56 Facts About Kang Sheng

Kang Sheng was a Chinese Communist Party official, best known for having overseen the work of the CCP's internal security and intelligence apparatus during the early 1940s and again at the height of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Kang Sheng remained at or near the pinnacle of power in the People's Republic of China from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1975.

Kang Sheng was born in Dataizhuang, Zhucheng County to the northwest of Qingdao in Shandong Province to a landowning family, some of whom had been Confucian scholars.

At the direction of the Party, Kang Sheng worked underground as a labor organizer.

Kang Sheng helped organize the February 1925 strike against Japanese companies that culminated in the May 30th Movement, a huge Communist-led demonstration, and brought Kang into close contact with Party leaders Liu Shaoqi, Li Lisan and Zhang Guotao.

Kang Sheng participated in the March 1927 worker's insurrection alongside Gu Shunzhang and under the leadership of Zhao Shiyan, Luo Yinong, Wang Shouhua and Zhou Enlai.

Kang Sheng entered the employment of Yu Qiaqing, a wealthy businessman with strong Kuomintang sympathies, as Yu's personal secretary.

Several months after the Sixth Congress, Kang Sheng was named director of the Organization Department of the Jiangsu Provincial Committee, which controlled personnel matters.

In 1930, while in Shanghai, Kang Sheng was arrested along with several other Communists, including Ding Jishi, and later released.

Kang Sheng later denied he had ever been arrested, as the circumstances of his release suggested that he had, as Lu Futan alleged in 1933, "sold out his comrades" in order to secure his freedom.

Kang Sheng allegedly demonstrated his loyalty to Wang Ming by betraying to the Kuomintang secret police a meeting convened on January 17,1931, by He Mengxiong, who had been strongly opposed to Li Lisan and was disgruntled by Pavel Mif's high-handed role in securing the ascendancy of Wang within the Chinese Communist Party.

Kang Sheng remained in Moscow for four years, acting as Wang's deputy on the Comintern, returning to China in 1937.

From Moscow, Wang and Kang Sheng did seek to maintain control over Communist forces in Manchuria, which were ordered by them to conserve their strength and avoid direct confrontation with the Japanese army.

Kang Sheng gained great power from the Elimination Office, which he used to silence opponents and witnesses to any embarrassing episodes in his past, especially his arrest in Shanghai.

Kang Sheng had played a wily game in the complex and murky world of Stalin's Moscow, earning the following comment from Josip Broz Tito, who had met Kang Sheng in Moscow in 1935:.

When Kang Sheng arrived in the Party's redoubt at Yan'an in late November 1937 as part of Wang Ming's entourage, he may have already realized that Wang Ming was falling out of favor, but he initially supported Wang and the Comintern's efforts to guide the Chinese Communists back into line with Soviet policy, especially the need to align with the Kuomintang against the Japanese.

Kang Sheng was a valuable catch for Mao as he strove to consolidate the power he had won at the Zunyi Conference in January 1935.

Kang Sheng could betray all the secrets of Wang Ming and his supporters.

Kang Sheng had absorbed sufficient Marxism-Leninism and Stalinist polemicizing to affect the patina of a theorist, and he was a fluent writer.

At Yan'an, Kang Sheng was close to Jiang Qing, who may have been Kang Sheng's mistress when he visited Shandong in 1931.

In 1938, Kang Sheng earned Mao and Jiang's gratitude by supporting their liaison against the opposition of more socially conservative cadres, who were aware of her past and uncomfortable with it.

Kang Sheng acted decisively to protect Mao and rebut the charges against Jiang Qing.

Kang Sheng was a Party member in good standing, he declared, and had no affiliations that would bar marriage to Mao.

Mao was suspicious of the Russians and, soon after aligning himself with Mao, Kang Sheng began to speak out against the Soviet Union and its agents in China.

Peter Vladimirov, the Comintern agent sent to Yan'an, recorded that Kang Sheng kept him under constant surveillance and even forced Wang Ming to avoid meeting him.

Vladimirov believed that Kang Sheng delivered biased reports of Soviet affairs to Mao.

Mao did not view Kang Sheng, who had already openly switched to his side, nor several of these other party officials [named in the ECCI Personnel Department memorandum] as his foes.

Kang Sheng even tried to defend Kang Sheng in one of his letters to [Georgii] Dimitrov.

Kang Sheng was the mastermind behind the "pain and friction" that underlay the Rectification process.

Kang Sheng used a classic Soviet technique of accusing loyal party members of being Nationalist spies.

Kang Sheng was sufficiently brutal in his methods to arouse the opposition of senior cadres, including Zhou Enlai, Nie Rongzhen and Ye Jianying.

Accordingly, following the CCP's Seventh Congress in April 1945, Kang Sheng was replaced as head of both the Social Affairs Department and the Military Intelligence Department.

Kang Sheng returned after five weeks with the view that land reform needed to be more severe and that there could be no compromise with landlords.

In March 1947, Kang Sheng put his methods into practice in Lin County, Shanxi Province.

In November 1947, the CCP Politburo assigned Kang Sheng to inspect land reform in his home province of Shandong.

Some commentators speculate that the private humiliation of being placed under a former subordinate may be one reason why Kang Sheng "fell ill" and largely disappeared from view until after Rao's fall in 1954.

In January 1956, Kang Sheng made his first public appearance in years at a meeting of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference in Beijing.

The challenges that Kang Sheng faced during the early months of 1956 underscored the dangers he would have risked by continuing his retreat.

Kang Sheng suffered a severe reversal of fortune at the Central Committee plenum that followed the first session of the CCP's Eighth Congress, when he was demoted to alternate, nonvoting membership of the Politburo.

Kang Sheng visited the Soviet Union and various socialist countries in Eastern Europe on several occasions between 1956 and 1964, expressing increasing disdain for the "revisionist" policies of Nikita Khrushchev and Josip Broz Tito.

Kang Sheng was a member of the delegation that attended a meeting in Moscow in July 1963, which failed to bridge the growing gap between the Chinese and Soviet parties.

Well before the start of the Cultural Revolution as such, of course, Kang Sheng played his part in attacking rivals of Mao in the Party leadership.

Two months later, [Kang Sheng] moved to the Diaoyutai guest complex in the capital to mastermind a team of ideologues for the campaign against Soviet revisionism.

Kang Sheng became an adviser to the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group, chaired by Chen Boda, upon the group's formal establishment by the Central Committee in late May 1966.

In 1968, Mao and other leaders finally began to rein in the Red Guards, with Kang Sheng playing a leading role.

Kang Sheng was instrumental in supervising the drafting of the new Party Constitution, adopted at the CCP's Ninth Congress in April 1969, which reinstated "Mao Zedong Thought" alongside Marxism-Leninism as the theoretical basis for the Party.

Ill with the cancer that would eventually kill him, Kang Sheng increasingly ceded control of the COPG to Jiang Qing and her close associates, who were always attentive to Mao's wishes.

Kang Sheng was initially active in supporting Jiang Qing, perhaps seeing her as a successor through whom he would exercise power.

Kang Sheng subsequently shifted tack when it became apparent that Jiang was out of favor with Mao, even going so far as to denounce her as having betrayed the Party to the Kuomintang during the mid-1930s, notwithstanding his support for her when the same charge had been leveled 30 years earlier in Yan'an.

Kang Sheng last appeared in public at the Tenth Congress of the CCP, in August 1973.

The Tenth Congress adopted a new Constitution that removed the embarrassing reference to Lin Biao as Mao Zedong's successor, but as a sign that his position had not been adversely affected, Kang Sheng was named one of five vice chairmen of the Party.

Kang Sheng's backing of Pol Pot was an effort to back his own cause within the CCP, as his touting of Pol Pot as the true voice of the Cambodian revolution was in large part an attack on the Chinese Foreign Ministry, whose pragmatic support for Prince Sihanouk's regime was thereby presented as reactionary.

Kang Sheng died of bladder cancer on December 16,1975.

Kang Sheng was given a formal funeral, attended by every member of the Politiburo except Mao, who did not attend funerals at this stage, and Zhou Enlai and Zhu De, who both were too weak to attend.

Kang Sheng made a sort of talent of looking for a particular point he could attack.

In October 1980, just in advance of commencing the trial of the Gang of Four, Kang Sheng was posthumously expelled from the CCP and the Central Committee formally rescinded Marshal Ye Jianying's eulogy.