by Edgar Snow
In 1945, when he was consulted during Mao’s composition of the important “Resolutions on Some Questions in the History of Our Party,” Ch’en was elected to the CC at the CCP Eighth Congress. In 1946 he appeared for the first time as an alternate member in the PB. By 1949 he was senior deputy director of the propaganda department under Lu Ting-yi and in 1955–56 was deputy director of the rural-work department of the CC—spectacular advances for a man with virtually no known history in the pre-1937 Party.
Ch’en accompanied Mao to Moscow on his first visit there in 1949–50, and may have interpreted Mao’s talks with Stalin. He was with Mao again in Moscow when Mao attended the fortieth-anniversary celebrations of the October Revolution in 1957, and made his “East-Wind-prevailing” speech.
Ch’en was one of the few Chinese students educated in Moscow during the 1920’s who avoided overt involvement in the maneuvers of Pavel Mif or any of the several factions of Soviet-oriented Chinese Party leaders (the “Twenty-eight Bolsheviks”) who clashed with Mao before 1935 (see Po Ku, Wang Ming, etc.). Mao may have had less reason to distrust him as a loyal disciple and political Boswell, which he aspired to be and to an important degree became, than other “returned students,” who perhaps erred by excluding Ch’en from their counsels in the thirties.
Ch’en Po-ta probably published more philosophical, political, and Party historical books than any prominent Chinese Communist except Mao himself. In 1937–38 he wrote about means of mobilizing intellectuals for resistance and united-front work. In the 1940’s he produced Notes on Ten Years of Civil War, 1927–36, and Notes on Mao Tse-tung’s Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan, both in close consultation with Mao. In 1949 and 1952 he produced short books eulogizing Stalin’s contributions to the Chinese revolution—tactically required in periods of the CCP’s maximum dependence on Stalin. But his status-making works in China were his essay “Mao Tse-tung’s Theory of the Chinese Revolution Is the Combination of Marxism-Leninism with the Chinese Revolution,” and his book Mao Tse-tung on the Chinese Revolution (both 1951). He was also the editor of The Thought of Mao Tse-tung (Mao Tse-tung Ssuhsiang). In 1958 he became chief editor of Red Flag. As vice-president of the Chinese Academy of Sciences he was a dominating force in Party historiography.
Ch’en was instrumental in the removal of Lu Ting-yi, whom he replaced (after the fall of T’ao Chu in 1966) as chief of the CC propaganda department. As such, he was also boss of the Ministry of Culture. At a PB level just below Mao, Lin Piao, and Chou En-lai, and as Mao’s writing arm during the GPCR, he was responsible for the official press campaigns against chosen purgees. Probably Ch’en was the main source of supply, to unsophisticated teenage Red Guards, of highly recondite materials of inner-Party history that appeared on many of the “large character” wall posters used during the accompanying purge, including attacks on his former superiors, Lu Ting-yi, Liu Shao-ch’i, and Teng Hsiao-p’ing. Ch’en was also chiefly responsible for compiling Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, the “little red book” that became a universal best-seller, and for a long series of polemical articles called “The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” circulated (1966-67) in many languages in pamphlet form.
In 1966 Ch’en was described by the official Hsin Hua news agency as “the leader of the cultural relations group under the CC.” One of his closest collaborators was his first deputy, Chiang Ch’ing (Mme. Mao Tse-tung), who also served as cultural adviser to the PLA. By 1968 seemingly heir to fractions of administrative authority formerly exercised by the PB members with whom Mao had ruptured relations, Ch’en lacked prestige with veterans of the Party and the army, however, where his influence merely reflected his role as spokesman for Mao.
Ch’en Shao-yu. See Wang Ming.
Ch’en Tu-hsiu (p. 73), the first general secretary (1921-27) of the CCP, influenced radical youths during 1919–27 more than any other Chinese cultural and political leader except Li Ta-chao (q.v.), with whom he laid the foundations of Chinese Marxism upon which rose the edifice of Maoism. Ch’en was born in 1879 in Huaining, Kiangsu, of a wealthy official family, studied the Classics, led a great revolution, and died (1942) a writer of essays and studies in the ancient Chinese language.
Dean of the College of Letters of Peking University (1915), he became best known as the founder and editor of New Youth (Hsin Ch’ing-nien), which in 1917 initiated a language and cultural reform of profound impact, and was also the voice of the May Fourth Movement (1919). After three months in jail for participating in the May Fourth Movement, Ch’en resigned from Peking University’s faculty, went to Shanghai (1920), organized Communist study groups throughout China, and was, with Li Ta-chao, one of the two leading founders of the CCP. For comment on his difference with the CMT and CCP after July, 1927, see Part Four, Chapter 5, note 1, and Chapter 6, note 3. Discussion of Ch’en Tu-hsiu may now be supplemented from many other sources, including his own works. See also Bibliography, especially Chow Tse-tung, The May Fourth Movement, Isaacs, Schwartz, and the BDRC.
Ch’en Yi (p. 167n), an authentic military hero and China’s Foreign Minister from 1958, was one of the ten marshals of the PLA. Born in Lochih, Szechuan, in 1901, Ch’en was the son of a district magistrate. He received his middle-school education in Chengtu, where he also learned to play basketball at a local American-operated Y.M.C.A. After winning a scholarship to a French-language preparatory school in Peking for a year, he went to France, where (1919–21) he combined labor (barge-loading, washing dishes, and work at the Michelin and Creusot plants) with study in a vocational school and at the Institut Polytechnique in Grenoble. In 1921 he joined the Chinese Socialist Youth Corps, which evolved into the CYL (see Chou En-lai). In the same year he and some other members were deported from France for staging a sit-down strike at the Institut Franco-Chinois in Lyons. Returning to Szechuan, he joined the staff of warlord Yang Sen. In Peking, in 1923, he joined the KMT. As a member of the CYL he was admitted to the CCP in 1923. After two years (1923-25) at Sino-French University, in Peking, he next worked at Whampoa Academy, Canton, as political instructor under Chou En-lai.
Assigned to Yeh T’ing’s (q.v.) staff during the Northern Expedition (1926), he took part in the Nanchang Uprising. Retreating with Ho Lung and Yeh T’ing to Swatow, he fell in with Chu Teh’s retreat to southern Kiangsi. In early 1928 he accompanied Chu Teh to Chingkangshan. Ch’en headed the political department of the Fourth Red Army until 1929, when he took command of the Thirteenth Division. In 1930 he sided with Mao in a dispute with the CC under Li Li-san and, with P’eng Teh-huai, suppressed the anti-Maoist forces of the Party involved in the Fu-t’ien Incident. During the Long March, Ch’en stayed behind with Hsiang Ying (Han Ying) to command a Red rear guard in Kiangsi, and from 1934 until 1937 fought bitter battles for survival. With the outbreak of major Sino-Japanese war the remnant Reds in the South were permitted by Chiang Kai-shek to regroup under the command of Yeh T’ing and Hsiang Ying as the New Fourth Army. It grew very rapidly. Alarmed, the Generalissimo sought to drive it entirely into Japanese-occupied territory. In January, 1941, part of the New Fourth was ambushed by Nationalists. Hsiang Ying was killed and Yeh T’ing wounded and taken prisoner. Supported by units under Su Yu, T’an Chen-lin, and Chang Ting-ch’eng (qq.v.), Ch’en Yi held his detachments together and was named acting commander by Mao Tse-tung. Liu Shao-ch’i soon joined him as political commissar.
By 1945 the New Fourth Army had carved an immense territory from the Japanese conquest and built up the largest Red force in Central China. At the CCP Seventh Congress Ch’en was elected to the CC. Following Japan’s surrender and the death of Yeh T’ing, in 1946, Ch’en became full field commander of the New Fourth—renamed the East China PLA. With renewal of civil war in 1947, Ch’en Yi’s army played a decisive role; in June, 1948, it captured Kaifeng, capital of Honan province. Soon afterward Ch’en assumed a new “general front command” which included Liu Po-ch’eng, Su Yu, T’an Chen-lin and, as chief political commissar, Teng Hsiao-p’i
ng. In the “Hwai-Hai” campaign, in November, Ch’en defeated the main forces of Chiang Kai-shek so decisively that the KMT lost East Central China. As the Third Field Army, Ch’en Yi’s troops pushed on to Nanking, Shanghai, and the provinces of Fukien and Chekiang, south of the Yangtze River.
Following victory, Ch’en Yi was successively or concurrently commander of the East China military area; second secretary of the East China Bureau of the CP; mayor of Shanghai; secretary of the Shanghai CP committee, and a member of the Party revolutionary military council. With adoption of the constitution and formation of the NPC, in 1954, he became a vice-premier of the CPR State Council and vice-chairman of the National Defense Council. In 1956 he was elected to the PB for the first time. From 1949 onward Chou En-lai had been concurrently premier and minister of foreign affairs; in 1958, Ch’en Yi took over the latter post. At the same time Ch’en relinquished the mayoralty of Shanghai.
Ch’en led the Chinese delegation to Indonesia which signed a treaty of friendship in 1961; accompanied Liu Shao-ch’i on visits to Indonesia, Burma and Cambodia in 1963; represented China on Kenya’s independence day; joined Chou En-lai on a 1963–64 tour of ten African countries; and represented China at the tenth-anniversary celebration of the Algerian Republic. In 1965 he visited Jakarta for the tenth anniversary of the Bandung Conference.
At the eleventh session of the Eighth Party Congress (August, 1966) Ch’en retained his rank in the PB and his government posts, but he was not immune from attacks by the Red Guards of the GPCR. Wall posters appeared that accused him of barring the gates of the Waichiaopu (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) to Red Guards who wished to search the premises for persons or indications of reactionary or revisionist thoughts or things. Many attacks were leveled at the Ministry, and Ch’en’s diplomatic agents abroad were accused of having taken on decadent bourgeois habits of dress, eating, and culture, including attendance at nude pictures and excessive indulgence in alcohol. Many were recalled for interrogation in Peking. At the 1967 October anniversary celebration, however, Ch’en Yi’s name stood high on the PB list.
In 1965 Marshal Ch’en Yi told the author that if the United States continued to escalate the war in Vietnam, China would sooner or later become involved, and that when that happened the war would “know no boundaries.”
Ch’en’s first wife died in Kiangsi in 1934. Chang Chien, his second wife, was formerly a schoolteacher.
Ch’en Yun (Liao Ch’eng-yun) (p. 159n), a vice-chairman of the CCP CC from 1934, was re-elected to the PB in 1966, and despite his long-time association with Liu Shao-ch’i (q.v.) and many Red Guard verbal attacks, was still favorably mentioned in the official press in 1967.
Born in 1900 in a Shanghai working-class family, Ch’en Yun was a typesetter when he joined the CCP in 1924. He specialized in labor unions and in Soviet Kiangsi (1931-34) organized the handicraft workers. At Tsunyi, in 1935, after supporting Mao Tse-tung against the former PB leadership, he became a member of the Party military affairs committee, and was sent to Moscow as a delegate to the Seventh CMT Congress (July-August). His report on the Tsunyi conference probably explained why Mao was there elected (for the first time) to the CEC of the CMT. Ch’en returned to China with Wang Ming and K’ang Sheng (q.q.v.) in 1937 and quickly took pro-Mao positions in Yenan. His book, How To Be a Good Communist Party Member (1939), together with Liu Shao-ch’i’s How To Be a Good Communist (1939), became an essential tool in the cheng-feng (rectification) program (1942) to establish the prevalence of Maoist-Marxist orthodoxy over imported dogma. (By 1967 Liu Shao-ch’i’s book was denounced in Peking as a “poison weed.”)
Ch’en specialized in economic and financial affairs (1940-45) and in 1945 was a top CC leader sent to Northeast China with Lin Piao (q.v.) to prepare for a capture of power there, following Japan’s surrender. From 1949 onward he held senior responsibilities in heavy industry, finance, state planning, and labor organization. In 1954 he became a vice-premier.
Ch’en was, like Liu Shao-ch’i, one of very few Chinese Communists with a long practical experience in urban working-class organization. His fall from fifth place in the PB hierarchy to eleventh place in 1966, after the Eleventh Plenum of the Eighth Congress, suggested that de-emphasis on centralized economic and industrial planning and management might be part of the drive to break up some of the power accumulated by Party technocrats accused by the Red Guards of practicing “economism”—meaning the use of material incentives along lines of the “capitalist road”—specifically, “Liebermanism.” By 1968 Ch’en seemed restored, however, to his niche in the hierarchy.
Chiang Ch’ing (Green River) (p. 420), Mao Tse-tung’s third wife (excluding an unconsummated childhood marriage), was suddenly given great power as a cultural arbiter during the GPCR from 1966 onward. Her real name was Li Chung-chin (Yun-ho), and she was born in 1912, in Taian, Shantung, in the shadow of T’ai Shan, one of China’s five “sacred mountains.”
Chiang Ch’ing’s parents, of middle-class origin and with scant assets, separated when she was a young child, but her mother managed to put her through primary school, in Tsinan. She then entered a provincial theatrical training institute, at government expense. The principal of the school, Chao T’ai-mou, later became chancellor of Tsingtao National University, where Chiang Ch’ing worked as an assistant librarian. While there she met Yu Ch’i-wei (Huang Ching, q.v.), who became perhaps the most important leader of the North China student “rebellions” of 1935–37. His sister, Yu San, was already a well-known opera singer and actress when she married Chao T’ai-mou, through whom Chiang Ch’ing met both Yu San and Yu Ch’i-wei. Their uncle, Yu Ta-wei, was minister of defense in the Nationalist Government at Nanking, while another uncle, Tseng Chao-lin, was a former vice-minister of education. At the time Chiang Ch’ing met Yu Ch’i-wei he was propaganda chief of the Communist underground apparatus in Tsingtao.
Chiang Ch’ing secretly joined the Party in 1933. In the same year Yu Ch’i-wei was arrested and sentenced to death by the KMT authorities, but his influential uncle, Yu Ta-wei, secured his release in 1934. That account was given to the author when he first met Yu Ch’i-wei in Peking (1935) as David Yu. He was then propaganda secretary of the underground Peking Party CC, under the name Huang Ching, and chief Communist adviser to students who participated in and partly led the December 9th student movement.
Chiang Ch’ing returned to Tsinan in 1934 and married an actor with the stage name T’ang Na. They worked in the infant Shanghai film industry, Chiang Ch’ing taking the name Lan P’ing (Blue Apple) for the parts given to her. They were divorced in 1937. With another actress (who later married Li Teh) Chiang Ch’ing then joined Huang Ching and together they made the long, dangerous overland trek to Yenan, the Red capital. Reaching Yenan in 1938, Huang Ching enrolled in the Party School for further study, while Chiang Ch’ing, with his excellent sponsorship, entered the Lu Hsun Art Institute, which trained theatrical troupes for service at the front. It was there that she met Mao Tse-tung.
The previous year Ho Tzu-ch’en (q. v.) and Mao had been divorced, on Mao’s demand, by a special court set up by the CCP CC.
Chiang Ch’ing, a slender, attractive young woman when the author met her in Yenan in 1939, a few months after her marriage to Mao, played a good game of bridge and was an excellent cook. She bore Mao two daughters, both of whom were by 1967 reported married.
Chiang Ch’ing took little part in political activity before 1964 aside from her appearances as Mme. Mao. Her important new independent role became manifest after the meeting of the CC (August, 1966) which launched the GPCR. She was unexpectedly declared “first deputy leader” under Ch’en Po-ta, officially “the leader of the Cultural Group within the Central Committee.” In the motor cavalcade and parade following the August meeting, Chiang Ch’ing stood in the first car beside Premier Chou En-lai.
All that was clarified in 1967 when the Party’s theoretical organ, Red Flag (edited by Ch’en Po-ta), published Chiang Ch’ing’s speech made before cultu
ral workers in July, 1964, which Red Flag now declared was the “great beginning” of the GPCR. Subsequent revelations credited her with having issued “directives” for the rewriting of operas, plays, ballets, and symphonies to introduce proletarian heroes and bourgeois villains to correspond to Mao Tse-tung’s cultural guidelines in his 1942 Talks at the Yenan Forum on Art and Literature.
Mme. Mao, it was also disclosed, had initiated the “clarion call” for the GPCR when (late 1965) she led “exposures” of Hai Jui Dismissed from Office, a play by Wu Han (q.v.), as a bourgeois-reactionary and thinly veiled allegorical attack on Mao Tse-tung. Counterattempts allegedly were made by P’eng Chen, Liu Shao-ch’i (qq.v.), and other “revisionists” to take over the burgeoning GPCR, before they themselves were purged along with Wu Han. Red Flag reported that they were partly frustrated by Chiang Ch’ing’s address delivered in February, 1966, before a meeting of army cultural workers, sponsored by Marshal Lin Piao. Their rout was completed by a pronouncement written by Mao and issued in the name of the CCP CC in May, 1966, which turned the GPCR into the purge of “anti-Maoists” that followed.
As Mao’s deputy, Chiang Ch’ing became cultural adviser to the armed forces. Among writers and artists in opera, drama, films, and the musical world, she became the No. 1 authority on acceptable proletarian art. Many were required to undergo thought remolding, while others—including whole opera troupes—were drafted into service with the army. Traditional and historical operatic and dramatic themes and forms virtually disappeared from the stage during that period when Chiang Ch’ing and the Red Guards determinedly sought to replace “old habits, old ideas, old culture,” and all that was bourgeois, feudal, and foreign, with new folk heroes glorifying the proletariat.
Chiang Ching-kuo (p. 44), Chiang Kai-shek’s son by his first wife, whom Chiang divorced when he married Soong Mei-ling, was in effective control of the political and security forces in Taiwan in 1968 and was considered most likely successor to Chiang Kai-shek to head the American-protected regime there. Born in 1909 in Fenghua, Chekiang, he was educated by private tutors before 1925, when he went to Russia. He graduated from the CMT’s Sun Yat-sen University in 1927, having joined the CYL. After the 1927 split in China, Chiang Ching-kuo remained in Russia, studying military and political science. He opposed Wang Ming (q.v.) and was punished with various forms of exile, then given work as a plant director. In 1937 Stalin personally permitted him to return to China, where he effected a reconciliation with his father and joined the KMT. During the war his father gave him a job in Kiangsi; his chief task was to suppress the Reds. He joined the Methodist Church, together with his wife, a Russian. In 1949 he fled to Taiwan with his father. He was Chiang’s only son by birth; his foster brother, Chiang Wei-kuo, was adopted, the son of right-wing KMT leader T’ai Chi-tao and a Japanese mother.