Red Star over China (70 page)

Hatem, Dr. George.
See Ma Hai-teh.

Ho Lung
(p. 78) led an even more remarkable life than the largely hearsay account of him in this text may suggest. Born in 1896 (during the Ch'ing Dynasty), in Sangchi county, Hunan province, the son of a military officer, he organized armed peasant insurrections at least a decade before Mao Tse-tung tried it. His reputation as a “bandit” was well earned. A youth of sixteen, with little schooling and an empty belly, he tried to kill a government officer, then gathered a band of outlaws in the mountains. By the time he was twenty-one his 19,000 followers held eight counties. Rebels in three provinces united around him, calling themselves a Peasant Army. They became so formidable that government forces were obliged to grant them amnesty and monetary rewards to disband. Ho Lung went down to Changsha, a free man, to ally himself with Dr. Sun Yat-sen.

In 1920 Ho raised a brigade for the Nationalist Army. In 1926 he joined the CCP, while he was in command of the Twentieth KMT Army. At Nanchang he joined Yeh T'ing and Chu Teh in the armed uprising of August 1, 1927. Defeated, he escaped to Shanghai but then re-entered the Kiangsi-Hunan area and recruited new forces for Chu Teh and Mao. From 1927 onward he was a top army leader, but he was not admitted to the CC until 1945.

Ho Lung's refusal to give the support of his Second Front Army to Chang Kuo-t'ao during the Mao-Chang dispute of 1935–36 was decisive in Chang's final defeat. Throughout the war against Japan and the Second Civil War he held major field commands; in 1955 he was commissioned a marshal of the PLA. A member of the cabinet (minister of physical culture) and a vice-premier, he held his rank in the Party PB at the eleventh plenary session, 1966, but in 1967 was reported under mild attack by wall posters for alleged sympathies with Lo Jui-ch'ing
(q.v.).

Ho Tzu-ch'en
(p. 91), Mao's second wife (excluding his unconsummated
childhood marriage), was the daughter of a Kiangsi landlord. A teacher before she joined the Communists, she married Mao in 1930. In 1937 Ho Tzu-ch'en formally charged Wu Kuang-wei (“Lily Wu”), an interpreter in Yenan, with having alienated Mao's affections. Mao denied the charges and then sought a divorce, which was granted by a special court set up by the CCP CC. Both Miss Wu and Ho Tzu-ch'en were exiled from Yenan. Ho Tzu-ch'en and Mao had two children in Kiangsi, left behind in the care of Red peasants when the Long March began. The children were never found after the war. In Shensi, Ho Tzu-ch'en bore Mao a daughter. In Yenan, in 1939, I was told that Ho Tzu-ch'en had gone, with her child, to live in Russia.

Hsia Hsi
(p. 147) was a member of the New People's Study Society organized by Mao in 1918. He joined the first CCP cell organized (by Mao) in Hunan. A loyal Maoist, he was in 1967 a high-ranking member of the CC.

Hsiang Chung-fa
(p. 426) was, while general secretary of the CCP CC (1928—31), largely a puppet of Li Li-san
(q.v.)
and Li's backer, Lominadze, Stalin's agent in the CMT. Hsiang replaced Ch'u Ch'iu-pai at the Sixth Congress of the CCP held in Moscow (July, 1928), a meeting which coincided with the CMT Sixth Congress.

Of Shanghai working-class origin, semiliterate in Chinese, Hsiang was trained in the CMT's Sun Yat-sen University in Russia. He was the CMT choice to break a deadlock between left and right Chinese “intellectuals” in the PB. As a “proletarian,” Hsiang provided a front behind which Lominadze supported Li Li-san and the CMT line of the period. Under Stalin's control, the CMT had just decided that the capitalist world was disintegrating, and compromise even with Social Democrats was ruled out; the Party was to lead imminent great upsurges.

When Li Li-san's line—uprisings in the cities supported by Red Army attacks—failed, Li was discredited at a Party plenum in January, 1931. Hsiang Chung-fa was retained in the PB only after his abject confession of error. The CMT's Pavel Mif had become the new power behind the CC PB. When Li Li-san led a revolt against Mif's domination, Mif had Li recalled to Moscow. Meanwhile Hsiang Chung-fa's address was betrayed to KMT police by a Li Li-san adherent, Ku Shun-chang. After Hsiang's arrest and execution in June, Wang Ming
(q.v.)
became general secretary. Ku Shun-chang's entire family was assassinated, the KMT police reporting that the CCP PB had ordered the deaths in reprisal. True or not, the report shattered CP influence in the Shanghai labor unions, where Ku had had a following. See
Part Four
,
Chapter 6
, note 3.

Hsiao Ching-kuang
(p. 148n), born in Changsha, Hunan, in 1902, was in 1967 one of a dozen powerful military leaders in China. The son of a middle-class family, Hsiao attended Hunan Normal School (Mao's alma mater). He joined the Socialist Youth Corps in Shanghai in 1920 and in that year reached Russia and entered the Comintern's Sun Yat-sen University, where he entered the branch CCP. Returning to China in 1924, he became an instructor and student cadet at Whampoa Academy.
He took part in the Northern Expedition (1926). After the 1927 debacle he studied in Russia (Red Army College) until 1930. Back in China, he entered Soviet Kiangsi, where he commanded the Seventh Army Corps.

Hsiao never became part of the “returned students” (“Twenty-eight Bolsheviks”) group. In 1933 he supported the so-called “Lo-Ming” line, a pro-Mao position in intraparty struggle which was also favored by T'an Chen-lin, Teng Hsiao-p'ing, Teng Tzu-hui, and Mao's brother, Tse-t'an. He was, with them, disciplined for acting contrary to the PB's directives. In 1936 Hsiao Ching-kuang told the author that Li Teh, the German CMT adviser, had overruled Mao and Chu Teh to decide the strategy followed during 1934 which ended in success for Chiang Kai-shek's fifth anti-Communist campaign.

After the Long March, Hsiao took part in the 1935 Shansi expedition and was credited with recruiting 8,000 volunteers there. A deputy commander under Lin Piao, he distinguished himself in the Second World War and the second KMT-CP civil war. In 1955 he was made a marshal of the army. A member of the CC from 1945 and of the NPC from 1954, Hsiao Ching-kuang became (with Lin Piao's rise to No. 2 position in the PB in 1966) a member of the all-powerful Party military affairs committee and an alternate in the PB. His wife was Russian. Hsiao's autobiography (to 1936) appears in
RNORC.

Hsiao Hua
(p. 257n), born in 1914, was chairman of the general political department of the PLA in 1967, and was responsible for indoctrination of PLA Red Guards in the Thought of Mao Tse-tung.

He was born in Hsing-ko county, Kiangsi, in 1914, in a poor peasant family. In 1936 he told the author that he had been “educated entirely by the Red Army and the CCP.” He was a youth organizational leader in the army (beginning at Chingkangshan) from the age of fifteen. Only twenty at the start of the Long March, he was political commissar of the Second Division, First Army Corps, two years later. Commander of the Hopei-Chahar-Liaoning Military Region in 1946, he was a group army leader in 1948. In the CCP CC from 1945, he was director of the General Cadres Department, PLA, from 1956, deputy secretary general, Party military commission, from 1961, deputy chief of the CC Control Committee and a member of the CC secretariat from 1963. A loyal Maoist for nearly four decades, he was, during the GPCR, still “one of the youngest” veteran combat Communists. In 1967 he was deputy chief of the “all-army cultural affairs group,” a member of the supreme military affairs committee, and an alternate member of the PB.

Hsieh Fu-chih
(p. 116n) in 1966 was elected to the PB (as an alternate member) and succeeded Lo Jui-ch'ing
(q.v.)
as Minister of Public Security. He became an important figure in the purge activities as one of those “leading the cultural revolution under the CC.”

Born in Hunan in 1899, Hsieh joined the partisans in the Oyuwan Soviet in the early thirties and was said to have received most of his education in the army. In 1938 he was a deputy brigade commander under
Ch'en Keng. He took part in the “100 Regiments Battle” (1940) and continued to distinguish himself as Ch'en Keng's forces grew to group army size. From 1949 onward Hsieh held leading roles in the Southwest Military Region, including secretaryship of the Yunnan provincial Party when Ch'en Keng was military commander (1950-53) of the area. Briefly Minister of Interior (1949), Hsieh was first elected to the CC in 1956. After 1953 he specialized in security, legal, and political organizational affairs. His wife, Wang Ting-kuo, was a member of the People's Supreme Court.

Hsu Hai-tung
(p. 168) became, with the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war, a brigade commander in the Eighth Route Army. In 1939 he organized guerrilla forces in Shantung which by 1944 had spread into his old stamping grounds in Honan and Hupeh. Invalided by wounds, he was given rear-area assignments from 1945 onward. In 1956 he was elected to the Eighth CCP CC. By 1957 he appeared in public only occasionally, in a wheel chair.

Hsu Hsiang-ch'ien
(p. 168) commanded a division of the Eighth Route Army from 1937 and in 1939 led troops across Japanese lines to form a guerrilla base in Shantung. During the Liberation War (1946-49) he captured Taiyuan, capital of Shansi. He was elected to the CC in 1945 and became one of the ten marshals of the army named in 1955. In 1966 he was elected to the PB for the first time, and became a vice-chairman of the supreme CC military affairs committee. In January, 1967, he was made chairman of the subcommittee of the GPCR in the PLA, under the new chief of staff, Yang Ch'eng-wu. He thus seemed to have completely overcome the political handicap of his past with Chang Kuo-t'ao.

Born in Wu T'ai county, Shansi, in 1902, in a landlord family, Hsu was educated at a normal school; in 1924 he entered Whampoa Academy. He joined the CP in 1927, took part in the Canton Uprising, worked with P'eng P'ai in the Hailufeng Soviet, and then went underground in Shanghai. In 1930 he organized Anhui guerrilla forces and rose to the rank of army commander. Hsu won a major victory over one of Chiang Kai-shek's best commanders in 1931, and his skill helped build up the Fourth Red Army, north of the Yangtze River, under his political chief, Chang Kuo-t'ao. In 1933 defeats forced them to move westward and set up the Szechuan Soviet, where the Fourth Army grew rapidly until 1935, when the southern Reds met the Chang-Hsu forces (100,000?) at Moukung. Owing to the Chang-Mao dispute and failure to agree at Maoerhkai, the two main armies divided, Hsu remaining in Sikang with Chang, Chu Teh and others, while Mao moved on to Shensi (1935). A year later (December, 1936) Hsu's army moved north and followed Mao but was ambushed while attempting to cross the Yellow River. The Red forces were badly defeated and Hsu and Chang arrived in Pao An in a parlous state. The northern column was badly cut up by attacks and reduced, under the command of Li Hsien-nien, to 2,000 men. At a CC meeting in Shensi in 1937 Hsu Hsiang-ch'ien was exonerated of political
responsibility for Political Commissar Chang's “anti-Party” decisions during the Szechuan schism. See
RNORC.

Hsu Ping
(p. 419) was deputy director of the United-Front Department of the CCP CC until he came under attack during the GPCR.

Hsu was born in Honan, in 1902, in a family able to send him to Germany to study economics. In Berlin he joined the CYL (1920), which merged with the CCP. After studying at the CMT's Sun Yat-sen University (1925-27), in Moscow, he returned to do underground work in China. A university professor in Peking when the author met him in 1935, he provided important liaison between the Manchurian exiled armies in China, and the Red Army, which led to a united front. Deputy mayor of Peking in 1949, he was also deputy director of the United-Front Department of the CCP CC from that time onward. In 1967 he was denounced by Red Guard publications for having authorized Communists held in KMT jails in Peking in 1936 (!) to sign repudiations of communism (in order to secure their release on the eve of war against Japan). Hsu was also charged with “sheltering renegades” in the Party—when Liu Shao-ch'i was his chief in the North China Bureau of the Party. His wife, Chang Hsiao-mei, was a veteran Communist and vice-chairman of the All-China Federation of Democratic Women.

Hsu T'eh-li
(p. 85) was hailed by Mao as his “most respected and beloved teacher.” Born in 1877 in Changsha, Hunan, in a poor family, he had primary school education, entered a teachers' school, then taught school, tutoring himself in math. After taking part in the 1911 overthrow of the imperial government, he taught at Hunan First Normal, where he helped Yang Chang-ch'i prevent Mao Tse-tung's expulsion as a student. At the age of forty-three he joined a Work-Study group, went to France, and worked part time as a cook while studying at Paris and Lyons universities. He was in the band of students (including Ch'en Yi, Li Li-san and Ts'ai Ho-sen,
qq.v.)
who “occupied” the Institut Franco-Chinois, and was deported with them. Returning to Hunan, he taught at the Changsha Girls' Normal School, finally being admitted to the CCP in 1927. A participant in the Nanchang Uprising, he retreated to Swatow and escaped to Shanghai. For two years (1928-30) he studied at the CMT's Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow, then returned to China, to become director (commissar) of education in the All-Central Soviet Government, except for the period that office was held by Ch'u Ch'iu-pai. At fifty-seven he was the oldest man to make the Long March. A deputy to the NPC from 1954, he remained active in a wide range of political and cultural tasks, and ranked fifteenth in the CCP CC.

Huang Ching
(Yu Ch'i-wei, or David Yu) (p. 41n), who became the first Communist mayor of Tientsin, in 1949, won national fame in the CCP as a hero of the 1935–37 student movement of North China. Its leaders helped to restore Party influence among youth in the great cities after a decade of bloody suppression.