On December 1, 1967, a meeting called by PRC Vice-Premier and Minister of Public Security Xie Fuzhi ordered the indefinite suspension of all operational use of agents (teqing renyuan), as well as the decommissioning of safe houses nationwide, and the launch of a general inquiry into whether the men and women who for the past eighteen years had been in China what inoffizielle Mitarbeiter were in East Germany had, in Xie's words, “done any bad stuff” (zuole shenme huaishi). Four and a half decades later, historians still struggle to understand what triggered this drastic course of action. Was it simply how Xie chose to respond to Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolutionary wish to see the “public security, procuratory, and legal sectors beaten to a pulp”? A few months earlier, in July 1967, Xie had specifically tasked his deputies with exploring ways of meeting this stated desire on the part of the CCP Chairman. Or was it prompted – in part or in full – by something completely different, such as a fatal loss of faith, perhaps, in the political integrity of lower-level public security officers and hence in the utility of the agent operations they ran? Or was the reason more simply cold war paranoia?

On June 14, 1999, some 200–300 peasants surrounded the leadership compound in Maliu township, in impoverished Kai county, a remote, mountainous area up the Yangtze River from Chongqing in southwest China. The anger of the peasants had boiled over when they heard that cadres planned to renovate their office compound. Tensions had already been running high as cadres had been trying to squeeze extra funds from the peasants, and the thought that this revenue would be used to improve the lives of the cadres was simply too much. The peasants blocked the entrance to the township offices so there was no way for the cadres to leave the building. The local cadres’ first instinct was to respond forcefully: arrest the leaders and suppress the outburst. But there were no police stationed in Maliu township; they would have to come from the county seat, 66 kilometers away. More importantly, any police action to suppress the peasants would have to be approved by the Political and Legal Affairs Office of the Kai County Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Committee. Fortuitously, the head of the office was a former teacher in Maliu township, and many of the people involved in the protest were his former students. He knew they were not bad people, so he demanded that local leaders find a way to resolve the incident peacefully. He was backed by the party organization of Chongqing municipality, particularly its Organization Bureau.

Maliu township is a fairly typical mountain settlement. The population is highly dependent on agriculture, with 97 percent of the residents relying on agriculture as their main source of income. Spread over 94 square kilometers, Maliu township's 7,241 households live in twenty-four administrative villages and one street committee. Agriculture is difficult and unrewarding, so more than 6,000 of the township's 27,112 people had left to make their fortunes elsewhere. Of those remaining, more than 7,000, or about one-quarter of the population, were impoverished. Their annual incomes averaged about 1,021 yuan, less than half the average income in the township.

On June 22, 2008, a sixteen-year-old girl by the name of Li Shufen went out in the evening with three young men, all of whom were reportedly well-connected politically in Weng'an county of Guizhou province. Late that night, officials came to her house to tell her parents that their daughter had committed suicide. Li Shufen's father, doubting the officials’ explanation, requested an autopsy. Soon there were rumors that the girl had been raped and murdered, so her family kept her corpse on ice, demanding an adequate explanation. Following a second autopsy on June 28, the local Public Security Bureau notified the family that “since the cause of death has been ascertained [i.e., drowning], the preservation of her body is no longer necessary” and it demanded that the body be interred that day or the police would handle the matter themselves.

Rather than calm the situation, the notification angered residents, who continued to suspect foul play. There were many reasons why the people of Weng'an distrusted officials. Weng'an is a poor county in the poor province of Guizhou, not far from the prefectural city of Zunyi, where the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had paused along the Long March in January 1935 to convene a meeting that would lead to Mao Zedong becoming preeminent leader. In 2008, Weng'an county was still overwhelmingly agricultural, with 90 percent of the population engaged in farming. There were, however, other resources in the area, including the potential for hydropower and the development of phosphorous and coal resources. When the Goupitan Hydropower Station was built in 2004, more than 4,000 peasants were relocated, but others refused to be moved, complaining bitterly about the low compensation that they were offered. When county party secretary Wang Qi went to Jiangjiehe village, where most of the peasants to be relocated lived, residents blocked the road and would not allow Wang and his entourage to leave unless they were offered higher compensation. Soon the police showed up and over thirty villagers were injured in the ensuing conflict. In 2007, after again demanding that all residents relocate, the government moved in with bulldozers and leveled houses and fruit trees. Fields were sprayed with herbicides to prevent the crops from ripening. Some 1,000 villagers were thus forcibly relocated to Seven-Star village in the country seat, where they continued to believe that their compensation was too low.

In its editorials, the People's Daily in the 1950s came down hard on those unnamed “members of our revolutionary ranks” who failed to appreciate the supreme importance of having the correct political stance. More or less by default, PRC news media attributed the operational successes of public security organs to the superior political qualities of the men and women involved. Behind closed doors, however, senior public security officers assessed somewhat differently the relative importance of politics and professionalism – or the qualities of “redness” and “expertise,” as they were also known. “Talking about politics day in and day out is not going to put food on your table!” Shanghai's director of public security impressed upon his subordinates in 1959. Operational officers, he emphasized, also had to develop the requisite professional skills and tradecraft: in the words of a British writer on the ethics of the subject, the “arts of deception.”

Nobody was more fully aware than the CMPS leadership of the fact that, in reality, the victories that officers and their agents scored on the covert front had everything to do with first-rate tradecraft. During his tenure as minister, Luo Ruiqing made the development and improvement of professional skills among his officers a priority: “We not only need to master primitive forms of struggle,” he noted specifically in his 1953 New Year's address, “but in particular need to master sophisticated forms of struggle.” Three years earlier, in 1950, Wang Jinxiang had told operational officers: