Background
There is conflicting evidence about An’s place of birth. It was probably in Sui-te in north Shensi, but Japanese sources use Hunan.
There is conflicting evidence about An’s place of birth. It was probably in Sui-te in north Shensi, but Japanese sources use Hunan.
He is said to have graduated from the Sui-te Normal School in Shensi and then to have studied at Peking Normal College, presumably in the 1920’s. An is reported to have joined the CCP while a student in Peking. He subsequently went to the USSR for further study.
He was imprisoned in Peking in the mid-1930’s, but when the war broke out in mid-1937, he was working as a Party organizer in an area some 50 miles northeast of Lin-fen in Shansi Province.1 He was then working with Chang Yu-ch’ing, a Party leader captured and killed by the Japanese in 1942 in Taiyuan, the Shansi capital. The area where Chang and An worked was known as the T’ai-yueh region; by 1942 An was a member of the T’ai-yueh Party Committee. This region was a part of the territory controlled by the Eighth Route Army’s 129th Division (commanded by Liu Po-ch’eng), and together with the T’ai-hang mountain area to the northeast, it made up one of the major divisions of the Communist Shansi- Hopeh-Shantung-Honan (Chin-Chi-Lu-Yu) Border Region (see under Yang Hsiu-feng). Among his colleagues during this period were such important political and military figures as Po I-po and Ch’en Keng.
An’s activities in the latter years of the war and during the early postwar years are not documented. However, he was apparently assigned to Manchuria after the war ended in 1945; in any event, he was identified in 1949 as a deputy director of the Industry Department under the Northeast Administrative Committee (NEAC), the name of the principal administrative unit for the Communist government in Manchuria from 1946 to mid-1949. An was in Peking in September 1949 to attend the first session of the CPPCC, the organization that inaugurated the new central government (October 1). He attended the CPPCC as one of 16 CCP delegates, a group that included such prominent Communists as Mao Tse-tung, Liu Shao- ch’i, and Chou En-lai. An was not elected to the CPPCC National Committee in 1949, but when the Second National Committee was formed in December 1954, he was named as a member representing the CCP. He has also served as a CCP representative on the Third and Fourth National Committees, which first met in April 1959 and December 1964-January 1965, respectively. In addition, he has been a member of the governing CPPCC Standing Committee in the Second, Third, and Fourth CPPCC’s.
An’s work with the CPPCC has been minor in contrast to his duties within the Party. As early as 1946 he was reported as director of the important CCP Organization Department. P’eng Chen (q.v.), a far more senior leader, became the director that same year, and as a consequence An was made a deputy director. P’eng returned to the directorship in about 1949 and held it until 1952 when Central Committee member Jao Shu-shih (q.v.) assumed the post. An, in the meantime, continued as the deputy director. In 1954-55 Jao was charged with plotting against the top Party leadership. Jao and his major accomplice Kao Kang were dismissed (see under Kao Kang). Subsequent to these events, the Organization Department apparently lost some of its power, with a number of its functions being transferred to two other Central Committee organs: the Committee for Organs Directly under the Central Committee and the Committee for Organs Directly under the Central People’s Government (see under Kung Tzu-jung). An was apparently unaffected by the dismissal of Jao Shu-shih, but the Organization Department remained without a director until An assumed the post sometime in 1957. In September of the previous year he had been elected a full member of the Central Committee, at the Eighth National Congress. While the Congress was in session An served as a member of its Credentials Committee.
Though An’s primary responsibilities have been in Party organizational work, in the period from 1949 to 1954 he was also assigned to other tasks ostensibly outside the purview of the CCP. From October 1949 to December 1954 he was a member of the First Executive Board of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association, then one of the most active of the “mass” organizations. When the PRC Government was established in October 1949 An was appointed a member of the People’s Supervision Committee (PSC), one of the four major committees subordinate to the Government Administration Council (the cabinet). This position placed him in the governmental counterpart to the Party Organization Department, but it is evident that it was a far less authoritative body. The PSC was headed by T’an P’ing-shan, one of the Party founders, who had left the CCP in 1927 but who returned to Peking in 1949 to work with the new Communist government. In a position of more power, An served as head of the Ministry of Personnel, created in September 1950. He held the post until September 1954 when the ministry was abolished with the inauguration of the constitutional government. In this capacity, he gave a number of reports before the Government Administration Council, as in November 1951 when he spoke on regulations relating to the appointment and dismissal of government functionaries. In addition, in 1951-52 he was a member of the Central Austerity Examination Committee, headed by An’s colleague from the war years, Po I-po. He was also a vice-chairman of Li Wei-han’s Labor Employment Committee (1952-1954), formed to deal with unemployment problems. Finally, in 1953 he was a member of the Committee for Drafting the Election Law; headed by Chou En-lai, this committee drafted the law for the elections to the First NPC. The First NPC was initially convened in September 1954 at which time the constitutional government was inaugurated.
Although most of An’s work has been oriented toward domestic Party organizational work, he has also been involved in international relations. For example, he is often on hand when important foreign visitors come to Peking, especially those from foreign Communist parties. An’s only visit abroad since 1949 took place from May to August 1958 when he accompanied Party veteran Tung Pi-wu to Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany to attend Party congresses in those nations.
An has served on the funeral committees of several important Communists who have died in the post-1949 period. Protocol undoubtedly accounted for his membership on some of these committees, but it is of interest that three of the deceased men had been leaders in the Peking student movement of 1935-36, a time when An was in north China. All three of the deceased, Huang Ching, P’eng T’ao, and Chu Ming (political commissar of the PLA Signal Corps at the time of his death in 1964), belonged to the National Liberation Vanguard of China (see under Li Ch’ang), a militant student organization established in 1936, which soon came under CCP control. Many of its members joined the Communists in north China after the Sino- Japanese War began in mid-1937. The fact that An was on the funeral committee for these three men suggests he may have had earlier connections with them.
Quotes from others about the person
During the “Hundred Flowers” period, when a certain amount of free speech was tolerated, An was subjected to some harsh criticism delivered during a public forum held in Peking in May 1957. He was accused of occupying a 10-room house while other cadres were forced to live in overcrowded quarters. It was further asserted that his daughter had two rooms in this house, even though she boarded at school during most of the week. An was one of the very few important Party leaders criticized in public during the “Hundred Flowers” campaign, but there was nothing to indicate that it has hindered his career during the next decade. However, in 1966, during the early phases of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, he was sharply attacked in the press and presumably stripped of his authority.