Debriefing Agent 594: Monitoring Campus Unrest

In May 1966, Agent 594 had just begun his third year as a HUMINT asset of the Cultural Protection Division of the municipal Public Security Bureau on one of Harbin‘s college campuses. An ambitious teacher in his mid-twenties from a non-proletarian family background and engaged but not yet married, Agent 594 started out hoping his overall career would benefit from serving as an agent, but the head of the Cultural Protection Division had not been particularly impressed and informed the officer who had recruited him that ‘from the looks of it, this guy is willing to do the job, but he has only limited skills’. Agent 594 met his case officer regularly once a month and, on the whole, had very little to report, but suddenly all that changed in early June 1966 when the CCP leadership in Beijing announced that regular teaching had been suspended and students on campuses all over China would be called upon to henceforth concentrate full time on conducting a Great Cultural Revolution.