Zheng Recruits Rong Jinzhen into Unit 701

Director Zheng’s recruitment of Rong Jinzhen into Unit 701 turns a chance recommendation into a decisive meeting of two lives already linked, indirectly, through N University. Zheng recognized in Rong an unusual combination of mathematical ability and insight into the human mind; later, he remembered finding him and bringing him into the work as his greatest contribution to Unit 701, shadowed by the disaster he had not foreseen.

A Connection Formed Before the Recruitment

Director Zheng traced his connection to Rong Jinzhen back to his maternal grandfather, who met Old Lillie at a theatre in the second year after the Xinhai Revolution. The two became close, and Zheng, raised in his grandfather’s residence, came to know Old Lillie from early childhood. When Old Lillie died, Zheng accompanied his grandfather to N University for the memorial service. He was fourteen, in his second year of middle school, and the campus made a lasting impression on him. After middle school, Zheng took his transcripts to Young Lillie and asked to enroll in N University’s affiliated high school. There, a language teacher who belonged to the Communist Party later recruited him. When the War of Resistance against Japan began, teacher and student left the school and made their way to Yan’an, setting Zheng on a long revolutionary path. His first steps toward the institution and the people associated with Rong thus came well before he knew that their paths would meet.

The Search at N University

Fifteen years after his early connection to N University, Zheng was sent there to find candidates for Unit 701’s cryptography division. The former chancellor recommended Rong Jinzhen during a conversation about Zheng’s search for people with particular abilities. Zheng recalled that he could not tell Young Lillie what work the candidate would do, but knew clearly what capacities the position required. He was therefore both surprised and pleased by the recommendation, trusting the former chancellor’s judgment of character and taking his joking manner as an indication that Rong was the right person. The convergence depended on coincidence: a visit to the former chancellor happened to place Rong’s name before Zheng. Yet the narrative presents the recommendation as more than a lucky match. Zheng’s earlier arrival at N University had laid the ground for his eventual encounter with Rong, even though the chain of events that brought them together did not begin until years later.

Recognizing Rong’s Suitability

Once Zheng met Rong, he concluded that the recommendation was sound. He saw a mathematical genius who had been closely acquainted with dream interpretation since childhood, had studied both Chinese and Western thought, and had explored the intricacies of the human mind. To Zheng, these traits made Rong unusually suited to cryptography: the work required not only mathematical power but an ability to approach the concealed workings of thought. Zheng and Young Lillie agreed to let him take Rong, but Zheng never disclosed how that agreement had been reached. The interviewer suspected that, in his urgency to obtain Young Lillie’s consent, Zheng might have broken professional rules and revealed the true purpose of the recruitment. That explanation remains the interviewer’s inference, not a confirmed account; Zheng maintained that the circumstances would remain a secret between himself and Young Lillie.

Recognition, Fear, and Regret

In later interviews, Zheng repeatedly called discovering Rong his greatest contribution to Unit 701’s work. He also insisted that he had not anticipated the catastrophe that would befall him. When the subject arose, Zheng would shake his head, sigh, and call Rong’s name several times, making his pride in the recruitment inseparable from grief over its outcome. His retrospective image of Rong sharpened after Rong deciphered the PURPLE cipher. Before that achievement, Zheng’s impression had wavered between genius and insanity; afterward, he remembered Rong as graceful and terrifying, like a tiger waiting to strike. He admired and respected Rong but feared getting too close, comparing the force of Rong’s spirit and problem-solving to a predator stalking its prey. The recruitment had identified extraordinary ability, but Zheng’s later account also registers the danger he perceived in that ability and the cost he had failed to foresee.