Ch’iao Kuan-hua was one of Peking’s more important diplomats, having served in the Foreign Ministry since the Communist conquest of the mainland in 1949. A veteran journalist and propagandist, he and his wife Kung P’eng have been closely associated with Chou En-lai since the early forties and both were well known to Western journalists, scholars, and diplomats in China during the war and postwar years.
Background
He was born in March 1914 in Yen-ch’eng hsien, in eastern Kiangsu. Propagandist Hu Ch’iao-mu also comes from Yen-ch’eng, and both men have used the same nom-de-plume, Ch’iao Mu. To distinguish between them the Communists nicknamed Hu as Pei (“north”) Ch’iao-mu and Ch’iao Kuan-hua as Nan (“south”) Ch’iao-mu. Fortunately, the confusion between the two men ended after 1949 when both men dropped “Ch’iao Mu” as pen name. Ch’iao Kuan-hua was also known by the pen name Yii Huai during the Sino-Japanese War years.
Education
He received his education at Tsinghua University in Peking, graduating in 1933 with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy. He then traveled briefly in Japan and France before enrolling at the University of Tübingen in Germany, receiving his doctorate in philosophy in 1936. Ch’iao was one of the very few Chinese Communist leaders to hold a doctorate and also one of the few educated in Germany. As a result of his extensive education, he was among the most accomplished linguists in the PRC. Fluent in English and German, he reportedly also speaks Japanese, Russian, and French, skills that served him well in later years as a diplomat.
Career
Upon the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in mid-1937, Ch’iao returned to China, where from 1937 to 1938, during a period of relatively good KMT-CCP relations, he engaged in propaganda work for the KMT Propaganda Department in the Nationalists’ Seventh War Zone (the Wuhan area). He probably joined the CCP during this period. From 1938 to 1941 he worked as a propagandist and journalist in Hong Kong where as a writer on international affairs he quickly gained fame for his articles in such journals at Ta-chung sheng-huo (Masses’ life), edited by the well-known leftist journalist Tsou T’ao-fen. Other prominent leftist or Communist journalists working in Hong Kong at this time include Chin Chung-hua and Hu Yü-chih. When the city fell to the Japanese at the end of 1941 Ch’iao escaped and took refuge with Communist guerrillas in the Tung-chiang (East River) area of Kwangtung (see under Tseng Sheng).
From Kwangtung Ch’iao made his way in 1942 to Chungking where he became a secretary to the CCP delegation there headed by Chou En-lai. This was apparently Ch’iao’s first contact with Chou, an association that has lasted since that time. Ch’iao was also the international news editor for the Communists’ Hsin-hua jih-pao (New China daily) and he contributed articles to Ch’Un-chung (The masses), a journal published at irregular intervals.“ In the 1943-45 period he was identified as a member of the Party’s Propaganda Department, working both in Chungking and Yenan. Over the winter of 1945-46, Ch’iao was a secretary to Chou En-lai when the latter was negotiating in Chungking with the Nationalists about the cessation of hostilities and the terms under which the Communists would participate in the Nationalist-convened Political Consultative Conference (held January 1946). Ch’iao spent most of the first half of 1946 in Nanking and Shanghai working as a CCP propagandist; the Communists were able to operate openly at this time as a result of the January 1946 Cease-Fire Agreement that had been worked out through the cooperation of U.S. Special Envoy George C. Marshall. A number of articles on international relations written by Ch’iao at this time appear in Wetits’ui (Digest), a Shanghai weekly that was closed down by the KMT in March 1947 when virtually all CCP periodicals in ,Nationalist-held areas were suppressed.
On various occasions in 1950 Ch’iao served as acting director of the Foreign Ministry’s Asian Affairs Department, and from the same year until the end of 1952 he was editor of People's China, an English-language publication. In November-December 1950, immediately after the entry of Chinese forces into the Korean War, he was in New York as a member of the special PRC delegation sent to the United Nations to present the Chinese case regarding the alleged aggression of the United States in Korea and Taiwan (see under Wu Hsiu-ch’iian, the delegation leader). As such, he is one of a handful of Chinese Communist officials to have been in the United States since 1949.
Ch’iao was abroad again in the spring and summer of 1954 as an adviser to Chou En-lai’s delegation to the famous Geneva Conference, which brought an end to the fighting in Indochina between the French and the Communist forces of Ho Chi-minh. During a recess in the conference in June, Ch’iao accompanied Chou on goodwill visits to India and Burma. The delegation proceeded to Peking for a short stay and then returned to Geneva. When the conference closed in July, Ch’iao accompanied Chou en route home on brief visits to East Germany, Poland, the Soviet Union, and the Mongolian People’s Republic. Soon afterwards, in October 1954, he was appointed an assistant minister (one rank below a vice-minister) in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Politics
By the time Ch’iao left Hong Kong for the mainland, he was one of the best-known Chinese Communist leaders among the Western diplomats, journalists, and scholars concerned with China. His knowledge of Westerners, of course, stemmed from his extensive experience in cities with a significant Western diplomatic, press, and scholarly community, namely, Chungking, Nanking, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. Much the same could also be said about his wife, Kung P’eng (see below), who was with him most of this time. During these years most of Ch’iao’s Western friends and acquaintances knew him by the name of Ch’iao Mu.
In September 1949 Ch’iao was present in Peking for the First Session of the CPPCC, the organization that brought the new government into existence (October 1). He attended as a representative of the South China Liberated Area and while the CPPCC was in session served on an ad hoc committee that prepared the press releases on the results of the meetings. In October he was appointed as one of the deputy directors of the Staff Office of the Central People’s Government Council (CPGC), the highest organ of state in the PRC that operated under the chairmanship of Mao Tse-tung. Ch’iao worked in the Staff Office under Director Ch’i Yen-ming until the CPGC was abolished in 1954 with the inauguration of the constitutional government. He was identified in October (although not officially appointed until December 1949) as the vice-chairman of the Foreign Ministry’s Foreign Policy Committee. Chou En-lai headed both the Ministry and its subordinate Policy Committee, but little was heard of the latter’s activities and apparently it went out of existence in the early fifties. Ch’iao received a closely related appointment in December 1949 when he became director of the International News Bureau under the Press Administration, an organization one level below a ministry in the Government Administration Council (the cabinet). The Press Administration, headed by Hu Ch’iao-mu, was abolished late in the summer of 1952, and it is probable that some of the functions of the International News Bureau were placed under the Foreign Ministry’s Information Department, a department headed by Ch’iao’s wife, Kung P’eng.
Membership
During the latter part of 1949 Ch’iao was also given new assignments in three important “mass” organizations. From October 1949 until a reorganization one year later, he served as a National Committee member of the China Peace Committee. Also from October 1949 he was a member of the First Executive Board of the Sino- Soviet Friendship Association, holding this post until the Association was reorganized in December 1954. Most important was Ch’iao's election as a vice-president of the Chinese People’s Institute of Foreign Affairs (CPIFA) in December 1949. The CPIFA, officially described as an “organization devoted to the study of international relations,” has been utilized by the PRC as an unofficial arm of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA). Headed by non-Communist Chang Hsi- jo, the CPIFA’s leadership consists mainly of highly educated men with considerable experience abroad. With the exception of Ch’iao and his colleague Hu Yü-chih, another vice-president, most of the other Institute leaders are non-Communists. In practice the CPIFA has been used largely to promote ties with nations not hiving diplomatic relations with the PRC.
Connections
Ch’iao has been married to Kung P’eng since the latter part of the Sino-Japanese War, and by 1945 they had a son named Paris. Kung is as well known to Western diplomats, scholars, and journalists as her husband. She was born into a Christian family about 1917 in Shanghai where she was educated in an Episcopalian girls’ school. Under her original name, Kung Wei-hang, she studied in the Chinese language and literature department at Yenching University in Peking, graduating in 1937. Since the war years, Kung’s career has been quite similar to that of her husband; she too worked for Chou En-lai in Chungking and was a propagandist-journalist in Shanghai and Hong Kong. She also joined the Foreign Ministry in 1949, serving as head of the Information (Intelligence) Department until 1964 and since then as an assistant minister. She has accompanied her husband abroad on several of the delegations described above, including those to Geneva (1954 and 1960) and to Africa (1963-64). Kung’s sister, Kung P’u-sheng, is married to Foreign Ministry Vice-minister Chang Han-fu and has also held important positions in the Chinese foreign service (see under Chang Han-fu).
