Kang Sheng - Kang in Shanghai

Kang in Shanghai

After arriving in Shanghai, Kang enrolled in Shanghai University, a former teacher’s college that was officially funded by the Kuomintang but had come under the control of the Communist Party and the intellectual leadership of Qu Qiubai. After about six months at the university, he joined the Communist Party Youth League and then the Party itself, although the circumstances of his membership and sponsorship remains something of a mystery.

At the direction of the Party, Kang worked underground as a labor organizer. He helped organize the February 1925 strike against Japanese companies that culminated in the May 30th Movement, a huge Communist-led demonstration, and brought Kang into close contact with Party leaders Liu Shaoqi, Li Lisan and Zhang Guotao. Kang participated in the March 1927 worker’s insurrection alongside Gu Shunzhang and under the leadership of Zhao Shiyan, Luo Yinong, Wang Shouhua and Zhou Enlai. When the uprising was put down by the Kuomintang with the crucial assistance of Du Yuesheng’s Green Gang in the Shanghai massacre of April 12, 1927, Kang was able to escape into hiding.

Also in 1927, Kang married a Shanghai University student and fellow Shandong native, Cao Yi’ou (born Cao Shuqing), who was to become a lifelong political ally. He entered the employment of Yu Qiaqing, a wealthy businessman with strong Kuomintang sympathies, as Yu’s personal secretary. At the same time, Kang remained an active but secret Party organizer, and was named to the Party’s new Jiangsu Provincial Committee in June 1927.

In the late 1920s, Kang worked closely with Li Lisan, a favorite of the Comintern, who had been made head of the Propaganda Department at the CPC’s Sixth Congress, which for security reasons and proximity to the Comintern’s congress was held outside Moscow in mid-1928. Several months after the Sixth Congress, Kang was named director of the Organization Department of the Jiangsu Provincial Committee, which controlled personnel matters.

In 1930, while in Shanghai, Kang was arrested along with several other Communists, including Ding Jishi, and later released. Ding’s uncle Ding Weifen, who was head of the Kuomintang Central Party School in Nanjing, where he worked with Chen Lifu, head of the Kuomintang’s secret service. Kang later denied he had ever been arrested, as the circumstances of his release suggested that he had, as Lu Futan alleged in 1933, “sold out his comrades” in order to secure his freedom. As Byron and Pack note, however, "Kang’s arrest in itself is no proof that he was turned by his captors or forced into long-term cooperation with them. KMT prisons were notoriously chaotic and corrupt."

After Li Lisan’s adventurism and the failed Changsha operation of June 1930 lost Li the support of the Party, Kang moved adroitly to align himself with the Comintern’s new favorite, Wang Ming, and Pavel Mif’s young students from Sun Yat-sen University, later known as the 28 Bolsheviks, who took control of the Party Politburo at the Fourth Plenum of the Sixth Central Committee on January 13, 1931. Kang allegedly demonstrated his loyalty to Wang Ming by betraying to the Kuomintang secret police a meeting convened on January 17, 1931 by He Mengxiong, who had been strongly opposed to Li Lisan and was disgruntled by Pavel Mif’s high-handed role in securing the ascendancy of Wang within the Chinese Communist Party. On the night of February 7, 1931, He Mengxiong and 22 others were executed by the Kuomintang police at Longhua, Shanghai. Among those murdered were five aspiring writers and poets, including Hu Yepin, lover of Ding Ling and father of her child, later canonized as a martyr by the Party.

The April 1931 arrest and defection to the Kuomintang of Gu Shunzhang, former Green Gang gangster and member of the Party’s Intelligence Cell, led to serious breaches in Party security and the arrest and execution of Xiang Zhongfa, the Party’s General Secretary. In response, Zhou Enlai created a Special Work Committee to oversee the Party’s intelligence and security operations. Chaired by Zhou personally, the committee included Chen Yun, Pan Hannian, Guang Huian and Kang Sheng. When Zhou left Shanghai for the Communist base in Jiangxi Province in August 1931, he left Kang in charge of the Special Work Committee, a position he held for two years. In this role, Kang was “in charge of the entire Communist security and espionage apparatus, not only in Shanghai but throughout KMT China.”