Red Star over China (72 page)

Li Hsien-nien
(p. 202) was born in 1905 in Huangan county, Hupeh, the son of a worker, and was himself a carpenter's apprentice. In 1966 he was reelected to the CC and PB and was often mentioned in the press as prominent among leaders of the GPCR.

Li joined the Northern Expedition when it reached Hankow and soon (1927) became a Communist. A Red Guard guerrilla leader in Hupeh peasant uprisings, he rose to a regular command in the Red Army under Hsu Hsiang-ch'ien, and withdrew westward with Chang Kuo-t'ao and Hsu. In 1935, at Maoerhkai, he first met Mao Tse-tung. Party discipline requiring that he obey his immediate superior, Li stayed with the recalcitrant Chang during the Mao-Chang dispute. A year after Mao
reached Shensi, Chang Kuo-t'ao moved his troops northward. His main forces were caught in an enemy encirclement near Sian and nearly destroyed, while Li Hsien-nien's Thirtieth Army, renamed the West Route Army, attempted to reach Sinkiang but again suffered very heavy casualties. Li got to Yenan in 1937, where he entered K'ang Ta (“Resist Japan University”) and studied for a year. In 1938 he was sent behind Japanese lines in Hupeh to organize guerrilla warfare. Starting with only a few rifles and old friends among peasants, Li built an army of 60,000 by 1941. During the civil war he became a field army commander. From victory onward he was the chief political and military person in his native province, Hupeh. In 1956 he was elected to the Party PB, after which he took a leading part in conferences, pacts, and trade agreements with Albania, Guinea, Mali, Tanzania, Ghana, North Korea, North Vietnam, etc., traveling to some of those countries and to Eastern Europe. Elected a vice-premier, PRC, in 1962, he was in August, 1966, confirmed in his position in the PB.

Li Hsueh-feng
(p. 212n) was born in 1907, in Shansi, the same province as P'eng Chen (q.v.), whom he replaced in 1966 when the latter was driven from his office as secretary of the Peking Party committee, a key post because its membership embraced many CC members and the highest administrative officials of the central government of the CPR.

Li Hsueh-feng joined the Party about 1926, had affiliations with Liu Chih-tan during early peasant insurrections, and was elected (in absentia) a member of the CEC of the provisional Central Soviet Government (1934). In the North China Bureau under Liu Shao-ch'i (1935-39) he was active during the Red Army drive into Shansi in 1935. He served variously as political commissar and Party secretary in Shansi, Chahar, Hopei and the Central Plains Bureau in the 1940's. Director of the CC Central Plains Orgburo in 1949, he then held responsible Party bureau posts in Central and South China 1949–52. In 1956 he was elected a member (No. 71) of the CC. He was in the presidium of the NPC from its outset (1955) and in 1965 was a vice-chairman of its standing committee. In 1963 he became first secretary of the CC North China Bureau. In 1966 he entered the PB, where (as de facto mayor of Peking) he carried primary organizational and management responsibility for repeated Red Guard demonstrations, and for Party direction of the GPCR.

Li K'e-nung
(p. 69) was still inhabiting the Foreign Office—as a vice-minister—when he died in 1963.

Li Li-san
(p. 73), rehabilitated in the CCP in 1945, was still in the CC when the GPCR was formally launched in August, 1966, and presumably remained a member at this writing.

Li was born in Liling county, Hunan, in 1896, in a landlord's family; his real name was Li Lung-chih. After graduating from middle school (1914) he went to Peking to join the Work-Study Plan established by the Sino-French Educational Association, and to study French. He reached France in 1918. With other Chinese students (Chou En-lai, etc.) he
helped found the CYL, which merged with the CCP in 1922. Returning to China in 1922, Li was assigned to work with Liu Shao-ch'i in the organization of miners at Anyuan, Kiangsi, where Mao Tse-tung was also active. In Shanghai in 1923 he began to organize labor unions and in 1924 became chairman of the Shanghai Federation of Trade Unions and concurrently secretary of the propaganda section of the KMT. The same year he entered the KMT CEC to become a political instructor at Whampoa Academy, in Canton. In 1925 he and Liu Shao-ch'i led workers who launched the May 30th Movement in Shanghai.

Proceeding to Moscow, Li represented the All-China Federation of Trade Unions and was elected to the Trade Union International Committee. Returning to Shanghai in 1926, he was elected to the CCP PB and worked with Chou En-lai in preparing the 1927 Shanghai Uprising. In July, 1927, after breaking with Ch'en Tu-hsiu's PB leadership (and authorized by a directive from Stalin) Li Li-san joined Chou En-lai and others in planning the Nanchang August 1 Uprising. Following its defeat he attended the emergency conference of the PB, held August 7, where he was instrumental in electing Ch'u Ch'iu-pai to succeed Ch'en Tu-hsiu as CC general secretary.

Elements of Li's political career from 1927 onward are summed up in
Part Four
,
Chapter 6
, note 3, and in biographical notes on the principals mentioned therein. For further details see an account by James P. Harrison. “The Li Li-san Line and the CCP in 1930,”
China Quarterly,
Nos. 14 and 15 (London, 1963); see also
RNORC.

After Li's removal from the PB following his “trial” in Moscow by the CMT in November, 1930, Li stayed on (probably involuntarily) to work there as a translator and editor in the Foreign Languages Press. In 1936 he was arrested as a Trotskyist but was released in 1938 and resumed his work. With Mao's support (at Stalin's suggestion) he was readmitted to the CCP and at the Seventh Congress in April, 1945, was elected (No. 16) to the CC. In the same year he left Moscow for Manchuria, to join Lin Piao's group there as a political adviser. In 1948 he was elected to the presidium of the Sixth All-China Congress of Labor, at which he delivered the opening address, in Harbin. Elected first vice-chairman of the All-China Federation of Labor, he was also director of its Cadres School until 1953, when he was dismissed for “mistakes of subjectivism.” Meanwhile he had held numerous other important government posts, notably as Minister of Labor and director of the CC Industrial and Communications Work Department (1949-54). At the Eighth Congress of the CCP (1956) Li confessed to “leftist opportunist mistakes” and was re-elected to the CC (No. 89). In 1962 he was briefly secretary of the CC North China Bureau. Li remained a symbol of Mao's “forgivingness.” Although he took no prominent part in the GPCR he was not attacked as a revisionist nor were his past errors exhumed for vilification.

Li's first wife, Wang Hsiu-chen, a leader in the CCP CC women's
department, was arrested in Shanghai in 1932 by the Nationalists, and disappeared. During Li's stay in Moscow he married a Russian.

Li Ta
(p. 157) left the Party during the 1927 repression but took no counterrevolutionary action. He reappeared as a Communist collaborator during the Second World War, and became a member of the CPPCC of the PRC. In 1966 he came under heavy attack as a “revisionist,” during the GPCR, but the role assigned to him seemed largely symbolic, since he had no political power.

Li Ta-chao
(p. 73) became, during his relatively brief life (1888-1927), which ended in execution by strangulation, the single most important Chinese radical political influence in his time, the first impressive Chinese interpreter of Marxism, and the first major contributor to a system or ideology which may be called Chinese Marxist thought. As librarian at Peking National University, Li Ta-chao gave Mao Tse-tung a job and first introduced him to serious Marxist study. To say that without Li Ta-chao there could have been no Mao Tse-tung may be an overstatement, but some of the main features of Mao's Thought are explicit or implicit in the writings of Li Ta-chao, which Mao implemented in action. As a co-founder of the CCP he provided a bridge between China's few Western-educated “liberals” and the younger generation of intellectuals decisively influenced by the Russian Revolution. For a fascinating account of the range of Li's life and works—indispensable to a fuller understanding of the complexity of the Chinese revolution and of Maoist Thought—see Maurice Meisner's
Li Ta-chao and the Origins of Chinese Marxism.

Li Teh
(p. 90) was the Chinese Party name adopted by Otto Braun, born
circa
1896. A German Communist sent to China by the Comintern, Braun so identified himself in print for the first time in an article published in
Neues Deutschland
(East) Berlin, May 27, 1964. “Li Teh” may have reached Shanghai late in 1932. Early in 1933 he called on the author in Peking, representing himself as a German newspaper correspondent named Otto Stern. In Pao An, where his role was clear, he never mentioned his real name, but he did speak of work undertaken as a revolutionary agent in South America and Spain. In 1928 he was arrested in Germany and reportedly “sentenced to death,” but he escaped and fled to Moscow. A soldier in the First World War, he received some further military training in Moscow. After serving as CMT representative on the underground military advisory committee in Shanghai, Braun entered Kiangsi in 1933, smuggled into the Red areas in a sampan where he lay covered with cargo for many days. As a Comintern delegate he held a position of extraordinary prestige in the CC revolutionary military council, and he bore a large share of responsibility for military practices followed in 1933–34. He was the only foreigner who made the Long March. After the Tsunyi Conference he was placed in a subordinate and advisory capacity under Mao. Li Teh left Yenan in 1939, on the only Russian plane known to have landed there during the Second World War. In Moscow until 1945, he entered Berlin with the Soviet Red Army.
Neues Deutschland
described
him as a “professor” and a China expert. His 1964 article, “For Whom Does Mao Speak?,” fully supported Moscow in the Sino-Soviet dispute. Li Teh's role in Kiangsi is further described in
Part Four
,
Chapter 6
, note 3.

Li Tsung-jen
(p. 112) led his Kwangsi army in one of the Nationalists' few victories against the Japanese. He was “elected” vice-president of China in 1947. Before “President” Chiang fled to Taiwan (1949) he resigned, and General Li became Nationalist president. When Chiang Kai-shek later took back his title, on Taiwan, Li retired to the United States. In 1965 he returned to Peking, made his peace with Mao Tse-tung, and denounced Chiang Kai-shek as a puppet of American imperialism.

Liao Ch'eng-yun.
See Ch'en Yun.

Lin Piao
(p. 37) was in 1966 officially declared “Chairman Mao's closest comrade-in-arms.” After the Eleventh Plenum of the CC (August, 1966), Lin emerged as second only to Mao in the seemingly all-powerful standing committee, as first vice-chairman of the Party, first vice-chairman of the Party's supreme military affairs committee, minister of defense, and first vice-premier of the State Council. Lin was commonly regarded as effective leader of the People's Republic in case of Mao's death—having replaced, in effect, President of the Republic Liu Shao-ch'i—but at this writing no clear line of succession had been established.

Lin Piao was born in 1908. In 1936, at Pao An, Shensi, he gave the author the details of his early life which appear in the text (Part Three,
Chapter 4
).

When Generalissimo Chiang drove the rebels from Kiangsi, in 1934, Lin Piao led the breakthrough forces of the Long March. At Tsunyi, Kweichow, in 1935, he helped elect Mao to supreme command. He fought successful battles in Shansi and Shensi (1935-36) and took part in the occupation of Yenan in December, 1936. During the resistance against Japan, Lin commanded Red Army (renamed Eighth Route Army) detachments in northern Shansi. His 115th Division delivered a smashing defeat to invading Japanese forces, a first proof that Chinese troops, properly organized and led, could be victorious against modern armies. Seriously wounded in 1938, he spent about two years convalescing in Russia. On his return he was briefly with Chou En-lai's “liaison headquarters” in Chungking, and then became deputy chairman of the Party school in Yenan, of which Mao was chairman.

In 1946 Lin was commander-in-chief of Red forces in Manchuria. To him, in 1946, Mao Tse-tung addressed his now celebrated “general concepts” of military operations for renewed KMT-CP civil war. Lin held command of the main Communist forces in Manchuria. Within a year he entrapped the core of Chiang Kai-shek's American-armed and American-trained armies, capturing or killing a total of thirty-six generals. Following victory in Manchuria, Lin encircled Chiang's main forces in northern China. Peking surrendered to him without a battle.

In July, 1950, Lin Piao was elected to the PB. Early in China's
intervention in the Korean War, in November, 1950, Lin Piao led the “Chinese People's Volunteer Corps” in a counteroffensive which took General MacArthur's headquarters by surprise. Using “human sea” tactics, Lin pushed the American and United Nations troops to near-disaster. Withdrawn from Korea, supposedly because of illness, he again spent some time recuperating in Russia. Marshal P'eng Teh-huai replaced him. A deputy chairman of the Party military affairs committee from 1950, and a deputy premier, he was re-elected to the PB in 1956, a year after he was promoted to the rank of marshal of the PLA.

In 1959 the Chinese Party bitterly debated future policy toward the U.S.S.R. Obvious and bitter personal rivalry had developed between P'eng and Lin in which Mao himself was a protagonist. In the midst of their ideological dispute, Nikita Khrushchev canceled his promise to supply China with a “sample atom bomb.” P'eng Teh-huai was relieved as Minister of Defense, and Lin Piao replaced him. Lin Piao's reforms aimed at “de-Russification.” “Professional-officer-caste” mentality was fought, titles and insignia of rank were abolished, special officer privileges ended, the Yenan type of soldier-peasant-worker-student combination was restored, and the Thought of Mao Tse-tung superseded all other ideological texts.