Director Zheng

Director Zheng is the Unit 701 officer who recognizes Rong Jinzhen as the kind of mind the cryptography division needs and recruits him at N University. Years later, speaking to a reporter whose account of Rong seems incomplete, he supplies a personal history of their paths crossing and a painful assessment of what happened after Rong deciphered PURPLE and took on BLACK. His testimony connects the act of discovering a talent with the consequences of placing that talent under an immense burden.

Identity and Background

Director Zheng’s connection to Rong began long before they met. His maternal grandfather became friendly with Old Lillie after meeting him at a theatre in the second year after the Xinhai Revolution. Zheng grew up in his grandfather’s residence and came to know Old Lillie early. When Old Lillie died, his grandfather took Zheng to N University for the memorial service. Zheng was fourteen, in his second year of middle school, and the campus made a lasting impression on him.

After finishing middle school, Zheng brought his transcripts to Young Lillie and asked to enrol in the high school attached to N University. He later recalled this arrival at the university as the beginning of the route that would eventually bring him into contact with Rong, though the meeting itself lay years ahead. At the affiliated high school, a language teacher who belonged to the Chinese Communist Party later recruited him. When the War of Resistance against Japan began, teacher and student left the school for Yan’an, setting Zheng on what he described as a long revolutionary career.

Recruitment of Rong Jinzhen

Fifteen years after Zheng first entered N University, he returned there to find talent for Unit 701’s cryptography division. The meeting with Rong came about through coincidence: Zheng visited the former chancellor and explained that he was looking for people with particular abilities. The chancellor recommended Rong. Zheng could not disclose the nature of the work to Young Lillie, but he knew what capabilities the post required. He trusted the former chancellor’s judgment of character and took the recommendation seriously; after meeting Rong, he concluded that Rong was indeed the person the division needed.

Zheng later regarded this discovery as his single greatest contribution to Unit 701’s work. That pride is shadowed by his admission that he never anticipated the disaster that would follow for Rong. In later interviews, the memory could bring him to grief: he would shake his head, sigh, and repeat Rong’s name. The story therefore makes recruitment both a professional success and the beginning of a responsibility whose human cost Zheng says he did not foresee.

A Witness to Talent and Strain

Zheng distinguishes sharply between the work Rong did on PURPLE and the later struggle with BLACK. Before PURPLE was deciphered, Zheng’s picture of Rong had wavered between genius and madness. Afterward, Rong’s abilities seemed unmistakable to him. Zheng admired and respected him, but also kept his distance, describing his impression through the image of a tiger: controlled, watchful, and capable of tearing into a problem with ferocious concentration. The comparison expresses not only awe at Rong’s analytical force but also Zheng’s unease in its presence.

The work on PURPLE, as Zheng remembered it, did not appear to crush Rong. Rong arrived on time, left at the end of the workday, and seemed to those around him to treat the challenge almost as a game. BLACK changed that pattern. Zheng says he did not probe Rong’s state of mind, but he saw the suffering that the assignment brought. Rong’s former lightness disappeared under the weight of the task. Zheng witnessed his black hair beginning to turn grey and his stature seeming to shrink, and understood him to be caught in a labyrinth from which he could not escape.

Zheng portrays the burden as extending beyond the cipher itself. Rong became obsessed with breaking BLACK and, in Zheng’s account, with the possibility of breaking his own mind. He carried not only personal shame and sorrow but also what Zheng understood as the pain of the Unit. Zheng remained certain of Rong’s talent and diligence, yet could not be certain that he would achieve another extraordinary success. His reflection refuses to turn genius into invulnerability: even a brilliant person could become confused or make an error, and Zheng feared that an error by someone of Rong’s gifts might have enormous consequences.

BLACK and the Retrospective Account

The eventual deciphering of BLACK complicates the burden Zheng describes. He reports that cryptographers broadly agreed the cipher was not an exceptionally rigorous or important high-level system, and that the means by which it was cracked astonished them through their simplicity. Not long after Rong’s mental collapse, other cryptographers dispatched the task in only three months, and, Zheng says, did so in a relaxed fashion. Their success did not diminish Rong’s earlier achievement on PURPLE; instead, the contrast makes the suffering associated with BLACK more disturbing. The task that had consumed Rong proved manageable for others, while his struggle had already exacted a grave personal cost.

Zheng’s account reaches the reader through a reporter who has come to see him and identifies him as the man who recruited Rong at N University. Zheng notes that the reporter’s notebook is scattered and that more than half of its material rests on hearsay. Yet the fragments awaken his own memories, and he offers to speak because he believes he understood Rong better than the others did. The interview gives the book a new source of vitality: instead of treating Rong only as a distant puzzle of brilliance and collapse, it adds the recollections of the person who first recognized his suitability for Unit 701 and later watched the consequences of his work.

Narrative Distinction and Significance

The narrative also separates Zheng from an earlier official who confronts Rong at the A City railway platform. That predecessor, not Zheng, leads the delegation that questions Rong about sensitive documents and witnesses him collapse. The distinction matters: Zheng’s role is the recruiter and later interviewee, not the official in that platform scene. His presence in the account is principally retrospective, shaped by the distance between his confidence in Rong’s abilities and his sorrow at the outcome.

Through Zheng, recruitment is shown as more than the discovery of a useful mind. His memories establish the long, contingent path that brought him to N University and then to Rong, while his later testimony measures the difference between recognizing exceptional ability and knowing what its use will cost. He can explain why Rong was chosen and describe what he witnessed during the work on BLACK, but he cannot claim to have foreseen the collapse. That gap—between accurate recognition and inadequate foresight—is central to the force of his account.