Red Star over China (68 page)

Following victory, Ch'en Yi was successively or concurrently commander of the East China military area; second secretary of the East China Bureau of the CP; mayor of Shanghai; secretary of the Shanghai CP committee, and a member of the Party revolutionary military council. With adoption of the constitution and formation of the NPC, in 1954, he became a vice-premier of the CPR State Council and vice-chairman of the National Defense Council. In 1956 he was elected to the PB for
the first time. From 1949 onward Chou En-lai had been concurrently premier and minister of foreign affairs; in 1958, Ch'en Yi took over the latter post. At the same time Ch'en relinquished the mayoralty of Shanghai.

Ch'en led the Chinese delegation to Indonesia which signed a treaty of friendship in 1961; accompanied Liu Shao-ch'i on visits to Indonesia, Burma and Cambodia in 1963; represented China on Kenya's independence day; joined Chou En-lai on a 1963–64 tour of ten African countries; and represented China at the tenth-anniversary celebration of the Algerian Republic. In 1965 he visited Jakarta for the tenth anniversary of the Bandung Conference.

At the eleventh session of the Eighth Party Congress (August, 1966) Ch'en retained his rank in the PB and his government posts, but he was not immune from attacks by the Red Guards of the GPCR. Wall posters appeared that accused him of barring the gates of the Waichiaopu (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) to Red Guards who wished to search the premises for persons or indications of reactionary or revisionist thoughts or things. Many attacks were leveled at the Ministry, and Ch'en's diplomatic agents abroad were accused of having taken on decadent bourgeois habits of dress, eating, and culture, including attendance at nude pictures and excessive indulgence in alcohol. Many were recalled for interrogation in Peking. At the 1967 October anniversary celebration, however, Ch'en Yi's name stood high on the PB list.

In 1965 Marshal Ch'en Yi told the author that if the United States continued to escalate the war in Vietnam, China would sooner or later become involved, and that when that happened the war would “know no boundaries.”

Ch'en's first wife died in Kiangsi in 1934. Chang Chien, his second wife, was formerly a schoolteacher.

Ch'en Yun
(Liao Ch'eng-yun) (p. 159n), a vice-chairman of the CCP CC from 1934, was re-elected to the PB in 1966, and despite his long-time association with Liu Shao-ch'i (
q.v.
) and many Red Guard verbal attacks, was still favorably mentioned in the official press in 1967.

Born in 1900 in a Shanghai working-class family, Ch'en Yun was a typesetter when he joined the CCP in 1924. He specialized in labor unions and in Soviet Kiangsi (1931-34) organized the handicraft workers. At Tsunyi, in 1935, after supporting Mao Tse-tung against the former PB leadership, he became a member of the Party military affairs committee, and was sent to Moscow as a delegate to the Seventh CMT Congress (July-August). His report on the Tsunyi conference probably explained why Mao was there elected (for the first time) to the CEC of the CMT. Ch'en returned to China with Wang Ming and K'ang Sheng
(q.q.v.)
in 1937 and quickly took pro-Mao positions in Yenan. His book,
How To Be a Good Communist Party Member
(1939), together with Liu Shao-ch'i's
How To Be a Good Communist
(1939), became an essential tool in the
cheng-feng
(rectification) program (1942) to establish the prevalence
of Maoist-Marxist orthodoxy over imported dogma. (By 1967 Liu Shao-ch'i's book was denounced in Peking as a “poison weed.”)

Ch'en specialized in economic and financial affairs (1940-45) and in 1945 was a top CC leader sent to Northeast China with Lin Piao (q.v.) to prepare for a capture of power there, following Japan's surrender. From 1949 onward he held senior responsibilities in heavy industry, finance, state planning, and labor organization. In 1954 he became a vice-premier.

Ch'en was, like Liu Shao-ch'i, one of very few Chinese Communists with a long practical experience in urban working-class organization. His fall from fifth place in the PB hierarchy to eleventh place in 1966, after the Eleventh Plenum of the Eighth Congress, suggested that de-emphasis on centralized economic and industrial planning and management might be part of the drive to break up some of the power accumulated by Party technocrats accused by the Red Guards of practicing “economism”—meaning the use of material incentives along lines of the “capitalist road”—specifically, “Liebermanism.” By 1968 Ch'en seemed restored, however, to his niche in the hierarchy.

Chiang Ch'ing
(Green River) (p. 420), Mao Tse-tung's third wife (excluding an unconsummated childhood marriage), was suddenly given great power as a cultural arbiter during the GPCR from 1966 onward. Her real name was Li Chung-chin (Yun-ho), and she was born in 1912, in Taian, Shantung, in the shadow of T'ai Shan, one of China's five “sacred mountains.”

Chiang Ch'ing's parents, of middle-class origin and with scant assets, separated when she was a young child, but her mother managed to put her through primary school, in Tsinan. She then entered a provincial theatrical training institute, at government expense. The principal of the school, Chao T'ai-mou, later became chancellor of Tsingtao National University, where Chiang Ch'ing worked as an assistant librarian. While there she met Yu Ch'i-wei (Huang Ching,
q.v.),
who became perhaps the most important leader of the North China student “rebellions” of 1935–37. His sister, Yu San, was already a well-known opera singer and actress when she married Chao T'ai-mou, through whom Chiang Ch'ing met both Yu San and Yu Ch'i-wei. Their uncle, Yu Ta-wei, was minister of defense in the Nationalist Government at Nanking, while another uncle, Tseng Chao-lin, was a former vice-minister of education. At the time Chiang Ch'ing met Yu Ch'i-wei he was propaganda chief of the Communist underground apparatus in Tsingtao.

Chiang Ch'ing secretly joined the Party in 1933. In the same year Yu Ch'i-wei was arrested and sentenced to death by the KMT authorities, but his influential uncle, Yu Ta-wei, secured his release in 1934. That account was given to the author when he first met Yu Ch'i-wei in Peking (1935) as David Yu. He was then propaganda secretary of the underground Peking Party CC, under the name Huang Ching, and chief Communist adviser
to students who participated in and partly led the December 9th student movement.

Chiang Ch'ing returned to Tsinan in 1934 and married an actor with the stage name T'ang Na. They worked in the infant Shanghai film industry, Chiang Ch'ing taking the name Lan P'ing (Blue Apple) for the parts given to her. They were divorced in 1937. With another actress (who later married Li Teh) Chiang Ch'ing then joined Huang Ching and together they made the long, dangerous overland trek to Yenan, the Red capital. Reaching Yenan in 1938, Huang Ching enrolled in the Party School for further study, while Chiang Ch'ing, with his excellent sponsorship, entered the Lu Hsun Art Institute, which trained theatrical troupes for service at the front. It was there that she met Mao Tse-tung.

The previous year Ho Tzu-ch'en
(q.
v.) and Mao had been divorced, on Mao's demand, by a special court set up by the CCP CC.

Chiang Ch'ing, a slender, attractive young woman when the author met her in Yenan in 1939, a few months after her marriage to Mao, played a good game of bridge and was an excellent cook. She bore Mao two daughters, both of whom were by 1967 reported married.

Chiang Ch'ing took little part in political activity before 1964 aside from her appearances as Mme. Mao. Her important new independent role became manifest after the meeting of the CC (August, 1966) which launched the GPCR. She was unexpectedly declared “first deputy leader” under Ch'en Po-ta, officially “the leader of the Cultural Group within the Central Committee.” In the motor cavalcade and parade following the August meeting, Chiang Ch'ing stood in the first car beside Premier Chou En-lai.

All that was clarified in 1967 when the Party's theoretical organ,
Red Flag
(edited by Ch'en Po-ta), published Chiang Ch'ing's speech made before cultural workers in July, 1964, which
Red Flag
now declared was the “great beginning” of the GPCR. Subsequent revelations credited her with having issued “directives” for the rewriting of operas, plays, ballets, and symphonies to introduce proletarian heroes and bourgeois villains to correspond to Mao Tse-tung's cultural guidelines in his 1942
Talks at the Yenan Forum on Art and Literature.

Mme. Mao, it was also disclosed, had initiated the “clarion call” for the GPCR when (late 1965) she led “exposures” of
Hai Jui Dismissed from Office,
a play by Wu Han (q.v.), as a bourgeois-reactionary and thinly veiled allegorical attack on Mao Tse-tung. Counterattempts allegedly were made by P'eng Chen, Liu Shao-ch'i
(qq.v.),
and other “revisionists” to take over the burgeoning GPCR, before they themselves were purged along with Wu Han.
Red Flag
reported that they were partly frustrated by Chiang Ch'ing's address delivered in February, 1966, before a meeting of army cultural workers, sponsored by Marshal Lin Piao. Their rout was completed by a pronouncement written by Mao and issued in the name of the CCP CC in May, 1966, which turned the GPCR into the purge of “anti-Maoists” that followed.

As Mao's deputy, Chiang Ch'ing became cultural adviser to the armed forces. Among writers and artists in opera, drama, films, and the musical world, she became the No. 1 authority on acceptable proletarian art. Many were required to undergo thought remolding, while others—including whole opera troupes—were drafted into service with the army. Traditional and historical operatic and dramatic themes and forms virtually disappeared from the stage during that period when Chiang Ch'ing and the Red Guards determinedly sought to replace “old habits, old ideas, old culture,” and all that was bourgeois, feudal, and foreign, with new folk heroes glorifying the proletariat.

Chiang Ching-kuo
(p. 44), Chiang Kai-shek's son by his first wife, whom Chiang divorced when he married Soong Mei-ling, was in effective control of the political and security forces in Taiwan in 1968 and was considered most likely successor to Chiang Kai-shek to head the American-protected regime there. Born in 1909 in Fenghua, Chekiang, he was educated by private tutors before 1925, when he went to Russia. He graduated from the CMT's Sun Yat-sen University in 1927, having joined the CYL. After the 1927 split in China, Chiang Ching-kuo remained in Russia, studying military and political science. He opposed Wang Ming
(q.v.)
and was punished with various forms of exile, then given work as a plant director. In 1937 Stalin personally permitted him to return to China, where he effected a reconciliation with his father and joined the KMT. During the war his father gave him a job in Kiangsi; his chief task was to suppress the Reds. He joined the Methodist Church, together with his wife, a Russian. In 1949 he fled to Taiwan with his father. He was Chiang's only son by birth; his foster brother, Chiang Wei-kuo, was adopted, the son of right-wing KMT leader T'ai Chi-tao and a Japanese mother.

Ch'in Pang-hsien.
See Po Ku.

Chou En-lai
(p. 51) was also known by his Party name, Shao Shan (Small Mountain). In his laconic account of himself, as given to me in 1936, Chou understated his prominence in the Party and drama-charged moments when his life and political fate had stood in peril. That is suggested in
Part Four
,
Chapter 6
, note 3, which discusses intraparty and CMT disputes in the 1927–35 period. After he visited Russia in 1928, when he was re-elected to the CC and the PB of the CCP Sixth Congress, he stayed on for special indoctrination at Sun Yat-sen University, and received some military instruction as well, Chou was already a candidate for supreme leadership. That seemed often within grasp thereafter, but Chou never quite made the reach for it.

On his return to Shanghai in 1929 he supported General Secretary Hsiang Chung-fa and Li Li-san, who dominated Hsiang
(qq.v.).
In Moscow in 1930 as CCP chief delegate to the CMT, Chou might have led an attack on Li, but it was Wang Ming
(q.
v.) who took the offensive. Back in Shanghai, in the sanctuary of the foreign-ruled International Settlement, Chou continued to work with Li until the latter, summoned
to Moscow in November, 1930, was held responsible for his (and the CMT's) failures at urban insurrection. In January, 1931, Pavel Mif (Stalin's CMT agent) maneuvered Chou aside and put Wang Ming in PB control. Only then did Chou abandon Li Li-san, recant, and call upon the Party to “condemn my mistakes.” Chou was retained in the Shanghai PB and held his position as chief of the military affairs committee. In that year he was sent by the new leadership to Kiangsi, where he succeeded Hsiang Yin as chief of the “Central Bureau.” In that role he took on the significant task of reconciling the remote control exercised by Po Ku, the new PB general secretary, from Shanghai, backed by Wang Ming (in Moscow), with Mao Tse-tung's de facto dominance among the rural combat Communists. (Mao was “chairman” of the Soviet Government but only a member of the PB and its Branch Central Bureau.)

When Chou became political commissar to Chu Teh's command, in 1932, his prestige in Kiangsi began to overshadow that of Mao. As political chief at Whampoa Academy he had early won the confidence of cadets and instructors such as Lin Piao, Tso Chuan, Nieh Jung-chen, Li Ta, Yeh Chieng-ying, Hsiao Ching-kuang, Hsu Hsiang-ch'ien and Ch'en Keng. As organizer of the Shanghai and Nanchang uprisings he was already a combat hero. His sojourns in Moscow had brought him into contact with Stalin and among the “Twenty-eight Bolsheviks” of the Wang Ming-Po Ku group. His pioneer CYL activity in organizing young intellectuals in France had won respect among important Hunanese in Mao's own camp. Now his control of Party indoctrination in Kiangsi expanded his influence among the newest army cadres. Perhaps it was the unequaled breadth of Chou's viable connections with all factions that committed him to the role of chief reconciler and balancer of forces rather than to bitter-end struggle for personal leadership attainable only by violent repression of one or the other element in a core dispute.