Since the end of the Cold War, the operations of secret police informers have come under the media spotlight and it is now common knowledge that vast internal networks of spies in the Soviet Union and East Germany were directed by the Communist Party. By contrast, very little historical information has been available on the covert operations of the security services in Mao Zedong's China. However, as Michael Schoenhals reveals in this intriguing and sometimes sinister account, public security was a top priority for the founders of the People's Republic and agents were recruited from all levels of society to ferret out 'counter-revolutionaries'. On the basis of hitherto classified archival records, the book tells the story of a vast surveillance and control apparatus through a detailed examination of the cultivation and recruitment of agents, their training and their operational activities across a twenty-year period from 1949 to 1967.
Since the end of the Cold War, the operations of secret police informers have come under the media spotlight and it is now common knowledge that vast internal networks of spies in the Soviet Union and East Germany were directed by the Communist Party. By contrast, very little historical information has been available on the covert operations of the security services in Mao Zedong's China. However, as Michael Schoenhals reveals in this intriguing and sometimes sinister account, public security was a top priority for the founders of the People's Republic and agents were recruited from all levels of society to ferret out 'counter-revolutionaries'. On the basis of hitherto classified archival records, the book tells the story of a vast surveillance and control apparatus through a detailed examination of the cultivation and recruitment of agents, their training and their operational activities across a twenty-year period from 1949 to 1967.
Mao Zedong launched the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" 30 years ago. This documentary history of the event presents a selection of key primary documents dealing with the Cul
The Cultural Revolution was a watershed event in the history of the People’s Republic of China, the defining decade of half a century of communist rule. Before 1966, China was a typical communist stat
A reader consisting of 72 fascinating primary documents drawn primarily from public and classified Chinese sources. Documents are divided into sections representing texts that deal with what Mao Zedo
First published in 1936, this remarkable guidebook explores the seamier side of Shanghai, China, in the mid-1930s. Written by two pretty, dissolute foreigners living life to the fullest and working, a
This volume in the series 'Mass Dictatorship in the Twentieth Century' sees twelve Swedish, Korean and Japanese scholars, theorists, and historians of fiction and non-fiction probe the litera
As a twentieth century phenomenon, mass dictatorship developed its own modern socio-political engineering system which sought to achieve the self-mobilization of the masses for radical state projects.
