Soong Ching Ling, nominally the wife of Chinese Founding Father Sun Yat-sen, was in fact a long-time anti-government operative who played an important role in destroying the communist movement in Three People’s China, and much historical information has been revealed in recent years. After reading the records of Liao Mengxing’s daughter’s correspondence about Mao Zedong’s $50,000 loan to Soong Ziwen, I felt the need to talk more about Soong’s anti-government activities in the past. I will only pick up the major events here.
The rescue of the Soviet spy criminal Niu Lan and his wife
On April 25, 1931, Gu Shunzhang, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), was arrested in Wuhan and defected. Gu was a key aide to the Special Section of the CCP established by Zhou Enlai to assassinate people within the CCP who were considered unreliable. His defection nearly wiped out the underground Communist Party. Zhou Enlai received information about the communist agents who had infiltrated the CPC and evacuated Shanghai to Jiangxi province with his senior staff. Niu Lan and his wife, who were Polish, were not so lucky and were arrested and imprisoned in the Shanghai Concession.
The Nulans were the Far East heads of the Communist International, the secret intelligence organization of the Soviet Communist Party. The Comintern, in today’s terms, is the highest overseas body that guides communist terrorist groups against governments in various countries. The underground Communist Party received $25,000 a year in funding from the Comintern, which was undoubtedly an enormous amount of money in the early 1930s, enough for the Chinese Communist Party to engage in activities to overthrow the Chinese government. The Niu Lan and his wife were the leaders of the Comintern’s management of intelligence, secret radio stations, and funds in several Far Eastern countries in Shanghai after 1930. Niu Lan was in possession of secret information about the Communist Parties of various countries, and more importantly, Niu Lan had a large number of top-secret documents that he did not know where to store. If he defected, the Communist Party’s underground in various countries would be finished. Therefore, the top leadership in Moscow ordered that “Niu Lan and his wife be rescued at all costs.
The German Zorg, known as the “Red Spy”, personally bribed the KMT officials with $30,000, but only received a note to report their safety. So, the highest levels in Moscow thought of exchanging Niu Lan for Chiang Ching-kuo, the eldest son of Chiang Kai-shek, who was detained in the Soviet Union. But how could they contact Chiang Kai-shek? Soong Ching Ling was the perfect candidate for the job. She was the mother of the state, her brother-in-law was Chiang Kai-shek, and her brother, Song Ziwen, was the vice president of the Executive Yuan of the Kuomintang government and its finance minister. Soong had always been pro-communist and anti-Chiang, and hoped to gain the power of the Soviet Communist Party, which was the perfect time for Soong to show her loyalty. When a representative of the Communist International sent a message to “exchange Chiang Ching-kuo for Niu Lan,” Song agreed to help and expressed her request to join the Communist Party and do secret work. It is assumed that Song Qingling may have been developed into an underground agent of the Comintern in 1931[1].
In December 1931, Soong approached Chiang Kai-shek with a hostage exchange proposal, which Chiang rejected. Chiang wrote in his diary on December 16, 1931: “Madame Sun would like to release the Russian Communist Minister of the East, …… Yu would rather keep Jingguo from returning, or allow the Russians to kill him, than to exchange a criminal who has harmed the country for her own son. How can I hope to be spared? But I prayed that the law would not be broken by me, and that the country would not be sold by me, in order to protect the name of my parents, so that no agile conscience would be ascribed to me.”
Niu Lan was sentenced to life imprisonment. Song Qingling took Niu Lan’s son to her home and formed a “Niu Lan Rescue Committee” in Shanghai to try to arrange for Niu Lan to go to Nanjing Gulou Hospital for medical treatment while in prison. In December 1937, when the Japanese attacked Nanking, they were helped to escape in the chaos.
United Front and Enemy Forces First
Song Qingling secretly joined the Party and became the central point of contact for the Communist International (CI), which exported money and aid to China. The Communist International provided funding for Song, and sent American Communist Party member Smedley to be her English secretary and Austrian Lucy Wei to assist in her work. As the leftist face of the Kuomintang, Song organized the establishment of hospitals, alliances, and federations to carry out united front activities among the elite, and used the government’s relatively lenient laws and human rights as a weapon to rescue important members of the Communist Party and the underground. It also supported the Left Alliance and other underground organizations affiliated with the Communist Party, which echoed each other and influenced public opinion.
Liao Zhongkai’s wife, He Xiangning, was always close to Soong Ching-ling, and all of the Liao children joined the Communist Party at an early age and were Soong Ching-ling’s most trusted people. Liao recalled that in early May 1933, on behalf of the Communist International, Song Qingling approached him and asked for a list of traitors to the Chinese Communist Party that he had in his possession. After the Shanghai underground party radio station was busted, it was impossible to contact the top brass. Soong helped find a special pass issued by Zhang Xueliang and paid for the trip. Dong Jianwu, known as the “Red Priest” and head of the Shanghai underground, went to Shaanbei to contact Mao Zedong and the Red Army.
Communist agents provided information to the CPC in Ruijin, Jiangxi province, that the Chinese army would surround and annihilate the Red Army at every step of the way, and the CPC Central Committee, knowing that the odds were stacked against them, withdrew from Jiangxi province and fled northward to get closer to the northern strongholds for Soviet assistance. When they arrived in Shaanbei, there were only a few tens of thousands of people left, many of whom were sick and tired, and their morale was low. Mao Zedong asked Song Qingling to provide foreign doctors and journalists, and in 1936, Song sent Ma Hyde, an American doctor who had come to China under her command, and Snow, an American communist journalist. Ma Hyde stayed behind and became the personal physician to Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist leaders, and helped the Communist Party establish a hospital. Upon his return, Snow wrote “The Red Star Shines in China,” which helped to whitewash and enhance the reputation of the CCP and confuse a large number of patriotic youths into heading for Yan’an.
Song Qingling was extremely cautious in her clandestine activities, and known historical evidence indicates that Pan Hannian and Dong Jianwu, prominent leaders of the underground Communist Party, were in direct contact with her, but they did not know that Song was a member of the Communist International. At the time, Pan Hannian said of Soong: “She is steadfast in her cooperation with our Party, and her special role cannot be replaced by anyone else.
The most feared thing was to give Mao $50,000.
In 1936, Mao Zedong wrote to Song Qingling asking her to borrow $50,000 from Song Ziwen, the younger brother of Song Qingling. Soong Ziwen, the younger brother of Soong Ching Ling, was managing money for the state government. Because of his pro-Communist stance, Soong had already parted ways with his brother and could not ask for the loan, so he took $50,000 of his own money and Pan Hannian passed it on to Mao Zedong. In 1936, 50,000 French dollars was equivalent to 20 years’ salary of a senior engineer, and 50,000 US dollars was equivalent to about 190,000 French dollars, which was a huge sum of money at that time. In order to fulfill Mao’s order, Song not only took out her pension, but also mortgaged her house on Moli Ai Road in Shanghai, raising the 50,000 US dollars.
After the Xi’an Incident, Song Ziwen went to Xi’an to rescue Chiang Kai-shek, who had been detained, and returned to meet with Song Qingling after receiving assurances of his release. Afterwards, fearing that her identity would be exposed and threaten her future movement, Song wrote to her superior, Wang Ming, asking for advice. Wang Ming was originally the highest leader of the Communist Party of China (CPC), and later, as the CPC’s representative to the Comintern, he spent a long period of time in Moscow controlling the Communist Party of China, at which time he took precedence over Mao and others in northern Shaanxi.
Song wrote to Wang Ming in Shanghai on January 26, 1937 [3]: “Zhou Enlai negotiated with Chiang Kai-shek and Song Ziwen, who said that we had agreed to keep everything absolutely secret. But the Communists unexpectedly announced these conditions on Xi’an radio, and their English translation was reported by Smedley. Chiang Kai-shek was so annoyed by “the Communists’ broken promises and lack of integrity” that he decided not to be bound by those promises and not to fulfill any of the conditions. Soong wrote: “I will naturally defend our comrades ……”, when Soong asked me: “If I told you that Zhou Enlai had told me not long ago that you had sent them $50,000, would you still deny that you had sent them $50,000? Did a comrade betray you? And he also said to the two of us (Song Meiling and I) that we could get in touch with the representatives of the Red Army through you.”
It is not known whether Wang Ming replied to the letter or not. After the Xi’an Incident, Communist Party Mao Zedong increased his position of influence and succeeded in seizing power. It was stated to the Comintern that Wang Ming was only a representative of the Chinese Communist Party. Wang Ming lost his position of authority. History reached a stage where the Communist Party of China made peace, and Song Meiling and Song Ziwen, in the midst of their affection, did not expose their sister’s Communist problem.
According to the correspondence and analysis of Song and Liao Mengxing’s letters exposed by Liao’s daughter, Li Mae, in the revised edition of Dreams of Family and Country: Mother Liao Mengxing and Her Times, we have a glimpse of the dark and brutal political struggle of the Chinese Communist Party. In 1954, Mao Zedong asked Pan Hannian to transfer a loan to Song Qingling, and Song thought Pan Hannian wanted to “borrow money” again. Song thought that Pan wanted to “use” her again, so she asked Secretary Sui to return the money to Xu Jianguo, who was then Shanghai’s chief of public security and deputy mayor. He had to explain in front of Secretary Sui that he was returning the money that Chairman Mao had asked Soong to lend to Song Ziwen. Mao Zedong did not want to see this internal party secret leaked out in this way. Pan Hannian was arrested and imprisoned six months later, but this was not the trigger, but it may have been a contributing factor.
Mao Zedong wanted to bring Pan Hannian down once and for all. Pan Hannian was convicted on a variety of charges, and all the underground parties that he had developed and with which he was in contact were unjustly implicated in the CCP’s victory. They were all unjustly implicated and subjected to inhuman prison tortures, death and insanity. This is a typical portrayal of “cooking a running dog”.
Song Qingling was given special protection. Of course, she also kept her mouth shut under the horrors of the harsh struggle. Her support for the Communist Party, as the mother of the nation and the patriarch of the Kuomintang, was a legitimate reason for the CCP to proclaim itself as the People’s Government. She was also valuable to the CCP because her relatives were overseas and needed her at all times to unify the war effort. All of these are incomparable to the likes of Pan Hannian.
In his account of the Cultural Revolution, Liao Mengxing wrote about Pan Hannian’s repayment of Song Qingling’s loans
Conclusion
Song Qingling misinterpreted Sun Yat-sen’s founding ideals and claimed to have the mantle of authenticity. She fawned over the Soviet Union to such an extent that she believed she could not lead China without relying on it. She was keen on being a strong woman in politics. When the Nationalist Qing Party refused to be infiltrated by the Chinese Communist Party, she unsuccessfully went to the Soviet Union to form a provisional government organization. Later, she set up a third party in the vain hope of gaining Soviet support to replace the KMT and the CCP as leader, but Stalin rejected her and lost her. Moscow developed a policy of using Song to break up the KMT [4]. Unable to distinguish between good and evil, Soong willingly worked for the Communist International and used the capital left to her by Sun Yat-sen to finance her enemies in order to overthrow the Republic of China. Under the iron fist of socialism, she played the role of a flower vase and sought the honor of honorary president of the country.
The Communist Party’s seizure of power was a perversion of its own policies, resulting in at least 80 million unnatural deaths in various campaigns. This is the true face of the doctrine for which Song Qingling fought. When she experienced the cold winter of socialism, perhaps her heart became colder and more sober. She knew that she was unworthy of the father of the nation, Sun Yat-sen, and that is why she did not want to be buried together in her last will and testament.
The purpose of restoring historical truth is only to identify the subversive trajectory of the communists through Song Qingling. In today’s attempts to subvert the Western democratic value system, the Communist Party’s original pattern of infiltration and encroachment can still be seen. The Chinese Communist Party’s attempts to subvert the democratic value system in the West are still evident in its primitive methods of infiltration and encroachment.
[Note]
[1] Wenhui Reading Weekly, June 10, 2011, page 16, original title: “Secret Party Member Song Qingling”.
[2] Liao Chengzhi, “My Memories,” People’s Daily, May 29, 1982.
[3] 2007, Volume XV of the United Communist Party (Bu), the Communist International and the Chinese Soviet Movement (1931-1937), published by the Chinese Communist Party History Press.
[4] Li Yuzheng, “Soong Ching Ling and the Third Party,” in Sun Yat-sen Soong Ching Ling Literature and Research, 2nd Series, and Chen Xianchu, “The Communist International, the Chinese Communist Party, and the Third Party.
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