CCP security and intelligence

CCP security and intelligence 1898–1975 ○ Natural causes

Mao’s inquisitor who ran party security and intelligence from the Yan’an “rescue” campaign to the Cultural Revolution

He died of bladder cancer in December 1975 and was buried with state honours as a “proletarian revolutionary”, but in October 1980, on the eve of the Gang of Four trial, he was posthumously expelled from the party and exhumed from Babaoshan.

From a Shandong landlord family, he worked in the Shanghai underground and in 1933 went to Moscow as Wang Ming’s deputy, where he studied the Soviet purges. Back at Yan’an in 1937 he sided with Mao and, as head of the Social Affairs Department, ran the rectification movement’s “rescue” campaign that branded thousands as enemy agents. Sidelined for a time after 1949, he returned in the Sino-Soviet polemics of the 1960s and as adviser to the Cultural Revolution Group directed the investigation and persecution of Liu Shaoqi, He Long and other veterans. He died of cancer in 1975 and was posthumously expelled from the party in 1980.

CCP security and intelligence 1906–1978 ↓ Removed 1965 · natural causes

First minister of public security and chief of the general staff, purged on the eve of the Cultural Revolution as Lin Biao’s target

Mao trusted him as his closest security chief, saying "if the sky falls, Luo the Tall will prop it up." First minister of public security from 1949, he built the police apparatus for a decade, then led the general staff until his purge in late 1965.

From Sichuan and Whampoa’s sixth class, he served in Red Army political and security work and ran the Anti-Japanese Military and Political University. As first minister of public security from 1949 he built the police system and the campaign to suppress counter-revolutionaries, and after Peng Dehuai’s fall in 1959 he managed the army as chief of the general staff. Putting training before politics, he was denounced by Lin Biao at the end of 1965 for plotting to seize military power, fell, and injured his legs in a suicide attempt in 1966. Rehabilitated in 1977 as secretary-general of the Military Commission, he died after surgery in West Germany the next year.

CCP security and intelligence 1916–2015 ↓ Left office 1980 · natural causes

Mao’s bodyguard chief whose Zhongnanhai Unit 8341 arrested the Gang of Four, then pushed aside for the “two whatevers”

"A loyal soldier of Chairman Mao to the end": he guarded Mao for decades and had Unit 8341 arrest the Gang of Four in 1976.

From Jiangxi, he guarded Mao after the Long March and from 1949 headed the Central Guard Bureau (Unit 8341), managing the leadership’s security and daily life. Director of the General Office during the Cultural Revolution and trusted by Mao, in October 1976 he used Unit 8341 with Ye Jianying and Hua Guofeng to arrest Jiang Qing and the Gang of Four. Made party vice-chairman in 1977, he backed Hua’s “two whatevers” against Deng Xiaoping, resigned the vice-chairmanship in 1980 and left politics. He died in 2015 at 99.