Red Star over China (76 page)

Po's real name was Po Shu-ts'un and he was born in Tingshang, Shansi, in 1907, with a gentry family background. He joined the CCP in 1926 and was arrested and imprisoned in Peking in 1933. Released in 1936, he may have been one of those Communists who recanted, in that year, on authorization of the regional Party leader (Liu Shao-ch'i), in order to secure their freedom—a crime for which Hsu Ping came under attack as late as 1967. Po worked as a political commissar in North China guerrilla areas throughout the Second World War and the Second Civil (Liberation) War. He specialized in financial and economic affairs and state planning from 1951 onward and held important supervisory powers over major industrial ministries down to 1967.

Po Ku
(Ch'in Pang-hsien) (p. 251) died in an airplane crash in 1946, but since he was general secretary of the Party, chief antagonist of Mao from 1932 to 1935, and responsible for policies that Mao in 1945 asserted had “cost more Communist lives than enemies',” some knowledge of his career remains important to an understanding of Party history.

Born in 1908, the only son of a county magistrate, Ch'in Pang-hsien
graduated from a Soochow technical school at seventeen, and then entered the CCP-organized Shanghai University, studied English, and joined the CCP. Sent to Russia in 1926, he studied four years at the CMT's Sun Yat-sen University, where, like his classmate Wang Ming (q.v.) he became fluent in Russian and in Marxist-Leninist doctrine. In 1930 he returned to China as one of Pavel Mif's “Twenty-eight Bolsheviks,” and helped Mif and Wang Ming discredit Li Li-san and put Wang Ming in the leadership, although Hsiang Chung-fa remained nominally secretary general. With the latter's execution by the KMT in 1931, Wang Ming (aged twenty-four) replaced him, and Po Ku (aged twenty-three) became Wang Ming's first deputy. Later that year Wang Ming returned to Moscow and became resident delegate on the CEC of the CMT. Po Ku was elected general secretary of the CCP CC and PB. In the protracted struggle between “Moscow-oriented” and “native” Marxists for dominance in the Chinese Party leadership (which reflected differences over the relative importance of the cities and the countryside in the conquest of power) Po Ku personified the former and Mao Tse-tung the latter. For a brief chronological digest of events of that struggle see
Part Four
,
Chapter 6
, note 3.

At the end of the Long March Po Ku continued in the PB, and in 1936 the author found him acting as chairman of the provisional Northwest Soviet Government. In December, 1936, he accompanied Chou En-lai to Sian during the Incident there. After the KMT-CCP truce of 1937 he became propaganda director in the Eighth Route Army's liaison mission in Chungking (1938-40), and then was first editor of the
Liberation Daily
in Yenan.

Po Ku's name was linked with Wang Ming's once more during the rectification movement (1942). By 1945 his dwindling influence was indicated in his decline to No. 44 position in the CC, to which he was reelected shortly before his death. Po Ku was married to Liu Ch'un-hsien, also Moscow-trained, whom he divorced. He fathered seven children. For interviews with him, and his autobiography as told to the author, see
RNORC.

P'u Yi, Emperor
(p. 120), abdicated from the throne of the Ch'ing Dynasty in 1911, when the ancient empire collapsed and the first Republic was established. He was then five years old. After a brief attempt at a restoration by militarists, he fled in 1915 to the Japanese Concession in Tientsin. In 1934 he left Tientsin with Japanese officers who installed him in occupied Manchuria as puppet emperor of the puppet empire of Manchukuo. In 1945 he was seized by the Russians during their occupation of Manchuria. In 1950 he fell into the Chinese Communist's hands. After a long period of “thought remolding” he was a common gardener in the Botanical Institute when the author met him in Peking in 1960. By 1965 he was a member of the Academy of History—working on the archives of his imperial ancestors—and held a seat in the CPPCC. He had divorced his several imperial brides and, for the first time, married a woman of his
own choice, a Chinese nurse. He had also written an interesting autobiography,
From Emperor to Citizen,
Peking, 1965
(The Last Manchu,
N.Y., 1967), when he died in Peking, of cancer, in 1967.

Shao Li-tzu
(p. 43), a native of Ningpo, Chekiang, remained with the Nationalists until after Pearl Harbor, when he favored a coalition government between the Kuomintang and the Communists. He helped to form the CPPCC, which in 1949 represented a fusion of non-Communist but anti-Chiang Kai-shek “united front” groups and parties, including a “revolutionary Kuomintang.” In 1949 the CPPCC, with 662 delegates present (Communist-led), formally adopted a “Common Program” and an Organic Law for its own existence, to proclaim the People's Republic of China. In 1954 the Conference adopted a constitution and announced an election to be held to choose delegates to an NPC, to which it then transferred power. The CPPCC continued to exist also, however, to represent non-Communist elements. Shao Li-tzu remained one of its factotums. In 1967, at the age of eighty-eight, he still held minor government posts and frequently appeared at state functions.

Soong (Sung) Ch'ing-ling (Mme. Sun Yat-sen)
(p. 99n), who married Dr. Sun Yat-sen in Japan (1914), was a graduate of Wesleyan College, Macon, Georgia. She was born in Shanghai
(circa
1895), the second of three sisters, of whom the youngest was Soong Mei-ling (Mme. Chiang Kai-shek), in a family originally from Hainan island. After the death of Dr. Sun, his widow remained a member of the CEC of the KMT but continued to uphold a pro-Communist, or leftist, interpretation of his principles, and declined office in Chiang Kai-shek's government. In the CPR she held leading positions in women's organizations and in the fields of child care and education. In 1968 she was a vice-chairman of the NPC, an office she had held since the inception of the People's Republic. After the vilification of Liu Shao-ch'i, Soong Ch'ing-ling received foreign envoys on official occasions, as acting chief of state. For a profile of Mme. Sun, see
JTTB
and the Biographical Notes in the Penguin revised edition of
RSOC
(1972).

Su Yu
(p. 189) was in 1966 among the few generals under the age of sixty who were veterans of the Nanchang Uprising, the “birth of the Red Army.” Chief of the PLA General Staff (1954-58), when P'eng Teh-huai was defense minister, he seemed somewhat eclipsed after P'eng's dismissal in 1959. In 1966 he was re-elected to the CC and held a high position as a member of the Party military affairs committee.

Born in 1909 in Fukien, he attended the Second Hunan Normal School, where in 1926 he joined the CYL branch established by Mao Tse-tung. In 1927 he enlisted in Yeh T'ing's army, with about 1,000 other student members of the CYL-CCP, in time to participate in the Uprising. Two years later he led a division in the Fourth Red Army, and by 1932 was chief of staff of the Tenth Army. During the Long March he stayed behind as chief of staff to Fang Chih-min. After Fang's capture and execution Su took command. His rear guard force later merged with Ch'en Yi's army, which in 1937 became part of the New Fourth Army, of which
Su Yu was vice-commander. Thereafter, as Ch'en's deputy, his career ran parallel to Ch'en's until after the establishment of the CPR. Su held many important administrative and political responsibilities besides the military posts mentioned above.

Sun Ming-chiu
(p.380) was in 1964 reportedly a vice-admiral in the naval forces of the CPR.

Sun Yat-sen, Mme.
See Soong Ch'ing-ling.

T'an Chen-lin
(p. 167n) was born in 1912, a native of Kiangsi. In the Party PB from 1956, he was a specialist in agricultural policies who came under Red Guard attack in 1966. A follower of Mao Tse-tung since the Autumn Harvest Uprising (1927), he supported Mao's military concepts in Kiangsi in opposition to the “Twenty-eight Bolsheviks,” and was a Long March veteran. He played a role in the Resistance War at the highest level of political and military command. During the Second Civil War he was a member of the Front Committee led by Teng Hsiao-p'ing, which directed all the PLA forces in eastern China. In 1966 he stood eighteenth in Politburo rank—a vice-premier and a member of the CC secretariat. Despite criticism by Red Guards he appeared in public with Mao in May, 1967.

Tao Chu
(p. 432), a Hunanese born in 1906, joined the CCP about 1927 and after 1930 was active in the Oyuwan Soviet with Li Hsien-nien. He held responsible posts representing the CC in various armies throughout the Resistance War and the Second Civil War, and after 1949 became a leading Party secretary in South China. In 1962 he was vice-premier of the SC of the CPR and chief of the Party bureau in the Central-South region. At the eleventh plenary session of the Eighth Party Congress (August, 1966) he was jumped from No. 95 rank in the CC to the fourth highest rank in PB membership, as published after that meeting. He emerged as chief among those responsible for carrying through the GPCR. By November, 1966, he had been discredited as a “pragmatist-revisionist” and had fled to obscurity in the South. Judging from attacks in Ch'en Po-ta's official press on T'ao Chu's two books, formerly used as training texts for youth
(Ideals, Integrity and Spiritual Life
and
Thinking, Feeling and Literary Talent),
he had overemphasized the material rewards promised by communism and understated the importance of continued class struggle as taught by Mao. Perhaps more significant than the formal charges, Ch'en Po-ta took over T'ao Chu's tasks as propaganda-culture chief.

Teng Fa
(p. 52) was a PB member at the time of his death in the airplane crash, April, 1946, which also killed Po Ku, Yeh T'ing, and Wang Jo-fei.

Teng Hsiao-p'ing
(p. 122), after 1954 general secretary to the CCP CC, became a principal target, during the GPCR, among “those in the Party in authority who are taking the capitalist road.” He was born in 1904 in Chiating, Szechuan. After a rudimentary schooling he joined the Work-Study Plan and went to France in 1920. When the author met him at Yu Wang Pao, Shensi (August 19,1936), Teng said that he did not attend school in France but spent his five years there as a worker. He learned Marxism from French workers and became a Chinese member of the
French Communist Party, from which he transferred to the CCP. In 1925 he returned to China by way of Russia, where he “studied several months.” General Feng Yu-hsiang, commander of the Kuominchun (“People's Army”), was visiting in Moscow in 1926. Teng joined Feng's headquarters and became dean of a training school Feng set up at San-yuan, near Sian. In 1927 he helped form a peasant army in Kiangsi. After the counterrevolution Teng worked in the Shanghai Party underground until 1929. He then formed the Seventh Red Army at Lungchow, Kwangsi. “The Lungchow Soviet had relations with the Annamites [Vietnamese] who began the worker-peasant rebellion in 1930. French airplanes bombed Lungchow and we shot one down,” Teng told the author in 1936. Combined French and Nationalist forces destroyed the Lungchow soviet movement, as well as the Vietnamese forces, but the latter maintained ties with the Chinese guerrillas. With remnants of the Seventh Army, Teng made his way through Kwangsi and Kiangsi to Chingkangshan. With his followers reorganized as the Eighth Army, he took part in the capture of Changsha in 1930. From 1932 to 1934 Teng was in the political department of the Red Army and edited
Hung Hsing (Red Star).
In that period he supported the “Lo-Ming line,” which followed guerrilla tactics and strategy advocated by Mao Tse-tung, in opposition to the prevailing PB leadership. In 1935, at Tsunyi, he voted for Mao to lead the CCP PB.

During the Long March Teng Hsiao-p'ing was deputy commander and political commissar of Liu Po-ch'eng's Twelfth Division. He backed Mao Tse-tung in his dispute with Chang Kuo-t'ao at Maoerhkai, and he completed the Long March with Mao's columns. In 1936 he was Nieh Jung-chen's deputy as political commissar of the First Army Corps in Kansu.

At the start of the Resistance War in 1937, Teng became political commissar of the 129th Division commanded by Liu Po-ch'eng, with whose forces he was identified for the next twelve years. In 1943 Teng headed the general political department of the People's Revolutionary Military Council and entered the secretariat of the CC. At the Seventh Party Congress (Yenan, 1945) he became secretary of the CC and PB. Returning to the field with Liu Po-ch'eng, he served as chief of the General Front Committee, the supreme staff of all the PLA on the Central Plains, and was also political commissar of Liu Po-ch'eng's army of victory in Szechuan (1949). As such he carried out Mao's “general strategic concepts” which led to the complete defeat of all Chiang Kai-shek's armies north of the Yangtze River. Teng became first secretary of the Party's Southwest Bureau and concurrently a vice-chairman of the provisional government (1950-54). From 1952 to 1954 he was minister of finance and a member of the State Planning Commission. With formation of the NPC in 1954, he became a deputy premier and a deputy chairman of the National Defense Council. In 1956 the Eighth Congress of the CC restored the post of general secretary (which no longer carried the
primary leadership role, however), and Teng was elected to that office. Third in rank in the SC, Teng Hsiao-p'ing served as Acting Premier during Chou En-lai's absences from China (winter, 1963–64, and March, 1965). At the August, 1966, meeting of the CC, Teng was re-elected to the PB and listed sixth, as before, but he was no longer vice-chairman of the Party or PB general secretary. Until December, 1966, Teng Hsiao-p'ing and Liu Shao-ch'i both appeared on the stand with Mao to review the Red Guards, but after that became prime targets of wall poster attacks. Their followers were widely accused of sabotaging the GPCR and were driven from office by Red Guards (often with PLA help) in half a dozen major cities and provinces, but elsewhere they stubbornly clung to power. Teng's fate at this writing was undetermined.