Ch’in Pang-hsien was a leader of the “28 Bolshevik” clique of Chinese students who studied at Sun Yat-sen University in the second half of the 1920’s, and he had close contact with the Comintern for a time. He was the Party’s general secretary from 1931 to 1935 and participated in some of the major revolutionary episodes of the first two decades of CCP history.
Background
The family of Ch’in Pang-hsien was native to Wu-hsi, an important south Kiangsu city located on the Grand Canal, but Ch’in may have been born in Ning-po, Chekiang, where his father was a hsien magistrate for a number of years. When the boy was ten his father died and the family returned to the ancestral home in Wu-hsi, where Ch’in was brought up by his mother.
Education
After attending primary school in his native city he went to the Second Provincial Technical School in nearby Soochow and spent the years from 1921 to 1924 there, becoming president of the student union and joining the KMT and the Socialist Youth League. Indeed, Ch’in became so involved in student politics while he was in Soochow that he almost failed to graduate from the middle school. In the fall of 1924 he enrolled in the English Department at Shanghai University, an institution founded under the joint auspices of the KMT and the CCP in 1923 (see under Ch’ii Ch’iu-pai). In a short while Ch’in left the university to engage in full-time political work with Shanghai laborers, this plus his earlier university connections brought him in touch with Ch’ii Ch’iu-pai, Ch’en Tu-hsiu, Yun Tai-ying, and other young Communists who were then active in the city. Working also in the Propaganda Department of the KMT’s municipal office, he joined the CCP about this time. The Communist Party sent him to Moscow in 1926 (according to Ch’in’s official obituary), where he enrolled at Sun Yat-sen University. He became fluent in Russian during his four years in Moscow.
Career
Ch’in was in Moscow for the Sixth CCP Congress of 1928. At the congress the impetuous young Hunanese Li Li-san became head of the CCP Propaganda Department and from this post came to dominate the Party in the next two years. Li’s activities in China were not favorably viewed in Moscow by Stalin and the Comintern, it was to counter Li that Mif and his “28 Bolsheviks” returned to China late in the spring of 1930. Once in China, Ch’in went to work in the Shanghai office of the All-China Federation of Labor, headed by Lo Chang-lung and affected by the policies of Li Li-san. No sooner had they returned than the “28 Bolsheviks” made their opposition to Li felt in Communist circles. In June of 1930 four of them, Ch’in, Ch’en, Wang Chia-hsiang, and Ho Tzu-shu, tried to get Li to alter certain of the views that he wished to make public in the form of a Politburo resolution. The attempts were unsuccessful and the resolution was published on June 11. Following this the four dissenters were said to have again strongly opposed Li at a top Party conference held in late June or early July. All four were subsequently censured for their actions, Ch’in being sent to “study.” However, by the end of the year he was more active than ever in the affairs of the Labor Federation, serving in its Propaganda Department and editing two labor newspapers in Shanghai.
In April 1931 Ch’in took over the position of secretary of the CCP Youth League, but he was to assume a more important role in the course of the year. Tn the spring of 1391 the head of the “special affairs unit” of the CCP, Ku Shun-chang, was arrested while on a visit to Wuhan. Ku turned traitor and disclosed the names of many' of his colleagues. Thus in June Hsiang Chung-fa was captured and executed. These events forced Party workers in Shanghai to carry on at an even greater risk and a number of them were forced to leave Shanghai and join their comrades in the hinterlands. In 1931 Chou En-lai and a number of others went to southeast Kiangsi to join Mao Tse-tung and Chu Te. For a brief interval following the death of Hsiang it is generally believed that Ch’en Shao-yii took over chief responsibilities in Shanghai. But in a short time Ch’en and his wife returned to Moscow to continue work with the Comintern, and by September 1931 the Shanghai Party office was left to Ch’in Pang- hsien and Chang Wen-t’ien. We learn of the time of the change through the writings of Mao Tse- tung made public in the mid-forties. These speak of Ch’in as “the head ... of the Party’s provisional leadership in Shanghai” from September 1931,4 which seems to be a euphemism for the post of CCP general secretary, although by this time it did not carry the power that it had had prior to the Sixth CCP Congress in 1928. Whatever the exact nature of the post, the importance of Ch’in's career is that he became a chief protagonist in a political controversy with Mao. At the time that Ch’in took over the Shanghai office, the Party headquarters served as the chief contact between the CCP and the Comintern, but from 1931 the importance of this contact diminished, and after the Fourth Party Plenum the Comintern was never again able to exert such influence over the internal affairs of the CCP.
At an unspecified date in 1934, often thought to have been during the Long March, Ch’in is said to have taken over from Yang Shang-k’un, another of his “28 Bolshevik” colleagues, as director of the Political Department of the First Front Army, the principal military force that accompanied Mao Tse-tung to north Shensi. But according to some of these reports, upon completion of the march in 1935, Yang resumed responsibility for the Political Department. However, as the dates of these changes are not specific, possibly Ch’in headed the Political Department from the time of the Fifth Plenum and the Second All-China Congress of Soviets and relinquished the post to Yang at Tsun-i. In either case, it remained in the hands of the defeated political group, possibly because at that time Mao could not get control of the entire power structure of the Red Army.
In the summer of 1935 while Mao Tse-tung and Ch’in were making the Long March, the Comintern held its Seventh Congress in Moscow. Although some of the Chinese who were named to the Seventh Comintern Executive Committee (ECCI) were not present for the meetings, six Chinese were elected. Ch’en Shao-yti, who was in Moscow and an official Chinese delegate, was made a full ECCI member. Ch’in became an alternate. He was very much in evidence in north Shensi when Edgar Snow visited there in the summer of 1936, giving him several long interviews from which much of the data on his early life has been taken. According to Snow, Ch’in was then “the youngest member of the Politburo,” and the “minister of foreign affairs” as well as the “chairman” of the Northwest Government (evidently a forerunner to the Shen- Kan-Ning Border Government of 1937; see under Chang Kuo-t’ao). Both Snow and his wife Nym Wales, who saw Ch’in when she visited north Shensi a year later, were well aware that he had once been “secretary” of the CCP, which they seemed to equate with head of the Party apparatus. But it is noteworthy that in talking to Snow, Ch’in did not mention this and only said that in the Shanghai period he had belonged to the Party Central Committee. It was Snow’s impression that at this time Ch’in was not very popular with the army and played no role in military affairs.
By the time the Sino-Japanese War began in mid-1937, Ch’in had been assigned to Nanking as one of the principal liaison officials with the Nationalists. There, before the city fell to the Japanese in November 1937, he conducted negotiations for the creation of the New Fourth Army, the Communist army to operate in central China. When Nanking fell, Ch’in followed the Nationalist government to Hankow, but he left the city before it was evacuated (October 1938) and preceded the government’s move to Chungking, arriving there by the spring of 1938. In Chungking Ch’in was a member of the Party’s Yangtze Bureau, which was then under the direction of Ch’en Shao-yii. Later Ch’in became chief of the CCP South China Bureau and director of the latter’s Organization Department. However, these positions were somewhat nominal because the Communist Party was not very strong in south China during wartime, and the Party side of Ch’in’s life while he was at the Nationalist capital was secondary to his role as a liaison official. From 1938 he served as a CCP delegate to the People's Political Council (PPC) where attempts were made to settle the growing political differences between the Communists and the KMT. In the later war years the CCP boycotted most of the PPC sessions, but Ch’in carried on his work for a time as a member of Chou En- lai’s staff in Chungking. In this connection he was known to diplomats and foreign residents who were in Chungking during the war. Early in 1940 Ch’in took part in some of the negotiations with Nationalist General Ho Ying-ch’in, the War Minister, which were held outside the PPC and attempted to settle political differences with the Communists.
Politics
He joined Communist Party around 1924. Despite the intensity of personal antagonisms exhibited at the Fourth Plenum, little is known about the meetings themselves. They were held in secret for fear of Nationalist police, attendance must have been small, and, moreover, a number of the Party’s important leaders were not in Shanghai to attend the sessions. Among those absent were such leaders as Mao Tse-tung, Chu Te, Ho Lung, and other young military activists who had already gone to the rural hinterlands and were building up Red military bases among the peasants. The Fourth Plenum achieved a major shift in top Party officers in Shanghai. It also chose an important Party bureau of 16 members and alternates to take charge of CCP operations at the Party headquarters. The nature of the new Party bureau remains uncertain. Mao Tse-tung in later times referred to it as a “provisional” Politburo. The Party headquarters in Shanghai continued to be the seat of the Central Committee; one source has likened this organization to a secretariat or standing committee formed to operate as a de facto Party organ.3 The leading officers of the Shanghai Party bureau included Ch’en Shao-yii, generally thought to have been chief of the “28 Bolsheviks” group at this time. Serving with him was Ch’in, who became director of the Party Youth League’s Propaganda Department. Shen Tse-min headed the Propaganda Department of the Party, and Chang Wen-t'ien at first took charge of work with the peasants but later took over organization work. At the Fourth Plenum, Ch’en, Ch’in, Chang, Shen, and Wang Chia-hsiang all became members of the Central Committee; the first three were also elected to the Politburo. The general secretary was Hsiang Chung-fa, a holdover from the Sixth Congress of 1928 who had been named to the post under Mif’s direction because the Party needed a compromise candidate. Hsiang was weak and inoffensive, but retaining him in office may have given an air of continuing authority to the new leadership. Under his nominal direction the young “Bolsheviks” proceeded to launch a wide “reshuffle” of Party personnel at all levels, the changes becoming most apparent in Shanghai.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Edgar Snow described Ch’in as one of the more “personable and interesting of the Communist leaders” whom he met. Above average height, thin and wiry, he had a high nervous laugh, and moved with tense, jerky bodily movements. “His mind was very quick and as subtle as, and perhaps more supple than, Chou En-lai’s.” He spoke Russian and some English and read English with ease.
Interests
It is matter of record that Ch’in contributed frequently to the CCP literature in the Shanghai period and in the years before the Long March. Using his Party name, Po Ku, he wrote many theoretical articles of the kind already cited. A number of his writings also dealt with previous political controversies that had split the CCP in the middle 1920’s when the Party was under the leadership of its first general secretary, Ch’en Tu-hsiu. While he was in Shanghai there is little reporting about his political activities, largely because of the need to conduct these underground. In July 1936, in an interview with American journalist Edgar Snow in north Shensi, Ch’in stated that while in Shanghai he led an organization of volunteer workers to join the 19th Route Army, the army that defended the city against the Japanese in 1932. He also reported that he organized strikes in the Shanghai cotton mills, which were broken up by the Japanese.
Connections
Ch’in was twice married and had seven children. His first wife, Liu Ch’iin-hsien, a native of Wu-hsi like her husband, had once been a worker in a cotton mill. They met while both were students at Sun Yat-sen University and she too belonged to the “28 Bolsheviks.” Married in Moscow, she presumably returned to China with her husband in the spring of 1930. She was again with him in the Kiangsi Soviet and was elected a member of the Second CEC in January 1934. She also made the Long March. Sometime after' 1936 the Ch’in’s were divorced. Later he married Chang Yueh-hsia who has been a Standing Committee member of the All-China Federation of Supply and Marketing Cooperatives since mid- 1954, and since the latter part of that year she has represented the cooperatives on the CPPCC National Committee. Chang was elected a member of the Asian Solidarity Committee of China in February 1956, and since September of the following year she has been a member of the Executive Committee of the National Women’s Federation. At the time of Ch’in’s death in 1946, three of his children lived in Yenan and four in Shanghai, but it is not known how many of these may have been the children of his second marriage.