Jinzhen Is Recruited into Unit 701

Rong Jinzhen’s recruitment into Unit 701 begins as a family farewell and becomes a disappearance into a sealed world. On 11 June 1956, he left N University before dawn after Zheng the Gimp persuaded Young Lillie to release him to an unnamed work unit. Rong Jinzhen could not refuse or disclose where he was going; his family could only pack for him, watch him leave, and wait for letters that would not explain the life ahead.

The closed-door decision

Zheng the Gimp’s arrival at the family home first looked like a farewell visit. Young Lillie met him with formal courtesy but made plain that he would not willingly let him take Rong Jinzhen away. Zheng said he would simply say goodbye, and the two men went into Young Lillie’s study. The door remained shut through a conversation whose contents the family never learned. Master Rong later recalled that her father refused to discuss it, becoming angry whenever anyone raised the subject. Yet the outcome was unmistakable: in a little over half an hour, Zheng had changed Young Lillie’s mind.

That afternoon Zheng collected Rong Jinzhen in a jeep and took him away for a few hours. He returned in an ordinary car with a guarded expression, and the family’s repeated questions eventually drew out his distress: the place to which he had been sent did not suit him. His words unsettled Young Lillie, Mrs Lillie, and Master Rong, but dissatisfaction could not alter the decision. When Mrs Lillie suggested that he simply refuse to go, he answered that he had no right to do so if the authorities wanted him. He was not allowed to tell even his mother what kind of unit it was; he had sworn secrecy and could say nothing further.

Young Lillie immediately understood that asking for details would only put his son at risk. He stopped the questioning and turned to the practical business of departure. The instruction to leave came with almost no time to prepare: Rong Jinzhen said he would go before dawn the next morning.

A farewell before dawn

The family stayed awake packing. By about four in the morning, Rong Jinzhen’s books and winter clothes had been tied into two cardboard boxes. Mrs Lillie and Master Rong then assembled everyday supplies, including a radio, cigarettes, tea, and a first-aid kit, until their efforts filled a leather suitcase. Their insistence on preparing things he could supposedly buy at his destination gave the household a task to perform while it faced a departure it could not prevent.

At around five, the family gathered downstairs. Mrs Lillie was so overcome that she could not prepare breakfast herself and went to the kitchen with Master Rong to guide her through the meal. She treated it as a special farewell, not an ordinary breakfast. Later, when the waiting car sounded its horn again, Rong Jinzhen still had not gone. Mrs Lillie placed her hands on his shoulders and urged him to leave, saying that she would wait for his letters.

Her touch seemed to bring him out of a trance. He rose unsteadily, reached the door, then turned back and fell to his knees before Young Lillie and Mrs Lillie, striking his head against the floor as he kowtowed. Through tears, he told Mrs Lillie that even if he went to the ends of the earth, he would still be her son. The gesture made the separation both filial and wrenching: he was leaving under compulsion, but not renouncing the family that had raised him.

At five o’clock on 11 June 1956, the man who had been a fixture in N University’s mathematics department for ten years got into the jeep. Before leaving, he asked Young Lillie and Mrs Lillie for permission to change his name to Rong Jinzhen. The new name marked a break between his family life and what followed, although the family had no destination to associate with it. Their only contact address was Box No. 36 in the provincial capital, an address that suggested proximity without revealing where he had gone.

The secret journey and the training base

The secrecy began before Rong Jinzhen reached his new post. On the previous afternoon, Zheng had taken him to complete recruitment paperwork by a circuitous route, and for about ten minutes he had been made to wear dark glasses. Rong Jinzhen believed they had remained within the city. At dawn, however, the car crossed the city limits and continued along National Highway XX. The discrepancy between his local contact address and the road leading far away alarmed him. Zheng reminded him that he had already violated his oath, and ordered him to repeat its first part rather than ask where they were going.

After hours on the road, the car reached a mountain site with no sign at its gate. The person who opened it had lost an arm and bore a prominent scar across his face; the silent buildings and shadowy figures made the place seem to Rong Jinzhen like the castles in the stories he had read as a child. Zheng introduced him to the woman in charge, whose name he did not catch, and identified the site as Unit 701 Training Base. New recruits received political education and professional training there. Zheng said he would send someone to collect Rong Jinzhen once he had finished, then drove away, leaving him at the base.

About three months later, a young man arrived at Rong Jinzhen’s bedroom and said that Section Chief Zheng had sent him. The motorbike did not take the main gate route. Instead it carried Rong Jinzhen deeper into the complex, through a vast network of caves, to a round-topped steel door. Beyond the underground passage stood buildings far larger than the training centre: the Northern Complex, where Unit 701 was based and where Rong Jinzhen would spend the rest of his life. The training site was called the Southern Complex. It functioned as both gateway and checkpoint; anyone who failed inspection there could not enter the Northern Complex. The journey made physical what the family’s unanswered questions had already suggested: access, movement, and knowledge inside the unit were controlled.

From mathematics to cryptography

Rong Jinzhen did not know that cryptography would become his profession until he began work after breakfast. The training centre’s lessons had prepared him to expect something secret and military in character. He had studied X Country’s history, geography, foreign relations, government officials, military capabilities, installations, and defences, and considered possibilities ranging from research on a secret weapon to service as a military adviser, expert, instructor, attaché, or spy. Cryptography had not occurred to him.

His work required a different kind of attention from the broad military knowledge he had studied. The account describes conventional codebreaking as gathering intelligence, forming hypotheses, and testing possible keys against possible locks. The method could be slow and laborious, but its painstaking elimination of possibilities made it comparatively safe and effective, especially against high-level ciphers. The work was also framed as making use of every second and every inch: a cipher might seem seamless, yet its use could produce a revealing slip, a small opening through which a codebreaker could enter its structure.

That professional world would bring Rong Jinzhen into contact with PURPLE and BLACK. Unit 701’s account presents the breaking of PURPLE as a reason the opposing side became more cautious, while the later failure to find errors in BLACK became a particular puzzle. Rong Jinzhen eventually broke BLACK; its key was zero, concealed in the leather attaché case. In retrospect, that discovery gives the recruitment its sharpest irony: the man taken away under elaborate secrecy would devote himself to finding what a secret system had hidden in plain sight.

A life bounded by secrecy

The journey launched by Zheng’s jeep was not a temporary assignment. The narration identifies cryptography as the work Rong Jinzhen would devote the rest of his life to, while the family’s farewell establishes the cost at the outset: he could not tell them where he was going, and the promised address did not disclose his actual location. Even Zheng’s role was initially opaque. Only in retrospect does the account identify him as the head of Unit 701’s cryptography section and Rong Jinzhen’s immediate superior.

The controls surrounding that work extended beyond the recruitment oath. Personal mail sent to Unit 701 was inspected, and Rong Jinzhen’s correspondence could be withheld depending on its contents. Later, after BLACK was broken in the second half of 1970, Zheng and his family were placed under strict house arrest; surveillance and restrictions had already begun around the time PURPLE was cracked. These later measures show how the secrecy that first separated Rong Jinzhen from his family became an enduring institutional condition, shaping what could be said, sent, and known.

As an event, the recruitment is therefore also a carefully staged change of narrative scale. It opens with a shut study door and a mother preparing a meal, then moves through a dark journey, a masked route, and guarded gates into a hidden workplace. The family sees a son leaving for an unnamed destination; the reader learns that he is entering Unit 701 and, unknowingly, a lifetime of cryptography. His new name joins the two halves of that passage: a farewell to the household that raised him, and the beginning of an identity formed within a world designed to keep its work—and its people—out of sight.