My father sacrificed everything for the Communist party... Even his family

But when he died in 2017, his hidden letters revealed his terrible realisation his loyalty had all been for nothing

In 2017, a former intelligence officer called Jie died in a quiet military retirement home in China. When his daughter, Snow, went to the house after his death, she made a startling discovery. In Jie’s study – a room Snow had never been allowed to enter – she found that his dictionaries had been hollowed out and filled with a trove of mysterious letters.

The letters had been written by Jie over many decades, and their contents revealed the inner life of a man who had been at the heart of the communist party for years, and sacrificed nearly everything for it – but who had come to question his involvement. Snow resolved to sort through the material, and asked her mother Moon, who’d been married to Jie for 57 years, whether she approved of the idea. ‘Whatever’s in that room

‘Over his 10 years in a labour camp he received just one letter’

has nothing to do with me,’ Moon replied.

Growing up, Snow knew her family was a front. ‘There was a mother and father, a son and a daughter, but no warmth. In some ways our family was an instrument of the state,’ she writes. She knew little about her parents’ careers; questions at home were not encouraged. Her father spent much of his time holed up in his study; her mother rarely spoke: she was like a ghost in her own home.

The Book Of Secrets is the remarkable story of this deeply dysfunctional family. After meeting the author Xinran, who emigrated to the UK from China in 1997, Snow sent Xinran much of the material she had found in her father’s study. Some of the book is composed of recordings Jie made before his death; much of the rest is made up of letters he wrote to his wife, but never sent, for fear she might use their contents to denounce him. No wonder, given that she had betrayed her own father to the Red Guards to prove her ‘revolutionary credentials’, telling them he’d been an associate of the hated Taiwan leader Chiang Kai-shek.

The tale that slowly emerges is nothing short of extraordinary. Our hero, or rather anti-hero, is Jie, who was born to an affluent Han Chinese family in Shanghai in 1927. His was an initially carefree and rather pleasant-sounding childhood, but the household – like the country around it – soon fell on hard times. When the Japanese invaded Shanghai in 1937, young Jie was soon being dispatched to the countryside, to buy rice off farmers and smuggle it back to the city. On one of these trips, he saw an apparently pregnant Chinese woman in the checkpoint queue in front him being stabbed in the belly by a suspicious Japanese soldier. Rice poured out of her stomach. The soldier stabbed again, this time drawing blood, and the woman died before Jie’s eyes.

In the 1940s, as a student at the elite Tsinghua University, Jie secretly joined the communist party, convinced that it alone could restore China to

greatness. And it was through the party that he met Moon, when he was an instructor at a military academy, and she was his scrawny 16-year-old pupil. Their relationship met a road block, however, when he found out she was in love with an East German called Karl, who had been dispatched to China to help it modernise. Jealous, Jie had the lovers separated. Karl was investigated and sent into exile in Siberia; Moon was left with no real option but to marry Jie. She continued to write to her lost love for years, however, unaware Jie was ensuring her letters never reached him.

The book isn’t a breezy read. It’s not badly written – quite the opposite – but the epistolary structure means there are holes in the tale, some of them maddening. We hear enormous amounts from Jie, but virtually nothing from his wife. You long to hear whether her politics shifted, like her husband’s, and how she endured the agony of being separated from her two young children when they were just a few weeks old, so that she could continue to work for the party at full pelt. We do hear from Snow, her and Jie’s daughter, but all too little, and nothing from Frost, her brother.

One of the agonies of the book is imagining how much happier Jie, Moon and the children might have been, had they felt able to confide in one another, to argue out their resentments rather than see them fester into silences.

There are other mysteries too, such as the decade Jie spent in a labour camp during the Cultural Revolution. It wasn’t the first time he had been persecuted – his loyalty to the party, like that of many others, had frequently been doubted. Over his 10-year imprisonment, he notes afterwards, he received just one letter. It was a poster composed by his young daughter, clearly under duress. ‘You must confess to your family’s crime: you drank the blood of the working people as wine,’ it read.

Though essentially the story of a family, many of the biggest moments in recent Chinese history do break into the tale. In the 1950s, Jie admits the country is ‘struggling to eliminate the last remnants’ of the KMT – the party that ruled China from 1927

‘I wonder does the red of revolution still run through my veins?’

until 1949, when it retreated to Taiwan. A footnote brings that ‘struggle’ into stark relief: we learn that in 1954 alone, 712,000 people in China were recorded being executed by firing squad. In the 1960s, Jie writes about the devastating effect of the Great Chinese Famine. According to party data he’s seen, he writes, ‘Around 45 million people have starved to death’. In some provinces, he adds, people are being killed for food.

As a young man, Jie’s faith in the party was fervent. But over the years, that faith wavered. ‘As I look back on my life,’ he says, ‘I find myself wondering – does the red of revolution still run through my veins?’ He had seen its ruthlessness up close; seen how it could chew up and spit out even the most devoted members. He feels used, he writes; he feels ‘worn down to the nub’. The picture that emerges is, for all Jie’s flaws, deeply moving: that of a man who gave his life – and ruined other lives – to a cause he ended up not really believing in. In that way, it’s a universal story – about the dangers of ideology unchecked by compassion and self-doubt – as well as a distinctly Chinese one.