AustLit

Since his return from Moscow to Yan’an, known as the Red Capital in
China, Kang Sheng realised that there were basically two tasks of
revolution, one being military revolution and the other, punishing the
counterrevolutionaries, the first one being against the external and the
second one, the internal, particularly those who were hiding inside the
Party. As his return to Yan’an coincided with Stalin’s Great Purge, he
was consciously aware of what he was facing after his return. Mao had
recently established his personal prestige within the Party despite the
existence of quite a number of Trotskyists (based on Trotsky, one of
the founders of the Soviet Red Army but who was removed by Stalin
because of his opposition to the latter’s totalitarianism) and, for this
reason, he deemed it his duty to establish his absolute power similar to
Stalin’s. If Mao were China’s Lenin, Kang would like to become China’s
Dzerzhinski (first head of the Cheka, a secret service organisation after
the October revolution in the Soviet Union). (Introduction)