If all one had to go by were contemporary foreign visitors’ reports, one could be excused for believing that the operational activities of public security organs in Mao's China were entirely a matter of mobilizing the revolutionary masses. “I still have to meet someone,” a resident Belgian correspondent for Agence France Presse wrote in the early 1960s, “who has actually discovered a microphone in his Peking home or office.” A Canadian journalist working for the Globe and Mail described at some length the housewife “with the knitting needles” residing on the ground floor, who kept an eye on the activities and habits of her neighbors. “To maintain the security and interests of the state,” he wrote in 1958, was one of her “unspoken duties.”

Yet the neighborhood watch that casual observers might catch a glimpse of did not convey the whole picture. Yes, urban police stations were aided on a voluntary basis by a sizable local contingent of so-called social eyes and ears (shehui ermu), who kept an eye on people deemed of interest. But in addition, well out of sight, public security organs employed assets of an altogether different sort. On the final day of the 1st National Conference on Economic Protection Work in 1950, Luo Ruiqing had explained to officers from all over China why “history” would punish them unless they developed specialized and entirely covert operational resources “as a basic means whereby we can vanquish our enemies.” In the short run, any officer dragging his feet in regard to developing covert resources, he added, in what sounded like a veiled threat, would also be committing “a major political error.” Given the highest ministerial seal of approval, public security organs set about aggressively recruiting and secretly deploying large numbers of agents. Looking back in 1957, it was possible for the CMPS to assert that “the agent contingent of the public security organs, having been built up over a number of years, is already of a definite size and has played a major role in operational work.”

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has understood the need for some sort of political reform since the 1980s. Deng Xiaoping gave his well-known speech, “Reform of the Party and State Leadership System,” in August 1980, and thereafter, in the early 1980s the party began regularizing party affairs, including inner-party life and retirement. The topic of political reform was hotly debated in 1986, and the People's Daily reprinted the text of Deng's 1980 speech on July 1, 1987, in anticipation of the Thirteenth Party Congress that would be convened that fall. At the congress, Zhao Ziyang outlined the first effort to systematically separate the party from the government apparatus and to create a civil service. In those years, however, the party's focus on political reform centered on increasing economic efficiency, even though liberal intellectuals spoke hopefully of democracy.

The violent suppression of protesters around Tiananmen Square and elsewhere in 1989 led to a reversal of efforts to separate the party from the state; any party groups that had been removed from government bureaucracies were quickly reintroduced. Nevertheless, the topic of political reform never disappeared entirely, and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 forced the CCP to think about the issue systematically. One result of these deliberations was the enactment of regulations on the selection and appointment of cadres, issued on a trial basis in 1995. These regulations were drawn up under the auspices of Zeng Qinghong, a close protégé of Jiang Zemin, who at the time headed the Central Organization Department. The regulations were based on an understanding that the very closely held power to appoint cadres – as laid out in Chapter 1 of this volume – had led to the personalization of power and corruption. The basic solution, as encompassed in these regulations, was a proposal to involve more people in the selection process, in other words to promote “inner-party democracy.” It is very clear that the Central Organization Department supported such an expansion of inner-party democracy and that Sichuan province responded to this appeal.

As I was finishing this book, I emailed a friend – a perspicacious social historian in Florence who for many years has written on both the Soviet Union and Mao's China – and admitted that I was still uncertain about what, if any, firm conclusions could be drawn about “the meaning of it all.” He wrote back suggesting that I console myself with the thought that “none of us is ever going to work out ‘what it all meant’ (apart from the third-rate scholars who knew the answer before they started).” I have been mulling over his message ever since, my mental synapses also triggering vague recollections of Eric Hobsbawm's warning that “historians as an occupation are the primary producers of the raw material that is turned into propaganda and mythology. We must be aware that this is so.”

This study has been infinitely more conjectural than anything I have done in the past. Writing about the Cultural Revolution was easy, because so much received wisdom on the subject was in the public domain already and could be debated at length with individuals with firsthand experience of what it had been like. In this last respect, even talking to myself made sense: after all, I had been there. Doing research on agent work in Mao's China proved harder by an order of magnitude. Initially, as I have already hinted (in the Acknowledgments), I did not even know what the Chinese term teqing (agent) meant. History as a practice thrives on the exchange of ideas, but the number of historians who had studied agent work in Mao's China with whom I could have in-depth conversations turned out to be fewer than the number of fingers on Harold Lloyd's right hand. Therefore, this study, I fear, has only managed to throw a very faint beam of light on an institution that is still shrouded in darkness and attended by a bodyguard of propaganda and mythology. My firm conclusions? Only one: that widespread – but not necessarily efficient – use of agents was made by the competent governmental authorities in the urban People's Republic up to 1967 in counterintelligence and in compliance-oriented surveillance of status offenders (that is to say, of “class enemies”).

In Mao's China, the power to recruit and deploy agents for domestic operational purposes was vested exclusively in the public security organs. These organs formed a hierarchy of organizations stretching – in the urban civilian sphere – from the branches of municipal bureaus of public security at the bottom to the CMPS at the very top. Agents were but one of their choice instruments of operational activity: a 1957 inventory also mentioned physical surveillance, interception of postal communications, and technical operations.

Their contrasting formal designations notwithstanding, these public security organs were the functional equivalent of the then Soviet Union's domestic agencies of state security – the KGB. In the period when Sino–Soviet relations could be described as those of “fraternal socialist allies,” this was duly acknowledged by Chinese leaders: “Our ministry safeguards the security of the state,” Minister of Public Security Luo Ruiqing remarked in April 1958, “and what the Soviet Union calls the Committee for State Security also safeguards the security of the state.” When bilateral relations started to turn sour, CCP leaders began to claim that the public–state terminological distinction was significant, but it is doubtful whether they ever succeeded in convincing anyone of this. In May 1962, Party Vice-Chairman Liu Shaoqi made the following assertion in front of an audience of provincial and municipal public security officers in Beijing: