Following the arrest of a British parliamentary researcher on suspicion of spying for China, Rana Mitter spoke to Matt Elton about how surveillance culture has shaped Chinese society
The history of intelligence in the UK and China is different in many ways, and we can look at the historical contrast of what intelligence means in the two nations. Over the past 100 years or so, British intelligence services, both at home and abroad, have built up a wealth of experience, much of it during the Cold War. But spying is regulated by society: there are laws, regulations and strictures on what British spies can do.
In China, you have to look at the history of a particular institution: the Communist Party (CCP). Secrets are part of its means of consolidating power. When we think of how the CCP came to power in the early 20th century, a key moment is the Long March, which was the famous occasion in the 1930s when communist rebels marched thousands of miles through the interior of China to set up a base [and evade oncoming nationalist forces during the Chinese civil war].
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But what’s not as well known is that, during that time in the countryside, they perfected techniques of intelligence-gathering and used them to create a surveillance society. This carried on in the 1940s as a means of not only gathering intelligence but also retraining people to understand they should confess and tell all to the party. The idea was that the party was bigger than them.
Today’s China is a very different sort of society: modernised and consumerist, with a growing middle class. But there’s still a belief that intelligence is not separate or even a secret part of how it is organised. It’s an integral part of government and seen as a good thing. That’s very different to what you find in liberal societies such as the United Kingdom.
Many people who work in Chinese government would be aware of the names of people such as Kang Sheng. He was basically Chairman Mao’s top intelligence operative, particularly during the time they were holed up in the countryside during the Second World War. Much of what he’d learned was under Stalin’s henchmen in Moscow in the 1930s. He transferred these tactics.
But other figures, who were not as involved with torture and cruelty as Kang Sheng, were also very skilled at finding out secrets within China and elsewhere. People such as Pan Hannian [former senior head of the CCP’s secret service and a major figure in the party’s intelligence from the 1930s until the 1950s] and Yan Bao Hang [a senior CCP intelligence agent who warned the Soviet Union of a Nazi invasion in 1941] were also big names in terms of intelligence craft – you might say statecraft – in China.
In Britain, fear about some aspects of China – and Chinese people – has a long history. We can think about the late Victorian era, for instance, when the Limehouse area of east London was associated with Chinese immigrants who – at least according to western stereotypes and clichés – were up to all sorts of dubious things in opium dens.
It was clearly a highly racialised image, but one that was nevertheless very powerful at the time. The character of Dr Fu Manchu – a Chinese criminal mastermind invented by British author Sax Rohmer – played into some of that in the mid-20th century.
And there are other examples, too. The University of Oxford is a great liberal institution in all sorts of ways. And yet the Chinese poet and author Chiang Yee, in his wonderful 1944 book The Silent Traveller in Oxford, writes about being a Chinese resident in Oxford during the Second World War.
He describes visiting one of the colleges and it having a ‘colour bar’ – in other words, they didn’t let non-white people come in very easily. Reading accounts such as that makes me think, goodness me, times have changed – and it’s good that they have.
Trust is at the heart of a social crisis in today’s China. A frequent remark of users of the internet and social media in that country is that few people trust each other. They trust their family and perhaps people they know very closely, but the idea of wider social trust – which perhaps you do find in relatively more integrated and smaller societies such as the Scandinavian nations – is harder to find in China, a country which has experienced revolution, turbulence and a great deal of social change.
Just this past September, the United Nations gathered for its General Assembly, and one of the things that was notable there is that the level of trust between various key countries is in some ways much less than would have been the case even 30 or 40 years ago when there was a feeling of relative convergence of interests between the major countries.
The link between domestic trust – whether people trust each other in terms of wider society – and international trust isn’t often sufficiently explored, but I think that it’s really important.
Rana Mitter is a historian and broadcaster and ST Lee Chair of US-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School. He was speaking to Matt Elton for an episode of History Extra‘s History Behind the Headlines podcast series.
This article is from the December 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine