The story of China's rise over the last three decades is largely a political story, one that seemed highly unlikely when it started. A century of political decline, internecine conflict, and revolution hardly seemed like a propitious foundation for economic development. But the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 and the rise of Deng Xiaoping at the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee in 1978 gave the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) a new lease on life. Its leaders were well aware that its legitimacy was weak. People talked of the “three crises” – spiritual (jingshen weiji), belief (xinyang weiji), and culture (wenhua weiji). Not only was the charismatic leader dead, but the leader who tried to routinize charisma, Hua Guofeng, was repudiated by the Dengist coalition. Raising the banner of “practice,” Deng Xiaoping turned to performance legitimacy to restore the CCP's reputation.

In 1978, promises of economic development were difficult to believe. Per capita urban income was 316 yuan, and in the rural areas one-quarter of the population lived on incomes of less than 50 yuan per year. The situation was so bad that the party's senior economic specialist, Chen Yun, warned that if something were not done, peasants in the countryside would flock into the cities to demand food. Desperation and weak legitimacy led the CCP to embark on a course of economic reform, starting with the household responsibility system (HRS) in the countryside.

“As you all know,” officer cadets were told in the Central People's Public Security Academy in 1957, “agents are secretly recruited from all social strata, and include party and Youth League members, revolutionary masses, backward elements, as well as elements of the hostile classes and tewu elements. There are some of them who can be trusted politically, some who cannot altogether be trusted, and even some who are altogether untrustworthy and for whom special measures have to be devised for the sake of making controlled use of them.” As this observation suggests, the reality of the agent–officer relationship was some distance removed from the class struggle fare that the CCP was feeding China's population at large. It provided no easily actionable answer to the questions posed in the very first line of the first page of the Selected Works of Mao Zedong: “Who are our enemies? Who are our friends?”

The CCP would certainly have preferred under no set of circumstances to rely on hostile classes and tewu elements. But, as Mao had famously remarked in 1937, “practice is the criterion of truth,” and practice proved that there were, and seemingly always would be, times when the services of a coerced “class enemy” or turned enemy operative had to be relied upon to attain an operational goal. An agent recruited from within the ranks of the Communist Party's own membership or activist constituency was obviously preferable when a mission's goal entailed guarding critical assets and production processes. However, when a mission involved infiltrating a counterrevolutionary organization or “reactionary sects and societies,” activists rarely got very far before their covers were blown, for to be credible (as studies of the use of informers by the FBI have also shown), the agent had to share at least some of the key attributes of the group he or she was expected to work against. Stated with unusual forthrightness by a senior public security officer in the city of Zhengzhou, Henan province, the problem with activists was that, “needless to say, they are reliable and expedient, but not really suitable as penetration agents.”