Rong Jinzhen–Klaus Johannes relationship

Rong Jinzhen’s connection with Klaus Johannes is at once a professional hierarchy, a dreamlike encounter, and a search for an absent book. In Rong’s imagined conversation with the famous cryptographer, Johannes calls himself the greatest in the field and places Rong immediately below him, then argues that Rong’s work has carried him away from the kind of cryptography that could bring them closer. The book Johannes wrote becomes the measure of that distance—and the possibility of crossing it.

Professional Rank and Distance

In the conversation attributed to Johannes, he points out that Rong has made two serious mistakes: he has become part of the system, and he has spent his effort deciphering mid- and low-level ciphers that others could readily solve. Johannes treats the second error as a consequence of the first. In his view, working inside the system has drawn Rong into tasks that move him farther from the highest level of cryptographic thought, rather than toward Johannes. The assessment is severe, but it also assumes a striking degree of ability: Rong is not described as an ordinary subordinate, but as the person immediately behind Johannes in professional standing.

Rong answers the criticism by naming the practical predicament. The adversary is no longer using new high-level ciphers, so he asks what work would remain if he refused the ciphers available to him. The disagreement is therefore not simply about talent. Johannes measures progress by proximity to the most difficult secrets; Rong also has to account for the work his circumstances actually place before him. Their exchange holds ambition and obligation in tension, without resolving how Rong could leave the system while continuing to work.

The Challenge of the Book

Johannes offers a different task: he has recently completed a book that represents the apex of high-level cryptography, and he proposes that Rong try to decipher it. The claim attached to the book is extraordinary. Whoever understands its contents, Johannes says, would within thirty years be able to decipher the world’s most sophisticated ciphers. The challenge shifts the relationship away from routine assignments and toward a test supposedly capable of restoring intellectual closeness between them.

The encounter is explicitly placed inside a dream within a dream, in the mind of Rong’s imaginary Johannes. Its terms should therefore not be mistaken for an independently verified meeting or a straightforward exchange in waking life. Yet the dream gives formal shape to Rong’s professional longing: Johannes supplies the judgment, names the mistakes, and presents a task proportionate to Rong’s presumed ability. Even in this imagined setting, the offer does not yield an easy solution. Rong’s response is that the book is nowhere to be found.

The Absent Text and Johannes’s Mind

Rong reasons that if such a book truly exists, it could only have been written by Johannes. He then links the absent work to its author more intimately: Johannes’s mind itself, he says, was like the book. The comparison makes the text more than a technical puzzle. It stands for a level of thought that Rong regards as uniquely Johannes’s, and for a mind he can approach only by trying to comprehend its work.

The imagined challenge also points toward an actual book associated with Johannes. During his lifetime, Johannes wrote The Writing of the Gods, published by Chunghwa Book Company in 1945; its translation was titled The Riddle. Someone reportedly claimed to have seen the book in a bookshop, but Rong considers this unlikely. He has mobilized all the forces at his disposal to search for it without success, and concludes that there is nothing his people cannot locate unless there is nothing there to begin with. The gap between the dream’s promised book and the book that cannot be found leaves the challenge suspended between a concrete bibliographic object and an almost impossible ideal.

Cryptographic Inheritance and Separation

Rong’s relation to Johannes takes place against a profession described as hostile to ordinary inheritance. Its history is a silent, lonely forest: cryptographers cannot safely ask predecessors for directions, and they cannot simply build on earlier work. Conventional decryption instead proceeds by collecting information, forming hypotheses, and testing possible keys against possible doors. Rong’s interest in the history of cryptography departs from that cautious method; he ventures into the field’s forbidden past in the hope of narrowing the search. Johannes’s book, as the dream presents it, would concentrate that inheritance into a single decisive test.

Elsewhere, Rong’s history with Jan Liseiwicz supplies a contrasting instance of intellectual intimacy turned into estrangement. They had once been like father and son, but their political positions and beliefs created a gulf between them; Liseiwicz understood Rong well enough that Unit 701 feared he could help the creators of BLACK prepare against Rong’s deciphering ability. The text does not identify this relationship as the same as Rong’s connection with Johannes. Rather, the contrast clarifies what the imagined Johannes offers: not a reconciliation already achieved, but a demanding standard and a possible route toward shared understanding. That route remains uncertain because the book at its center may be impossible to locate.