According to the account of his life given by Ch’eng to Nym Wales,1 he was born in 1904. He came from a family of middle peasants in Hsia-hsien, southwest Shansi. His father and a brother were merchants, and another brother was a doctor in the Nationalist army. Ch’eng’s original name was Szu, but he took the married name of a maternal aunt, who adopted him because she had no son of her own.
In 1921 Ch’eng graduated from the Yun-ch’eng school and went to Taiyuan, the Shansi capital, to attend the Kuo-min Normal School headed by Chao Tai-wen. Chao, a Japan-trained follower of Sun Yat-sen, was a confidant of Shansi warlord Yen Hsi-shan and “represented the conservative, Japanese-oriented element in Yen’s regime.” Ch’eng, who claims to have been deeply influenced by the May Fourth Movement, became one of the most politically active students at the normal school. In mid-1925, in the wake of the May 30th Incident in Shanghai, which raised the student movement throughout China to new levels of activism, a student association was formed at the normal school with Ch’eng as its chairman. In the latter part of 1925 the students were able to have the conservative Chao Tai-wen replaced by the more liberal Chao P’i-lien, another leading Shansi official in Yen’s government.
Ch’eng joined the CCP in 1926 while he was still a student. In December of that year he left Shansi for Wuhan where the Nationalist Government had just been moved during the course of the Northern Expedition. There Ch’eng entered the Wuhan branch of the Whampoa Military Academy, which Chiang Kai-shek had organized in Canton two years earlier. In early 1927 Ch’eng and some of his fellow cadets became members of a training regiment in Chang Fa- k’uei’s Fourth Army. He was still with the regiment in mid-1927 when the final split between the CCP and the left-KMT occurred. But after the Communists’ August First Uprising at Nanchang, Ch’eng made his way to Canton and in December he participated with the more radical members of his former training regiment in the Communists’ Canton Commune (see under Chang T’ai-lei). The Communists held the city for less than three days, after which the survivors, Ch’eng among them, fled to Kwangtung’s East River District where P’eng P’ai had organized a small Communist soviet in the adjoining seacoast hsien of Hai-feng and Lu-feng. Before P’eng’s soviet was crushed by the Nationalists in early 1928, Ch’eng received a permanently disabling wound on his left hand.
Up to this time Ch’eng had been a common soldier with the newly recruited and badly organized Red armies, and he had probably experienced the demoralization felt by many ordinary soldiers as their leaders tried unsuccessfully to capture Nanchang, Swatow, and Canton. Following each defeat many soldiers deserted and went home. Ch’eng’s autobiographical account suggests that he too may have felt a moment of disillusionment after the Canton failure, for he left the Red forces and made his way to his native Shansi. He quickly discovered that old friends and classmates had left or been arrested, and as an order for his own arrest had been issued, he was forced to hide in his grandmother’s house. Escaping from Shansi he went to Nan-yang in eastern Honan and joined the troops of the local warlord, forces that were fighting against Feng Yti-hsiang. Here he met a former schoolmate, a battalion staff officer, who helped him to become a platoon commander. Ch’eng spoke of himself and his former schoolmate as having lost contact with the Party and operating for a time on their own. In 1929 Ch’eng went with his warlord’s troops to Hupeh to fight the forces of Chang Fa-k’uei. Now allied to the Nationalists, Ch’eng’s regiment encountered P’eng Te-huai’s Fifth Red Army at Ta-yeh, near Wuhan. Ta-yeh was an iron-mining region that P’eng’s forces were trying to capture in December 1929. Ch’eng, then a squad leader and political worker, made this possible by bringing over his troops to join the Communists. In the account that Ch’eng gave to Nym Wales, he accorded himself full credit for leading the successful uprising at Ta-yeh.
In 1934 Ch’eng was sent to the Oyuwan Soviet area on the borders of Hupeh, Honan and Anhwei Provinces to contact what was left of the leadership there. He carried instructions to the Party secretary in East Hopeh, Cheng Wei-san, ordering him to evacuate Oyuwan. Oyuwan was the second largest of the Communist soviets in the early 1930’s and one that operated with a certain amount of independence from Kiangsi. It had been so strongly attacked by the Nationalist armies that most of its personnel had been forced to evacuate in late 1932. Chang Kuo-t’ao, Hsu Hsiang-ch’ien, and the Fourth Route Army had moved west into Szechwan, but Hsu Hai-tung’s 25th Red Army had been left to cover the retreat and to continue guerrilla operations in the Oyiiwan area. It was this army that Ch’eng joined in 1934. He told Nym Wales that he commanded the 25th Army and that Hsu Hai-tung was the deputy commander, but some accounts state that Hsu was the commander and Ch’eng the leading Party functionary.
The 25th Red Army’s 1934-35 march to Shensi is described in the biography of Hsu Hai-tung. In September 1935 their units joined forces with the Red guerrillas that had been operating there for several years under the command of Liu Chih-tan and others. The merged forces, known as the 15th Army Corps, were commanded by Hsu Hai-tung. Liu Chih-tan was the deputy commander, Ch’eng the political commissar, and Kao Kang the director of the Corps’ Political Department. At the same time a political reorganization took place and a “Central Committee Representative Body” was set up with Ch’eng as one of its members. In October 1935 Ch’eng was among those present to welcome to Shensi the units of the First Front Army led by Mao Tse-tung and P’eng Te-huai. In early 1936 Ch’eng participated in the Communists’ thrust across the Yellow River into Shansi, a short-lived campaign described in Liu Chih-tan’s biography. Ch’eng was wounded again during the fighting in Shansi.
When the ACFC held its next major meeting, July 1952, Ch’eng gave the keynote speech. The Provisional Board at this time brought a permanent organization into existence, Ch’eng continued as a vice-chairman and then in 1953 he became acting chairman. In July 1954, when the ACFC was reorganized and renamed the All-China Federation of Supply and Marketing Cooperatives, he became the chairman. Ch’eng made his first trip abroad in connection with the Federation when he led a 28-member delegation to the Soviet Union in August 1954 at the invitation of the Central Union of Soviet Consumers’ Cooperatives. In addition to his reports at Federation meetings, Ch’eng wrote an important article on the cooperative movement for the August 3, 1955, issue of the Tientsin Ta-kung pao, which was reprinted in the 1956 Jen-inin shouts’e (People’s handbook). Ch’eng continued as the most active figure in the Federation until about 1957 when he became more occupied in other posts; from then on Chang Ch’i-lung, one of the vice-chairmen, became the de facto head of the organization. Finally, in 1963, still another man, P’an Fu-sheng, formally succeeded Ch’eng Tzu-hua as the chairman.
Apart from his work with the cooperative movement in the early and mid-fifties, Ch eng was engaged in other tasks. In June 1952 he took part in the organization of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce, a mass organization established to maintain liaison with “capitalist” enterprises and to assist in their “transformation” into state organizations. From mid-1952 to 1954 he was a member of the central government’s Labor Employment Committee, and from 1953 to 1954 he served as a member of the Central Election Committee that was set up to prepare for the elections to the NPC. When the elections were held in 1954 Ch’eng became a Shantung deputy to the First NPC, and at the close of its inaugural session in September 1954 he was elected to the important NPC Standing Committee. He was also a member (and later vice-chairman) of the NPC’s Budget Committee. Ch’eng did not serve in the Second NPC (1959-1964), but he was again elected to the Third NPC, which opened in late 1964, this time as a deputy from his native Shansi.
