In Mao's China, the power to recruit and deploy agents for domestic operational purposes was vested exclusively in the public security organs. These organs formed a hierarchy of organizations stretching – in the urban civilian sphere – from the branches of municipal bureaus of public security at the bottom to the CMPS at the very top. Agents were but one of their choice instruments of operational activity: a 1957 inventory also mentioned physical surveillance, interception of postal communications, and technical operations.

Their contrasting formal designations notwithstanding, these public security organs were the functional equivalent of the then Soviet Union's domestic agencies of state security – the KGB. In the period when Sino–Soviet relations could be described as those of “fraternal socialist allies,” this was duly acknowledged by Chinese leaders: “Our ministry safeguards the security of the state,” Minister of Public Security Luo Ruiqing remarked in April 1958, “and what the Soviet Union calls the Committee for State Security also safeguards the security of the state.” When bilateral relations started to turn sour, CCP leaders began to claim that the public–state terminological distinction was significant, but it is doubtful whether they ever succeeded in convincing anyone of this. In May 1962, Party Vice-Chairman Liu Shaoqi made the following assertion in front of an audience of provincial and municipal public security officers in Beijing:

The CMPS inclined toward a holistic view of agent running. While for didactic purposes it may have been prepared to separate the process into its constituent parts, including direction and control, briefing and debriefing, agent welfare, and so on, in the operational real world these parts were so closely intertwined that it was impractical to isolate them. How well or how badly any one part was managed inevitably impacted on the quality of the whole. In this respect, problems on the ground were plentiful. “In some public security sectors,” one 1952 report from the Northeast Railroad Public Security Bureau lamented, “not only does the officer in charge of the sector not personally exercise control [of the recruited agents], even his section chiefs show no concern and delegate [the running of] agents to the rank and file, in this way preventing efficient control, utilization, and hence use of agents in the struggle against the enemy.” The CMPS leadership expressed its disquiet on innumerable occasions after 1949 concerning how agent running was being managed, pointing out that agents without direction and control were agents in name only.

The situation was undoubtedly better in some sectors than in others, and better in some parts of China than in others. Where it was mismanaged, it may have resembled the state of economic protection in Jiangsu province, where, according to the provincial Bureau of Public Security's self-critical assessment of October 1954, “there are serious deficiencies with respect to the direction of agents and a state of chaos prevails wherein things are just left to drift: in the provincial-level organs in the trade and finance sector, contact has been altogether lost with approximately 60 percent of agents.” In one of the province's factories, some twenty agents had been recruited, but more than a year after having agreed to serve and having had their Agent Registration Forms opened, not a single one of them had actually been contacted again, much less been given or executed an actual operational task.

As China began to emerge from the trauma of the 1989 Tiananmen events, its leadership began to cast about for new frameworks in which to think about political reform. After all, the problems that had generated vigorous debate on political reform and had led the Thirteenth Party Congress in 1987 to adopt proposals for removing party groups from State Council ministries and to establish a civil service were still there. “Democracy” was still a good word, and it would have a continuing impact on the way intellectuals and practitioners thought about political reform. Added to the discourse, however, were new concerns about institution building. Increasingly, people began to speak of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as a “ruling party” (zhizheng dang); the implication was that the time had come to do away with the sort of politics associated with the CCP when it was a revolutionary party (geming dang): secretive, personalistic, divided by political struggles, arbitrary, and often hostile to societal interests. It was time to subject the party to accountability, to normalize its relations with society, and to select its leaders at various levels in a more democratic way according to agreed-upon procedures. The party needed to rebuild its legitimacy through its own institutionalization.

What such ideas meant in practice was open to debate and experimentation. Most people assumed that some sort of democracy – socialist democracy, whatever precisely that meant – would be a part of the formula. The Fourteenth Party Congress in 1992 declared that the development of socialist democracy would ensure that “institutions and laws will not change with changes in the leadership or changes in the views or focus of attention of any leader.” At the Fifteenth Party Congress, meeting five years later and only months after Deng Xiaoping's death, Jiang Zemin announced that “without democracy there would be no socialism or socialist modernization” and he called for “grassroots organs of power” to “establish a sound system of democratic elections.” This call for democracy was closely linked to the efforts to create a more sound legal system and stronger institutions. The work report of the Fifteenth Party Congress stressed “governing the country through law” (yifa zhiguo).

Operational profiling can be described as a process of selecting a suitable person to make a good agent. One popular introduction to the subject, a book accompanying the BBC television series Spy, highlights the role of the specialized “profiling team” that “most intelligence services will have…devoted to this hunt.” For its part, the CMPS in the 1950s focused much of its attention on the role of the individual field officer in identifying persons of operational interest. It was the officer's active involvement in the profiling process, the ministry argued, that more than any other factor determined whether or not the outcome would be successful – finding an ideally positioned individual who, in due course, would be recruited.

CSAD veterans had learned from personal experience in hostile pre-1949 environments just how crucial a task operational profiling was. Biographical sketches of the men and women who served the party on the covert front in the 1930s and 1940s record their efforts – some spectacularly successful, some disastrously misconceived – at identifying targets for recruitment who possessed in sufficient measure such key agent qualities as discretion, nerve, and self-motivation. The esoteric behavior observation skills and ability to “read” personality traits and types called for on the part of the profiler had been employed – and in a sense been turned on their head – in the Yan'an Rectification Campaign of 1942–44, in the phase known as the Rescue Campaign. Led by the then CSAD director, Kang Sheng, the Rescue Campaign had as its goal the identification of enemy agents and assets that had already penetrated or otherwise posed a potential threat to the Communist Party. Perfected and refined, the profiling skills of CSAD officers were subsequently put to good use in the Chinese Civil War (1945–49), years that Chinese intelligence historians today, quoting Mao Zedong, claim were when the party's “intelligence work was the most successful.”

There were no uniquely “socialist” ways of recruiting an agent: there were only those ways that worked and those that did not. Experienced operational officers had learned the hard way the importance of tailoring their approach to the target and understood only too well the meaning of the following injunction by Mao Zedong, included in a reader compiled under the aegis of the CMPS in the winter of 1959–60: “The most fundamental method of work that all Communists must firmly bear in mind is to determine our working policies according to actual conditions.”

Notwithstanding the pragmatism of Mao's statement, officers had to identify the most suitable recruitment strategies under the conditions prevailing in urban China after 1949. While, for example, the Shenyang Public Security Bureau Agent Work Initiation Procedures stressed the “absolute impermissibility of employing a fixed formula or attempting to follow the same rigid procedure every time,” it nevertheless described a finite number of strategies open to modification. Later textbooks attempted to strike a similar balance: the Lectures on the Subject of Agent Work devoted a full three chapters to the subject of recruitment, to be studied by officer cadets attending the Central People's Public Security Academy; at the same time, cadets were reminded that “there is no fixed rule that says where or in what capacity one should personally observe and study – or under what kind of cover one should meet and get to know – the target. Everything is determined by hard facts such as what the nature of the target's job is, what kind of life it leads, etc.” While stressing that, as a rule, the actual recruitment of the target was to be made “in the name of” the public security organs, the Lectures explained that the initial approach might also, under some circumstances, be attempted “under some other flag.”

The municipality of Taizhou sits on Zhejiang's east coast, about two hours by bus north of Wenzhou. Taizhou is a prefectural-level city, a status below the provincial level but above the county level. Because of the particularities of China's administrative structure, Wenling, a county-level city, falls under Taizhou's jurisdiction. With a population of approximately 1.16 million people (as of 2006), Wenling is a large city in its own right, and one of China's most densely populated; indeed, it used to be independent of Taizhou, merging with the larger city only in 1994. Wenling is made up of eleven townships and five neighborhood associations. Its rural population is 971,000, whereas its urban population is 186,000 (though observation suggests that the number of those actually making a living from agriculture and fishing is considerably less than these figures would suggest, based on household registration).

As part of the southern Zhejiang area, Wenling has much in common with Wenzhou to its south. Like Wenzhou, it was in a front-line area likely to be engulfed in any confrontation across the Taiwan Straits, and thus was deprived of central state investment. Also like Wenzhou, Wenling has a long commercial tradition and a lively religious life, including a very visible Christian presence. It is not clear that religion plays a role in any of the experiments described below, though some argue that the religious influence embodies an egalitarian ethos. It is also a city with high mobility. Of its 1.16 million residents, some 200,000 live away from the city on a long-term basis. Another 500,000 residents have migrated from elsewhere, attracted by the factories and other economic opportunities in the city. In 2006, the urban population of Wenling earned an average of 12,651 yuan per year, whereas the rural population made 6,229 yuan per year, making Wenling one of the wealthiest county-level units in China.