Qian Zhuangfei (1896-1935), a native of Huzhou, Zhejiang Province, was admitted to the National Beijing Medical College in 1914 and joined the Communist Party of China (CPC) in 1926.
At the end of 1928, Qian according to the organization’s arrangement, passed the examination and was assigned to the Shanghai Sales Office of the Radio Administration Department of the Construction Committee of the Kuomintang Government, engaging in the work of drawing advertisement paintings and soliciting business, etc.
Qian was a versatile and shrewd person, good at socializing and entertaining.Xu Enzeng, the director of the Shanghai Sales Office of the Radio Management Bureau, found Qian to be skilled in business, well-organized, and a fellow countryman from Huzhou, and regarded him as his “right-hand man”.
In December, Xu Enzeng was transferred to be the director of the General Affairs Section of the Organization Department of the Central Committee of the Kuomintang and the acting director of the Investigation Section, and Qian went to Nanjing with Xu Enzeng to serve as his confidential secretary.
At that time, Xu Enzeng had a code book for communicating with senior officials of the Kuomintang, which could only be kept and translated by him. After learning this secret, Qian copied the code book, and from then on, he was able to get hold of the more central secrets of the KMT ruling group.
In 1930, when Chiang Kai-shek launched the first and second military “encirclement” of the Central Revolutionary Base in Jiangxi, Qian intercepted a lot of very important military intelligence, which played a significant role in crushing the “encirclement” of the Red Army.
In April 1931, Gu Shunzhang, an alternate member of the Politburo of the Central Committee, defected to the enemy in Wuhan and asked the enemy to send him to Nanjing immediately, in a bid to sell out the leading organs of the CPC Central Committee and the central leadership in Shanghai as a capital for further betrayal, and to ask the Kuomintang reactionaries for credit.
On the night of April 25, Qian was on night duty in Xu Enzeng’s “base camp” when he received six top secret telegrams from the Wuhan secret service one after another.
Qian used a copy of the cipher to translate all of these telegrams, and after reading them, he couldn’t help but be shocked: it turned out that Gu Shunzhang had been arrested and had defected to the enemy.
In the nick of time, Qian managed to report this urgent information to the Party Central Committee. Zhou Enlai, who presided over the actual work of the Central Committee, snatched at the enemy’s action before, took urgent measures to crush the enemy’s criminal plot to wipe out the leading organs of the Party Central Committee, so that the Party avoided an unprecedented serious destruction, catastrophe.
On April 1, 1935, Qian Zhuangfei was 39 years old when he died in Houshan Township, Jinsha County, Guizhou Province during the Long March.