The Disappearance of Yu Qiangsheng

A 36-year mystery

Yu Qiangsheng 俞强声 was a senior detective who worked for the Beijing Security Bureau until 1985. His job was to investigate sensitive criminal cases among the government leadership, and report the results of his investigations to his superiors, where they would discretely handle them after internal discussions. (In China, the judiciary is under Party control, so the Party would deal internally with the issues as they saw fit without public interference.)

He came from a politically well-connected family, his father was Huang Jing, who was an early Communist supporter in Republican China. (Since the Communist Party was effectively an underground organization, many members used aliases to avoid capture by the Nationalist security services.) Most significantly, Huang Jing was married to Li Yunhe 李云鹤， who later divorced him to go to Yanan and marry Mao Zedong and become Jiang Qing 江青， the leader of the Gang of Four who would become denounced after Mao's death, and would commit suicide in jail in 1991. The fact that Yu Qiangsheng came from an early Communist revolutionary family meant that he was trusted for handling sensitive political investigations.

This meant that it came as a serious blow to the Chinese Ministry of State Security when he defected to the US in 1985, and revealed to his US handlers that Larry Wu-tai Chin had been working for the Chinese security services since 1944, and become a mole at the China desk of the CIA. This was the single biggest revelation for the Americans which came from Yu's defection. 

After his debriefing, Yu Qiangsheng disappeared. There have been a number of theories about what happened to him.

• He was given a new identity, and moved to South America, where he was killed (presumably by a Chinese Ministry of State Security hit squad) for being a traitor. This theory raises a few questions:

  • Why did he relocate to the South America instead of remaining in the US, where he would be protected by US security services? 

  • If he was indeed killed by the Chinese security services, doesn't that mean that the Chinese security services still had another active mole in the US security services feeding them Yu's identity and location?

  • Killing a turncoat on foreign soil carries risks; what if the assassins are caught and put on trial? Why was he worth killing? 

• Another rumor is that Yu was killed in California in 2017. Since he was born in 1950, that would have meant that he was 77 when he died. 

• Another rumor is that he is still living in the US under a fake identity, at the age of 81.

Yu's younger brother, Yu Zhengsheng 俞正声 is a member of the seven-man Central Committee which rules China. The younger Yu was a confidant of the family of Deng Xiaoping, dealing with the occasional business and financial messes they got into in the early years of reform. Obviously Yu Zhengsheng had to have come clean about his older brother's actions, and draw a clear line of separation to be entrusted in a Chinese leadership position.

To this day, none of the individuals who really know about Yu Qiangsheng's fate, both on the US side and China side, are talking, so we are only left with rumors and conjecture.