Red Star over China (67 page)

In 1937 Chang was “censured” by the CC, meeting in Yenan. He left the Red areas in 1938 and joined the KMT at Hankow. In an “Appeal to My Countrymen” he described the KMT as “the most revolutionary party” and Chiang Kai-shek as “the only leader.” He was then expelled from the Party.

After 1949, Chang became an exile in Hongkong, where Mao Tse-tung sent his family to join him. For more detailed accounts of the Mao-Chang struggle see
RNORC
and Agnes Smedley's
The Great Road.
Chang Kuo-t'ao's autobiography was scheduled for publication in English at this writing.

Chang Ting-ch'eng
(p. 169), an important Fukien CP leader, was born in 1897, in Chinsha, Yungting county, Fukien, of a poor peasant family. Reelected to the CC secretariat in August, 1966, he was Fukien Party secretary when Red Guards reportedly reorganized the Fukien provincial government, to combine an “alliance of Red Guards, PLA and dependable cadres,” and remove those Party leaders “taking the capitalist road.” but Chang evidently remained in power.

A primary school teacher, Chang joined the CP in 1926, while attending the Peasant Movement Training Institute at Canton under Mao Tse-tung. He organized a peasant movement in his home area and in 1928 led an uprising in Chinsha. He then became chairman of a west Fukien soviet, entered the CC in 1930, and supported Mao Tse-tung in disputes with Li Li-san. He stayed behind in Fukien during the Long March and joined forces with Ch'en Yi and Su Yu, who later formed the New Fourth Army. From 1940 to 1944 he taught at the Central Party School, Yenan. Deputy commander, East China PLA and Third Field Army, 1948–49, under Ch'en Yi, he became Party secretary, Fukien, 1949; chairman, Land Reform Committee, Fukien, 1951; chairman, Fukien government, 1949–54; and concurrently a member of the East China Party Bureau, 1953, deputy to the National People's Congress, 1954, chief procurator of the Supreme People's Procuracy, 1954, and member of the Control Committee of the CC, 1956.

Chang Wen-t'ien
. See Lo Fu.

Ch'en Keng
(p. 203) was born in Hsianghsiang, Hunan, m 1904, and died in 1961. A Whampoa graduate (1925), he studied in Russia in 1926 and participated in the Nanchang Uprising in 1927. He had an adventurous career, ending as a full general (1955), and was deputy defense minister at the time of his death. A long account of his life, as told to the author
in 1936, throws interesting light on Chiang Kai-shek's efforts to win over former Whampoa cadets among the Red Army commanders. For Ch'en Keng's own story, see
RNORC.
Ch'en Po-ta (p. 419) achieved international notice when he jumped from No. 23 spot in the PB, as constituted in 1962, to No. 5 in accordance with ranking announced after the CC eleventh plenary session, Eighth Congress, August, 1966. He was also a vice-premier of the government in charge of ideological training of the Red Guards, and editor of
Red Flag (Hung Ch'i),
theoretical organ of the CCP. His rise dated only from his arrival in Yenan, in 1937, when he met Mao Tse-tung and became his “political secretary” and literary amanuensis.

Born in Huian county, Fukien, 1904, Ch'en attended primary and middle school in Amoy, Kwangtung, then became secretary to warlord Chang Chen. He was said to have secretly joined the CCP in 1925. He was a student at the CMT's Sun Yat-sen University in 1926, and he remained in Russia until 1930, but he seemed to play no significant role in intense intraparty struggles of the period. In 1930 he joined the faculty of China University (Chung-Kuo Ta Hsueh), Peking, where he taught under an assumed name (Ch'en Chih-mei) and wrote exhortative patriotic articles under his real name. Although Ch'en later stated that he had revealed his identity at China University, he somehow went unmolested there.
The Roar of the Nation
(Peking, 1963) asserts that “Ch'en Po-ta, one of the leaders of the North China Bureau of the CCP CC, also taught in China University. … His lessons on the philosophy of the Later Chou Dynasty were based on Marxism-Leninism.” Its author adds that “reactionaries” made unsuccessful “attempts on his life” and later tried to have him dismissed from the university because of his Fukien accent (
sic
) but that they failed. No detail is furnished concerning his role during the student demonstrations of 1935, when the Party underground was led by Liu Shao-ch'i. Of Ch'en's Party activity during the first seven years after his return from Russia, in fact, very little is revealed.

Following the Japanese occupation of Peking (July, 1937) Ch'en made his way to Yenan. He taught at the Party school, and did research work for the propaganda department of the CC under Lu Ting-yi ((
q.v.
). Primarily a polemicist, he had no combat experience, but his writings interested Mao and so did his familiarity with Russian Party history.

In 1942 Ch'en went to Chungking briefly as an editor of the Communist wartime newspaper,
New China Daily (Hsin-hua Jih-pao),
but in 1943 he resumed work in the Yenan propaganda department, which brought him in close touch with Mao. During that period (1937-47), Mao Tse-tung produced his principal theoretical, historical, and military works. Ch'en's counsel was available at an interesting time when Mao's leadership and theses on the united-front period of 1937 were attacked by Wang Ming (
q.v.
), which led to Mao's “rectification” movement of 1942. The Party's definitive rejection of Wang Ming was written by Ch'en.

In 1945, when he was consulted during Mao's composition of the
important “Resolutions on Some Questions in the History of Our Party,” Ch'en was elected to the CC at the CCP Eighth Congress. In 1946 he appeared for the first time as an alternate member in the PB. By 1949 he was senior deputy director of the propaganda department under Lu Ting-yi and in 1955–56 was deputy director of the rural-work department of the CC—spectacular advances for a man with virtually no known history in the pre-1937 Party.

Ch'en accompanied Mao to Moscow on his first visit there in 1949–50, and may have interpreted Mao's talks with Stalin. He was with Mao again in Moscow when Mao attended the fortieth-anniversary celebrations of the October Revolution in 1957, and made his “East-Wind-prevailing” speech.

Ch'en was one of the few Chinese students educated in Moscow during the 1920's who avoided overt involvement in the maneuvers of Pavel Mif or any of the several factions of Soviet-oriented Chinese Party leaders (the “Twenty-eight Bolsheviks”) who clashed with Mao before 1935 (see Po Ku, Wang Ming, etc.). Mao may have had less reason to distrust him as a loyal disciple and political Boswell, which he aspired to be and to an important degree became, than other “returned students,” who perhaps erred by excluding Ch'en from their counsels in the thirties.

Ch'en Po-ta probably published more philosophical, political, and Party historical books than any prominent Chinese Communist except Mao himself. In 1937–38 he wrote about means of mobilizing intellectuals for resistance and united-front work. In the 1940's he produced
Notes on Ten Years of Civil War,
1927–36, and
Notes on Mao Tse-tung's Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan,
both in close consultation with Mao. In 1949 and 1952 he produced short books eulogizing Stalin's contributions to the Chinese revolution—tactically required in periods of the CCP's maximum dependence on Stalin. But his status-making works in China were his essay “Mao Tse-tung's Theory of the Chinese Revolution Is the Combination of Marxism-Leninism with the Chinese Revolution,” and his book
Mao Tse-tung on the Chinese Revolution
(both 1951). He was also the editor of
The Thought of Mao Tse-tung (Mao Tse-tung Ssuhsiang).
In 1958 he became chief editor of
Red Flag.
As vice-president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences he was a dominating force in Party historiography.

Ch'en was instrumental in the removal of Lu Ting-yi, whom he replaced (after the fall of T'ao Chu in 1966) as chief of the CC propaganda department. As such, he was also boss of the Ministry of Culture. At a PB level just below Mao, Lin Piao, and Chou En-lai, and as Mao's writing arm during the GPCR, he was responsible for the official press campaigns against chosen purgees. Probably Ch'en was the main source of supply, to unsophisticated teenage Red Guards, of highly recondite materials of inner-Party history that appeared on many of the “large character” wall posters used during the accompanying purge, including attacks on his former superiors, Lu Ting-yi, Liu Shao-ch'i, and Teng Hsiao-p'ing. Ch'en
was also chiefly responsible for compiling
Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung,
the “little red book” that became a universal best-seller, and for a long series of polemical articles called “The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” circulated (1966-67) in many languages in pamphlet form.

In 1966 Ch'en was described by the official Hsin Hua news agency as “the leader of the cultural relations group under the CC.” One of his closest collaborators was his first deputy, Chiang Ch'ing (Mme. Mao Tse-tung), who also served as cultural adviser to the PLA. By 1968 seemingly heir to fractions of administrative authority formerly exercised by the PB members with whom Mao had ruptured relations, Ch'en lacked prestige with veterans of the Party and the army, however, where his influence merely reflected his role as spokesman for Mao.

Ch'en Shao-yu
. See Wang Ming.

Ch'en Tu-hsiu
(p. 73), the first general secretary (1921-27) of the CCP, influenced radical youths during 1919–27 more than any other Chinese cultural and political leader except Li Ta-chao (
q.v.
), with whom he laid the foundations of Chinese Marxism upon which rose the edifice of Maoism. Ch'en was born in 1879 in Huaining, Kiangsu, of a wealthy official family, studied the Classics, led a great revolution, and died (1942) a writer of essays and studies in the ancient Chinese language.

Dean of the College of Letters of Peking University (1915), he became best known as the founder and editor of
New Youth (Hsin Ch'ing-nien),
which in 1917 initiated a language and cultural reform of profound impact, and was also the voice of the May Fourth Movement (1919). After three months in jail for participating in the May Fourth Movement, Ch'en resigned from Peking University's faculty, went to Shanghai (1920), organized Communist study groups throughout China, and was, with Li Ta-chao, one of the two leading founders of the CCP. For comment on his difference with the CMT and CCP after July, 1927, see
Part Four
,
Chapter 5
, note 1, and
Chapter 6
, note 3. Discussion of Ch'en Tu-hsiu may now be supplemented from many other sources, including his own works. See also Bibliography, especially Chow Tse-tung,
The May Fourth Movement,
Isaacs, Schwartz, and the
BDRC.

Ch'en Yi
(p. 167n), an authentic military hero and China's Foreign Minister from 1958, was one of the ten marshals of the PLA. Born in Lochih, Szechuan, in 1901, Ch'en was the son of a district magistrate. He received his middle-school education in Chengtu, where he also learned to play basketball at a local American-operated Y.M.C.A. After winning a scholarship to a French-language preparatory school in Peking for a year, he went to France, where (1919–21) he combined labor (barge-loading, washing dishes, and work at the Michelin and Creusot plants) with study in a vocational school and at the Institut Polytechnique in Grenoble. In 1921 he joined the Chinese Socialist Youth Corps, which evolved into the CYL (see Chou En-lai). In the same year he and some other members were deported from France for staging a sit-down strike at the Institut Franco-Chinois in Lyons. Returning to Szechuan, he joined the staff of
warlord Yang Sen. In Peking, in 1923, he joined the KMT. As a member of the CYL he was admitted to the CCP in 1923. After two years (1923-25) at Sino-French University, in Peking, he next worked at Whampoa Academy, Canton, as political instructor under Chou En-lai.

Assigned to Yeh T'ing's (
q.v.
) staff during the Northern Expedition (1926), he took part in the Nanchang Uprising. Retreating with Ho Lung and Yeh T'ing to Swatow, he fell in with Chu Teh's retreat to southern Kiangsi. In early 1928 he accompanied Chu Teh to Chingkangshan. Ch'en headed the political department of the Fourth Red Army until 1929, when he took command of the Thirteenth Division. In 1930 he sided with Mao in a dispute with the CC under Li Li-san and, with P'eng Teh-huai, suppressed the anti-Maoist forces of the Party involved in the Fu-t'ien Incident. During the Long March, Ch'en stayed behind with Hsiang Ying (Han Ying) to command a Red rear guard in Kiangsi, and from 1934 until 1937 fought bitter battles for survival. With the outbreak of major Sino-Japanese war the remnant Reds in the South were permitted by Chiang Kai-shek to regroup under the command of Yeh T'ing and Hsiang Ying as the New Fourth Army. It grew very rapidly. Alarmed, the Generalissimo sought to drive it entirely into Japanese-occupied territory. In January, 1941, part of the New Fourth was ambushed by Nationalists. Hsiang Ying was killed and Yeh T'ing wounded and taken prisoner. Supported by units under Su Yu, T'an Chen-lin, and Chang Ting-ch'eng (
qq.v.
), Ch'en Yi held his detachments together and was named acting commander by Mao Tse-tung. Liu Shao-ch'i soon joined him as political commissar.

By 1945 the New Fourth Army had carved an immense territory from the Japanese conquest and built up the largest Red force in Central China. At the CCP Seventh Congress Ch'en was elected to the CC. Following Japan's surrender and the death of Yeh T'ing, in 1946, Ch'en became full field commander of the New Fourth—renamed the East China PLA. With renewal of civil war in 1947, Ch'en Yi's army played a decisive role; in June, 1948, it captured Kaifeng, capital of Honan province. Soon afterward Ch'en assumed a new “general front command” which included Liu Po-ch'eng, Su Yu, T'an Chen-lin and, as chief political commissar, Teng Hsiao-p'ing. In the “Hwai-Hai” campaign, in November, Ch'en defeated the main forces of Chiang Kai-shek so decisively that the KMT lost East Central China. As the Third Field Army, Ch'en Yi's troops pushed on to Nanking, Shanghai, and the provinces of Fukien and Chekiang, south of the Yangtze River.