It was perfectly true: at the time when a certain country broadcast to us every day on their JOC radios hoping that we’d defect, they put a price on each of us, offering the most senior people several hundred thousand US dollars – even the cheapest was still a good few thousand. For someone like me, you’d be talking not hundreds of thousands but millions. Yeah, if you could have sold me to them, you could have made millions. And some people will do anything for money. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t very happy about having to leave the unit right then, so I was feeling particularly jumpy. Perhaps it was because I had been through so much, perhaps it was due to the problems attendant in the circumstances in which I found myself … and talking about circumstances, as everyone knows the situation then was bad, it was going to continue being bad, and no one knew how much worse it was going to get. When you think about it, particularly back then, no one would have imagined that our big brother, the Soviet Union, would now turn into our enemy. In the blink of an eye we were on opposite sides, and at daggers drawn. With open conflict and with undercover fighting. In addition to that, the situation with Taiwan was getting tenser every day, what with Chiang Kai-shek’s wild plan to ‘Recover the Mainland’. In that kind of situation I could feel myself becoming more and more nervous, more and more suspicious, more and more cautious. I was very cautious. Caution is not the same as cowardice, but my caution was concealing a certain amount of cowardice. This room was a lot better than the last one, not least because the room next door had two bodyguards in it. I liked that feeling. The feeling of being safe.

The Party secretary didn’t seem at all like the person that had been described to me: ‘a scholar in an ivory tower’.