by Edgar Snow
In China’s 3,000 years of written history the combination of Mao’s achievements was perhaps unique. Others had ridden to power on the backs of the peasants and left them in the mud; Mao sought to keep them permanently erect. Dreamer, warrior, politician, ideologist, poet, egoist, revolutionary destroyer-creator, Mao had led a movement to uproot one-fourth of humanity and turn a wretched peasantry into a powerful modern army which united a long-divided empire; provided a system of thought shaped by valid Chinese needs and aspirations; brought scientific and technical training to millions and literacy to the masses; laid the foundations of a modernized economy, able to place world-shaking nuclear power in Chinese hands; restored China’s self-respect and world respect for or fear of China; and set up examples of self-reliance for such of the earth’s poor and oppressed as dared to rebel. No wonder Mao refused to yield ground to those who sought to revise his success formula.
For Mao, as he neared the three-quarter-century mark, the GPCR might be a last struggle. But Maoism had become larger than Mao, and if the GPCR failed to suppress revisionism, neither could revisionism permanently erase the impact, for better or worse, of the life of Mao Tse-tung.
(In 1965 the author talked with Mao for four hours and found him mentally alert and in good health for his age. At this writing there was still no evidence to support newly made rumors of Mao’s “fatal” illnesses—cancer, heart trouble, Parkinson’s disease, etc.)
Mif, Pavel (p. 424) was Stalin’s appointee to the CMT Far Eastern Department to replace Lominadze after the latter joined Syrtzov in an attempt to overthrow Stalin. Mif had been on the CMT “China Commission” as early as 1925; as a teacher at Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow he helped to expel pro-Trotsky Chinese students there in 1927. He was made director of the university in 1929, when he also took over the CMT China desk and eliminated Earl Browder as chief of the CMT Far Eastern Bureau. Mif’s role as brood-hen of his Chinese students sent back to take over the CCP leadership is briefly described in Part Four, Chapter 6, note 3. His influence waned after Mao’s rise in 1935 but he continued to serve in the CMT until 1938. He then became a joint editor of Tikhii Ocean, organ of the U.S.S.R. Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations.
Nieh Ho-t’ing (p. 257n) was born in Hu-yuan, Anhui, in 1908, in a family of small landlords. After primary school he studied one year in the Han-Mei (Chinese-American) Middle School in Anyuan, then graduated from a two-year teachers’ training school in Anyuan. Involved in revolutionary student activity, he fled from an arrest order, to Nanchang, where he entered a military academy. In 1924 he joined the CCP and was sent back to Anhui, where he taught for a year and organized a Party cell. After April, 1927, he took part in an Anhui uprising which failed. He participated in the Nanchang and Canton uprisings, and escaped to Hongkong. He worked underground in Shanghai (1928-29) and entered Kiangsi in 1930. As a Red division commander he was wounded, recovered in time for the Changsha victory, and fought throughout the Kiangsi campaigns. In 1935 he was deputy chief of the political department of the Red Army. In the war against Japan he organized large guerrilla forces in Shansi and Hopei. A member of the CC and of the National Defense Council, he seemed somewhat eclipsed after the dismissal of P’eng Teh-huai in 1960.
Nieh Jung-chen (p. 329) was in 1967 a member of the CC, a vice-premier of the State Council, vice-chairman of the National Defense Council, a member of the Party military affairs committee, and chairman of the Scientific and Technological Commission to which China’s nuclear program was entrusted. He was born near Chungking, Szechuan, in 1899, in a rich peasant family. He left Chungking Middle School to join the Work-Study group that went to France in 1920. He worked part time in the Schneider munitions plant, then entered a “workers’ college” in Belgium, studied natural science two years, and acquired some technical training as an electrician. In France he met Chou En-lai, studied Marxism under the French instructor who taught Li Fu-ch’un, and joined the CCP by way of the branch CYL in France. He learned French and some German and English. In 1924 he studied in the Red Army Military Academy in Moscow for six months, and in 1925–26 was secretary of the political department of Whampoa Academy. He participated in the Nanchang Uprising, as political commissar in Yeh T’ing’s division, took part in the Canton Commune, and from 1931 was in the political department of the Red Army in Kiangsi. He made the Long March and in 1936 was chief of staff of the First Red Army Corps. During the Resistance War he became famous as an organizer of guerrilla forces in the Wu-T’ai Mountains, and after the Liberation War was made one of China’s ten marshals of the PLA. In 1966 he entered the PB as a full member, with duties of the highest responsibility.
P’eng Chen (p. 419), the dynamic former mayor of Peking, stood only twenty-ninth in CC precedence but was listed as ninth in PB rank before his seeming political eclipse in 1966. It was under Liu Shao-ch’i that P’eng rose to prominence in the Party for his work (1935-39) in the North China Bureau. Their close relationship persisted when, while P’eng was Peking Party secretary, and first deputy to Teng Hsiao-p’ing on the CC secretariat, Chairman Liu became the main target of the Red Guards among “those in the Party in authority who are taking the capitalist road.”
Born in Shansi in 1899, in an impoverished gentry family, P’eng attended a normal school where he was infected by the May Fourth Movement. He drifted into radical company, studied Marxism in the CYL in 1922, helped organize railway workers, and was briefly jailed in Peking. He joined the CCP in 1926 but played no significant role until he began to organize students and teachers in the Peking-Tientsin area in 1935, at a time when Liu Shao-ch’i was chief of the bureau there (underground) and K’e Cheng-shih was his first deputy. In 1937 he visited Yenan and was assigned to work in Shansi and Hopei. From 1939 to 1942 he taught at the Party school in Yenan and, as a deputy director under Lin Piao, had special responsibilities for indoctrination in “rectification” principles. Elected to the CC in 1945, he accompanied Lin Piao to Manchuria and served there (1946-49) as Party deputy under Ch’en Yun, after which he became secretary of the Peking Party Committee (1949-66) and mayor (1951-66). Re-elected to the PB in 1956, he was No. 2 under Teng Hsiao-p’ing in the CC secretariat, the operational arm of the PB.
P’eng began to emerge as CCP CC spokesman abroad when he denounced Khrushchev at Bucharest in 1960 for criticizing Mao and advocating coexistence with the U.S.A. Subsequently he led various delegations abroad (1961-63). This work was climaxed (1965) by a long speech in Indonesia which bitterly denounced Russia and contained all the essential exhortations repeated later in Lin Piao’s call for world revolution under Mao’s banner—“Long Live the Victory of the People’s War!”
P’eng was accused by the press and by Red Guard posters of planning a “February [1966] coup” against Mao, but the charges rested publicly unsubstantiated two years later. Stripped of his posts in the spring of 1966 and succeeded by Li Hsueh-feng as Peking Party secretary, he was variously reported killed or a suicide. But in April, 1967, he was recognized by a foreign visitor when seen (partly bald, of medium height, a brief case under his arm) strolling through the Imperial Palace grounds of Peking, a stone’s throw from Mao Tse-tung’s residence. Official Peking press vilification of P’eng as a “renegade,” “revisionist,” “counterrevolutionary,” and “anti-Party minister” continued throughout 1967 but no confession by P’eng was yet forthcoming.
P’eng P’ai (p. 157), a member of the Central Committee, held views on the poor peasants as a “main force” of the revolution very similar to Mao Tse-tung’s. In the same month (November, 1928) that Mao set up a soviet at Chingkangshan, P’eng P’ai led formation of the Hailufeng Soviet on the Kwangtung provincial border. Hailufeng was destroyed by KMT forces and P’eng P’ai was executed in 1929. See RNORC.
P’eng Teh-huai (p. 169) was deputy commander-in-chief of the Eighth Route Army, under Chu Teh. He successfully expanded guerrilla war against Japan (1937-45). As deputy commander of the Northwest Border Area during the Second Civil Wa
r (1946’49), P’eng defeated KMT forces which invaded Shensi. In 1950 he succeeded Lin Piao as commander-in-chief of the Chinese “Volunteers” in North Korea and held that position until the truce with the United Nations forces. As a marshal of the army (1955), a member of the PB, and Minister of Defense, P’eng was until 1960 the chief liaison between the PLA and the Soviet military advisers during the modernization of China’s armed forces and basic construction of modern military industries.
As bitter Sino-Soviet ideological and strategic differences intensified during 1957–59, P’eng apparently favored placating Russia to gain time and strength. He did not believe China was yet ready to “go it alone.” He also opposed Mao’s “self-reliance” strategy and a return to Yenan guerrilla-style training in the army. In September, 1959, P’eng was defeated in a fateful meeting of the Party and defense chiefs and was dismissed from his posts. Under P’eng’s successor, Lin Piao, Russian influences were extirpated from the army. (See RNORC and TOSOTR.) In 1967 the Red Guard and official press aired charges against P’eng Teh-huai as a counterrevolutionary who conspired with Liu Shao-ch’i against Mao as early as 1959.
Po I-po (p. 419) rose steadily in the Party hierarchy, reaching the PB in 1956. He was re-elected in August, 1966, but in 1967 came under attack by the Red Guards for alleged past sympathy with the policies of Chairman Liu Shao-ch’i.
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 st
aff 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.