作者：陀先润  

第一篇：幕后那只手

1969年的缅甸北部，一批中国年轻人正在哭着往山上跑。

他们背着弹药，没有枪。任务是把弹药送进山顶的坑道，给里面坚守的战友。从集结地到山脚下大约一公里，美军的炮火把这一公里变成了一条死亡走廊。一个亲历者后来回忆，他用高倍望远镜看着一百多人冲出去，炮火散去之后，进入坑道的只有三个人。第二天，又是一批人哭着往上冲。

这些人是中国的红卫兵，是文革武斗中的失败派系。有人悄悄告诉他们，去缅甸打仗，政治污点可以一笔勾销，打完仗回来算参加革命，一切既往不咎。于是他们跨过边境，加入了缅甸共产党的游击队。最多的时候，有一万多中国人在缅北的丛林里打仗。

没有人告诉他们，在缅共内部有一条秘密指令：这批中国人要被放在战斗第一线，逐渐消耗掉。

他们不是战士，他们是炮灰。而决定他们命运的那个人，坐在北京的办公室里，从来没有去过缅甸。

同一时期，在大半个地球之外的约旦，一批巴勒斯坦游击队员被约旦军队俘虏。约旦国王侯赛因下令，把其中一批人单独关押，不和其他俘虏关在一起。这批人不是巴勒斯坦人，也不是约旦人，他们是中国人，是混在巴勒斯坦法塔赫武装里的中国军事顾问。

他们在沙漠里教阿拉伯人打仗，教的是毛泽东思想，教的是农村包围城市，教的是如何建立基层群众组织。这件事后来被压了下来，约旦政府和中国政府都不想把它弄大，于是这批人悄悄被遣返，这段历史从公开记录里消失了。

再往北，在纽约的法拉盛，华人社区里流传着一条不成文的规矩：中国派来的情报人员如果出了麻烦，只要跑进法拉盛，就能安全换身份或者离开美国。这个规矩不是最近才有的，它的根基从1930年代就开始建立，经过几十年的经营，法拉盛已经是一个任何外部力量都很难渗透进去的安全区。

在日本，一个叫重信房子的女人在2000年被捕时，护照上有二十多次进入中国的记录，在北京居住的时间加起来将近两年。她是日本赤军的领袖，一个在中东活动了几十年的恐怖组织的核心人物。日本警视厅认为，日本赤军在中国有一个秘密基地。中国政府没有承认，也没有否认。

缅北丛林里哭着冲锋的中国知青，约旦监狱里被单独关押的中国顾问，纽约唐人街深处的秘密网络，在北京有据可查的日本恐怖分子。这些故事发生在不同的国家，不同的年代，表面上毫无关联。但它们背后有同一只手在操控。

这只手，叫中联部。

中联部的全称是中国共产党中央对外联络部，1951年正式成立。它的官方定义是负责与各国政党开展交流合作的机构，听起来像是个专门接待外宾、互赠礼品、发表联合声明的礼宾部门。2024年，德国宪法保卫局向联邦议院正式发出警告，称中联部是一个情报组织，要求德国政界人士提高警惕。这个警告发出的时候，中联部已经存在了七十多年。德国人花了二十年才搞清楚对手是谁。

这不是德国人笨，是这个机构本来就不想让你知道它是什么。

中联部最核心的功能从来不是联络，而是渗透。它在东南亚孵化并控制了多个共产党，在中东扶持武装组织，在美国建立秘密基地网络，在日本培植极左势力。它用过的工具包括枪支弹药、秘密电台、假护照、政治顾问、帮派组织和选举干预。它做这一切，从来不以中国政府的名义出现。

要理解中联部是什么，可以看一个具体的人。

孙海燕，中联部前副部长，曾任中国驻新加坡大使。1990年进入北京大学法学院，军训期间入党，政审干净。这个时间节点很重要——1989年天安门事件之后，国家安全系统和情报系统开始大规模从当年入学的名校学生中招募人员，挑选标准是背景干净、政治可靠。孙海燕是那几届被招募的人之一，很可能在大学期间就已经进入了情报系统。

1995年本科毕业后，她公派赴日本攻读法学硕士。那个年代能够公派出国的人，要么家庭背景过硬，要么已经和某个系统建立了关系。她1997年回国，直接进入中联部，第一个岗位是政策研究室。研究室是中联部的情报分析核心，对外可以挂学者头衔，实际上生产的是供高层阅读的战略情报报告。她在这里一路做到副主任，然后转任中联部一局副局长、局长。

中联部一局负责的是南亚和东南亚的政党运动，也就是马来西亚共产党、泰国共产党、缅甸共产党这些组织的总负责部门。换句话说，孙海燕从情报分析起步，最终成为情报行动的具体负责人。后来她去新加坡当大使，是为了给自己的履历做一层包装——副部级以上的官员需要公开履历，如果简历上全是中联部的各局各处，太过扎眼，挂一段大使经历，对外就成了外交系统出身的人。

这种包装不是孙海燕一个人的做法，而是整个系统的惯例。

与孙海燕形成对比的是刘建超。他是正宗的外交部系统出身，后来被调入中联部担任部长。他高调访美、会见布林肯，以中联部部长的身份做外交部长该做的事，在中联部内部是严重越界。外交是台面上的事，中联部做的是台面下的事，两套系统的逻辑完全不同。刘建超搞不懂这个区别，或者说他根本不在乎，因为他的目标是接任王毅的外事办主任位置，中联部不过是一个跳板。这是他后来出事的根本原因。

一个从大学时代就被招募、在系统内部成长了三十年的情报官员，和一个空降进来走过场的外交系统官员，在同一个机构里，活在完全不同的世界。这个对比，本身就说明了中联部是什么。

中联部在1971年成立了内部研究组，后来扩展为研究室，对外可以挂教授、学者的头衔，实际上是战略情报和政党情报的分析中心。到了九十年代，研究室的部分成果开始对外发行，就是现在还存在的《当代世界》杂志。这是冰山一角，水面以下的东西，从来不对外公开。

2003年到2004年间，中联部经历了一次大规模重建。这次重建不是换人，而是换功能。工作重心从政党交流和情报分析，开始向情报收集乃至情报行动方向转移。配合当时启动的大外宣工程，中联部开始系统性地介入各国议会政党，扶持小党，安插人员，干预选举。德国人后来花了二十年才意识到的事情，正是从这个阶段开始的。

在中联部的内部逻辑里，它扶持的那些组织和人员都是棋子。棋子有用的时候，给钱给枪给顾问。棋子没用的时候，一个电话通知停止援助，然后假装从来不认识。缅北丛林里哭着冲锋的中国年轻人，马来西亚丛林里打了四十年的华人游击队，约旦监狱里的中国顾问，中东沙漠里流亡的日本赤军——他们都以为自己在为某种理想战斗。他们不知道，在北京的某间办公室里，有人随时可以决定他们的命运，就像扔掉一颗用过的棋子一样简单。

这个系列，就是要把这只手背后的故事，一件一件讲清楚。

编辑：李晶    校对：周敏 翻译：沈美花

The Party’s Pawns: A Secret History of the CCP’s Export of Revolution

Author: Tuo Xianrun

Part I: The Hand Behind the Curtain

In northern Burma in 1969, a group of young Chinese people were running up a mountain in tears.

They carried ammunition but had no guns. Their mission was to deliver the ammunition to the tunnels at the top of the mountain for the comrades holding out inside. From the staging area to the foot of the mountain was about one kilometer; American artillery fire had turned this kilometer into a corridor of death. A survivor later recalled using high-powered binoculars to watch more than a hundred people charge out—after the artillery smoke cleared, only three people made it into the tunnels. The next day, another group of people charged upward in tears.

These people were Chinese Red Guards, members of the defeated factions from the factional violent clashes of the Cultural Revolution. Someone had quietly told them that if they went to Burma to fight, their political stains could be wiped clean with a single stroke; returning after the war would count as participating in the revolution, and everything in the past would be forgiven. Thus, they crossed the border and joined the guerrilla forces of the Communist Party of Burma (CPB). At the peak, there were more than 10,000 Chinese people fighting in the jungles of northern Burma.

No one told them that within the CPB, there was a secret directive: this group of Chinese was to be placed on the front lines of combat to be gradually consumed.

They were not soldiers; they were cannon fodder. And the person who decided their fate sat in an office in Beijing, having never once set foot in Burma.

During the same period, half a globe away in Jordan, a group of Palestinian guerrilla fighters was captured by the Jordanian army. King Hussein of Jordan ordered that a specific group among them be isolated and detained separately from the other prisoners. This group consisted neither of Palestinians nor Jordanians; they were Chinese—military advisors blended into the Palestinian Fatah armed forces.

They taught Arabs how to fight in the desert, teaching Mao Zedong Thought, teaching “encircling the cities from the countryside,” and teaching how to establish grassroots mass organizations. This incident was later suppressed; both the Jordanian government and the Chinese government did not want to blow it out of proportion. Consequently, this group was quietly repatriated, and this piece of history vanished from public records.

Further north, in Flushing, New York, an unwritten rule circulated within the Chinese community: if intelligence personnel sent from China got into trouble, as long as they ran into Flushing, they could safely change their identities or leave the United States. This rule is not recent; its foundations began to be established in the 1930s. After decades of management, Flushing had become a safe zone that any external force found very difficult to penetrate.

In Japan, when a woman named Fusako Shigenobu was arrested in 2000, her passport contained records of entering China more than twenty times, and her total cumulative time living in Beijing was nearly two years. She was the leader of the Japanese Red Army, a core figure in a terrorist organization that had operated in the Middle East for decades. The Japanese Metropolitan Police Department believed that the Japanese Red Army maintained a secret base in China. The Chinese government neither admitted nor denied this.

The Chinese sent-down youth charging in tears through the jungles of northern Burma, the Chinese advisors isolated in Jordanian prisons, the secret networks deep within New York’s Chinatown, and the Japanese terrorists with verifiable records in Beijing—these stories took place in different countries and different eras, seemingly completely unrelated. Yet, behind them, the exact same hand was pulling the strings.

This hand is called the ILD (International Liaison Department).

The full name of the ILD is the International Liaison Department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, formally established in 1951. Its official definition is an institution responsible for conducting exchanges and cooperation with political parties of various countries, making it sound like a protocol department dedicated to receiving foreign guests, exchanging gifts, and issuing joint statements. In 2024, the German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) issued a formal warning to the Bundestag, stating that the ILD is an intelligence organization and urging German politicians to heighten their vigilance. When this warning was issued, the ILD had already existed for more than seventy years. It took the Germans twenty years to figure out who their opponent was.

This was not because the Germans were stupid, but because this institution inherently did not want you to know what it was.

The most core function of the ILD has never been “liaison,” but rather penetration. It incubated and controlled multiple communist parties in Southeast Asia, supported armed organizations in the Middle East, established secret base networks in the United States, and cultivated far-left forces in Japan. The tools it utilized included firearms and ammunition, clandestine radio stations, fake passports, political advisors, gang organizations, and election interference. It did all of this without ever appearing in the name of the Chinese government.

To understand what the ILD is, one can look at a specific individual.

Sun Haiyan, a former Vice Minister of the ILD, once served as China’s Ambassador to Singapore. In 1990, she entered the Peking University Law School, joining the Party during her mandatory military training period, having a clean political background check. This time node is highly critical—after the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989, the national security and intelligence systems began large-scale recruitment of students who entered prestigious universities that year, with selection criteria requiring a clean background and political reliability. Sun Haiyan was among those recruited from those cohorts, very likely entering the intelligence system during her university years.

After graduating with her bachelor’s degree in 1995, she went to Japan on a government sponsorship to pursue a master’s degree in law. In that era, people who could secure government sponsorship to go abroad either had exceptionally strong family backgrounds or had already established a relationship with a particular system. Returning to China in 1997, she directly entered the ILD, with her first post being in the Policy Research Office. The Research Office is the core of intelligence analysis within the ILD; externally it can use the title of “scholars,” but in reality, it produces strategic intelligence reports for top-level reading. She rose through the ranks here to become Deputy Director, and was subsequently transferred to serve as Deputy Director-General and then Director-General of the First Bureau of the ILD.

The First Bureau of the ILD is responsible for party movements in South and Southeast Asia—meaning it is the overall management department for organizations like the Communist Party of Malaya, the Communist Party of Thailand, and the Communist Party of Burma. In other words, Sun Haiyan started from intelligence analysis and ultimately became the concrete head of intelligence operations. Her later appointment as Ambassador to Singapore was to add a layer of packaging to her resume—officials at or above the vice-ministerial level require public resumes. If a resume is entirely composed of various bureaus and offices of the ILD, it appears too conspicuous; attaching a stint as an ambassador makes her appear externally as someone from the foreign affairs system.

This kind of packaging is not Sun Haiyan’s practice alone, but a conventional practice across the entire system.

Contrasting with Sun Haiyan is Liu Jianchao.He emerged from the authentic Ministry of Foreign Affairs system and was later transferred to the ILD to serve as Minister. He visited the United States in a high-profile manner and met with Antony Blinken, performing duties meant for a Foreign Minister in his capacity as ILD Minister, which constituted a severe overstepping of boundaries within the ILD. Diplomacy is a matter above the table, whereas the ILD handles matters below the table; the logic of the two systems is completely different. Liu Jianchao failed to comprehend this distinction, or rather, he simply did not care, because his goal was to succeed Wang Yi as the Director of the Office of the Central Foreign Affairs Commission, and the ILD was merely a stepping stone. This was the root cause of his subsequent downfall.

An intelligence official recruited since university days who grew within the system for thirty years, and a foreign affairs system official parachuted in just to pass through—living under the roof of the same institution, they inhabited completely different worlds. This contrast, in and of itself, explains what the ILD is.

In 1971, the ILD established an internal research group, which later expanded into the Research Office. Externally, staff could hold titles like professors and scholars, but in reality, it served as an analysis center for strategic and political party intelligence. By the 1990s, some outputs of the Research Office began to be distributed externally, which is the still-existing Contemporary World magazine. This is merely the tip of the iceberg; what lies beneath the surface has never been disclosed to the public.

Between 2003 and 2004, the ILD underwent a large-scale restructuring. This restructuring was not a change of personnel, but a shift in function. The focus of its work began to pivot from political party exchanges and intelligence analysis toward intelligence collection and even intelligence operations. In coordination with the “Grand External Propaganda Project” launched at that time, the ILD began systematically intervening in foreign parliamentary political parties, nurturing minor parties, embedding personnel, and interfering in elections. The development that the Germans took twenty years to realize began precisely during this phase.

Within the internal logic of the ILD, the organizations and personnel it nurtures are all pawns. When a pawn is useful, it is given money, guns, and advisors. When a pawn is no longer useful, a phone call is placed to terminate aid, followed by a pretense of never having known them. The young Chinese charging in tears through the jungles of northern Burma, the ethnic Chinese guerrillas who fought for forty years in the Malaysian jungles, the Chinese advisors in Jordanian prisons, and the exiled Japanese Red Army in the Middle Eastern deserts—they all believed they were fighting for some ideal. They did not know that in a certain office in Beijing, someone could decide their fate at any moment, as easily as discarding a used pawn.

This series aims to clarify the stories behind this hand, piece by piece.

Editor: Li Jing Proofreader: Zhou Min Translator: Shen Meihua