Content area
Full text
SPYING FOR THE PEOPLE: Mao's Secret Agents, 1949-1967. By Michael Schoenhals. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. ix, 266 pp. (Figures.) US$29.99, paper. ISBN 978-1-107-60344-8.
Michael Schoenhals' newest work offers a rich and elegant examination of the surveillance and control apparatus of the People's Republic of China in the two decades after revolution. Through the compilation of operational training manuals, archival accounts and never-before-seen "garbage materials"-grassroots, gray-market archival materials bought and sold by private peddlers-Schoenhals reconstructs the quotidian texture and day-to-day realities of China's early surveillance operations. As the functional equivalent of the Soviet KGB, the Central Ministry of Public Security (CMPS) of the Central People's Government was formally ratified on October 19, 1949, vested with exclusive authority to recruit and deploy agents for domestic operational purposes. How were they identified, trained, deployed and dismissed? How did the scope and influence of this organization change over time? What was the extent of its power and influence in the mid-1950s, at a time when China's national railroad network alone saw more than ten thousand public security agents serving in a variety of capacities? What ensued in the wake of the Sino-Soviet split, when CCP authorities established their own surveillance textbooks and operational protocols based upon "Chinese characteristics?" What was the system's fate at...