Red China: Refugee from the Tiger Squad

Of the million refugees who have poured into Hong Kong from Red China since 1949, most have been farmers and fishermen fleeing overwork and hunger. In Hong Kong last week, TIME Correspondent Loren Fessler interviewed a rarity among the refugees: Chan Po-cheung, 30, a self-confident young man who served the Communists for years as a party stalwart and a high-ranking officer in the feared Public Security Bureau. Chan’s story offers a striking insight into the life of both oppressors and oppressed in Red China. It also shows that in the past year Communist police efficiency has declined sharply, and that a man with strong nerves and his wits about him can survive for a long time outside the system. “My mistake,” says Chan Po-cheung wryly, “was in being too straightforward.”

Dissolving Society. A solidly muscled man who looks like a bouncer in a waterfront saloon, Chan Po-cheung was born in the Toishan district, southwest of Canton, and grew up in the violence of a dissolving society. When he was eleven, his father was murdered by a hired gangster because of a property dispute, and the killer went free owing to his political connections. At 17, while South China was still shakily controlled by Chiang Kaishek, Chan was a student at a police training school in Canton. He spoke openly against the Nationalist regime and was overheard by a plainclothesman who warned him that such talk would get him into trouble. To Chan’s surprise, the plainclothesman made him a sort of protege—a riddle that was solved six months later when the Red army captured Canton and the cop was revealed as an underground Communist.

Chan was assigned to the 136-man “pistol squad” that functioned as i) a bodyguard for visiting dignitaries, and 2) an agency to ferret out counter-revolutionary activity. Within a year, Chan was a party member; by 1951 he was promoted to leadership of the pistol squad and was in charge of security arrangements during Mao Tse-tung’s first visit to the city. Says Chan: “Had I known what I know now, I would have shot him.”

His new importance enabled Chan to avenge his father’s death. He gave the name of the killer to Tan Chengwen, chief of the regional PSB, and says matter-of-factly: “Tan sent off the order for his execution. No trial was necessary.”

Listening to Bandits. Chan felt different about Communism’s summary justice when two comrades he liked were purged for being rightist deviationists. “It made me feel something was wrong.” He was switched to the “tiger squad,” which launched a drive on businessmen suspected of holding out on taxes or hoarding gold. Chan claims he saw police figures in 1953 listing, for Canton alone, 8,000 executions and 10,000 suicides. Chan says now: “I wanted to quit, but it was as if I were an orphan. I felt I had no place to go.”

He did escape from the tiger squad by entering Whampoa Military Academy near Canton, where he spent two years “listening to those bandits who took part in the Long March preach about the goodness of Communism.” Chan was still gullible enough to take at face value the “hundred flowers” campaign, which called for frank criticism, and industriously sent in 14 reports, castigating everything from party spying to forced labor.

For his pains, he was unofficially suspended from the party, and one morning in October 1958 Chan was arrested on charges of criticizing party policies and helping people to evade the law. Chan hastily scribbled a 37-page “confession,” but it did him little good. He was sentenced to 3½ years of labor reform.

Two-Foot Chain. With a batch of 1,200 other prisoners, Chan was shipped into the mountains of northern Kwangtung to work twelve hours a day on a skimpy ration of rice. Within two months. 300 of the prisoners died. In this and two other camps, Chan was continually in trouble. After writing a poetic lament for his pre-Communist life, Chan was denounced before a mass meeting of other prisoners, beaten, and forced to stand and kneel and stand again for hours. In 1960, while on a rock removal detail, Chan complained to the authorities that “corrupt cadres” were stealing the rice supposed to go to the prisoners. The government sent investigators who warned the cadres. Once the investigators were gone, Chan says, “the cadres fixed me good. They clamped forty-pound leg irons on my ankles and linked them together with a two-foot chain.” After nine months of leg irons and solitary confinement, Chan’s weight dropped from 140 lbs. to 92.

At the final camp, Chan used his last article of wealth, a Parker pen set, to bribe his way into the prison hospital. On a stormy night he slipped out a window, climbed the fence, and raced between the guard towers. Hopping a freight train bound for Canton, Chan hid out with friends who gave him food and civilian clothes. From September 1961 until he made it across the border, Chan was constantly on the move, sometimes staying with a sympathetic cop of the PSB, more often working for the black marketeers of Canton running gold bars, ginseng, watches and saccharin upriver to Changsha and Wuhan. His boldest act was his escape to Hong Kong. He stole a government seal, used it to stamp a letter “authorizing” him to requisition a Land Rover from a PSB motor pool. He drove to the Hong Kong border, and the PSB emblem on the car was as good as a pass—Red Chinese soldiers waved him by roadblocks.

Of the groaning land he left behind him, Chan Po-cheung says: “The people will continue to suffer and the regime to survive. First, the people have so little food and clothing that they cannot take to the hills and wage guerrilla war. Second, they have no weapons at all. Even if the cadres are not completely loyal to the government, they are held responsible if there’s any trouble. The party’s grip still extends from the top down to the lowest level of life in China.”