During the CCP\u2019s time in the countryside in the 1930s, they perfected their techniques of intelligence-gathering <\/blockquote> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n<\/div>
Today\u2019s China is a very different sort of society: modernised and consumerist, with a growing middle class. But there\u2019s still a belief that intelligence is not separate or even a secret part of how it is organised. It\u2019s an integral part of government and seen as a good thing. That\u2019s very different to what you find in liberal societies such as the United Kingdom.<\/p>\n
Many people who work in Chinese government would be aware of the names of people such as Kang Sheng. He was basically Chairman Mao<\/a>\u2019s top intelligence operative, particularly during the time they were holed up in the countryside during the Second World War<\/a>. Much of what he\u2019d learned was under Stalin\u2019s henchmen in Moscow in the 1930s. He transferred these tactics.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s secret service and a major figure in the party\u2019s 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<\/a>] were also big names in terms of intelligence craft \u2013 you might say statecraft \u2013 in China.<\/p>\n
In Britain, fear about some aspects of China \u2013 and Chinese people \u2013 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 \u2013 at least according to western stereotypes and clich\u00e9s \u2013 were up to all sorts of dubious things in opium dens.<\/p>\n
It was clearly a highly racialised image, but one that was nevertheless very powerful at the time. The character of Dr Fu Manchu \u2013 a Chinese criminal mastermind invented by British author Sax Rohmer \u2013 played into some of that in the mid-20th century.<\/p>\n
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<\/em> in Oxford, writes about being a Chinese resident in Oxford during the Second World War.<\/p>\n

The link between domestic trust and international trust isn\u2019t often explored, but it\u2019s really important <\/blockquote> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n<\/div>
He describes visiting one of the colleges and it having a \u2018colour bar\u2019 \u2013 in other words, they didn\u2019t let non-white people come in very easily. Reading accounts such as that makes me think, goodness me, times have changed \u2013 and it\u2019s good that they have.<\/p>\n
Trust is at the heart of a social crisis in today\u2019s 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 \u2013 which perhaps you do find in relatively more integrated and smaller societies such as the Scandinavian nations \u2013 is harder to find in China, a country which has experienced revolution, turbulence and a great deal of social change.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The link between domestic trust \u2013 whether people trust each other in terms of wider society \u2013 and international trust isn\u2019t often sufficiently explored, but I think that it\u2019s really important.<\/p>\n
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<\/em>\u2018s\u00a0History Behind the Headlines <\/em><\/a>podcast series.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n
This article is from the December 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine<\/em><\/a><\/strong><\/p> <\/body><\/html>\n
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