Kang Sheng (1898–1975)
Founding architect of the CCP's secret-police system: igniter of Yan'an's screening and the 1943 Rescue Campaign, operator of the Cultural Revolution's special-case machine. Buried with full honours in 1975; posthumously expelled from the party in 1980.
1. From Zhucheng to Moscow: an apprenticeship in purge technique
Kang Sheng was born in 1898 into a landlord family in Zhucheng, Shandong, under the name Zhang Zongke. He studied and taught in Qingdao and Shanghai, and joined the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai in 1924 or 1925 — the sources differ on the year, and this page records the discrepancy rather than choosing one. Through the late 1920s he worked in the party's underground apparatus in Shanghai. An arrest in the early 1930s left a gap in his file that later investigators would note with interest: the man who built a career auditing other people's pasts had an episode in his own that was never fully clarified.
In 1933 Kang was sent to Moscow as deputy head of the CCP delegation to the Comintern, serving under Wang Ming. Those four years mattered more than any posting at home. He watched the Great Terror gather force at close range, including inside the Comintern's own Chinese community, where cadres were denounced, interrogated and disappeared. Kang's role was to help Wang Ming police the delegation's internal enemies, above all alleged Trotskyists. Gao Hua's landmark study of the Yan'an Rectification, How the Red Sun Rose, traces many of the movement's later methods back to this Moscow schooling. Kang carried them home in his head: audit every cadre's biography, require everyone to confess a personal history, reward denunciation, and treat the party as a body permanently infiltrated by enemies. For the Stalinist system this was called vigilance. For the people processed by it, it was fate.
In November 1937 Kang flew back to Yan'an with Wang Ming. He brought credentials, Moscow vocabulary, and a complete theory of the enemy within. Mao Zedong, then fighting Wang Ming's faction for control of the party line, had use for such a man: a security chief fluent in Comintern language who was willing to transfer his loyalty to the new centre was worth more than a theoretician. Kang, a fellow Shandonger who had known Jiang Qing in Shanghai, is also credited in multiple biographies with easing her path into Yan'an's inner circle — a connection whose shadow reached into the Cultural Revolution decades later. This page flags that point as a biographical tradition whose details vary between accounts.
2. The Social Affairs Department: security as a system
In 1939 the party created the Central Social Affairs Department and put Kang in charge. Modelled on Soviet state-security practice, it fused intelligence, internal security and the hunting of enemy agents into a single organ answering to the very top. Kang ran it for nearly a decade. He also headed institutions such as the Central Party School at points in the Yan'an years, which meant the man training the cadres and the man vetting them were the same person — a combination that would prove decisive once rectification began.
The department's working methods matured in Yan'an. First came cadre screening (shengan): every cadre's biography, class origin, social connections and political history audited line by line, with the subject required to write and rewrite autobiographies that investigators then checked for gaps. Second came the enemy hunt: a blank in a biography, a complicated family connection, a careless remark could each be read as evidence of enemy infiltration. Third came the confession ritual: cadres were pressed to confess problems voluntarily and to denounce others, so that the file on every person grew by his own hand and his colleagues'. The system's common feature is that it did not depend on outside evidence. It depended on the organisation's monopoly of information about the individual, and on psychological pressure. In modern language, it turned every biography into a charge sheet waiting to be activated. Kang did not invent these techniques alone — the earlier Soviet-area purges and local security organs all worked similar ground — but he was the man who systematised them, theorised them and ran them at the centre. When rectification opened in 1942, the machine was ready and waiting for a party-wide opportunity.
3. Rectification and screening: from study sessions to universal suspicion
The Yan'an Rectification Movement opened in February 1942 with two speeches by Mao. In its first form it was a study campaign about writing style and party culture, aimed at all cadres. From late 1942 into 1943, however, its centre of gravity slid toward screening: every cadre's history was to be examined. Under Kang, screening meant written ideological autobiographies, itemised social connections and an official verdict on each person. On April 3, 1943 the Central Committee issued its Decision on Continuing the Rectification Movement, pushing screening to its climax with a call to examine whether enemy agents had penetrated the party. The atmosphere in Yan'an turned: confession rallies appeared in work units, named individuals were made to confess on stage, and everyone else was required to take a stand and denounce.
The case of Wang Shiwei marks the turn. Wang, a writer and translator, published an essay called "Wild Lilies" in the Liberation Daily in March 1942, criticising hierarchy and privilege in Yan'an. The essay enraged Mao. Wang was first denounced in struggle sessions, then branded a Trotskyist agent, arrested by Kang's Social Affairs Department in 1943, held for years, and executed during a retreat in 1947. He was rehabilitated in 1991. The precise chain of orders for the execution remains disputed in the scholarship — some accounts attribute the decision to the Social Affairs Department itself — and this page records only the confirmed links: criticised for his writing, arrested by the organ Kang led, executed in 1947, cleared in 1991. From publication to beheading took five years, and the decisive machinery in between belonged to Kang Sheng.
4. July 15, 1943: "Rescue the Fallen" and the Rescue Campaign
On July 15, 1943, Kang Sheng addressed a rally in Yan'an's Central Auditorium under the title "Rescue the Fallen." The speech pushed screening logic to its extreme: Yan'an, he declared, was crawling with enemy agents, and every unit had to act at once to rescue those who had been led astray — by forcing them to confess. Within days the Rescue Campaign erupted across Yan'an's offices, schools and units. Large numbers of cadres were branded spies, traitors and agents. The methods are documented in memoir after memoir: mass rallies, round-the-clock interrogation in shifts, sleep deprivation, pressure to name accomplices, and entire fabricated spy networks such as the so-called Red Flag Party case. Some victims killed themselves.
How many were falsely accused is genuinely disputed, and this page presents the dispute rather than a single figure. Gao Hua's research on Yan'an and the base areas describes screening that touched thousands in Yan'an alone, with very large numbers wrongly labelled; other studies and memoirs give higher totals when the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region and other base areas are counted, reaching five figures. The archives are incomplete and the categories differ — screened, detained, formally branded — so no single number should be treated as settled. What is not disputed is the campaign's quality: it was not investigating espionage that had happened; it was manufacturing espionage by torture and confession, in a self-confirming loop in which every new arrest proved the enemy was everywhere.
The campaign was halted from above. In late 1943 Mao laid down the formula "kill none, arrest few," and in 1944 a verification phase rehabilitated the overwhelming majority of those branded. Multiple memoirs record Mao doffing his cap in apology to wronged cadres at a public gathering. Kang, the campaign's igniter and director, received no punishment at all. The Rescue Campaign's real legacy was a reusable template for party persecution: the leader first declares that enemies exist; the security organ strikes the match; coerced confessions manufacture the evidence; then the supreme leader steps in to correct the excesses and collect the gratitude. Persecution and rehabilitation issue from the same hand, and both the harmed and the rescued owe thanks to the same address. Chinese politics would run this template again and again.
5. After 1949: eclipse and patience
After the founding of the People's Republic in 1949, Kang briefly governed Shandong as provincial party secretary and government chairman. Through the 1950s, though, his star sank: he withdrew for long stretches of supposed convalescence and played little part in central decisions; at the Eighth Party Congress in 1956 he was elected only an alternate member of the Politburo. Colleagues were not surprised. The Yan'an screening and the Rescue Campaign had left him with a heavy reputation inside the party, and his Moscow history with Wang Ming gave Mao reasons to keep him at arm's length.
Eclipse was not retirement. Kang worked the ideological beat, writing and theorising, and waited. In 1962 he seized on the novel Liu Zhidan, a fictionalised life of a dead Red Army commander, and reframed it as an attempt to reverse the verdict on the disgraced Gao Gang — an attack by literature against the party. Vice-Premier Xi Zhongxun, who had supported the novel's publication, was purged as head of an "anti-party clique" and spent sixteen years in disgrace; the case was later acknowledged as a fabrication and fully reversed after 1979. The episode was Kang's ticket back to the centre: he had shown he could still build a case out of a book. By the eve of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 he was back at the summit, and he had brought his favourite instrument with him — the special case group.
6. The Cultural Revolution decade: master of the special cases
When the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, Kang became an adviser to the Central Cultural Revolution Group and one of the movement's innermost decision-makers. He entered the Politburo Standing Committee at the Ninth Congress in 1969, and at the Tenth Congress in 1973 he was elected a vice-chairman of the party, ranked third after Mao and Zhou Enlai. A man famous in the 1940s for running purges had reached, three decades later, the very top of the pyramid.
His name is bound to the Central Case Examination apparatus. From 1966 the centre created a special-case review commission and a sprawling system of case groups to investigate senior cadres and major cases outside any judicial process. Kang was among its directors and personally supervised many of its biggest files. The cases of head of state Liu Shaoqi, of Marshal Peng Dehuai, and of hundreds of senior officials branded traitors and spies were produced by this system: verdict first, evidence afterwards; isolation and coerced interrogation to obtain confessions; confessions cross-cited to corroborate each other. It was the Yan'an screening method replayed at national scale, with victims rising from ordinary cadres to the president of the republic. Totals for the system's victims vary widely between official rehabilitation records and scholarly estimates — central-level cases alone involved senior cadres by the hundred, with families and staff swept in behind them — and this page adopts no single figure. What can be stated plainly is the mechanism: a conviction machine that bypassed every court, answered only to the top, and Kang Sheng was its most practised operator.
His self-protection deserves note. Kang ignited countless cases yet rarely left his own signature on the paper. He worked by hint, by relayed remark, by encouraging mass denunciation, so that persecution looked like the spontaneous product of the movement. The technique descends directly from Yan'an: he defined who the enemy was; the system did the seizing and the beating. On December 16, 1975, Kang Sheng died of bladder cancer in Beijing.
7. Five years after death: from eulogy to expulsion
At his death Kang received full honours: a formal memorial meeting, a eulogy by Marshal Ye Jianying praising him as a proletarian revolutionary, a Marxist theoretician and a heroic fighter against revisionism, and burial at the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery. Had the story ended there, he would have entered party history as another flawed founding elder.
The turn came after the Cultural Revolution ended. In 1978 Hu Yaobang publicly criticised Kang at the Central Party School, attacking his habit of reading between the lines for insinuations and building cases on association — methods Hu traced straight back to the Yan'an years. A formal review of Kang's record followed, with a special group auditing his files and his cases. In October 1980, just before the trial of the Gang of Four opened, the Central Committee announced that Kang Sheng was posthumously expelled from the party; Ye Jianying's eulogy was formally rescinded; and his ashes were removed from Babaoshan. Encyclopaedia Britannica and Wikipedia both record the sequence — the posthumous expulsion of a dead man is one of the rarest punishments in the party's history.
The official verdict on Kang concentrated on his Cultural Revolution persecutions and his association with the Gang of Four. It also had a visible boundary: Yan'an rectification and the Rescue Campaign were filed as errors of a movement rather than as Kang's personal crimes, because the movement's direction had been set by Mao. Kang carried the igniter's blame; the man who set the tone stayed outside the frame. That boundary is itself a footnote to this archive: the party's reckoning with its own history of persecution has always stopped at the level of the executors.
8. Responsibility: the system's designer
Kang Sheng's place in this archive differs from that of a local executor. He did not order arrests in one county or swing a baton in one interrogation room. His work was more fundamental and more durable: he translated Soviet purge technique — screening, confession, denunciation, coerced self-incrimination, the special case — into the CCP's own institutional language, and he test-ran it in Yan'an. From then on the party possessed a complete procedure for convicting its own members that required no court, no evidence and no defence, only organisational loyalty. The Rescue Campaign, the case groups of the Cultural Revolution and many later political vettings all descend from that prototype.
His personal responsibility is equally specific. The anti-Trotskyist vetting after 1937, the July 1943 Rescue speech, the arrest of Wang Shiwei and the verdicts of the Cultural Revolution case groups all carry his direct participation. He knew, better than anyone, that coerced confession produces false guilt — the 1944 rehabilitations happened in front of him — and he never let that knowledge slow him down, because the procedure was never about facts. It was about obedience. The posthumous expulsion of 1980 was the party's final word on him. It came too late, and it stopped too shallow. This page restores the full timeline: a man who institutionalised terror deserves to be remembered ahead of a hundred men who merely carried out orders.
9. Disputes and positions
Several points about Kang remain contested, and this page keeps them open. His early biography — the circumstances of his arrest in Shanghai in the early 1930s and the depth of his role in Moscow's internal purges — is told with varying detail in biographies such as John Byron and Robert Pack's The Claws of the Dragon; some of their charges lack archival proof, and this page uses only the multi-source core. The responsibility chain for Wang Shiwei's execution has no settled answer in the scholarship; only the confirmed links are recorded here. The scale of the Rescue Campaign, as set out above, is a range, not a number. And his overall standing is judged two ways: the official verdict stops at Cultural Revolution crimes and the 1980 expulsion, while overseas scholarship — Gao Hua, Byron and Pack among others — treats him as a founding architect of the party's secret-police system, with responsibility reaching back to Yan'an. The distance between those two verdicts is left for the reader to measure.
10. Two more fires: a novel and a poster
Kang's talent for ignition showed twice more, on either side of the Cultural Revolution. The 1962 Liu Zhidan affair, described above, turned a novel into a purge of a sitting vice-premier — method identical to Yan'an: fix the political label first, audit the biographies afterwards. The second fire opened the Cultural Revolution itself. In May 1966 Kang's wife, Cao Yi'ou, was leading a work team at Peking University when philosophy department party secretary Nie Yuanzi and six colleagues posted, on May 25, a big-character poster attacking the university and Beijing party leaderships. Kang relayed the poster to Mao at once. On June 1 Mao endorsed its broadcast as the first Marxist-Leninist big-character poster, and the movement burst out of the campus and across the country. Party histories and biographies converge on the couple's role at this hinge: they did not write the Cultural Revolution's script, but they handed over the first match, knowing exactly what Mao wanted to burn.
Set the three fires in a row — Yan'an in 1943, a novel in 1962, a poster in 1966 — and Kang's life takes a single shape. At the ignition point of each great persecution he stands in the same position: the man who carries the material upward, persuades the summit that the enemy is already inside the room, and supplies the first name. The machine does the rest. He never needed to arrest anyone himself. That is precisely why this archive files him not among the instruments of persecution, but among its authors.
Sources and further reading
- Wikipedia, "Kang Sheng" (biography, Social Affairs Department, Rescue Campaign, Cultural Revolution case groups, 1980 expulsion): en.wikipedia.org
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Kang Sheng" (return to Yan'an in 1937 to run internal security; Standing Committee 1969; posthumous removal 1980): britannica.com
- Wikipedia, "Yan'an Rectification Movement" (April 3, 1943 decision; Kang's July 15, 1943 "Rescue the Fallen" speech): en.wikipedia.org
- Gao Hua, How the Red Sun Rose: The Origins and Development of the Yan'an Rectification Movement (scholarly study of screening, the Rescue Campaign and Kang's system; print source, no link)
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