In the Chinese Communist Party, there are many members who are outwardly gentle and elegant, educated in traditional Chinese culture, but are actually devils inside and have lost their basic humanity. Throughout his life, it can be said that Kang Sheng committed many evils, suffered severe mental torture before his death, and was reviled after his death.
Persecution in Moscow
Born in 1898 in Zhucheng, Shandong province, Kang Sheng was originally named Zhang Zongke and Shaoqing. At the age of 13, he was confined by his father for fighting with others in the village. Later, with the help of others, he went to Qingdao High School to study.
In 1924, Kang went to Shanghai University to study and changed his name to Zhang Sol, then joined the CCP and met his wife Cao Yi’ou. In 1927, after the Kuomintang “purged” the CCP, Kang began to work in underground intelligence work, and later worked with Zhou Enlai, Chen Yun and others in charge of the intelligence and protection of the CCP Central Special Branch. When Gu Shunzhang betrayed the Chinese Communist Party and the underground was in crisis, Kang was sent to work for the Communist International in Moscow in 1933, where he had close relations with Wang Ming.
During his stay in the Soviet Union, Stalin launched a “purge” campaign. Under the instruction of Wang Ming and others, the Communist Party set up a purge office in Moscow, responsible for dealing with Chinese Communist Party cadres in the Soviet Union. Wang Ming was the director of the office and Kang Sheng was the deputy director. Kang Sheng branded some of the Chinese Communists left behind in the Soviet Union as Trotskyists and subjected them to brutal persecution, which was only a small test of his skills.
Yan’an Concocts a Series of Unjust Cases
In 1937, Kang Sheng returned to Yan’an and took charge of the CCP’s intelligence agencies. According to the book “Mao Zedong and Chen Yun” published on the mainland, from 1937 onwards, Kang Sheng concocted several famous “secret agent” cases in the Shaanxi-Ganjiang-Ningxia border area, which further strengthened people’s perception of the seriousness of “enemy intelligence”. The most famous are three major cases.
One is the case of Qian Weiren. Qian Weiren was formerly the director of the highway in the border area, and when the Communist Party cooperation began, he was responsible for contacting the Kuomintang about the construction of the highway. Kang Sheng repeatedly said he was a “traitor”, and later ordered his arrest.
One is the case of Wang Zunhe. Wang Zunhe was the niece of the traitor Wang Kemin, who came to Yan’an because she was dissatisfied with her traitorous family and demanded to resist Japan. In 1939, Kang Sheng wrote a letter to Wang Zunhe, asking her to confess to being a member of the Renaissance Society.
Another case was that of Li Ning. Li Ning was formerly a member of the Chinese Communist Party underground in Northeast China. She arrived in Yan’an in 1938 and was suddenly arrested in July 1939 by the security authorities of the border area. Kang Sheng forced her to confess that she had “defected to the enemy as a secret agent, and that she was a traitor within the Party. At a trial, Kang Sheng said brutally, “You are so pretty, if you are not a spy, who is!” The final conclusion of the conviction read: walking like a Japanese woman; having a Japanese-style female undershirt; spying on military secrets, etc.
The above cases caused a great stir in Yan’an at the time, but they were later proven to be unfounded.
Helping “Mao” in the Rectification Movement
After returning to Yan’an, Kang Sheng changed from following Wang Ming to following Mao Zedong and gained Mao’s trust through several incidents. One of them was to support Mao’s marriage with his fellow countryman Jiang Qing. At a time when everyone was against it, Kang Sheng’s attitude was deeply appreciated by Mao.
Secondly, he helped Mao launch the Yan’an Rectification Campaign in 1942 because he saw Mao’s desire to establish his own authority, and used the opportunity to extort confessions from a large number of Party members, branding them as agents, traitors and insiders, concocting a large number of unjust cases, and turning Yan’an into a red terror.
The book Mao Zedong and Chen Yun recounts that on March 20, 1943, Kang Sheng reported at a meeting of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee that since the war, the Kuomintang had generally practiced the policy of spying, and that the conspiracy of this policy had only recently been discovered from the examination of cadres. On April 3, the CPC Central Committee issued the “Decision on the Continuation of the Rectification Campaign” to purge the so-called “traitors”.
Soon after, Kang Sheng made a case of Zhang Keqin “enemy agent” and used it as a breakthrough to fight against traitors and catch agents in the whole border area, which caused everyone to be in danger and panic.
According to Mao’s secretary and Russian translator Shi Zhe recalled that in the evening of April 1, 1943, Kang Sheng called a meeting with the heads of security organs in the border area to lay out the work, and proposed a list of arrests. Shi Zhe, who was then the head of the First Bureau of the Border District Security Office, asked Kang Sheng, “Are there any materials for the people to be arrested, and how can we interrogate them without exact materials?” Instead, Kang Sheng replied, “Why do we need you to interrogate them if we have materials?” As a result, more than 260 people were arrested in one night.
On July 15, Kang Sheng, who was the main person in charge of cadre review in the CPC Central Committee, gave a report on “Rescuing the Lost” at the cadre conference in Yan’an, arguing that Yan’an was “full of secret agents” and stressing that “This is our urgent task at present”. Kang Sheng and others went on to use forced confessions, induced confessions, persuaded confessions, as well as wheel tactics and torture to frame underground Communist Party organizations in Gansu, Henan, Sichuan, Hunan, Hubei, Guizhou, Shaanxi, Zhejiang and other provinces as “Red Flag Parties” (i.e., fake Communist Parties) created by KMT agents, and to brand many Party members as traitors. The agents and traitors caused a large number of unjust, false and wrongful cases.
It is said that in order to examine the so-called “secret agents”, Kang Sheng personally burned people’s breasts with a branding iron and abused the prisoners with torture.
Perversions during the land reform
After the Yan’an rectification, Kang Sheng, who had a lot of grievances, was not liquidated under Mao’s protection and was elected as a member of the Central Political Bureau at the First Plenary Session of the Seventh CPC Central Committee in June 1945, after which he started to lose his power and became the secretary of the Shandong Provincial Committee, doing research work on land reform at the grassroots level.
During his participation in land reform in Longdong, Jinsui and Bohai in Shandong, Kang Sheng implemented extremely cruel policies, killing almost every landowner and rich peasant, which made many people detest him. Among the many tortures Kang invented at the time were: tying a prisoner to the back of a horse, then, whipping the horse and driving it to drag the victim around until he was dragged to death; pouring vinegar down the victim’s throat; and stabbing a horse’s tail into the victim’s penis. …… Whether Kang was a pervert or not is a matter of public opinion, but what Kang did caused the local people to begin The Chinese Communist Party was hated.
Criticizing Peng Dehuai for persecuting Xi Zhongxun and others
From 1948 to 1949, Kang Sheng served as secretary of the Greater Lunan District Party Committee in Shandong, secretary of the Shandong Branch of the CPC Central Committee, and deputy secretary of the East China Bureau of the CPC Central Committee. Dissatisfied with this arrangement, Kang Sheng began to quit his job to recover from illness. Later, due to a fall on a fast horse during the Yan’an period, Kang Sheng’s brain nerves were not healed for a long time, Kang Sheng recuperated until 1956.
In 1956, the Eighth Congress of the Communist Party of China was held, Kang Sheng learned that the Eighth Congress was the time to distribute power once again, and decided to return to work. Subsequently, he was elected as an alternate member of the Central Political Bureau and a member of the Central Committee at the First Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee, and from 1957 he became the deputy head of the Central Committee’s Culture and Education Group and the deputy director of the Education Working Committee.
After his resumption, Kang Sheng began to be responsible for the ideological work of the CPC, and was in charge of editing the Mao anthology, and in 1959, was also in charge of the Party School of the CPC Central Committee. By this time, Kang Sheng had assumed the leadership of the theoretical work in the Party. After the breakup of Sino-Soviet relations, Kang Sheng also presided over the drafting of the Ninth Review of the Soviet Communist Party.
At the 1959 Lushan Conference, Kang Sheng, who was well versed in Mao’s intentions, vigorously criticized Peng Dehuai and accused his former name, Peng Dehua, of being “so ambitious that he wanted to win China! Also named a number called ‘stone penetration’, water drops through the stone, engage in conspiracy well!”
In 1960, Kang Sheng led the Chinese delegation to the Political Consultative Conference of the Parties to the Warsaw Pact as an observer, and insisted on following Mao’s wishes, singing the opposite of Khrushchev, More than 6,000 people were persecuted to death. The cruelty of Kang Sheng is evident.
The Cultural Revolution again concocted unjust cases and stole cultural relics
The outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in 1966 gave Kang Sheng another opportunity to show off his skills. Kang Sheng became an advisor to the Central Cultural Revolution Group and a member of the Political Bureau and Standing Committee of the CPC Central Committee. With Mao’s acquiescence, he used his experience from several campaigns to fabricate charges and again created many unjust cases, including the downfall of He Long, Luo Ruiqing, Liu Shaoqi, Wang Guangmei, and the “Sixty-one Traitors Group Case”, known as the “Executioner”.
As Kang Sheng had a crazy hobby of collecting paintings and calligraphy, if before the Cultural Revolution, he still “borrowed” for a long time in the name of “borrowing” but did not return it, and eventually kept it for himself, then the Cultural Revolution made him completely carefree. According to the data, from 1968 to 1972, Kang Sheng visited the Beijing Cultural Management Office 32 times, stealing 12,080 books and 1,102 cultural relics, including a large number of rare and isolated books of Song and Yuan editions and Ming editions, bronze artifacts more than 2,000 years old, ancient inkstones, inscriptions, paintings and seals more than 1,000 years old, and tortoiseshell fossils more than 300,000 years old, all of which are of great historical and artistic value. Artistic value of the treasures, some are still the only national treasures.
A life of misery
In addition to harming and killing people for fun, and desperately stealing national treasures, Kang Sheng’s life was also very rotten. For example, during the famine of 1959-1961, when at least 35 million people were starved to death, Kang Sheng continued to enjoy himself, not only keeping pets, but also hiring a court chef to enjoy the food of the emperor.
Kang Sheng also loved to smoke big cigarettes and used his position of power to obtain drugs. In addition, he used to find actors in his home to perform bed scenes imitating men and women and recorded them on a tape recorder, which was very rare at the time, for his own enjoyment; and his hobby was to collect erotic paintings.
Fear before death
In 1973, Kang Sheng was elected Vice Chairman of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, after Mao, Zhou and Wang Hongwen. However, in 1974, Kang Sheng suffered from prostate cancer.
According to the recollection of Ms. Chen, who worked as a nurse in the anesthesia department of Beijing 301 Hospital, Kang Sheng was suffering from phobia before he died. He had to be accompanied by guards with lights on 24 hours a day, and the ward had to keep showing movies. As long as there was no one in the ward, he would scream in terror, whoever came to him for his life, whoever was covered in blood, whoever was in shackles clanking, shouting audibly and chillingly to the listener.
According to the Buddhist interpretation of karma, this is because Kang Sheng has done a lot of evil and the spirits have come to seek his life. Chen Yun, another senior official of the Chinese Communist Party, said “Kang Sheng is a ghost, not a human being”, and others called him “King of Hell”.
Telling on his deathbed
In 1975, when Kang Sheng was dying, he sued Deng Xiaoping in front of Mao, asking Mao to knock down Deng again, because Deng would completely deny the Cultural Revolution after Mao’s death. In this point, Kang Sheng was still very prescient.
Besides, when Kang Sheng found out that Mao’s attitude toward Jiang Qing had changed, his attitude toward Jiang Qing also changed drastically. He refused Jiang Qing’s visit, which made Jiang Qing cry and make a fuss; he changed his indifferent attitude and asked and cared about Zhou Enlai’s condition; he dragged his sick body to Zhou Enlai on a stretcher to expose Jiang Qing and Zhang Chunqiao as traitors; he asked someone to bring word to Mao to expose Jiang and Zhang as traitors, etc. And all this was for self-preservation. And all this was for self-preservation.
Kang Sheng’s ashes were expelled from Babaoshan Mountain, affecting his descendants
In December 1975, Kang Sheng died of illness. Although the eulogy at that time gave him high praise, after the end of the Cultural Revolution, the CCP announced some of Kang Sheng’s crimes to the whole party and decided to expel him from the Party, revoke the original eulogy, and his ashes were removed from Eight Treasure Mountains and taken home by his wife and son. However, the Chinese Communist Party did not acknowledge that it was the more cruel Mao Zedong who was behind Kang Sheng.
Because of Kang’s evil deeds, his descendants also suffered retribution. His son, alias Zhang Xiaoshi, was born to him and Chen Yi. During the Cultural Revolution, with Kang Sheng’s power, he usurped the power of Shandong Province with Wang Xiaoyu, the vice mayor of Qingdao, who became the director of the Shandong Provincial Revolutionary Committee and Zhang became a member of the Standing Committee. Later Wang was defeated, but Zhang Xiaoshi was unharmed and became secretary of the Hangzhou Municipal Party Committee in 1975, while also serving as a member of the Standing Committee of the Provincial Party Committee and deputy director of the Zhejiang Provincial Revolutionary Committee.
In 1979, Zhang Xiaoshi was removed from his post. He was later censored and expelled from the Party. After that, Zhang Xiaoshi quietly returned to a place in Shandong to live in seclusion and never asked about politics until his death.
Kang Sheng, who was a ghost but not a human being, was not at peace before his death, and after his death, he was cursed and punished more severely than anyone knew. How many other high-ranking Chinese Communist Party officials have done the same?
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