Due to historical reasons, the great powers once set up a wide concession in Shanghai, foreign forces were active in Shanghai, and spies from various countries also fought secretly here. Especially during the period from the Northern Expedition to the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, spies from all sides staged one big drama after another in Shanghai. Later, no matter how the history of all parties was described, there was no one person who could not be avoided, that is, Li Shiqun, the head of the secret service of the Wang puppet government.
In the espionage industry at that time, Li Shiqun was definitely a legend. His identity is not only the number one agent of Wang Pseudo, but also multiple backgrounds such as the State, the Communist Party, the Soviet Union, and Japan. Since returning to Shanghai at the end of 1938, it took only 1 year to become a minister from scratch, why did he have such a lot of energy?
During the period of controlling the headquarters of the Wang pseudo-secret agents, he frantically attacked Dai Kasa's military command forces, but he never persecuted the red agents, and no one even said what he had done that was detrimental to the interests of the red side. Although he defected to the enemy and became a traitor and fought for the Japanese, why was he poisoned by the Japanese in the end?
Due to Li Shiqun's unnatural death and the sensitivity of his identity, the official archives about him have not yet been declassified. Later generations mostly relied on the oral accounts of people close to him when describing his experience, and a completely different Li Shiqun could be seen from the oral accounts of different people. Make this mysterious character seem even more mysterious.
In today's article, the author will synthesize many information and briefly share with you the short and legendary life of Li Shiqun.
Li Shiqun was born in 1905 in Suichang, Zhejiang Province, to a poor family, but still insisted on his studies. He studied at Shanghai University, and during this period there were two things that changed his destiny. One is to join the party, and the other is to find a wife of Fuxing, Ye Jiqing (who is also a party member).
His wife, Ye Jiqing, is a typical Bai Fumei, a fellow of Li Shiqun, whose family has been doing business in Shanghai and has a well-off family. Not only did he provide great support to Li Shiqun's cause, but he also saved his life.
In 1927, Chiang Kai-shek launched the "412 Coup" and wantonly killed Red Fang personnel. The Red Party personnel in Shanghai went underground, and Li Shiqun was sent to the Soviet Union to study. Shortly after arriving in the Soviet Union, he was selected to train at the Special Police Academy, which was actually a spy school specially designed by the Soviet Army to establish an intelligence network in the Far East, and the trainees were mostly red officers from various Asian countries.
Responsible for the training was the General Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Soviet Army, one of the three major intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union at that time, who developed intelligence personnel from among the cadets and allowed them to collect intelligence for the Soviet Union after returning home. During his school training, Li Shiqun was also selected to study at the Spy College specially set up by the General Intelligence Bureau, and naturally had some connection with the Soviet intelligence agencies.
In 1928, Li Shiqun returned to China and was placed in the first section of the central special branch, which was actually the command organ of the special branch. As a result of the White Terror carried out by the Kuomintang, a large number of Red Fang personnel were arrested and persecuted. According to relevant statistics, from the autumn of 1933 to the autumn of 1934, 4505 people were arrested, of which 4213 defected, including high-level personnel such as Lu Futan, Gu Shunzhang, and Wang Yuncheng.
These traitors leaked a large amount of information on the Red Side, causing great harm to the Red Side. The main task of the Central Special Branch is to gather intelligence and execute traitors. Li Shiqun's starting point is relatively high, and staying in the Soviet background in that era is a very valuable qualification, and it is foreseeable that if he stays in the red side, he will definitely become a high-level in the future.
Unfortunately, he seemed to have bad luck, and soon after returning to Shanghai, he was arrested by the concession patrol house. In order to avoid being handed over to the Kuomintang, his wife Ye Jiqing spent a lot of money to find Ji Yunqing, a gangster in Shanghai, through family connections, to fish him out. After that, Li Shiqun also got into a relationship with the Shanghai gangsters.
Even more unfortunate was that in the summer of 1932, Li Shiqun and his wife were both arrested by Kuomintang agents. After all, Lee was trained as a secret agent, and if the enemy used up all kinds of torture with leather whips, tiger stools, and pepper water, he just would not admit his identity. However, when the agents dragged Ye Jiqing out and extended their claws to her, Li Shiqun gave in.
He put forward two conditions for Ding Mo Estate, who had come to interrogate and win over: first, he would not betray his friends; second, he would not do anything harmful to the red side. His explanation was that if he betrayed the red intelligence, he would be executed by the dog fighting team, rather than tortured to death. Ting Mo Estate is also a traitor to the Red Side, knows the stakes and understands this.
Soon after, Mr. and Mrs. Li Shiqun were released and worked under Tin Mo Estate, but he still found the organization through his previous connections, explaining that his defection to the enemy was a temporary measure forced to be helpless. During the special period, the organisation was unusually cautious about such a person and demanded that he execute Ding Mo Estate to prove his innocence.
Ding Mo Estate was also a party member, and after defecting to the enemy, he wantonly arrested and persecuted Red Fang personnel, which has long been regarded as a thorn in the eye. At that time, the Kuomintang Bureau of Investigation and Statistics set up three divisions, the first of which was later changed to the Central Command, with Xu Enzeng, the director of the department; the second was later changed to the Military Command, with the director Dai Kasa. The third division chief was Ding Mo Estate, who and Xu Dai had a three-legged presence within the KMT intelligence apparatus.
After receiving the task, Li Shiqun did not act, but informed Ting Mo Estate of the information. Because he can climb the big tree of Ding with this, paving the way for future development. After consulting with Ding Mo Estate, he decided to co-play a Tao Dai Li Zombie, targeting the newly appointed Shanghai District Governor of the Investigation Section, Ma Shaowu, and after the incident, he lied to the organization that the executives had confessed the wrong person.
Of course, the story is logically difficult to reconcile. Li Shiqun's execution of Ma Shaowu can be exchanged, but Ding Mo Estate is still on the blacklist. Ding Mo Estate certainly would not risk getting involved in an assassination attempt against his own key players. Another theory is that the task given to Li Shiqun by the organization at the beginning was to execute Ma Shaowu.
Ma Shaowu is a more dangerous figure than Tin Mo Estate. He sent undercover agents to the Red Side and, through the information provided by the undercover agents, captured Lu Futan, one of the three members of the Standing Committee of the Provisional Central Bureau. After that, he secretly kidnapped Wang Yuncheng, the secretary of the Jiangsu Provincial Party Committee.
It was difficult for the Red Side personnel to approach him, and Li Shiqun, as an insider, had a natural advantage and found out the law of his activities in order to successfully execute him, and he also gained the understanding of the organization.
Ma Shaowu's execution caused anger in Nanjing, and the case was ordered to be solved within a month. In the end, the paper package could not hold the fire, and it was found on Li Shiqun's head, and he was imprisoned again. This time the punishment was even more brutal than the last time, and he almost lost his life, but he did not recognize it. Because he knew that once he recognized it, he could not escape a dead word, and more people would be implicated.
This time it was still his wife Ye Jiqing who saved him. She first bought Xu Enzeng's men with her belongings, and through their introduction, she met Xu Enzeng. According to Ma Xiaotian, a special agent of the Central Command, he took Ye Jiqing to a secret office in Xu Enzeng, and the two spent the night in secret. The next afternoon, Ye Jiqing took a warrant from Xu Enzeng and led Li Shiqun out of prison.
After Li Shiqun was released from prison, he became Xu Enzeng's subordinate, was sent to Nanjing District as an investigator, and once again lost contact with the organization. In the period before 1938, it was the low point of his life, not only did he achieve nothing, but he also bore the name of a traitor. Although he worked under the Kuomintang, he had experienced physical torture and mental humiliation before, and he hated the Kuomintang agents extremely.
On July 7, 1937, the Lugou Bridge Incident broke out, and the all-out War of Resistance began. At the end of the year, After the fall of Nanjing, all the Kuomintang agents fled to the rear, but arranged for Li Shiqun to stay behind. Li Shiqun thought in his heart, this is tantamount to sending himself to death.
After the Japanese army invaded China on a large scale, it was also actively establishing an intelligence system, and it was inevitable that Chinese would be used. People like Li Shiqun, who were not welcomed by both the Kuomintang and the Communists, were the targets of their solicitation. When Li Shiqun stayed behind in Nanjing, the Japanese sent a beautiful spy to his side.
Under the temptation of beautiful spies, at the turn of the autumn and summer of 1938, Li Shiqun took advantage of the opportunity of being transferred to the special party office of the Kuomintang Zhuping Railway special party department to arrange for his wife Ye Jiqing to return to his hometown. He fled south to Hong Kong with office funds and a Beautiful Japanese spy. With the help of the spy, he was soon connected to the Japanese consul general in Hong Kong, Toyoichi Nakamura. Later, Nakamura introduced him to Shimizu Dongsan, a clerk at the Japanese Embassy in Shanghai.
In this way, Li Shiqun threw himself into the arms of the Japanese. However, there is also another theory that after Japan invaded China in an all-round way, the Soviet Union was also trying to send people into the Japanese army by all means to obtain intelligence. The Japanese sent a beautiful spy, Li Shiqun could not ask for it, and the two sides hit it off.
When he first arrived in Shanghai, Li Shiqun helped Qing Shui Dongsan to obtain intelligence, and at that time he was still a light rod commander, and he did not even have a broken gun. Through the influence of the gangster Ji Yunqing, he recruited a group of hooligans, frustrated soldiers, and personnel of the Central Unification Army in the concession, and gradually pulled up a team and won the attention of the Japanese.
At the end of 1938, Wang Jingwei openly surrendered to Japan, and soon came to Shanghai to organize a puppet regime. At this time, Ding Mo Estate, which was squeezed out by Xu Enzeng and Dai Kasa to live in Hong Kong, also defected to the enemy and came to Shanghai. Under the guidance of the Japanese, the Wang government set up a secret service headquarters at 76 Jisifei Road in Shanghai.
Ding Mo Estate was far more senior than Li Shiqun, and the Japanese decided that he would be the minister and Lee the deputy minister. But in fact, the secret service headquarters team is all people pulled up by Li Shiqun, and in the end, Li has the final say. Ding and Li, who controlled No. 76, acted as pawns for the Japanese and pseudo-Japanese, persecuted a large number of patriotic anti-Japanese people, and committed heinous crimes.
However, as far as Li Shiqun is concerned, his direction is very clear, that is, to frantically attack the military command forces.
As for the rise of the Wang puppet forces, the central unified military and unified forces all want to get rid of them quickly. Successively, Ling Ziyun, Lin Zhijiang, and others were sent to Shanghai to assassinate Li Shiqun, but they were all captured by Li Sheng, and through coercion and inducement, these people were included in his command. Dai gritted his teeth in anger and sent Wang Tianmu, one of his own relatives and one of the "Four Great Kongs" of the military command, to Shanghai to organize an assassination operation.
The news was still learned by Li Shiqun in the internal line of the military command, and arranged in advance for his backstage Qingqi Qingyin to watch the battle in the car, and staged a good play for him to tie up the ace agent of the military command, and then through various means, Wang Tianmu was also included under his command. The actions of the Central And Military Commanders not only did not hurt Li Shiqun in the slightest, but also greatly increased his strength, so he temporarily shifted his target to others.
In the autumn of 1939, The military command agent Jensen assassinated Ji Yunqing, a gangster in Shanghai, which completely angered Li Shiqun. Soon he captured Jensen and executed him. After that, Dai Xingbing, a special commissioner of the rank of major general of the military command, Wu Gengshu, director of the major general of the military command, and others were arrested and executed by Li Shiqun one after another while carrying out activities in Shanghai. The Qingdao station of the military command was put on the side by Li Shiqun, and all of them defected.
Li Shiqun's biggest operation against the military command was to destroy his Shanghai station. Chen Gongshu, the station chief of the Shanghai station, planned the assassination of Zhang Jingyao, Shi Yousan, Wang Jingwei and other traitors, and was known as the first killer of military unification. Soon after he was captured alive by Li Shiqun, he defected and expressed his willingness to lead more than a hundred of his cadres to his annexation. Dai Kasa's forces in Shanghai were completely destroyed, and he was unable to gain a foothold in Shanghai for a long time thereafter.
He was furious with the military forces, but his attitude towards the Red Agents was diametrically opposed.
In 1939, Pan Hannian sent Guan Lu to infiltrate Li Shiqun to understand his ideological dynamics. When Li Shiqun was imprisoned for the second time, his wife Ye Jiqing had just given birth to a child, and it was Guan Lu's sister Hu Xiufeng who took her in and took care of her. Li regards the Guan Lu sisters as a savior, and he naturally knows Guan Lu's true identity, but he has not broken it, because he also wants to contact the organization again.
Later, he expressed to Guan Lu that he wanted to see Pan Hannian and said, "Although I Li Shiqun have defected to the enemy, have I ever killed a party member in all these years?" Have I ever done anything to be sorry for the party? Don't I know how good the dog fighting team is? ”
In the autumn of 1941, under the guidance of Guan Lu, Li Shiqun and Pan Hannian met in Shanghai. He explained the reason for his defection to Japan: "Wang Jingwei is better than Chiang Kai-shek, Chiang Kai-shek is dictatorial and Wang Democratic, and he has turned to the Japanese to oppose Chiang Kai-shek with the help of their strength. Of course, this explanation concealed his personal purpose, because at that time the situation in the War of Resistance Against Japan had changed, and Li Shiqun was also anxious to find a way back.
After that, he gave Pan Hannian and the New Fourth Army a lot of help. He gave Pan a checkbook from the Reserve Bank of Shanghai and a codebook. Later, the Japanese military action plan against the New Fourth Army was also provided to Pan Hannian. After the situation in Shanghai deteriorated, Li also sent people to protect Liu Xiao, a cadre of the New Fourth Army, and others through the blockade line safely. In addition, it has provided food and ammunition and other materials to the New Fourth Army. The Japanese army's "clearing the countryside" operation was repeatedly swept away.
Li Shiqun met with Pan Hannian three times, the last time in April 1943. In order to show his energy, he lured Pan to Nanjing and abducted him to meet Wang Jingwei. This incident became a turning point in the fate of the two men. For various reasons, Pan Hannian did not report the meeting, which became the direct cause of the outbreak of his unjust case in the future. And Li Shiqun approached the Red Fang personnel almost openly, causing Jiang and Ri to decide to attack them.
After Dai Kasa sent people to assassinate Li Shiqun and failed one after another, he adjusted his thinking in an attempt to win him over. Tang Shengzhi's younger brother Tang Shengming was dispatched to infiltrate the Wang puppet government and plot against the important officials. However, Tang Shengming continued to work for several years, and Li Shiqun did not buy the account of the military command at all, and Dai Kasa decided to take advantage of the internal contradictions between Li and Wang Pseudo's other important officials to get rid of Li.
Tang Shengming's statement was: "At that time, the situation in the war was already very obvious, and Chiang Kai-shek wanted to take advantage of this time to use the enemy's and puppet forces to eliminate the New Fourth Army, so as not to increase trouble in the future, but he believed that Li Shiqun's refusal to obey the command was a big obstacle." Agent Jiang Fang had clearly realized that after the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, Li Shiqun would throw himself at the Red Side, and Li was a figure who made Dai Kasa a little afraid, and could only get rid of it.
The rise of Li Shiqun was inseparable from the help of Qingqi Qingyin, a staff officer of the Japanese North China Front, and Li's subordinate Wu Shibao robbed the Japanese army of transporting gold vehicles and caused a catastrophe, relying on Qingqi Qingyin's protection to escape safely.
Li Shiqun prides himself on having a Japanese backstage, is arrogant and arrogant in his daily life, and likes to compete with people for power and profit. He has offended Ding Mo Estate, Chow Fo Hai and others, and even the Japanese do not pay attention to it. He also took advantage of the opportunity of "clearing the countryside" to wantonly hoard cotton grain, and the behavior of aiding the New Fourth Army was gradually detected by the Japanese and the hypocrites. In 1943, Qingqi Qingyin was transferred back to Japan, and Li Shiqun lost his protective umbrella.
At that time, Xiong Jiandong, deputy commander-in-chief of the Pseudo-Taxation Police Corps, had a conflict with Li Shiqun's seizure of power, and at his instigation, Okamura, the head of the special high section of the headquarters of the Japanese military police corps, decided to get rid of Li Shiqun. On September 6, he invited Li to his home to dinner on the pretext of mediating the conflict between Xiong and Li, and put chronic poison on the food. Li Shiqun died within a few days of returning home, at the age of 38.
How to evaluate Li Shiqun is a difficult matter, which can be described as both good and evil. He acted as an accomplice of Wang Pseudo-Wang, persecuted a large number of patriotic anti-Japanese people and innocent people, and committed the most heinous crimes. But he also provided help to the Pan Hannian intelligence system and the New Fourth Army, even if this help was partly to find a way back for himself, but objectively contributed to the revolution. In the current popular narrative, Li Shiqun is listed as one of the ten traitors, but if he lived to be liberated, would he also enjoy the same treatment as the general of the Nationalist uprising, and would history evaluate him more comprehensively?
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