Page 115 - SELECTED WORKS OF CHEN YUN Volume I

DEVELOP REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT AND PREVENT SABOTAGE 111

movement has made it impossible for him to carry on, he “gives himself up”
as a Party member by publishing a “confession” in the newspapers to
undercut the prestige of the organization. The so-called Communist confes-
sions that sometimes appear in the press are in fact fabricated by enemy
agents.
It goes without saying that enemy agents are too wily to limit themselves
to the above-mentioned tricks. Constant vigilance on the part of the
revolutionaries is required to detect them.
No doubt one reason why enemy agents have sometimes been successful
is that they have become increasingly cunning over the past few years. But
the main reason is that the revolutionaries have not been vigilant enough
and, in some cases, have been totally blind to their counter-revolutionary
attacks. For example, on three occasions in 1932-33 the Communist Party
organization in Shanghai recruited members by open admission without
examing the applicants’ backgrounds, offering a superb opportunity for
enemy agents to infiltrate the Party. And each time a revolutionary organi-
zation was destroyed the cadres concerned, instead of trying to find out if
enemy agents were involved, were always taken in by the explanation that
someone had been shadowed by detectives. Some persons were known to have
organized factional groups. Wherever they went, revolutionary organizations
were destroyed. And when they were arrested, the detectives politely set them
free. But instead of investigating these unusual occurrences to see if there
were enemy agents in their ranks, the organizations concerned continued to
regard the dubious elements as good people. Later these organizations
suffered great losses, as might have been expected. Some people in revolu-
tionary organizations were so foolish that they regarded as their “comrades”
certain persons who had openly surrendered to the police and had later served
as enemy agents arresting and killing revolutionaries. They hoped that these
agents would return to the revolutionary path. That degree of folly is really
beyond explanation.
A number of revolutionaries working with lower-level organizations and
some inexperienced comrades are so gullible that they readily fall into the
clutches of enemy agents. This is due partly to the failure of higher-level
organizations to train them in revolutionary vigilance and partly to the many
structural weaknesses in the organizations, which enemy agents can exploit.
For example, some organizations have kept their structure unchanged for a
dozen years, ignoring the perils of underground work. Regardless of the
amount of work to be done or the number of people they actually need, they
are always reluctant to change either the vertical structure (the organizational
hierarchy) or the horizontal structure (the branches). So they recruit people