Red Star over China (77 page)

Teng Tzu-hui
(p. 169) during the Resistance and Second Civil wars resumed his ties in Fukien, where he was a veteran guerrilla leader, and carried out many responsible political, cultural, and military missions from 1937 onward. Born in 1893, in Lungai, Fukien, he attended middle school in Amoy, studied briefly in Japan (1916), taught school, joined the KMT in 1925 and the CCP a year later. He was active throughout the Kiangsi Soviet period, notably with Chu Teh and Chang Ting-ch'eng. He remained a second-line though respected leader, who was re-elected to the CC in 1966.

Teng Ying-ch'ao (Mme. Chou En-lai)
(p. 73) in 1956 ranked nineteenth in the list of CC members and was re-elected to the CC in 1966. She had continued her activities as a leader of women's organizations during and after the Resistance War and the Liberation War, and as a member of the NPC standing committee since 1955.

Born in 1903 in Hsinyang county, Honan, of the gentry (her mother tutored in the Yuan Shih-k'ai family), she studied at the First Girls' Normal School in Tientsin and then graduated from Peking Higher Normal School. A radical student, she was arrested in 1919 and briefly jailed. With Chou En-lai she helped found the Awakening Society (Chueh Wu She), and she joined the Work-Study Plan, with Chou and others, to go to France. A member of the Chinese CYL in Paris, she returned to China in 1924, joined the CCP, married Chou, was elected to the KMT CEC (1926) and was the only prominent woman participant in the Nanchang Uprising. In 1928 she went to Russia with Chou, and returned with him to China to do underground work (1928-31), until she entered Soviet Kiangsi, where she led the women's work department of the CC. She was one of only thirty-five women who made the Long March, during which she developed pulmonary tuberculosis and had to be carried on a stretcher. In 1937, while convalescing outside Peking, she was endangered when Japanese occupied the city. The author helped her escape to guerrilla territory.
^*
From 1938 onward she played a leading role in the political organization of women both in China and
internationally, frequently traveling with her husband. Mme. Chou shared the danger and hardships of her husband's life in an extremely close relationship since their schooldays. Her urbanity and simplicity, mixed with patriotic and revolutionary ardor, won her nation-wide respect. For further information about Teng Ying-ch'ao, see
JTTB.

Ting Ling
(p.123), born in Hunan in 1907, became China's best-known revolutionary woman writer. She studied at Peking University and Shanghai University, began to publish short stories in 1927, and married another noted writer, Hu Yeh-p'ing, who had joined the CCP in 1929. Ting Ling joined in 1931. Both were members of the semiunderground League of Left Writers, organized in Shanghai in 1929, and both were arrested by KMT authorities in 1933. Hu was the leader of a Shanghai ricksha-pullers union and a CC member who supported Li Li-san and opposed Wang Ming. He was executed but Ting Ling was released in 1936, and went to Yenan the same year. There she wrote, taught, and published some articles which satirized the CCP, but were in sympathy with Mao Tse-tung's “Talks at the Yenan Forum on Art and Literature.” In 1950 she was elected chairman of the Central Literary Institute.

Formally declared a rightist and “anti-Party” in 1957, Ting Ling refused to admit her “mistakes”; she was expelled from the CCP and sent to a commune to undergo thought reform.
Sunshine over the Sangkan River
, which had won her a Stalin Award (1952), was withdrawn from sale in China, together with Ting Ling's other works. In 1960 the author was authoritatively told that Ting Ling was dismissed from the Party not because of her anti-Party literary works but because she had “lied to the Party” about the circumstances under which she was released from prison in Nanking in 1936. For early data on Ting Ling see Snow,
Living China
(N.Y., 1937).

Ts'ai Ch'ang
(p.73), born in Hunan in 1900, a sister of Ts'ai Ho-sen (
q.v
), received a classical education to a degree unusual for girls. She joined the Paris branch CYL with her husband, Li Fu-ch'un, and in 1924 became the first director of the women's department, CCP CC. She was one of thirty-five women on the Long March and the only woman member of the CC at the front in 1936. Re-elected to the CC in 1956, with the rank of No. 12 in the Party, she was also a delegate to the NPC from 1956, and chairman of the Democratic Women's Federation. A leader of the women's auxiliary of the Red Guards, she was re-elected to the CC in 1966 but played no conspicuous role in the GPCR after August of that year.

Ts'ai Ho-sen
(p. 73) probably had a greater influence than anyone else on Mao's thinking as a revolutionary “internationalist.” The son of an intellectual family of Hunan, Ts'ai was among the first Chinese to join the Work-Study student emigrants to France in 1920, and perhaps the first Chinese to espouse the Communist cause there. Ts'ai Ch'ang, his sister, accompanied him to Europe. While in France he kept up a lively correspondence with Mao. After he returned to China, Ts'ai played a leading
role in the CC during the 1925–27 period. At the time of his arrest and execution in 1927, by order of Chiang Kai-shek, he was a member of the Party PB. His wife, Hsiang Ching-wu, a fellow Hunanese whom he married in France, was an outstanding women's leader; she was executed in 1928.

Ts'ai Shu-fan
(p. 349) was a trade-union leader and member of the CC at the time of his death (aged fifty-three) in an airplane crash, en route to the U.S.S.R., in 1958.

Tso Ch'uan
(p. 203) was killed during the Patriotic War.

Tung Pi-wu
(p. 116n). Seven years Mao's senior, Tung was in 1967 one of two surviving Party founders in the PB, the other being Mao.

Born in 1886 in Huang-an county, Hupeh, in a large gentry family headed by scholars and teachers, Tung received a classical education and passed the imperial official (Confucian) examinations at the age of sixteen. He joined the Republican forces during the Hankow revolt of 1911 and became a member of Dr. Sun Yat-sen's T'ung Meng Hui. In opposition to Yuan Shih-k'ai in 1913, he fled to Japan, joined Sun Yat-sen's inner circle there, and studied at the Tokyo Law College. From 1917 to 1920 Tung performed tasks for Dr. Sun but gradually drew to the left in his thinking. Meanwhile he earned a living teaching in Hankow. In 1921, influenced by Ch'en Tu-hsiu and Li Han-chun, he journeyed to Shanghai, there to become a founder of the CCP. He then helped to organize the Hupeh provincial branch of the CP.

After the “two-party alliance,” Tung's liaison role became pivotal, for he was a veteran member of both the T'ung Meng Hui—precursor of the KMT—and the CP. In 1927 the counterrevolution caught his closest comrade, Li Han-chun, who was executed in Hankow. Tung himself narrowly escaped to Shanghai, disguised as a sailor. Next, in Russia, he spent four years at the CMT's Sun Yat-sen University. Not among the “Twenty-Eight Bolsheviks” (see Wang Ming, etc.), he became a Mao partisan and an important source of information about Sun Yat-sen University when he returned to China and went directly to Kiangsi, to become director of the newly organized Party school there. As an alternate member of the CC he supported Mao Tse-tung at the historic meeting at Tsunyi, in 1935. At the end of the Long March, Tung resumed his post as head of the Party school. A Party “elder statesman,” Tung played an advisory role in CCP diplomacy from 1936 onward. He helped Chou En-lai negotiate terms of the second united front at Nanking in 1937 and he was with Chou at CCP Chungking liaison headquarters 1938–45. As a member of the People's Political Council, a united-front consultative body set up by the Chiang Kai-shek government, Tung was the only Communist in a ten-member Chinese delegation to San Francisco in 1945 to establish the United Nations. Chang Han-fu (now Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs) and Ch'en Chia-k'ang served as Tung's English-speaking secretaries.

Seventh-ranking member of the CC at the Seventh Congress, in 1945, he served in Chou En-lai's mission during negotiations for a coalition government (1945-47), mediated by General George C. Marshall.
The first National Congress in 1954 elected Tung president of the Supreme People's Court. In 1959 he was elected vice-chairman of the People's Republic. In 1966 he was, however, dropped from eighth place in the PB to twelfth. The only high-ranking Communist to hold an imperial degree in the Classics, a loyal follower of the late Sun Yat-sen as well as Mao Tse-tung, widely respected among all classes in China, an extensive traveler abroad and held in high esteem among foreign Communists, modest, selfless and patriotic, Tung Pi-wu was a remarkably durable gentleman.

Wang Ching-wei
(p. 142n) as a youthful rebel tried to assassinate the Manchu prime minister, Prince Kung, but the bomb he threw failed to explode. He was pardoned and became a hero, and, later, a rival of Chiang Kai-shek for leadership of the Kuomintang. In 1927 his Left Kuomintang government in Hankow collaborated with the Communists in a coalition formed after Chiang Kai-shek broke the two-party alliance. In a few weeks he also expelled the Reds and his regime soon disintegrated. In 1932 Wang was again Nationalist premier, at Nanking; in the same year he was ousted by Chiang Kai-shek. Returning to the Kuomintang in 1938, he once more quarreled with Chiang. After accepting the post of premier of a puppet government sponsored by the Japanese, at Nanking, he died in disgrace in 1943.

Wang En-mao
(p. 295n), a poor peasant born in Yunghsien, Kiangsi
(circa
1910), joined the Red Army in 1927 with his father and two brothers, was educated by the CP, and rose steadily as a combat commander. From the 1950's onward Wang dominated Northwest Party and military affairs. During the GPCR Wang commanded the vast Sinkiang military areas and the Army Production and Construction Corps concerned with military installations. Attempts to extend the GPCR purge to Sinkiang caused sanguinary clashes, according to wall posters in Peking. Mao Tse-tung nevertheless was photographed offering a cordial handshake to Wang at a 1968 New Year's reception in the capital.

Wang Ju-mei.
See Huang Hua.

Wang Kuang-mei
(Mme. Liu Shao-ch'i) (p. 484) was a graduate of Peking University (Pei-ta) and a physics teacher when she met Liu shortly after the establishment of the PRC. She became his second wife, his first wife having been killed in Kiangsi. Mme. Liu was a member of the CEC, All-China Women's Federation, and a delegate to the NPC from 1964. In 1964 she accompanied her husband on visits overseas. During the GPCR she led women's cadres at Pei-ta, but wall posters later attacked her for attempting to protect “bourgeois” and “revisionist” elements in the Party, and criticized her for wearing jewelry and patronizing fancy hairdressers. Allegedly her daughter denounced her and Liu before the Red Guards. She was evidently not in harmony with Mme. Mao, deputy leader of the GPCR. Scorn and ridicule were her lot in accounts which appeared in publications advised by Mme. Mao.

Wang Ming
(Ch'en Shao-yu) (p. 363) lost all his Party influence after 1942, but he remained important as a “negative example” used to personify major leadership errors and issues underlying intraparty struggle and the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960's. He was leader of the “Twenty-eight Bolsheviks” trained under Pavel Mif in Moscow when he became, at twenty-four, general secretary of the CCP and founded a PB regime which opposed Mao Tse-tung between 1931 and 1935.

Born in Anhui in 1907 to a prosperous gentry family, Ch'en joined the Socialist Youth Corps (later the CYL) while at middle school in Wuhan, then in 1923 enrolled in Shanghai University (established to train CP cadres). He was admitted to the CCP in 1925, and took the Party name Wang Ming. Sent to Russia to study at the CMT's Sun Yat-sen University (1925-27) he returned to China as interpreter for Pavel Mif at the Fifth Congress of the CCP at Wuhan (July, 1927). After the KMT-CP break he went back to Russia with Mif, who was made director of Sun Yat-sen University. He served Mif as interpreter at both the CMT and CCP Sixth congresses, held in Moscow (1928), and with Mif s help won leadership among those Chinese students at Sun Yat-sen University who became known as the “Twenty-eight Bolsheviks.” They were at first a minority, who favored Stalin against Trotsky. Most important were Po Ku, Lo Fu, Wang Chia-hsiang, Teng Fa, Yang Shang-k'un, and those elected to the CCP CC with Wang Ming, who himself (aged twenty-one) helped compose CMT directives sent to China.

In 1930 Wang Ming returned to China with Mif, then chief CMT delegate to the CCP, and helped him ease Earl Browder out of influence and out of China and then to unseat Li Li-san from PB leadership. At the Sixth Congress CC's Fourth Plenum, held underground in Shanghai in January, 1931, Hsiang Chung-fa was confirmed as PB general secretary but, invoking Stalin's prestige, Mif maneuvered Wang Ming into Li Li-san's place as head of the labor department and the PB's dominant figure. When Hsiang was executed later that year Wang Ming replaced him and put Po Ku, Lo Fu, and others in control of key PB organs. In the same year Wang was recalled to Moscow, where he became CCP resident delegate on the CEC of the CMT. As Pavel Mif's mouthpiece he published (1932)
The Two Lines,
in which he defined the current CMT line. In China, Po Ku succeeded him as general secretary of the CCP and the two worked together closely against Mao's “peasant line” leadership in the rural soviets.

In August, 1935, Wang Ming, reflecting Moscow's need for a broad united front against Hitler, called for a union of proletariat, peasants, petty bourgeoisie, and national bourgeoisie, to oppose Nazi-Fascism and Japan. In China, the CCP adopted the Moscow line in principle but with Mao's own interpretation, as already submitted in draft form at Tsunyi (January, 1935). When Wang Ming returned to China (Yenan) in 1937, with Ch'en Yun and K'ang Sheng, he again made common cause with Po Ku, still in the PB. In his December, 1937, thesis, “A Key to Solving the Present Situation,” Wang proposed a complete merger of the
Red forces with the KMT, in opposition to Mao's united-front strategy, limited by the retention of separate CCP command of armed forces and territorial bases. Thus began the last chapter in an old struggle. In 1940, Wang Ming republished
The Two Lines
(his own and Mao's). Seeking to modify Mao's views, which had placed main reliance on an armed peasantry, Wang called instead for a thorough “Bolshevization” (proletarianization) of the Party along orthodox Russian lines. Mao's response was the
cheng-feng
(rectification) campaign of 1942, when the entire Party was “reeducated” and brought into conformance with Mao Tse-tung's Thought.