Red Star over China

by Edgar Snow

  K’ang Sheng (p. 116n), whose original name was Chao Jung, was in August, 1966 (eleventh plenary session of the Eighth Congress), jumped to a PB position in the standing committee sixth below Mao. He was a vice-premier of the SC, head of the Party control commission, and among those officially described as “leaders of the cultural revolution under the Central Committee.” From Yenan days K’ang Sheng had closely identified him self with cultural concepts set forth by Mao in his “Talks at the Yenan Forum on Art and Literature.”

  K’ang was born (circa 1903) in a gentry family in Shantung. While attending CCP-organized Shanghai University he joined the CYL and CCP (1924-25), participated in Shanghai insurrections led by Chou En-lai (1926–27), and then worked underground. Sent to Moscow in 1930, he was, except for a brief visit to Shanghai in 1933, employed in the CMT under Wang Ming (q.v.) until he returned to China in 1937 with Wang Ming and Ch’en Yun. These three were lecturing at K’ang Ta (“Resist-Japan University”) when the author first met them in Yenan, in September, 1939. Elected to the CC secretariat in 1938, K’ang was criticized during the rectification movement (1942), but after self-reform replaced Li Wei-han as director of the Party school. Working closely with Lin Piao, director of K’ang Ta, he sharply dissociated himself from Wang Ming, who became the Party’s personification of “formalism” and imported dogmatism.

  Elected to the PB at the Seventh Congress (1945), K’ang headed the CC Orgburo, led the Shantung Party committee (1949-54), was reelected (alternate) to the PB (1956), spearheaded Party attacks on “rightists” (1957) and became a secretary of the CC secretariat (1962) under Teng Hsiao-p’ing and P’eng Chen. In 1963–65 he participated in major “line” talks led by Liu Shao-ch’i and/or Teng Hsiao-p’ing with foreign CP delegations to Peking seeking a Moscow-Peking reconciliation. In 1964 he accompanied Chou En-lai to Moscow for talks (abortive) after the fall of Khrushchev. In 1965 he joined Ch’en Po-ta in an offensive against Liu Shao-ch’i and Teng Hsiao-p’ing as “revisionists.” By 1967 K’ang Sheng appeared to be a possible successor to Teng Hsiao-p’ing as Party general secretary. While he remained in the PB no reconciliation with the U.S.S.R. seemed likely.

  Kao Kang (Kao Chung-yu) (p. 157) was the chief target of a major Party purge in 1954, when he was accused of “warlordism” and seeking to detach Manchuria as his “independent kingdom.” Disgraced, he committed suicide. Born in Hengshan, Shensi, in 1891, he and Liu Chih-tan built the Party there, and its isolated Red base became a sanctuary for the Communists at the end of the Long March. The son of a landlord, he graduated from a normal college in Sian, joined the CCP with Liu Chih-tan, led a peasant insurrection in 1927, and maintained guerrilla war bases in the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia area thereafter. As leader of a Party committee consisting of Lin Piao, Li Fu-ch’un, Ch’en Yun, Hsiao Ching-kuang, and P’eng Chen, he entered Manchuria and organized mass bases for guerrilla operations which ended in PLA victory there in 1946. Elected to the PB in 1945, he was in 1949 political commissar for all Manchuria, and in 1950 secretary of the Party Northeast Bureau and concurrently military commander. Chairman of the state planning commission in 1953, he was relieved of his Manchurian posts. Kao’s deputy on the planning commission was Jao Shu-shih, secretary of the Orgburo of the CC. During 1954, when Kao and Jao were removed from office as “anti-Party,” the most articulate accuser was Liu Shao-ch’i. Five provincial governors and several regional party and army chieftains were also dismissed. After Kao committed suicide and Jao Shu-shih fell into obscurity, foreign reports suggested that Kao Kang may have had Stalin’s backing in an attempt to overthrow Mao and set up a satellite state in Manchuria.

  Ku Ta-chen (p. 168) was born in Kiangsi in 1903. He helped to form the Eleventh Red Army (1928), made the Long March, and held responsible posts throughout the Resistance War and civil wars. In 1967 he was a permanent member of the All-China Labor Union Federation, a member of the CC, and vice-governor of Kwangtung province.

  Lan P’ing. See Chiang Ch’ing (Mme. Mao Tse-tung).

  Li Ching-ch’uan (p. 432) was for a decade the foremost Party personality with authority in Szechuan, Kweichow, and Yunnan, a vast territory with nearly 100 million inhabitants and numerous minority and frontier peoples, and embracing approaches to Tibet, Burma, Thailand, and Indochina. During the GPCR, frequent clashes, reportedly between Maoist Red Guards and Party authorities in those provinces, seemed aimed at Li. In April, 1967, the official press announced his replacement. Born in Hua-ch’uang county, Kiangsi (circa 1905), in a peasant family, Li was one of Mao’s students when he lectured at the Peasants’ Training Institute, Canton (1924-25). He helped organize peasant uprisings, received some military training in Kiangsi, and became a political commissar in units led by P’eng Teh-huai. During the Long March he served for a year with troops of Chu Teh and Chang Kuo-t’ao when the two Red armies split. After their reunion in the Northwest, Li took commands in the Mongolian border region, organizing guerrilla warfare (1937-47). During the Liberation War he held leading positions in Szechuan, from which developed an unusual degree of individual regional dominance. Reelected to the CC in 1956, he entered the PB in 1958 and was named first secretary of the Party’s Southwest Bureau in 1961. His Party and administrative control in so important an area as Szechuan could hardly have been held without the support of Party Secretary General Teng Hsiao-p’ing (q.v.), a Szechuanese with a special interest there. Evidently Mao was unable to prevent his re-election to the PB in August, 1966, but when Red Guards chose Teng Hsiao-p’ing as a main target Li’s prestige was badly shaken. After Maoists took over the Kweichow provincial Party bureau in 1966, and denounced its old leaders as “bourgeois reactionary,” Red Guard posters reportedly demanded that Li be put to death. In May, 1967, the official Peking press denounced Li as “No. 1 Party power-holder taking the capitalist road in the Southwest region,” holding him responsible for a “bloody tragedy in Chengtu” (the suppression of Maoist anti-Li Red Guards). At this writing he and his bureau were still ensconced in parts of Szechuan and Yunnan, despite announcements in Peking that the CC had dismissed Li.

  Li Chung-chin. See Chiang Ch’ing (Mme. Mao Tse-tung).

  Li Fu-ch’un (p. 73) was re-elected by the eleventh plenary session of the Eighth Congress to the PB in 1966, in the same rank (tenth) he held in 1956 (First Plenum). He was reportedly associated with the “economists” (those advocating the use of material incentives as against ideological incentives). One of Mao’s lifelong friends, and a fellow Hunanese, Li was born in Changsha in 1900, attended middle school there, joined the Work-Study Plan sponsored by the Sino-French Educational Association, Peking, and went to France in 1918. In 1921, with Chou En-lai, Li Li-san, Lo Man (Li Wei-han), Ts’ai Ho-sen, and others, he helped form the Communist Youth League in France, which soon incorporated into the CCP. He worked in the Schneider munitions plant and a motor factory in Paris, and French workers first introduced him to Marxism.

  Li left France in 1924, studied six months in Russia, returned to China, and became a member of the CC and PB in 1924. Director of Party political training in Canton, he was political director of Liu Po-ch’eng’s Sixth Army in the Northern Expedition. After the KMT-CP split he became secretary of the Kiangsi provincial CP (1927-33). He made the Long March and, when the author met him in 1936, was a member of the CC and chairman of the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia regional Party committee (see RNORC). He held important posts in the Yenan government (deputy director, finance department, 1940–45) until, in 1945, he was sent to Manchuria with a Party committee headed by Kao Kang to organize economic and related affairs. In 1956 he was re-elected to the CCP CC: his main duties continued to be in finance and economics. In 1950 he became minister of heavy industry. After Kao Kang’s dismissal in 1954, Li became chairman of the State Planning Commission, continuing in that job at this writing. Re-elected to the PB in 1956, he attended many intraparty conferences abroad and at home, especially concerning economic matters, and signed many trade agreements, as well as the China-Korea Treaty o
f Alliance (1961). Li Fu-ch’un and his wife (Ts’ai Chang, q. v.) were re-elected to the CC in 1966, and Li to the PB, but Li himself was attacked by wall posters for allegedly opposing a new Great Leap Forward economic policy. Paradoxically, Li Fu-ch’un was in 1967 elevated to membership in the standing committee of the PB, which normally had consisted of Mao and six vice-chairmen of the CC.

  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 ran
ge 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.