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Ch’ien Ying
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Ch’ien Ying was a guerrilla leader in central China during the Sino-Japanese War, Miss Ch’ien Ying was active during the early years of the PRC in central-south China where she specialized in Party and government supervisory and disciplinary work. She has continued this activity since her transfer to Peking in 1952 and has been a member of the Party Central Committee and a deputy secretary of the Central Control Commission since 1956.
Education
Ch’ien is said to have joined the CCP in 1933. She was then imprisoned for a time at the headquarters of the Nanking gendarmerie because of her radical political activities. In 1938 she was among a small group of Party workers trying to establish a rural CCP base in Central Hupeh. Two of her associates there were T’ao Chu (q.v.) and Yang Hsueh-ch’eng, a former Tsinghua University youth leader who joined the CCP in 1936 and died of tuberculosis on the Hupeh front in 1944. According to Ch’ien, in 1938 the Party cell in central Hupeh was very small and was armed with only “eight rusty old guns.”
Career
Ch’ien was not reported again until December 1949 when she was identified as a deputy director of the Organization Department of the CCP’s Central-South Bureau and as the secretary of the Bureau’s Women’s Work Committee. She was in central-south China from that time until late 1952, holding posts with the Central-South Military and Administrative Committee (CS- MAC; the regional government established in February 1950), as well as with the Party Bureau. She was a member of the CSMAC until November 1952, a vice-chairman of its People’s Supervision Committee from March until February 1951, and director of its Personnel Department from September 1951 until November 1952. Ch’ien’s work for the latter two organs was complemented by her Party post as a deputy secretary of the Central- South Bureau’s Discipline Inspection Committee (c. 1951-1952). The regional Inspection Committees were the predecessors of the more authoritative Control Commissions which were set up at the March 1955 Party Conference, when Kao Kang’s purge was announced. By June 1952 Ch’ien had been promoted from deputy director to director of the Bureau’s Organization Department, succeeding Li Hsueh-feng.
Ch’ien was transferred to Peking in November when she was appointed a vice-chairman of the People’s Supervision Committee of the Government Administration Council (the cabinet). From 1953 she held a parallel, national level position as deputy secretary of the CCP Discipline Inspection Commission. She probably relinquished this post at the Party Conference in March 1955 when the Discipline Inspection Commissions were replaced by Control Commissions (as noted above).
Ch’ien was a deputy from Shantung to the First NPC (1954-1959), which established the constitutional government in September 1954. During the second through fifth sessions (1955-1958) she served on its Motions Examination Committee. As part of the government reorganization in 1954 the People’s Supervision Committee on which Ch’ien had served was abolished and its functions were transferred to the newly created Ministry of Supervision. Ch’ien was given the new portfolio and for the next five years devoted much of her time to this post. In this capacity she made major reports at the annual national supervisory conferences. Her role in reorienting the mechanisms of control over Chinese industry is discussed at length in Franz Schurmann’s Ideology and Organization in Communist China.
Miss Ch’ien also continued her involvement in women’s work. In April 1953, at the Second Congress of the All-China Federation of Democratic Women, she was again elected to the Executive Committee. During the same year she was a member of the Committee to Implement the Marriage Law. When the Women’s Federation held its Third Congress in 1957, Ch’ien was re-elected to the Executive Committee.
Ch’ien was re-elected to represent Shantung in the Second NPC (1959-1964), and during its second, third, and fourth sessions she again served on the NPC Motions Examination Committee. At the inaugural session of the NPC, held in April 1959, her Ministry of Supervision was abolished. However, at this same time she received a comparable post when she succeeded Party veteran Hsieh Chueh-tsai as minister of Internal Affairs, but then in November 1960 she was replaced by Tseng Shan. Since then she has been reported in the press only infrequently. Most of her time has probably been spent in connection with the Control Commission, an organ rarely mentioned in the press. However, in late 1964 she was elected a deputy from Hupeh to the Third NPC. At the close of its initial session in January 1965, Ch’ien was elected to the NPC Standing Committee.
Politics
During her time in central-south China Ch’ien was also active in the mass organization for women, the All-China Federation of Democratic Women. She became a member of its national Executive Committee in 1950 and by August was chairman of its Central-South branch.
At the Party’s Eighth Congress in September 1956, Ch’ien’s importance in the CCP elite was reaffirmed. She was a member of the Congress presidium (steering committee) and spoke on the “struggle against bureaucracy.” At the close of the meetings she was one of only four women elected to full membership on the Central Committee. The measure of her importance can be gauged from the group in which she was now included: Mmes. Li Fu-ch’un (Ts’ai Ch'ang) and Chou En-Iai (Teng Ying-ch’ao), and Miss Ch’en Shao-min, three of the top women leaders of the CCP. At the First Plenum of the new Central Committee, held the day after the Congress closed, Ch’ien was made a deputy secretary of the Party’s Central Control Commission, which is headed by Party veteran Tung Pi-wu. At the time of her appointment she was the only woman among the five deputy secretaries. When a Standing Committee within the Control Commission was created in 1961, Ch’ien was made one of its members.
In June 1957 Ch’ien delivered an important report before the State Council on a case of mismanagement in Kwangsi, which had led to widespread starvation, and as a consequence Kwangsi Party First Secretary Ch’en Man-yuan was removed from his post. Ch’ien’s only recorded trip abroad took place in November 1958 when she attended celebrations in Moscow marking the 41st anniversary of the Russian Revolution. She was a deputy leader of the delegation led by Liu Lan-t’ao, a fellow deputy secretary of the Central Control Commission.
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Born
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Nationality
China -
Ethnicity
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Political Party
Chinese Communist Party