Red Star over China (71 page)

A native of Chekiang, born in 1911, Huang Ching came from a prominent bourgeois family; one uncle, Yu Ta-wei, served as KMT minister of defense; another had been a vice-minister of education in Peking. While a student at Shantung University (Tsingtao) Huang Ching was chief of the underground CCP CC propaganda department. There he met Chiang Ch'ing, who joined the Party (1933) just before Huang Ching was arrested and sentenced to death. Yu Ta-wei saved Huang's life; after his release Huang went to Peking, where he again joined the CC propaganda department. He was, however, in deep hiding—in the North China Bureau, under Liu Shao-ch'i—before the December 9th student demonstration.

At that time all patriotic (not to mention radical) organizations were strictly suppressed by Kuomintang gendarmes. Hundreds of students had been jailed for anti-Japanese activity; campuses were infested with spies. Police even protected Japan-paid puppets who marched in support of Japanese attempts to install a puppet regime in Peking by force and bribery. An exception was the oasis of relative freedom on the campus of the American-financed and missionary-founded Yenching University. Yenching's immunity from KMT gendarmes traced to foreign extraterritoriality rights enjoyed by some of its teachers. Those happened to include the writer, and Yenching's president and chief founder, Dr. J. Leighton Stuart, who was to be the last U.S. ambassador to the Kuomintang Nationalist government at Nanking.

In 1935 Huang Ching joined student representatives in a secret meeting at Yenching called by the Yenching University Student Association on the night of December 8. They planned the strategy for a daring mass street demonstration held on the following day. Its ultimate impact ended both the suppression of anti-Japanese patriotic activity and the urban isolation of the CCP.

Peking University (Pei-ta), the leading higher institute of the nation, had no student association, but December 9th made it possible to revive one. Huang Ching and others (Yao-I-lin, Huang Hua,
qq.
v.) who had participated in “December 9th,” rapidly helped to organize Pei-ta and other student associations for subsequent protest activities. From Peking, propaganda spread all across the country. Demands for resistance, for political education, for military education of the masses, etc., led to an excitement which so infected the population that serious preparation for a war of resistance against Japan could no longer be avoided.

Huang Ching went to Yenan in 1937, to enter the Party school. With the outbreak of war he assumed the important post of secretary of the CC Shansi-Hopei-Chahar regional Party committee. By 1949 he was Party secretary of the greater municipality of Tientsin. Long a semi-invalid from illnesses contracted during a youth of strenuous hardship, Huang died prematurely in 1958. He was then a member of the CCP CC and vice-chairman of the State Planning Commission. At this writing his wife, Fan Chin, was still a deputy mayor of Peking.

Huang Hua
(p. 41n) was the party name of Wang Ju-mei, born in 1912 in
an educated family in Kiangsu. He took a leading role in the December 9 (1935) student movement, became a national youth organizer, and rose to important posts in the Communist Foreign Ministry, as an ambassador and a negotiator. The author met Wang Ju-mei at Yenching (Christian) University in 1934. Wang was active among the student rebels at Yenching and conspicuous in patriotic anti-Japanese organizations then illegal. He joined the CYL in 1935 and the CCP in 1936. When the author went to Northwest China he sent word to Wang to meet him there. On their journeys Wang met Mao Tse-tung, Chou En-lai, P'eng Teh-huai, Teng Hsiao-p'ing, and other leaders. Later he worked there and in Hankow (1938) as a youth organizer, recruiting many student volunteers. Among them were Kung P'eng and her sister Kung Pu-ch'eng, both of whom became officials of the Foreign Ministry.

At the Foreign Office in Yenan and Chungking (1939-45), as chief CCP information officer during KMT-CP mediation talks (1945-47), as director of foreign affairs of the Nanking military area (1949), and in charge of affairs of foreign residents of Shanghai (1952), he became outstanding among young diplomat-negotiators trained by Chou En-lai. He conducted the bitter terminal truce talks in Korea (1952); served as spokesman of the Chinese delegation, Geneva Conference (1954); headed the West Europe and African department, Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1954-56); directed the West European department of the ministry (1956-59); and became China's first ambassador to Ghana (1960-65). He negotiated a number of treaties and agreements with Ghana and the Congo, providing for trade, technical, and cultural cooperation. After Peking's wholesale recall of diplomats he was, in 1968, at Cairo, the only Communist Chinese of ambassadorial status west of Vietnam and Cambodia.

Jen Pi-shih
(p. 148n) was born in Hsiangyin county, Hunan, in 1904, attended school in Changsha, and joined the Socialist Youth Corps in Shanghai in 1920. He studied at Oriental University in Moscow, 1920–22, and joined the CCP while there. In China, in 1927, he became secretary of the CYL, when he was also elected to the CCP CC. He was elected to the PB in 1930. In 1931 he entered the Hunan-Kiangsi-border soviet area, where he was chief of the military committee in Ho Lung's forces, and also political commissar. At the Tsunyi Conference Jen Pi-shih supported Mao against Po Ku. During the Long March, Ho and Jen Pi-shih sided with Mao Tse-tung against Chang Kuo-t'ao. Re-elected to the CC PB in 1945, he remained in Yenan with Mao Tse-tung during the Second Civil War. He died in 1950 of heart failure.

K'ang Sheng
(p. 116n), whose original name was Chao Jung, was in August, 1966 (eleventh plenary session of the Eighth Congress), jumped to a PB position in the standing committee sixth below Mao. He was a vice-premier of the SC, head of the Party control commission, and among those officially described as “leaders of the cultural revolution under the Central Committee.” From Yenan days K'ang Sheng had closely identified him
self with cultural concepts set forth by Mao in his “Talks at the Yenan Forum on Art and Literature.”

K'ang was born
(circa
1903) in a gentry family in Shantung. While attending CCP-organized Shanghai University he joined the CYL and CCP (1924-25), participated in Shanghai insurrections led by Chou En-lai (1926–27), and then worked underground. Sent to Moscow in 1930, he was, except for a brief visit to Shanghai in 1933, employed in the CMT under Wang Ming (q.v.) until he returned to China in 1937 with Wang Ming and Ch'en Yun. These three were lecturing at K'ang Ta (“Resist-Japan University”) when the author first met them in Yenan, in September, 1939. Elected to the CC secretariat in 1938, K'ang was criticized during the rectification movement (1942), but after self-reform replaced Li Wei-han as director of the Party school. Working closely with Lin Piao, director of K'ang Ta, he sharply dissociated himself from Wang Ming, who became the Party's personification of “formalism” and imported dogmatism.

Elected to the PB at the Seventh Congress (1945), K'ang headed the CC Orgburo, led the Shantung Party committee (1949-54), was reelected (alternate) to the PB (1956), spearheaded Party attacks on “rightists” (1957) and became a secretary of the CC secretariat (1962) under Teng Hsiao-p'ing and P'eng Chen. In 1963–65 he participated in major “line” talks led by Liu Shao-ch'i and/or Teng Hsiao-p'ing with foreign CP delegations to Peking seeking a Moscow-Peking reconciliation. In 1964 he accompanied Chou En-lai to Moscow for talks (abortive) after the fall of Khrushchev. In 1965 he joined Ch'en Po-ta in an offensive against Liu Shao-ch'i and Teng Hsiao-p'ing as “revisionists.” By 1967 K'ang Sheng appeared to be a possible successor to Teng Hsiao-p'ing as Party general secretary. While he remained in the PB no reconciliation with the U.S.S.R. seemed likely.

Kao Kang (Kao Chung-yu)
(p. 157) was the chief target of a major Party purge in 1954, when he was accused of “warlordism” and seeking to detach Manchuria as his “independent kingdom.” Disgraced, he committed suicide. Born in Hengshan, Shensi, in 1891, he and Liu Chih-tan built the Party there, and its isolated Red base became a sanctuary for the Communists at the end of the Long March. The son of a landlord, he graduated from a normal college in Sian, joined the CCP with Liu Chih-tan, led a peasant insurrection in 1927, and maintained guerrilla war bases in the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia area thereafter. As leader of a Party committee consisting of Lin Piao, Li Fu-ch'un, Ch'en Yun, Hsiao Ching-kuang, and P'eng Chen, he entered Manchuria and organized mass bases for guerrilla operations which ended in PLA victory there in 1946. Elected to the PB in 1945, he was in 1949 political commissar for all Manchuria, and in 1950 secretary of the Party Northeast Bureau and concurrently military commander. Chairman of the state planning commission in 1953, he was relieved of his Manchurian posts. Kao's deputy on the planning commission was Jao Shu-shih, secretary of the Orgburo of the CC. During
1954, when Kao and Jao were removed from office as “anti-Party,” the most articulate accuser was Liu Shao-ch'i. Five provincial governors and several regional party and army chieftains were also dismissed. After Kao committed suicide and Jao Shu-shih fell into obscurity, foreign reports suggested that Kao Kang may have had Stalin's backing in an attempt to overthrow Mao and set up a satellite state in Manchuria.

Ku Ta-chen
(p. 168) was born in Kiangsi in 1903. He helped to form the Eleventh Red Army (1928), made the Long March, and held responsible posts throughout the Resistance War and civil wars. In 1967 he was a permanent member of the All-China Labor Union Federation, a member of the CC, and vice-governor of Kwangtung province.

Lan P'ing.
See Chiang Ch'ing (Mme. Mao Tse-tung).

Li Ching-ch'uan
(p. 432) was for a decade the foremost Party personality with authority in Szechuan, Kweichow, and Yunnan, a vast territory with nearly 100 million inhabitants and numerous minority and frontier peoples, and embracing approaches to Tibet, Burma, Thailand, and Indochina. During the GPCR, frequent clashes, reportedly between Maoist Red Guards and Party authorities in those provinces, seemed aimed at Li. In April, 1967, the official press announced his replacement. Born in Hua-ch'uang county, Kiangsi
(circa
1905), in a peasant family, Li was one of Mao's students when he lectured at the Peasants' Training Institute, Canton (1924-25). He helped organize peasant uprisings, received some military training in Kiangsi, and became a political commissar in units led by P'eng Teh-huai. During the Long March he served for a year with troops of Chu Teh and Chang Kuo-t'ao when the two Red armies split. After their reunion in the Northwest, Li took commands in the Mongolian border region, organizing guerrilla warfare (1937-47). During the Liberation War he held leading positions in Szechuan, from which developed an unusual degree of individual regional dominance. Reelected to the CC in 1956, he entered the PB in 1958 and was named first secretary of the Party's Southwest Bureau in 1961. His Party and administrative control in so important an area as Szechuan could hardly have been held without the support of Party Secretary General Teng Hsiao-p'ing (q.v.), a Szechuanese with a special interest there. Evidently Mao was unable to prevent his re-election to the PB in August, 1966, but when Red Guards chose Teng Hsiao-p'ing as a main target Li's prestige was badly shaken. After Maoists took over the Kweichow provincial Party bureau in 1966, and denounced its old leaders as “bourgeois reactionary,” Red Guard posters reportedly demanded that Li be put to death. In May, 1967, the official Peking press denounced Li as “No. 1 Party power-holder taking the capitalist road in the Southwest region,” holding him responsible for a “bloody tragedy in Chengtu” (the suppression of Maoist anti-Li Red Guards). At this writing he and his bureau were still ensconced in parts of Szechuan and Yunnan, despite announcements in Peking that the CC had dismissed Li.

Li Chung-chin.
See Chiang Ch'ing (Mme. Mao Tse-tung).

Li Fu-ch'un
(p. 73) was re-elected by the eleventh plenary session of the Eighth Congress to the PB in 1966, in the same rank (tenth) he held in 1956 (First Plenum). He was reportedly associated with the “economists” (those advocating the use of material incentives as against ideological incentives). One of Mao's lifelong friends, and a fellow Hunanese, Li was born in Changsha in 1900, attended middle school there, joined the Work-Study Plan sponsored by the Sino-French Educational Association, Peking, and went to France in 1918. In 1921, with Chou En-lai, Li Li-san, Lo Man (Li Wei-han), Ts'ai Ho-sen, and others, he helped form the Communist Youth League in France, which soon incorporated into the CCP. He worked in the Schneider munitions plant and a motor factory in Paris, and French workers first introduced him to Marxism.

Li left France in 1924, studied six months in Russia, returned to China, and became a member of the CC and PB in 1924. Director of Party political training in Canton, he was political director of Liu Po-ch'eng's Sixth Army in the Northern Expedition. After the KMT-CP split he became secretary of the Kiangsi provincial CP (1927-33). He made the Long March and, when the author met him in 1936, was a member of the CC and chairman of the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia regional Party committee (see
RNORC).
He held important posts in the Yenan government (deputy director, finance department, 1940–45) until, in 1945, he was sent to Manchuria with a Party committee headed by Kao Kang to organize economic and related affairs. In 1956 he was re-elected to the CCP CC: his main duties continued to be in finance and economics. In 1950 he became minister of heavy industry. After Kao Kang's dismissal in 1954, Li became chairman of the State Planning Commission, continuing in that job at this writing. Re-elected to the PB in 1956, he attended many intraparty conferences abroad and at home, especially concerning economic matters, and signed many trade agreements, as well as the China-Korea Treaty of Alliance (1961). Li Fu-ch'un and his wife (Ts'ai Chang,
q.
v.) were re-elected to the CC in 1966, and Li to the PB, but Li himself was attacked by wall posters for allegedly opposing a new Great Leap Forward economic policy. Paradoxically, Li Fu-ch'un was in 1967 elevated to membership in the standing committee of the PB, which normally had consisted of Mao and six vice-chairmen of the CC.