Article: The Noulens Affair by Frederick S. Litten. Taken from The China Quarterly, No. 138 pp 492 - 512
1994
On 15 June 1931, a man best known as Hilaire Noulens (aka Paul Ruegg, M. Motte, ...) was arrested with his wife in the International Settlement in Shanghai. His became a cause c�l�bre, when Communist organizations started a world-wide campaign to free him, first from the Settlement's police, then from the Chinese to whom he was delivered. Although tried and sentenced to death by a Chinese court, his sentence was commuted to life and he was finally released in August 1937, because of Japanese bombardments on Nanjing. Only in July 1939 did the Noulens' leave for the Soviet Union. In fact, although portrayed as an innocent trade union official, Noulens had been an important member of the Communist International's "apparat" in China. Noulens worked for the Comintern's intelligence service, the OMS, and he was thus central to the Comintern's communications and monetary networks in Shanghai and, by extension, the whole of East Asia. The article is based on documents in the Comintern Archives in Moscow, the US National Archives in Washington/DC, the archives of the foreign ministries of France, the Netherlands and Germany, and the Swiss Federal Archives, as well as numerous publications, mainly in Western languages.
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