soviets really treated the Chinese services as equals in status if not in experience.Again the KGB major makes definitive, comprehensive statements with words like “out of the question” and “real”. In 1958, according to Golitsyn, the new KGB chief Shelepin was so impressed after a visit to China by the Chinese secret services and their “skillful” handling of dissidents that he recommended that the KGB learn a lesson from it and from learn the Chinese. In reality, the Chinese had only received basic training from the KGB without being taught how to shake off Russian control and how to spy on Russia. Golitsyn throws the reader a few ultimately worthless chunks of information to make it more believable:
More than a year after the reported departure of Soviet economic and technical specialists from China in July/August 1960, at least some of the KGB advisers were still there. A former colleague and friend of the author who had been sent to China to advise on the physical protection of Chinese nuclear facilities was still in China in November 1961.It is the greatest irony that Golitsyn promises clarification that Russia and China faked or exaggerated tensions between each other, but ultimately itself provides misleading information about supposed significant tensions.
The insensitivity of Stalin's handling of Sino-Soviet and other intra-bloc relations, if left uncorrected, would have resulted in a genuine Sino-Soviet split analogous to the Tito split. In fact, the necessary corrective measures were taken in good time. By the end of 1957 there were no more open differences between the members of the blockSo it almost came to a real split, which could only be averted by “corrective measures”. This is as absurd as anyone claiming that a Russo-Polish rupture almost came about because of Stalin’s rudeness, but after Stalin’s death the Soviets smoothed things over to Polish satisfaction. Stalin or not; Moscow set the line and the other countries had to follow. Real opposition would have been quickly exposed by espionage.
Golitsyn rattles off all sorts of fallacious evidence of how divided Russia and China would have been:
This unofficial evidence, much of it retrospective, pointed to a deterioration in party and diplomatic cooperation in 1959, an end to Soviet military and nuclear cooperation that year, and the cessation of Soviet economic aid to China in 1960.From late 1961, references to Sino-Soviet differences began to appear even in official communist sources.
Friction and competition between the Soviet and Chinese delegations at the meetings of international front organizations became noticeable. […] During the second period of schism, the existence of differences was fully acknowledged. An alleged attempt to settle them was made when a senior Chinese party delegation visited Moscow for talks in July 1963. The talks apparently failed and public polemics began between the parties. Previously secret party letters revealing differences between the parties were published in the Soviet and Chinese press. Some Chinese diplomats were expelled from the Soviet Union for distributing leaflets.Golitsyn is no exposer, sticking rather closely to the usual view that Russia and China are separate and fractious empires that may or may not pull together in the future.
In the third period, beginning around 1969, the apparent deterioration in Sino-Soviet relations was expressed in both deeds and words. Troop strengths were built up on the Sino-Soviet border. Border incidents broke out between the two countries against the background of mutual accusations of “hegemonism”. China began publicly and systematically to take an opposite position to the Soviet Union on NATO, the Warsaw Pact, the EEC, detente, disarmament, European security and many Third World issues, including the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan.The fact that Russia and China didn’t even break off diplomatic relations or start shooting at each other, but rather lived along side by side, gnashing their teeth, is the great communist deception maneuver that Golitsyn pretends to reveal here.
The Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Mutual Cooperation and Assistance was not rescinded either. By 1980, each side pledged to assist the other in emergencies.Where exactly in Golitsyn’s book is a noteworthy secret revealed at all?
Why would the Soviet and Chinese leaders deliberately draw Western attention to the existence of a dispute that they sought to conceal from their own parties and the populace, unless they could thereby serve their mutual interests in furthering their recently agreed long-term serve politics?According to Golitsyn, however, the pact between Russia and China would only be an ordinary pact between two completely separate empires and, as is well known, such calculations can constantly change, depending on what the USA, for example, offers. And then we are right back to the idiotic notion that perhaps Russia could be played off against China with concessions and vice versa. The considerable technology sales by the USA to the Eastern Bloc and massive appeasement were based on precisely these ideas. Ultimately, the problems that Germany now has are based on these ideas, namely the energy dependency on Russia and the trade entanglements with China. If China fails as a trading partner due to international tensions, this would endanger the German economy. Had people been publicly aware early on that Russia and China might be one and the same empire, we would not have made ourselves so dependent.
Golitsyn strongly accepts virtually every single point of alleged incompatibility between Russia and China: the long-term economic imbalance, the cessation of Soviet economic aid, the failure of communist ideology in practice under Mao, cultural and historical differences, and even classic disputes over territory:
Assertions of Chinese national interests are evident in Chinese claims to Taiwanese, Indian, and Outer Mongolian territory, and in calls for the revision of 19th-century "unequal treaties" that awarded certain Chinese territories to Russia. Soviet national confidence was evident in Soviet attempts to incite revolt in Sinkiang and among tribal groups bordering China, and in Soviet complaints of Chinese border violations, which, according to official Soviet sources, numbered five thousand in 1962 alone.While Golitsyn warns that “at a later stage, the option remains for the communist strategists to end the split and adopt the clenched-fist strategy,” he only superficially focuses on communist ideology (which no longer plays a significant role in Russia today). ) and otherwise considers Russia and China to be entirely separate.
Hiding
Investigating the question of a secret cartel by the Russians and Chinese inevitably leads to the expanded investigation of whether the British and Americans are also part of the secret cartel. Whether the three superpowers have common roots and would lose their status or even collapse without the continued secrecy of the real situation. The massive Western aid to the Eastern bloc has been “explained” in various nonsensical and contradictory ways:
One would have intended to help China as a counterweight against Russia. This doesn't make any sense per se.
One would have intended to help Russia as a counterweight against China. This makes no sense at all per se and especially with regard to the last point. Why support two opponents at the same time?
One would have naively hoped for change through trade. To believe that, key figures in the Anglo-American superpower would have to be unrealistically stupid. Russia and China are completely separate empires, which reduces the risk of trade. Ultimately, one should rely on Soviet and Chinese communist sources.
The "wise men of Zion" initiated communism in the Eastern bloc and also promoted Eastern communism via mostly left-wing politicians in the West. But there are no wise men from Zion.An occupation of China by Stalin
China’s communist revolution is part of the state cult. Mao is considered the founding father and his “Long March” a 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 adopted 1:1 by Stalin. It was Stalin who paid for Mao’s equipment and had military action planned. 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 “The Master of Shadows – Kang Sheng and the Chinese Secret Service” provides some important information: In the 1920s, various European powers had different sized spheres of influence (so-called concessions) on the territory of China with their own administration, their own police force and their own secret services. There were also several influential mafia secret societies that wanted to get involved everywhere. Kang Sheng, who came from the landed gentry, came into contact with relevant socialist literature from Germany by Kautsky, Marx and Engels in the early 1920s through his professor, which had been translated into Chinese. There weren’t really any new ideas. All important things were already planned and all important framework parameters were set. 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 circles. One has to reckon with the fact that even at this early stage of China’s socialist movement there was infiltration by the local secret police, mafia groups, the Russians and the secret services of the European powers on the ground. 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. About the GPU were
Special commandos set up with Chinese communists. Two people were also present on behalf of Moscow when the Chinese Communist Party was founded in a small circle. Almost all of the participants were arrested by the French and escape was only possible shortly before they were seized because someone knocked on the door and announced something like a warning. One can see that generally very difficult initial conditions prevailed in order to start a new movement and that even numerically small gatherings were in danger and had to be shielded by methods of the secret service “tradecraft”. 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.
In the run-up to the revolution in Russia, various figures such as Lenin and Trotsky had been parked in Europe to learn a certain trade before infiltrating Russia again. Something similar could also be observed among relevant Chinese revolutionaries, some of whom later rose to the highest echelons of power. According to witness statements, Kang Sheng completed an internship at a technical university in Berlin in 1922. His father is said to have provided the appropriate contacts for this. Shandong was once a German colony. Zhou Enlai commuted back and forth between Berlin and Paris at the time. The two got pretty close. There was a sworn communist “Chinatown” community in Paris’s Rue Godefroy and its neighborhood. Trained by the Soviet Russian secret service, Suzanne Girault from the French Communist Party distributed money there that was used, among other things, for the printing of a communist newspaper by Deng Xiaoping, who much later became the leader of China. Kang was in Paris and is said to have set up secret structures there, which was a strikingly responsible task for such a young man and which was certainly closely monitored and guided by the experienced French communists on behalf of Moscow. Because technical errors could quickly have led to the entire network being busted and arrested, or to some adversary succeeding in infiltrating agents. In 1924 the revolutionaries went home to China after their “basic training” and continued to be trained there in tradecraft and communist ideology through the works of Nicholai Bukharin, who worked on the Soviet daily newspaper Izvestia until 1937 and did not survive the Stalinist wave of purges. 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.
Later there was a show trial and a sentence of ten years in a camp. One or two guest lectures at the university were held by Leon Trotsky, who went into exile in 1929 and was murdered by Soviet agents in 1940. 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. Borodin also fell from grace and eventually died in a labor camp. Kang Sheng was tasked with “special affairs” for “political security”, which meant something like 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. Koenikov had once served under the tsars, then ended up in the communist camp and eventually turned out to be a British agent who had been working for Britain since at least 1926. 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 insurrection. 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 exactly as much as the Chinese absolutely needed to carry out their tasks. Neither Sheng nor his comrades learned the secret background of the Russian revolution and how ancient aristocratic intelligence networks kept socialism under control early on. No, they were only allowed to learn the craft, such as encrypted communication, dead mailboxes, cover addresses, shaking off potential pursuers on the street, recruiting informants, exposing traitors and reporting unreliable comrades to Moscow. The followers of the Chinese Communist Party were soon disappointed by the party leadership, which “was ready at any time to go to the barricades 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 carry out an assassination at any moment. 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. There was a meeting surrounded by snipers, where all decisions were made
were brought. 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 more 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 had depression and various physical symptoms of illness. He had not been raised by the Soviet Union’s elite elite schools and had a penchant for escalating adventures in sex and drugs, but he nonetheless had the support of Stalin, who was known to be hyper-paranoid and demanding of the utmost discipline. 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 dubious 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 secret service OSS created yet another such organization and was allowed to use the N
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 internment camps to dispossess landowners, enforce forced collectivization at lightning speed, 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. Top Chinese scientists who had gone to the US 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 almost got accepted 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; like e
twa James Jesus Angleton of CIA counterintelligence, who feared the obvious scenario that the Chinese and Russians covertly constitute a single communist bloc, trying to win concessions and trade ties internationally. 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.
Time Magazine founders Briton Hadden and Henry Luce were both members of Skull & Bones. Alfred Kohlberg also saw Stalin behind Mao. He was a textile importer and friend of communist hunter Joseph McCarthy. Billionaires from companies like Koch Industries paid for the John Birch Society, which combined ordinary anti-Communism with classic conspiracy fiction. A number of best-selling books have provided the reader with the misleading narrative that “international bankers” and certain western industrial bosses were behind global socialism and turned China into communists. These international bankers, led by the Rothschild clan, long ago would have taken control of the British Empire and then the US as well. If one reads Mao’s infamous Red Book (the Maoist Bible), one quickly realizes that it is completely insubstantial:
“Marxist philosophy, dialectical materialism, has two most salient features. First, it is characterized by its class character: it openly declares that dialectical materialism serves the proletariat: it is further characterized by its relation to practice. It emphasizes that theory depends on practice, that practice forms the basis of theory and that theory in turn serves practice.”It is hollow, meaningless gibberish that is not only unimaginative, borrowing cheap slogans from older socialist writings, but indistinguishable from the proclamations of serf-era noble rulers. Instead of referring to Jesus, one refers to Marx and Lenin. Instead of sanctifying the hereditary nobility, “the party” and the Politburo are sanctified. Rights and property for the masses are seen as the stuff of the devil. There is an inquisition against those who do not really believe in socialism but have some other ideology besides divine socialism. Peasants have to be frugal because the party needs the money to protect the peasants. And soldiers are recruited from the workers and peasants. Complaints are prohibited:
The second function of the dictatorship is to protect the state from insurgency and eventual aggression by external enemies.Contrary to Mao’s claims, the working and peasant class is by no means the most revolutionary group in and of itself, for behind virtually every significant, great revolution in history there has always been an established, experienced power with its professional secret services.
We must reaffirm party discipline:
1. Subordination of the individual to the organization;
2. Subordination of the minority to the majority;
3. Subordination of the lower authorities to the higher ones;
4. Subordination of the whole party to the Central Committee.
Anyone who breaks these rules undermines the unity of the party.Just a moment ago it was emphasized that a classless society would be the ultimate goal, and then came the confession that the newly formed party cadres with special status were absolutely necessary.
....we must purposefully train tens of thousands of officials; we need hundreds of first class leaders of the masses.The nobility did nothing else in Europe when they selected particularly trustworthy middle-class families, which received a special status and were organized in British Freemasonry, among other things, in order to secure the future of the Empire. The social contract Mao is announcing here is like a copy and paste of any random prince in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. Even under Mao, socialism had absolutely nothing new to offer, but you had to somehow come to terms with the standard ingredients of a state: a limited state territory with a
em state people that somehow have to be forced to work and pay taxes with some kind of state order without running the risk of being kicked out of the boss’s chair. Just like in the Roman Empire or some even older empire in Mesopotamia. The brutal tactics under Mao are identical to the methods of medieval colonizers and slavers. One in a thousand people should be killed under some pretext with as much publicity as possible. There were twice or three times as many.
Even today, communists defend the revolution, claiming that they are among the vanguard against the evil that springs from any “right-wing” disposition. Right wingers today take Mao’s campaign of assassination as absolute proof that evil is “leftist”. And in order to fight this left-wing evil, one should not tolerate that, for example, the colonial era is put in a bad light. Because the colonial powers like Britain were on the right, and the right is good. In reality, the methods are always the same, regardless of whether the perpetrators market themselves as left-wing or right-wing. In 1956 all remaining private companies were expropriated and in the same year the peasants lost ownership of their tools, their animals, their land and even the right to freedom of movement. You were forced to work on a patch of land owned by the party, you had to sell the grain to the state at fixed prices, and you had no power to change the situation. This corresponds almost exactly to the current definition of serfdom; with the difference that instead of a nobleman, a local party leader exercises control and on paper everything is in collective “public property”. Chinese peasants were left with a third less food for their own consumption than before the revolution, which meant that the peasants had neither the energy nor the supplies to dare an uprising against the established order. After the communist victory, citizens were urged to report their fellow men for anything that might be considered suspicious, even if it was possession of a radio receiver, which of course was not comparable to a short-wave transceiver used by spies .
Denouncing someone else was a way of showing allegiance to the new regime. At first the cleansing was still rather timid and the government had its hands full collecting the “lumpen proletariat” from the cities (including millions of war refugees) and deporting them to the rural areas. Workers went on strike for better conditions, but the government declared strikes illegal. There were massive tax demands in the form of grain, central Shanghai fell apart, factories closed. Only the communist unity newspapers were allowed to appear, hammer and sickle and relevant portraits hung everywhere. Fashion disappeared because no one wanted to be noticed anymore, so ordinary citizens wore only linen and no makeup like in the Middle Ages. Due to new surveys and the bureaucracy, the exact arable areas were finally known, which made more precise taxation possible. In China, before the communists, there really wasn’t a typical exploitative landowning class. This class was created by the communists in the form of local party bureaucrats. Farmers used to own their land. According to communist logic, which went back to the idiocy of Karl Marx, the task was to destroy exploitative landowners. In every village, no matter how remote, communist functionaries organized a kind of witch hunt for the alleged exploiting class, which did not really exist there. The main thing was that you had a certain quota of “culprits” who you could publicly yell at, torture and kill. Kang Sheng participated in the so-called land reform campaign, and his methods, which originated 1:1 in the Soviet Union, were used throughout China. The quota set from above was that 10% of the population should be classified as members of an exploitative wealthy peasant class. However, the program ran so out of control that twice or three times as many people were followed. Estimates range up to a million dead. In Taiwan, Korea and Japan, as part of land reform, wealthier landowners received shares in state industries and certificates for commodities in exchange for land redistributed to smallholders. So the whole thing was completely bloodless, while in China a class of enemies of the people was being frantically hallucinated that had to be stolen from, punished or killed outright. In the Chinese tradition, there were certain hierarchies in the countryside with citizens in leading positions, and people didn’t like it at all when strangers from distant areas, townspeople or bureaucrats arrived.
The communists set themselves the task of destroying these traditional hierarchies and replacing them with communist party structures. Out of fear, the townsfolk went on witch hunts and ended up with blood on their hands. There were also major uprisings. The concept was similar to that of the Roman Empire or medieval aristocracies: taxes in the form of grain were collected ruthlessly because the state had to feed the standing army of 1.7 million soldiers and somehow keep the economy running. But there was a lack of modern machines, artificial fertilizers and tools. Chinese farmers feared being more productive than others and being able to afford draft animals, for example, because doing so would put them at risk of being denounced as rich farmers. The more that was produced, the more that was taxed, so it was fatal to overexert yourself without spilling more food for your own consumption. The party also declared it glorious to be poor. Kang Sheng watched as agricultural productivity in his administrative area plummeted. The communists had marketed themselves as liberators, but they behaved like occupiers and in the background the Soviet Russian Empire was pulling the strings, behind which there was a certain probability the Anglo-American Empire, led by the Welf, Wettin and Reginare nobility. The North Korean communists were also under Russian control; for example, the future dictator Kim Il-sung had lived in Manchuria for many years and received his training at a cadre school of the Soviet Union’s Red Army in Vladivostok. In 1950, Stalin approved North Korea’s attack on the South, including China in the matter. Mao used the war at home as a propagandist for another purge, led by Luo Ruiqing, who came from a genuine landowning family and should therefore actually have been considered an enemy of the state.
But because he had been trained in the Soviet Union as a future head of a communist secret police and had a portrait of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet secret police, hanging in his office, he was seen as a champion against the “rich peasants” and “big landowners” of whom he had at least one in 1000 to kill on average. Once that quota was met, more citizens would be sentenced to life imprisonment in a labor camp. Others, while remaining free, were classified as belonging to the so-called “black” social classes, at the bottom of the national hierarchy of the regime’s original aim of creating a classless society. Incidentally, this black status was hereditary, like serfdom in medieval Europe. It was becoming increasingly dangerous for the normal classes of society to have many friends and to socialize, since denunciation could spell the end of one’s status. Doak Barnett reported in 1949 that Beijing had as many portraits of Soviet leaders as of Chinese leaders. Next to the Chinese flag hung the Soviet one. Newspapers and radio stations in China praised Stalin and the USSR. Mao’s right-hand man, Liu Shaoqi, toured Soviet territory, met with Stalin six times and held meetings with top ministers. He brought home hundreds of Soviet “advisers” (rather occupiers). Even the “Long March” that Mao had turned into a founding legend had been paid for by the Soviets in Mexican silver dollars. Stalin incorporated new territories in secret annexes to treaties with China and made the Chinese taxpayer/peasant pay for the many Soviet advisers. The historian Paul Wingrove wrote:
"Mao's victorious, independent, revolutionary state was treated in much the same way as the conquered [Russia's] territories in Eastern Europe."China just seemed like territory occupied by the Russians, albeit without large Russian troops and hordes of tanks everywhere, but mostly with intelligence networks and treaty safeguards. Russian advisers occupied the most luxurious suburbs and clubs, sat in all ministries as monitors in key positions. This deep penetration of China by Russian secret services was irreversible. Even the later purges failed to change the situation, but rather had the potential to make it worse and eliminate those party officials who genuinely wanted to break away from Russia and/or implement a nicer socialism. After a few years, the better ones had
By then, Communist Party cadres had become accustomed to a certain degree of stability and privilege, and they lost their determination and willingness to accept more brutality. Moscow did not need such cadres in China.
"In every area, from state security, urban infrastructure, cadre training, economic development, ideological work to heavy industry, China copied the Soviet Union."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 a rather absurd notion. No one was more Stalinist than Mao, no one copied Stalin like Mao, no one else acted in China as if 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 suffered 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 the level of a pre-1800s European colonial empire, 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 hallucinated classes of backwards, imperialists and spies. A few percent of the Chinese ended up in Laogai labor camps and were thus slaves with a high mortality rateitsrate, 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.
