On June 14, 1950, the second meeting of the First Committee of the Chinese Political Consultative Conference was held in Huairen Hall in Zhongnanhai. Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou presided over the meeting, and just as Premier Zhou was shaking hands with a person from a democratic party, two loud noises suddenly came from the distance, and the meeting suddenly fell silent, and then everyone whispered and speculated about what had happened. Chairman Mao saw the situation and said, "Comrades are invited to continue to speak. Premier Zhou, on the other hand, had a solemn expression and instructed the staff to investigate the situation.
After more than 10 minutes, the staff reported to Premier Zhou: At 5:20 p.m., a large explosion occurred at the Fuhua Heji Mining Pharmaceutical Factory, the casualties and the cause of the explosion were temporarily ominous, and the public security and fire personnel had quickly arrived and were rescuing at the scene. At this time, there were still a large number of unpurgeed enemy elements in the country, and at this time, the mysterious explosion in Beijing had cast a layer of haze on the new republic. Premier Zhou ordered the Ministry of Public Security to conduct a thorough investigation and make sure to find out the cause of the explosion, and if it is sabotage by enemy elements, it must be arrested and brought to justice and severely punished.
At the time when the Beijing public security department was closely investigating and analyzing, Mao Renfeng, the head of the Kuomintang secret service who fled to Taiwan, could not wait to publicize everywhere that the explosion was the work of the Kuomintang agents, and the Soviet experts who rushed to participate in the investigation also believed that someone deliberately sabotaged it. Was the 1950 Beijing bombing really the work of Kuomintang agents? Today, the History Inquiry Institute will take you to understand the 1950 year, which shocked the huge explosion of Beijing at home and abroad.
Mao Ren Feng
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="2" > extraordinarily large explosion, enemy special cloud</h1>
Was the explosion of fuhua heji mining and pharmaceutical factory deliberately committed by the enemy, or was it a natural disaster and man-made disaster in a safety accident? When the public security and firefighters arrived at the scene, they could not give an accurate answer to this question, the scene was already a ruin, the smoke was billowing straight into the sky, the fire was burning, and the telephone poles, branches and ruins that had been blown up to the east and west were faintly visible. After a full 10 hours of efforts by six fire squadrons, PLA fighters and nearby people who volunteered to fight the fire, the fire caused by the explosion was completely extinguished in the early morning of the next day. The damage caused by this explosion was even greater. According to the records of the incident, 32 nearby citizens, 7 employees of Fuhua Heji Mining Pharmaceutical Factory, a total of 39 people died, 406 people were injured, all 497 houses collapsed, and some collapsed 1928.
The explosion cast a lingering haze over the hearts of the people who had just started the nation and rejoiced. After the founding of New China on October 1, 1949, the poverty and weakness of modern China will not be able to be renewed under Chairman Mao's sonorous and powerful declaration, but also need the soldiers of the People's Liberation Army and the broad masses of the people to continuously clean up the accumulated defects for thousands of years. Among them, the most urgent task is to eliminate the enemy elements left on the mainland by the Kuomintang and restore the war wounds caused by the century-old war.
Founded new China
Chairman Mao said of the internal affairs of New China in early 1949: "Our country, if we figuratively compare it to a family, its house is too dirty, with firewood, garbage, dust, fleas, bed bugs, lice and everything." After liberation, we must conscientiously clean up and rectify..." "Cleaning up the house" is the task that we will face after the founding of New China.
The explosion of June 14, 1950, was only eight months after the founding of New China, and before the founding ceremony, the public security department in Beijing had specially cleaned up the Kuomintang enemy elements lurking in Beijing. After the peaceful uprising of hundreds of thousands of Kuomintang troops under Fu Zuoyi, the ancient capital of Beijing was protected to the greatest extent, but it also meant that most of those Kuomintang agents took advantage of this peaceful wind to lurk in the city of Beijing, planning a conspiracy to undermine the people's power.
Fu Zuoyi
At that time, There were "five more" in Beijing: there were many spies, many stragglers, many robbers, many thieves, and many silver dollar dealers. In particular, the number of spies ranks first in the country. Although the work of purging the kuomintang has been fruitful, the methods of the Kuomintang enemy elements who have concealed themselves and are determined to sabotage are even more sinister and vicious. As early as the eve of May 1, 1950, in order to celebrate the first Labor Day of New China, the Beijing Municipal Party Committee prepared a celebration team of 100 trams, each of which was polished and all tied with flowers, but on the night when it was about to come in handy, the Beijing Tram Factory was infiltrated by agents, and more than 50 trams in the parking lot were burned down, and the previous preparations were ineffective.
Premier Zhou personally went to the scene to investigate, and the reason was precisely because the tram factories did not implement their safety responsibilities in place and did not fully guard against the enemy elements, which led to this major accident. Seeing that the lessons of the tram factory are still fresh in our minds, this time there was an explosion with extremely bad impact and extremely huge losses, and Premier Zhou ordered a thorough investigation of the matter. That night, Minister of Public Security Luo Ruiqing, Beijing Municipal Party Committee Secretary Peng Zhen, and Mayor Nie Rongzhen instructed the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau to quickly find out the cause of the explosion.
Luo Ruiqing
The Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau immediately deployed a 17-person task force. The first thing the task force did after it was formed was to make an analysis and identification of the cause of the explosion. A Soviet explosives expert named Matveev was also invited to work on the case. The investigation began with the site of the explosion, the Fuhua Heji Mine Pharmaceutical Factory. Founded in July 1947, this mining pharmaceutical factory was invested by the private capitalist Wang Nianwei, and when it first started, there were only 4 or 5 workers, and it also made black powder and fire twist. It was not until early February 1950 that it cooperated with the Independent 208th Division of the Pingjin Garrison Command and renamed it Fuhua Heji Mine Pharmaceutical Factory, specializing in the production of mining explosives and detonators. After careful investigation, the task force finally determined that the two loud noises came from the finished explosive packaging point and the detonator packaging point, both of which belonged to the finished product workshop of the factory, about 30 meters apart from each other.
On June 15, Premier Zhou listened to a case analysis meeting of the task force, at which Soviet experts were extremely certain that the bombing was deliberately sabotaged, saying that there may be two ways of detonation, one is a time bomb, and the other is that flammable chemicals such as white phosphorus and yellow phosphorus have been artificially ignited or spontaneously ignited. Based on the conclusions of Soviet experts, the task force quickly extracted the residues from the explosion site and sent them to Tsinghua University for composition analysis, while the task force also looked for clues in the personnel who left the finished product workshop before the explosion occurred.
Premier Zhou
After the cooperation between the factory and the troops, the registration system for entering and leaving the production area has been implemented 5 months ago, and doormen have also been arranged in each production workshop, and all personnel entering and leaving must register the entry and exit time with the doorman. The doorman's room in the finished product workshop was exactly at a dead end with the two explosion points, so the doorman only suffered a slight ear injury, and there was no major problem, and the doorman took the register in time when the explosion fled the scene. Now only the registration of the workshop is needed to preliminarily identify the suspect.
Tsinghua University's analysis report on the evidence collected at the explosion site also came out at this time, and no other metal objects were found at the two explosion sites, that is to say, the explosion was not caused by a time bomb. At the same time, the possibility of open flame detonation of explosives is also ruled out, because before entering the workshop, everyone must hand over dangerous goods that are easy to ignite, such as matches, keys, knives, silver dollars and other metal items. Then all that remains is the possibility of spontaneous combustion and detonation of phosphorus chemicals.
The special case team focused its investigation on the internal personnel of the factory, and after much review, the special case team initially locked 3 suspects. They are Xiao Dingtian, a worker at the factory. On the day of the crime, Xiao Dingtian did not eat lunch, looking worried, and no one had seen what he was doing since 3:30 in the afternoon. Zheng Xinmin, a technician at the plant. On the day of June 14, he entered the workshop at 4 p.m., laughing with the packers from time to time, and an explosion occurred shortly after he left. Ding Songlin, a worker at the factory, made a living by carrying wooden boxes in the finished product workshop, and he was the only lucky person in the finished product workshop except for the janitor in the explosion, and his position was at the No. 2 explosion point, which was strange that he should die nine times.
The three were quickly summoned for questioning by investigators. First of all, Xiao Dingtian answered the investigators' doubts one by one: he did not eat lunch that day because he was upset, worried because he suspected that his pocket watch was lost, he went to the infirmary after 3:30 p.m., and did not return to the workshop until after 5 o'clock, and there was an explosion just after he returned. After investigation, what Xiao Dingtian said was true, and Xiao Dingtian's suspicious points could be ruled out, and the subsequent interrogation of Ding Songlin and Zheng Xinmin did not find any suspicious points, which was strange, and the investigation of the explosion case reached an impasse for a while.
On June 23, the 10th day of the bombing, the telecommunications investigation technicians of the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau intercepted a secret telegram sent by the Taiwan Secrecy Bureau, which read: "609: Congratulations on the success of your group's implementation of the Beiping explosion operation. The appearance of this telegram seems to confirm the crime of the Kuomintang agents in carrying out the bombing case, and then we intercepted another secret telegram, which was a "guide" to the technical problems of the explosion, which listed technical data, casualties and losses that were not publicly disclosed by the public security department at that time. Was this explosion really the work of Kuomintang agents?
No, the Kuomintang telegram came too strangely, especially because the data in it was extremely detailed, such as the statistical information of our department after the explosion. In view of the situation at that time, the public security department did not disclose the details of the casualties and losses, and only the Fuhua Heji Mine Pharmaceutical Factory had the most detailed data, so the investigators suspected that the enemy had obtained the situation from within the Fuhua Heji Mineral Pharmaceutical Factory. After such investigation, sure enough, a manager of the production department of the factory in charge of the aftermath said that his cousin Zha Yifeng had asked him for an "investigation report" from the Fuhua Heji Mining Pharmaceutical Factory after the explosion, saying that he worked at a newspaper in Tianjin and hoped to write an article.
After the investigators investigated, although this person lived in Tianjin, he was not a journalist, so what was the use of asking for this report? On July 1, 1950, investigators found traces of his espionage activities in a letter sent by Zha Yifeng to Hong Kong, and at the same time, a spy who was arrested in Shanghai also confessed that his accomplice was Zha Yifeng. After interrogation, Zha Yifeng was arrested on July 3, and after interrogation, he said that he had accepted a secret order from Taiwan's secret service. Those two secret telegrams were forged by the Kuomintang secret service after the fact, and the matter had nothing to do with them at all. Mao Renfeng, who had previously trumpeted that the bombing was the work of Kuomintang agents, no longer spoke hard, referring to the incident as "a joke with the mainland public security organs." ”
With the detection of the secret telegram case, the possibility of deliberate sabotage by the Kuomintang enemy was ruled out, and the special case group gradually formed a new line of thought. The task force decided to re-investigate the explosion site, and on July 6, the three experts who participated in the investigation completed the investigation of the scene, visited nearby witnesses, and conducted a simulation test, and finally concluded that the explosive packaging point first exploded, and then triggered the detonator packaging point explosion. The task force then reversed course and focused its investigative attention on the no. 1 scene of the explosives packaging point.
All three workers at the explosives packaging site were killed in the blast, and it was learned from the janitor's records that all three had handed over their contraband before entering the workshop, perhaps with items that could have caused the explosion. What exactly did they bring with them that day that would detonate explosives?
One of the clues caught the investigators' attention during the investigation, and when Fan Zhenguang, one of the 3 workers killed, routinely handed over contraband before entering the workshop on the day of the explosion, someone heard a "clanging" sound of metal colliding in his pocket. This clue instantly attracted the attention of the task force. After checking Fan Zhenguang's inventory registration that day, he found that the items he handed over were matches, keychains, and cigarettes. What you don't want to pay on your body should be silver dollars.
Did Fan Zhenguang bring silver dollars into the workshop that day? Can the sparks generated after the collision of silver dollars ignite explosives and cause explosions? For these two questions, the task force continued to investigate on the one hand, and on the other hand, immediately launched a test of whether the silver dollar collision could ignite explosives and cause explosions. According to several simulation tests, silver dollars can indeed ignite explosives when they collide. And in a factory because of the explosion of the old worker learned that on June 14, he had transferred 4 silver dollars to Fan Zhenguang, and reminded him that he must be stored in the safe, it may not be safe to take to the workshop, Fan Zhenguang verbally agreed, but who knew that he did not finally put the silver dollars into the safe, due to careless operation, the silver dollars he carried collided and led to the occurrence of this huge explosion accident, and he was also killed at the scene.
Based on this inference, investigators, with the assistance of the factory, found 3 silver dollars that had been blown out of shape near the scene, and the other was missing. The task force concluded that the explosion at the Fuhua Heji Mining Pharmaceutical Factory that occurred on the afternoon of June 14, 1950 was an exceptionally large explosion accident caused by lax supervision and careless operation.
After listening to the results of the investigation of the bombing case, Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou fell into deep thought; although they did not catch the enemy elements, this undoubtedly sounded the alarm bell for the production and construction that was in full swing after the founding of New China, and since then the measures and calls for safe production have been continuously launched. Welcome friends to leave a message in the comment area to discuss, like the content of this issue of friends like the comments to pay attention to support it, we will see you in the next issue.