Red Star over China (73 page)

In 1965 Lin published a lengthy thesis on revolutions in the underdeveloped countries, entitled “Long Live the Victory of the People's War!” Lin's article likened the “emerging forces” of the poor in Asia, Africa, and Latin America to the “rural areas of the world,” while the affluent countries of the West were likened to the “cities of the world.” Eventually the “cities” would be encircled by revolutions in the “rural areas,” following the Thought of Mao Tse-tung. Lin made no promise that China would fight other people's wars, however; they were advised to depend mainly on “self-reliance.” In 1966 the Chinese Party press referred to Lin's thesis as an integral part of the Thought of Mao Tse-tung.

Since 1956 a member of the presiding seven-man Party standing committee, Lin emerged as Mao Tse-tung's guarantee of armed support during the major
bouleversement
of 1966. One million Communist Party members, integrated in the army command, became the decisive ideological force in the national rectification movement known as the GPCR. Still the youngest member of the PB, Lin Piao seemingly held in his hands the fate of China in the event of Chairman Mao's death, but it was likely that his power would be one aspect of a collective leadership.

Liu Hsiao
(p. 189) was born in Shenking, Hunan, in 1911, in a family he described to the author in 1936 as “middle landlords.” His father studied in Japan for two years, and was antireligious. Liu Hsiao began school at five. He attended a middle school run by the American Christian Reformed Church, in Shengchoufu, where he learned English and became a Christian. After graduating he went to Shanghai to attend a higher school. En route he met a radical Chinese Christian pastor who introduced him to Marxism. In 1926 he joined the Communist Party and
took part in the Shanghai Uprising. He was then sent north of the Yangtze to teach and organize. His school was attacked, he fled to Shanghai, was arrested in the French Concession, and spent three years in jail. On his release he went to Red Kiangsi in 1931, and he became secretary of the Kiangsi CP CC in 1932. (For a detailed account of this period see
RNORC
“The Liu Hsiao Story,” pp. 64–69.)

Liu made the Long March and in 1936 was chairman of the political department of the First Front Army. Throughout the Japanese and Liberation wars he continued to work in the General Political Department of the army, with special responsibilities in the Shanghai and Kiangsu underground, where he was secretary of the CCP. Elected to the CCP CC in 1945, he was appointed ambassador to the U.S.S.R. (1955-63), and made contacts with East European and other Communist parties. Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1963, he took part in conversations between Chou En-lai and President Sukarno in Shanghai in 1964. In 1966 he was re-elected to the CCP CC and was prominently listed as a leader of the GPCR. In 1967 he became ambassador to Albania.

Liu Po-ch'eng
(p. 195), popularly known as the “One-eyed Dragon,” was born in Szechuan in 1892, joined the CCP in 1926, rose to the rank of marshal of the army, and in 1967 was a member of the PB, a vice-chairman of the standing committee of the NPC, and a member of the all-powerful Party military affairs committee. His father was a strolling musician who saved money to give his son a basic classical education, but Po-ch'eng chose a military school in Chengtu, won a commission in the provincial army, and took part in the 1911 Revolution. In the course of many battles he lost an eye. After joining the CCP he was chief of staff during the Nanchang Uprising in 1927, a fiasco from which he escaped; he went to Russia and studied at Frunze Military Institute until 1930. Returning to China, he entered Kiangsi and became chief of staff of the Central Revolutionary Military Committee. He led part of the vanguard forces during the Long March, and then commanded the 129th Division, Eighth Route Army, at the start of the Resistance War (1937-45). After widely extending his guerrilla forces in North and Central China he commanded the Central Plains Army in operations coordinated with Ch'en Yi's armies which (1948) decisively defeated KMT forces north of the Yangtze. First elected to the CC in 1945 and to the PB in 1956, logically he should have been a key PLA supporter of Mao Tse-tung and Lin Piao during the critical Party struggles of 1966–67, but he took no noticeable responsibility. He was, of course, seventy-five years old.

Liu Shao-ch'i
(p. 148n) was in 1967 still legally elected chairman of the government of the CPR, but he had become “China's Khrushchev” and the major target of the GPCR and the Red Guards campaign.

Liu was born in 1898 in Ning Hsiang, Hunan, close to Mao Tse-tung's home, and graduated from the Hunan First Normal School, which Mao also attended. Son of a “rich” peasant family, he turned radical under influences very similar to those described by Mao. In 1920 he helped
Mao organize a Socialist Youth Corps in Hunan, and was recruited for study at the Comintern's Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow, where he joined the branch CCP. When he returned in 1922 he became secretary of the All-China Labor Syndicate. He organized workers in the Yangtze Valley, and at Anyuan, on the Kiangsi-Hunan border, led a successful strike of the miners' union. In 1927 some of these miners joined Mao Tse-tung's first Workers' and Peasants' Red Army. (But in 1967 attacks on Liu by the Maoist press for the first time accused Liu of following bourgeois-reformist policies when leading the Anyuan unions—thus establishing for him a history of forty years of revisionist thought.)

In Canton in 1925, Liu was on the executive committee of the All-China Federation of Labor. He helped organize Shanghai labor unions (1925-26) and general strikes, and organized the Hupeh League of Labor Unions. Underground labor organizer from 1927 onward, he was a member of the CC but had differences with leaders Li Li-san and Wang Ming. He entered Soviet Kiangsi in 1932, as a member of Po Ku's PB. Liu participated in the 1934 retreat from Kiangsi but did not make the Long March. He was sent to try to reorganize the shattered Party underground in the White areas of North China, making his headquarters in Peking and Tientsin. In 1937 he rejoined the CC at Yenan, and in 1941 became political commissar of the New Fourth Army. After the Party rectification of 1942–43 (in which he supported Mao against Wang Ming), Liu Shao-ch'i became a pivotal person in the PB and CC secretariat.

During the Resistance War, Liu headed the Central Plains Bureau and was supreme in the branch Party PB in the guerrilla areas of North China and Manchuria. Many of the millions of new Party members recruited during that period were trained under Liu's direction. First vice-chairman of the CPC CC (1945-66), he was acting Party chairman when Mao went to Chungking for talks with Chiang Kai-shek in 1945. At the Seventh Party Congress, in 1945, Liu asserted that Mao Tse-tung had made new and original contributions to Marxism-Leninism, and later declared that Mao's “Asiatic Marxism” was “of universal significance.” He was recognized as No. 2 in the Party, and his written works (esp.
How To Be a Good Communist
and
On Inner Forty Struggle
) carried authority second only to those of Mao (until 1967). In 1949 he was vice-chairman of the Central People's Government, and from 1955 to 1959 was first vice-chairman of the NPC. In 1958 Mao retired as chairman of the CPG of the PR and Liu Shao-ch'i succeeded him. In 1961 Mao publicly indicated that Liu was his choice to follow him as supreme Party leader.

In 1966, after Mao's reappearance following a long absence from public view, supposedly a convalescence from a severe illness, a major Party purge was initiated under slogans of the GPCR. Following a meeting of the eleventh plenary session (Eighth Congress) of the CC CCP (August, 1966), presided over by Mao Tse-tung, Liu's name dropped from second to eighth place in the PB. Lin Piao replaced Liu in the hierarchical rank and also became Mao's deputy leader of newly formed
youth brigades called Red Guards (Hung Wei-ping). A “main target” of the Red Guards was “reactionary bureaucrats.” As chief administrator of the Chinese state superstructure, Liu Shao-ch'i was held personally responsible for alleged bourgeois, reactionary, and feudalistic atavisms in the Party and state bureaucracy, as well as for dangerous tendencies toward “revisionism,” “economism” (material incentives over zealotry), and softness on class-struggle and anti-capitalist indoctrination. In 1967 the Maoist press denounced Liu's books as counterrevolutionary and described him as “No. 1 among those in the Party in authority who are taking the capitalist road.” He was attacked for sabotaging the GPCR by sending in hostile “work teams” (among them those led by his wife, at Peking University) to try to take control of the movement. Red Guard posters accused him of involvement in a February, 1966, coup aimed at Mao's overthrow. He disappeared from public view but at this writing he still nominally held his offices in the Party and the government. (For details concerning Liu's alleged leadership of an opposition verging on conspiracy against Mao, see P'eng Chen, P'eng Teh-huai, Lu Ting-yi, Lo Jui-ch'ing, and Mao Tse-tung.)

Liu's first wife was killed by the KMT in 1933, during the Civil War. His second wife was Wang Kuang-mei (q.v.) See
TOSOTR;
see also Howard L. Boorman, “Liu Shao-ch'i, a Political Profile,”
China Quarterly
(London, May-June, 1962).

Liu Shao-ch'i
, Mme. See Wang Kuang-mei.

Lo Fu
(Chang Wen-t'ien) (p. 97) nominally was general secretary of the PB from 1935 to 1945 (when the office was abolished), but by 1936, during the author's conversations with him in Pao An, he deferred to Mao as principal authorized spokesman of the Party. His Party power sharply declined after a Party rectification
(cheng-feng)
in 1942, aimed at Wang Ming and other Soviet-educated members.

Lo Fu was the only Chinese PB member who knew the U.S.A. firsthand. Born in 1900, in Kiangsu, he was the son of a scholar-official (Man-chu regime) who became a prosperous businessman, able to send his son through engineering school in Nanking. Lo Fu then spent a year at the University of California (1921). On his return to China he taught school, worked as an editor, met Ch'u Ch'iu-pai and other left writers, translated Western classics under the pen name Lo Fu, was recruited to the CCP by Ch'en Yun, and studied at the Comintern's Sun Yat-sen University (1926-30). There he fell under the influence of Pavel Mif, the CMT delegate to the CCP. Chosen for the CC at the CCP Sixth Congress (Moscow, 1928), Lo Fu returned to Shanghai, became a PB member in 1931, and headed the Orgburo. As one of Mif's “Twenty-eight Bolsheviks,” Lo Fu opposed Mao Tse-tung's “peasant line” and his leadership in Kiangsi. For details of his career during this period, see
Part Four
,
Chapter 6
, note 3; and
RNORC.

Lo Fu was re-elected to the CC and PB in 1945 and was the CPR's first ambassador to Russia (1949-55), but he steadily lost place after the
Sino-Soviet split. In 1966 he was dropped from the PB. In 1967 he was attacked by the GPCR press as an ally of P'eng Teh-huai and Liu Shao-ch'i.

Lo Jui-ch'ing
(p. 117n), former chief of staff of the PLA, was secretary general of the Party military affairs committee until his eclipse occurred early in 1966. In February, Red Guard wall posters accused him of involvement in a conspiracy (together with P'eng Chen, Liu Shao-ch'i and others) to seize supreme Party power from Mao Tse-tung in an alleged attempted coup.

Born into a gentry family in Szechuan in 1906, Lo Jui-ch'ing was close to his fellow Szechuanese, Chu Teh, Mao's military right arm during the whole Communist struggle for power. A graduate of the Soviet-financed Whampoa Academy, Canton, Lo joined the CCP in 1926, was a political officer under Yeh T'ing, and followed Chu Teh and Mao to Ching-kangshan. At some period (1932-34?) he studied secret police and security techniques in Moscow and, briefly, at a CMT special Party services school in Paris. Director of Security Forces during the Long March, he was teaching at the Red Army College in Pao An when the author met him in 1936. Thereafter Lo was in charge of various branches of security and intelligence, continuing in that role as Minister of Public Security and commander of Public Security Forces (1949-59). Elected to the CC in 1945, he became a secretary of the CC secretariat in 1961, under Teng Hsiao-p'ing, and a vice-premier of the SC PRC in 1959. In 1966 Red Guard posters accused him of conspiring, with P'eng Chen and others, to seize power from Mao. Reportedly he attempted suicide. He was paraded before one mass meeting with Teng Hsiao-p'ing and Lu Ting-yi, in 1967, wearing a placard of self-denunciation; but no attempt was yet made to bring him to formal trial.

Lo Jung-huan
(p. 166) was born in Hungshan, Hunan, in 1902, and joined the CCP in 1921. He took part in the Nanchang Uprising and later was in the political department of the Red Army in Soviet Kiangsi. He was political commissar in Lin Piao's First Army Corps from 1932 throughout the Long March, and on into the War of Resistance, the Civil War (1948-49), and in Korea (1950). In 1955 he was named one of ten marshals of the PLA. After Lin Piao became Defense Minister in 1960, Lo Jung-huan headed the General Political Department of the PLA and was responsible for its security forces until his death in 1963.

Lo P'ing-hui
(p. 173) was killed in combat in 1943.

Lu Ting-yi
(p. 350) was born in 1904, in Wusih, Kiangsu, the son of a bourgeois family. He graduated from Chiaotung (Communications) University, Shanghai, and joined the CYL in 1922. He studied in Russia (1924-28) but did not collaborate with the “Twenty-eight Bolsheviks.” He rose to high rank in the Party PB until 1966, when he was deprived of all his Party posts and identified as a collaborator of P'eng Chen (q.v.), foremost among anti-Maoists. He was until 1966 also a vice-chairman of the State Council. As director of the propaganda bureau of the Party CC he often acted as spokesman for Mao Tse-tung and other leaders.
He wrote and edited many official press pronouncements and was also responsible for cultural and educational institutions. In 1966 Lu Ting-yi was blamed for rightist “anti-Party” and “black line” revisionist trends in the press and education. Dropped from the PB, he was replaced by T'ao Chu (q.v), who was himself soon eliminated. In 1967 the official press accused Lu of having joined P'eng Chen in an effort, in 1962, to secure Mao's effective retirement.