Red Star over China (78 page)

In 1945 the official Party repudiation of Wang Ming was embodied in a long historical review signed by Mao and adopted at the opening of the Seventh Congress of the CCP: “Resolution on Some Questions of the History of Our Party” (see Mao's
SW
, Vol. I). The document identified three infantile “left” lines, followed in opposition to Mao's policies, and the most serious was that led by Wang Ming and Po Ku (1931-34). Mao blamed Wang's doctrinaire ideas—basically, the rigid application of foreign (Soviet) Marxist dogma to Chinese conditions—for “the loss of more Communist lives than enemies'.”

In 1951, to cap the climax, Ch'en Po-ta wrote “Mao Tse-tung's Theory of the Revolution Is the Combination of Marxism-Leninism with the Chinese Revolution,” in which Wang Ming was profiled for posterity as the archetype of “slavish” mentality and blind following of foreign dogma in defiance of Chinese conditions and revolutionary practice (Mao's) based upon them. Despite this vilification, Wang Ming was reelected to the CC in 1956, but his position as No. 97 in that ninety-seven-member body ironically honored him only in the breach.

Wang Ming's prestige was already shattered even in 1936, when Mao ridiculed (to the author) the inaccuracies of Wang Ming's reports in
Inprecorr.
When the author first met Wang Ming in Yenan, in 1939, he was astonished by Wang's youthful appearance (he was then only thirty-two), charmed by his urbanity, and struck by marks of his sedentary life—he was a round little man, a head shorter than Mao—as well as by the mild contempt with which he was referred to by veterans of the Long March. Clearly Wang constituted no further threat to Mao, but perhaps the latter welcomed—
pour encourager les autres
—Wang's earnest and open espousal of his cause in order to expose and thoroughly eradicate any remaining tendencies in the Party to exploit borrowed Russian prestige in competing for internal power. In 1967 the Japanese press reported that Wang Ming had secretly returned to Russia with his wife.

Wang Ping-nan
(p.43n), an assistant foreign minister in 1967, and one of China's most experienced diplomats, first came to prominence when he served as Chou En-lai's political secretary in Chungking (1938-45).

Wang Ping-nan was born in 1906, in Sanyuan, Shensi. His father was a rich landlord and a blood brother of General Yang Hu-ch'eng, who made Wang his protégé and sent him to Germany to prepare to become his secretary. In Berlin he became active among radical students, and there met the
daughter of a conservative German family, a remarkable linguist who became his wife. When he returned to China in 1936, to work as Yang's secretary, he was also underground liaison between the CCP, Chang Hsueh-liang, and Yang Hu-ch'eng. He was in Sian before and during Chiang Kai-shek's captivity there, which he helped to bring about. In June, 1936, he served as interpreter in an interview between General Yang and the author. After visiting in Yenan, where he first met Mao in 1937, he was sent to Shanghai and later to Chungking to the Eighth Route Army liaison headquarters of Chou En-lai (1938-47). During the KMT-CP “peace talks” (1945-46), mediated by General George C. Marshall, Wang was secretary to the CP delegation. Subsequently he held important posts in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and in 1954 was made general secretary of the Chinese delegation to the Geneva Conference on Indochina, headed by Chou En-lai. As ambassador to Poland 1955–64, he became China's senior diplomat in Europe and principal Chinese representative in United States-China ambassadorial talks held in Warsaw from 1955 until Wang's return to Peking in 1964. Wang also took part in the 1962 Geneva Conference on Laos and led important missions which resulted in significant political, economic, and military agreements between China and Poland, Germany, and other East European countries. Made a deputy minister of foreign affairs under Ch'en Yi in 1964, he was China's foremost expert on German and Polish affairs. He and Anna Wang were divorced in 1954 and both remarried. Their son, an engineer, remained in China.

Wang Shuo-tao
(p. 295n) was born in Liuyang, Hunan, in 1907, in a family of poor peasants, who somehow managed to see him through primary school. He was adopted by a more prosperous uncle, who sent him to middle school and, at twenty, to a state agricultural college. Through the influence of Chen Tu-hsiu's
New Youth
he turned to radicalism, joining the CYL in 1922. In Canton in 1923, he enrolled in the Peasant Movement Training Institute, where Mao Tse-tung was deputy director and P'eng P'ai a teacher. Under their influence he joined the CP and received instruction in Marxism and in “principles of land revolution.” In 1926 he organized peasant unions in his native town. They took part in the Autumn Harvest Uprising (1927), and began confiscating land and redistributing property to the poor. After their defeat, Wang found his way, to Mao Tse-tung's guerrilla forces. He was a political worker with P'eng Teh-huai's army when Changsha was captured (1930), and his wife was caught and executed there. At the end of the Long March he joined the Red Army expedition to Shansi in 1935, and became political commissar of the newly organized Fifteenth Army Corps. During the Resistance War Wang headed guerrilla detachments organized on the Hunan-Kiangsi border, where his Party deputy chief was Wang En-mao. Subsequently he became Hunan Party chief and governor (1949), a member of the CC from 1945, Minister of Communications, SC, 1958–64, and secretary of the CCP Central-South Bureau from 1964. In 1966 he held the important post of
deputy chief of the General Political Department of the PLA and was a member of the CC group leading the GPCR.

Wu Han
(460), a non-Party intellectual leader of the China Democratic League, who closely collaborated with the Communists from the 1930's onward, became a principal target of the GPCR when, in November, 1965, he was attacked in official publications for his play,
Hai Jui Dismissed from Office.
In the same month Chiang Ch'ing, Mme. Mao Tse-tung, “exposed” Wu Han's play as “anti-Party” and “opposed to socialism” in a Shanghai speech later described as the “clarion call” which initiated the GPCR.

Wu Han was born in Yiwu, Chekiang, in 1909, in a middle-class family too poor to pay for his education at National (Tsing Hua) University, where Wu supported himself by tutoring until his graduation in 1934. The author first met him in that year, when he was already a lecturer at the university and one of the few faculty members who risked imprisonment by supporting the radical-patriotic student movement. After the Japanese occupation of Peking (1937) Wu went to Yunnan, where, as a historian and a scholar, he won intellectual prominence and was a founder of the China Democratic League. He helped form the CPPCC, in a united front with the CCP, working with Hsu Ping and Lo Man. After 1949 he held many offices in the Peking municipal government; e.g., he was one of the city's eight deputy mayors. As a “democratic personage” Wu made a number of trips in Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe, representing cultural and friendship groups. He was also dean of the arts and science department of Tsing Hua University, a national official of the All-China Federation of Democratic Youth, and, at the time of his fall, vice-president of the Peking branch of the World Peace Committee.

Mao's view of Wu's role in activities aimed at the downgrading of Mao Tse-tung's influence—if not his total removal from power, as some Red Guard wall posters of 1967 alleged—may have been accurately portrayed in a huge cartoon displayed in the Drum Tower in Peking. The cartoon lampooned twenty-seven leading Party members accused of revisionism, shown in a procession headed by Lu Ting-yi, former PB propaganda chief. Immediately behind Lu trotted Wu Han, wearing the uniform of an imperial messenger (yamen-runner), while at the tail of the procession, carried in sedan chairs, came Chairman Liu Shao-ch'i and Deputy Premier Teng Hsiao-p'ing, the big-game targets of the GPCR.

Wu Han's specialty as a Chinese historian was the Ming Dynasty. His controversial play,
Hai Jui Dismissed from Office,
dramatized the experience of a Ming official who dared to displease the emperor by criticizing some of his policies. The official was wrongfully dismissed but later vindicated as a patriot. Wu Han's play appeared in 1961, with the support of Lu Ting-yi and P'eng Chen, mayor of Peking. Five years elapsed before analyses in the Maoist press effectively exposed it as an allegorical attack on Mao: Wu had intended Hai Jui to be likened to P'eng Teh-huai, who was “dismissed” by Mao in 1959.

By 1967 the play was recognized as only one of the many “big poisonous weeds” promoted by cultural “revisionists” and “those taking the capitalist road,” led by Liu Shao-ch'i. Nothing better demonstrated the chasm that separates Western China experts from comprehension of Communist China than the fact that not one of them discerned the current political significance of Wu Han's play, and of the published Aesopian literature of the same nature, before these works came under counterattack by the Maoists.

Wu Hsiu-ch'uan
(p. 349) continued work in Soviet relations assignments and as CCP representative in many meetings of foreign CPs, and was mentioned prominently as a Maoist supporter during the GPCR. Wu was born in Wuch'ang, Hupeh, in 1909. He studied in Russia at the CMT's Sun Yat-sen University (1927-30) and on his return was a professor at Fu-t'an University in Shanghai. After 1949 his most dramatic appearance was at the head of Peking's delegation to the United Nations in 1950, where he berated (20,000 words!) the United States as an “aggressor” in Korea. No. 62 in the CC since 1956, he held many assignments in Eastern Europe and at international party conferences.

Wu Liang-p'ing
(p. 106) was born in Fenghua, Chekiang (1906), in a merchant family. He was in the CC from 1962, and became Minister of Communications in 1967. Wu graduated from Nanyang (Overseas) Middle School, studied at Amoy and Tahsia (Shanghai) universities, took part in the May 30th Incident, joined the CYL in 1925, and studied at Sun Yat-sen University (1925-29) in Moscow, where he joined the CCP branch. Later he traveled to Europe. Returning to Shanghai he worked in the underground and translated Engels'
History of Socialism, Anti-Duehring,
and
The Materialist Interpretation of History and Dialecticism.
He was imprisoned, 1931–32, in Shanghai, and then entered Soviet Kiangsi, where he worked in Lin Piao's political department. He has been mistakenly identified as one of the “Twenty-eight Bolsheviks,” but in Kiangsi was a Mao supporter. When the author met him in 1936 he was Mao's secretary and a member of the agit-prop department of the army. He spoke excellent English and Russian and knew some French. For an interview with Wu, see
RNORC.

Yang Ch'eng-wu
(p. 169n) rose to membership (alternate) in the PB in 1966, replaced Lo Jui-ch'ing (his vilified former superior) as chief of staff of the PLA, and became a vice-chairman of the supreme Party military affairs committee.

A native of Fukien of peasant birth (1912), Yang joined the guerrillas when he was seventeen. He was largely educated by the Party and its army, especially under Lin Piao, with whose command he fought and/or studied continuously, 1932–38. After the Long March (during which he led a regiment), Yang was a student in the Red Army University at Pao An when the author met him in 1936. During the Resistance War he served under Nieh Jung-chen in Shansi, and acquitted himself so well that a Japanese commander once wrote to congratulate him. In the Liberation
War he was deputy commander of group armies in Hopei, Shansi, and Chahar, and afterward commanded the Peking-Tientsin garrison, where he was also PLA Party secretary until 1955. Elected an alternate member of the CC in 1956, he set up China's air defense command and its Party organization. He served as an infantry private for a year during the Great Leap Forward period. Becoming deputy chief of staff of the PLA in 1959, he accompanied Lo Jui-ch'ing on many of his missions until the latter's eclipse, when Yang succeeded him.

Yang Hu-ch'eng
(p. 42) during the Resistance War offered his services to the Generalissimo. General Yang was put under house detention in Chungking, and toward the end of the war he was secretly executed.

Yang K'ai-hui
(p. 91) came from a wealthy landowning family of Hunan. She was the daughter of Yang Ch'ang-chi, Mao Tse-tung's highly respected teacher at the First Teachers' Training School in Changsha. Hsiao Yu gives a sympathetic portrait of Yang K'ai-hui in his dubious memoirs,
Mao Tse-tung and I Were Beggars
(Syracuse, N.Y., 1959). Mao was a frequent visitor in Yang's home; in Peking he often dined with the family. Marriages were then arranged by parents; in many cases, the bride and bridegroom did not see each other before betrothal (as in Mao's first “marriage”). Yang Ch'ang-chi obviously had advanced ideas about women's rights or he would not have provided a higher education for his daughter and permitted her to dine at the table with Mao and himself. Mao influenced Yang K'ai-hui toward radicalism—and marriage to himself, in 1920. She was then twenty-five. When arrested, in 1930, she refused to repudiate the Communist Party, or Mao, as the alternative to death. She was executed in the same year, at Changsha. Yang K'ai-hui bore Mao two sons, Mao An-ch'ing and Mao An-ying.

Yang Shang-k'un
(p. 258) after 1936 became secretary of the CC in Shansi and chief of its united-front department (1937-43), then director of the general office of the CC (1943-59), until in 1956 he ranked forty-second among ninety-seven full members and ninety-six alternate members of the CC. Yet in 1966 Yang was accused of major duplicity and dismissed from all his posts.

Born in Szechuan, in 1903, in a middle-class family, Yang was influenced by the cultural renaissance (May Fourth Movement, 1919), joined a Socialist youth group, and was sent to the CMT-organized Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow, where he entered the branch CCP. He returned to China with Wang Ming in 1927 and was considered one of the “Twenty-eight Bolsheviks.” At the end of the Long March, when the author met him, he was acting director of the political department of the Red Army. As alternate secretary of the CC secretariat 1956–66, he held responsible positions in meetings with Soviet and other foreign Communists, especially after the Sino-Soviet split. In 1966 he was accused of utilizing such opportunities to conspire against Mao, and Red Guard posters alleged that he had tried to wire-tap Mao's conversations. In April, 1967, “revolutionary cadres” of Peking reportedly demanded his execution,