The Claws of the Dragon

...The killings brought international opprobrium on the KMT...

...Once these were disShanghai...

...Vincent Millay...

...Like Mao, he did not scruple to pillage the best of what others had done for his own private collection...

...In November 1937, a Soviet plane carrying the two men touched down in Yan'an, a small town in North China where the survivors of the Long March lived in caves cut out of the brown mountain cliffs and operated their own provisional capital...

...The Claws of the Dragon, for instance, portrays a more passive Mao than we've seen, and does not sufficiently deal with Kang's time out of favor, including the first six years of the Communist regime...

...Mao Zedong was a peasant leader who established a fourteenth-century regime in the twentieth century...

...Some were tormented to death...

...some committed suicide...

...The Jiang-Kang alliance was to have disastrous consequences for China during the Cultural Revolution, and had he not died in 1975 it's likely that the trial would have been for the Gang of Five, not the Gang of Four...

...II The American Spectator November 1992 79...

...Yet the arrest did not seem to hurt him, for in 1933 Kang went to Moscow as part of the Chinese contingent to the Comintern...

...Along with the Party biography, Byron and Pack marshal an impressive body of additional evidence chronicling Kang's wickedness and perversions, personal as well as political...

...But it was also the time of the Trotsky-Stalin rift, and at this point Kang was firmly onStalin's side...

...Kang, say Byron and Pack, "was a match for the Borgias both in aesthetic refinement and in cruelty and deceit...

...Kang had known Jiang since her childhood, and Byron and Pack repeat longstanding rumors that they were once lovers...

...For all his successes in Shanghai it appears that Kang did not escape arrest himself in 1930...

...Throughout his career he would eliminate rivals by first whipping up hysteria, whether over "Japanese spies," "KMT agents" "renegades," or whatnot...

...Kuomintang Army—the Communists Perhaps the most notorious incident and the KMT were then still allied—led in this campaign was the January 1931 to their capture of the Chinese sections arrest in the International Settlement of of the city...

...In this he was abetted by an old friend, the willowy Jiang Qing, an actress with whom the Chairman had become infatuated...

...Ditto his journey to Yan'an...

...In short, Kang's patron was losing out to a man whom Kang had never even met...

...In 1967 he destroyed the more than ninety pages found in KMT archives in Shanghai that dealt with him...

...The Claws of the Dragon, by a former diplomat writing under the pseudonym John Byron and by journalist Robert Pack, is his story, based on an internal Communist Party biography intended to heap blame on Kang for most past Communist depredations, a copy of which was leaked to Byron in Peking in 1983...

...Not that Kang's time in Moscow had been wasted...

...Kang's reputation was such," they note, "that whenever an unexplainable tragedy occurred in China, he would become the main suspect—just as if one American were held responsible for the mysterious assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr...

...Documentary evidence links his name with the deaths of 30,000 people between 1966-70 alone, and the authors (continued on page 79) The American Spectator November 1992 77 THE CLAWS OF THE DRAGON (continued from page 77) quote from Hu Yaobang's 1978 denunciation of Kang: "Before they died many comrades suffered greatly, both psychologically and physically...

...In his early days in Shanghai, Kang had twice disciplined Wang for breaches of security, but when the Soviets anointed Wang as the man to bring the Marxist Gospel to China, Kang immediately turned into a Wang toady...

...The Social Affairs Department integrated the two classic functions of secret services," write Byron and Pack, "conducting counterespionage and countersubversion, as well as collecting intelligence by all available means about the Party's enemies, both external and internal...

...against the city's warlord establishment, This is the "White Terror" of the history a general strike timed to take advantage books, and it would last until the Japanese of the approach of the Nationalist invasion a decade later...

...When named head of the Chinese Party's "Social Affairs" Department, for example, he immediately began reorganizing it along Soviet lines...

...But there was one hitch...

...Kang, say the authors, was the "evil genius" behind Mao and in his life can be found "the missing pieces in many of the jigsaw puzzles of twentieth-century China...

...When not purging landlords—he had cut a hole in the nose of one and paraded him through the city—he was busy taking a measure of his own situation, and so within a year of his arrival he abandoned Wang for Mao...

...pensed with, the Communists were Or so they thought...

...some were assassinated...

...It exaggerates his role as the architect of the SinoSoviet split, a parting of the ways that, given the natures of Mao, China, and Russia, was more or less bound to occur as each pursued its own interests...

...He would simply switch sides again when Wang was going down...

...For however much pain and misery such men as Kang inflicted on their nation, it was complemented by the agony they inflicted upon one another as they jockeyed for position with all the bitchy cruelty of a courtful of eunuchs...

...One thing Kang did not have in his pedigree, however, was the Long March...

...Over the course of almost five decades his name was synonymous with terror in China, even more inside the Party than outside...

...Precisely...

...He possessed a keen eye for antiquities, and excelled at painting and Chinese script...

...That helped him immensely in Moscow, but in China at the same time events were transpiring that would shake the Party leadership from top to bottom...

...Of course, Kang was not one to forgo his aesthetic joys even in the midst of purges, and he used the chaos of the Cultural Revolution to build his collection, making him "at once a passionate antiquary and an accomplice to the destruction of the culture that had inspired the art he coveted...

...After two abortive uprisings Chiang's erstwhile Communist allies...

...He was rewarded with command of the secret service...

...Kang's patron in Moscow was a young revolutionary named Wang Ming...

...The value of Kang's history," Byron and Pack write, "lies less in its colorful, chilling episodes than in its power to illuminate the fundamental dynamics of Chinese politics and government...

...They died 76 singing the Internationale as a firing squad did its work...

...That could not have been welcome news to an ambitious young cadre—in Moscow, Kang had tried to keep locals in the dark about Mao's ascendency—but it did not prove an immense obstacle, either...

...Essentially, Kang's success lay in anticipating Mao's whims (particularly when they involved bringing down real or perceived rivals) and then acting decisively to satisfy them...

...His name was Kang Sheng...

...Although the rise of Deng and his cohort has tempered some of the excesses, the bloodshed at Tiananmen emphasizes that the essential character cannot change until the unraveling of the PRC itself: By exposing Kang's crimes, China's current leaders have set limits on their own elitist tendencies...

...Inasmuch as the visional capital of Nanking, the arrest had occurred in the foreign-run Communists were in an excellent posi- concessions, there were certain legal tion to present their brother revolutionar- formalities in turning them over to the ies in the KMT with a fait accompli in Chinese courts...

...While the authors present no evidence that Kang betrayed his comrades as a result, they do show that he went to considerable lengths to erase any trace of it...

...In close co-operation with the NKVD, he purged many of the "counterrevolutionaries" among the Chinese contingent...

...Nor is Kang credited for his early attraction to Communism...

...However real the crimes outlined in Party indictments, blame tends to be assigned according to the political needs of the moment rather than actual culpability in the past...

...There two dozen of them—twenty-one men and three William McGurn, who recently returned women—were told they would be to Hong Kong as senior editor of the Far transported to Nanking for trial...

...They have repudiated Kang personally, but they failed to dispel the dangers inherent in a revolutionary movement that amounts to nothing more than a new imperial system centered on a small, personalized elite...

...Later, in a foretaste of things to come, he would in 1931 assume control of and ultimately bring badly needed discipline to a Communist .underground riven with double agents and informants...

...For among those executed were five prominent local poets and authors...

...The foreign press in particular made big play of the "Five Martyrs," suggesting that the KMT was pursuing a general suppression of artists...

...summary death sentence...

...He indulged in his predilection for classic erotica, particularly the theater...

...Virtually unknown in the West, Kang Sheng was China's answer to Feliks Dzerzhinsky, founder of the forerunner of the KGB...

...After all, even Stalin was backing Chiang and the KMT over the Communists in those days...

...S till, in a curious way Kang Sheng's own culpability in specific crimes is the least important aspect of The Claws of the Dragon...

...Finally, there is the question of the Party biography upon which much of this book is based: it's an old tradition for living Communists to blame dead Communists for all the crimes of the past...

...The man responsible for their arrest was neither freelance warlord nor KMT officer...

...Like many a mandarin in the worker's state, Kang was no beer-hall Bolshevik...

...However loathsome he may have been, to have worked as he did in Shanghai when he did required a certain amount of courage, if not conviction...

...Today this might appear more opportunism, but in 1937, though the Long Marchers had survived, it was by no means clear theywould emerge triumphant...

...Even if it is incomplete in some of its details, the portrait of a Communist leadership every bit as venal and treacherous as its counterparts in the former Soviet empire is a welcome antidote in an area that has long been clouded by ideological hagiography...

...some waited for death with their eyes open in hospitals...

...A number of KMT members were also in Moscow at the time, including, ironically, Chiang Ching-kuo, son of Chiang Kai-shek and the man responsible for setting Taiwanon its present course toward full democratization...

...He stayed in the Hotel Lux with other foreign believers, among them Yugoslavia's Josip Broz, the future Marshal Tito, and ran into fellow travelers such as the American journalist Agnes Smedley...

...As long as Mao retains his place in the Chinese pantheon, the spirit of Kang Sheng, Mao's evil genius and hatchet man, will not likely be exorcised...

...But at times they appear to fall into the same trap, if only because the emphasis on Kang diminishes the role of other important actors...

...Given the number of agents and double agents in their midst, the news that he had been detained would have been enough to leave Kang suspect in Communist circles—and it certainly could have been used against him by rivals...

...some died of hunger...

...Kang's return to China was precipitated by the outbreak of full-scale war with Japan, Stalin hoping that Kang and Wang would help consolidate the united KMT-Communist Party front he'd been urging...

...When in the summer of 1980 Party officials put the cream of his private collection on display in an effort to discredit his name five years after his death, it included 12,080 rare books and 1,102 antiques and artifacts...

...Though he would later boastthat the Russians had taught him nothing, he never forgot key lessons in administration...

...Theodore Dreiser, Will Durant, Lewis Mum-ford, John Dewey, Edmund Wilson, and Malcolm Cowley...

...others were locked away in mental asylums...

...With most of Chiang Kai- a faction of Chinese Communists led shek's partisans bogged down in the pro- by He Mengxiong...

...He Mengxiong was not the first comrade Kang Sheng turned on, and he would by no means be the last...

...At times, too, they even go out of their way to exonerate Kang for specific crimes...

...THE CLAWS OF THE DRAGON: KANG SHENG—THE EVIL GENIUS BEHIND MAO— AND HIS LEGACY OF TERROR IN PEOPLE'S CHINA John Byron and Robert Pack Simon & Schuster /560 pages/$27.50 reviewed by WILLIAM MCGURN / n the early spring of 1927, Shang- a prominent local hoodlum whose goons hai's Communists were sitting pret- set out in force to root out and destroy ty...

...Despite efforts to keep the massacre secret, news leaked out...

...indeed, he had the exceptionally rare talent of wielding the calligrapher's brush with his left as well as his right The American Spectator November 1992 hand...

...The KMT crackdown on the Communists had forced the Red Army into its Long March, out of which Mao Zedong emerged as the pre-eminent (if not unchallenged) leader of the Communist movement in China...

...others were poisoned...

...In fact, he was a member of the Communist Central Committee, and he'd turned over the information about He Mengxiong and the Five Martyrs to the foreign and KMT police because they belonged to a faction trying to wrest control of the Party from the Soviet-directed Comintern...

...His Party career had begun in Shanghai, where he rose swiftly in the Communist underground...

...Among the 104 American authors who protested "the torture and execution of writers in China for their political opinions" were Sinclair Lewis, Robert Frost, Thornton Wilder, Edna St...

...even his mausoleum, the contemporary version of an imperial tomb, recalls the dynasties of old China...

...Less than two handed over to the KMT, who then weeks after they had seized control, transferred them to a prison on the outChiang availed himself of the services of skirts of Shanghai...

...Intimately involved in most of the landmark events of the Party's early years—the anti-British protests of 1925, the urban uprisings the next two years, and the battle with the KMT that began in 1927—Kang courted imprisonment, torture, and death...

...East Economic Review, is the author of Marched out of the prison yard in Perfidious Albion: The Abandonment of chains, they instead found themselves Hong Kong 1997 (Ethics and Public before a KMT judge, who barked out a Policy Center...

...When Mao's affair with Jiang became an issue in the then-puritan Party in 1938, Kang vouched for Jiang and earned Mao's gratitude...