Background
He was born in Juichin, Kiangsi, the famous Communist capital before the Long March began in 1934.
He was born in Juichin, Kiangsi, the famous Communist capital before the Long March began in 1934.
He apparently had little or no formal education, for he was apprenticed to a carpenter when he was 11 years old. In the late twenties, when Ch’iu was in his teens, he joined the Red Army, presumably about the time that Mao Tse-tung and Chu Te made Juichin their headquarters. In the fall of 1933 he was a cadet in the first class of the newly established Red Army Academy (Hung-chiin ta-hsueh). Ch’iu was a student in the Academy’s Political Department together with Liu Tao-sheng, who later became an important Chinese Communist naval officer. Ch’iu’s whereabouts for the next nine years are not known, except for the fact that at sometime in this period he studied in a military academy in Moscow where he specialized in artillery.
Nothing further was heard of Ch’iu until October-November 1951 when he was in Peking for the third session of the CPPCC. He attended the meetings as a representative of the PLA. Less than a year later, in August 1952, his association with the PLA was clarified when he was identified as a PLA Artillery Force deputy commander under Commander Ch’en Hsi-lien. In the same month he was a member of a delegation led by Chou En-lai to Moscow, one of the most important groups sent abroad in the early years of the PRC. From mid-August to the end of September Chou and his colleagues negotiated for the return of the Chinese Changchun Railway and for the extension of the joint use by China and the Soviet Union of the naval facilities at Port Arthur.
In December 1954 Ch’iu was a PLA delegate to the Second National Conference of the Sino- Soviet Friendship Association. Less than a year later the Communists awarded military decorations and personal ranks. Ch’iu was given the Order of Liberation in September 1955 for his services in the postwar period (1945-1950), and in the next month he was identified as a lieutenant-general, the equivalent of a two-star U.S. Army general. He was identified as Artillery Force deputy commander as late as May 1955; concurrently, he became deputy political commissar by February 1954 and then, in March 1956, the political commissar. He was identified in the last-mentioned post as late as March 1957. According to an unconfirmed but plausible report Ch’iu succeeded to the command of the Artillery Force in 1959 when Ch’en Hsi-lien was transferred to Manchuria. The lack of information about Ch’iu in the late 1950’s may have been due to a possible temporary transfer to Fukien opposite the Nationalist-held offshore islands, for in mid-1958 he was elected a deputy to the Second NPC from the Foochow Military Region. During the “Quemoy Crisis” of late summer and early fall 1958, the only real military force which the Communists brought to bear was artillery shelling. Ch’iu, an artillery specialist, may have been in command of these operations. In any case, he was back in Peking by the spring of 1960 and has presumably remained there since then. Then in September he was appointed minister of the newly established Fifth Ministry of Machine Building. No definition of the Ministry’s functions has been published, but Ch’iu’s background suggests that it may be in charge of some phase of armaments production. (Similar inferences can be drawn regarding the Fourth and Sixth Ministries of Machine Building which were also established at that time see under the respective ministers, Wang Cheng and Fang Ch’iang.)
As noted above, Ch’iu was a PLA deputy to the Second NPC (1959-1964). However, in he was elected from his native Hunan to the Third NPC, which held its first session in December 1964-January 1965. At the close of the session he was reappointed to his ministerial post and was also named to membership on the National Defense Council, an advisory body with considerable prestige but little real authority. If in fact Ch’iu succeeded to the command of the Artillery Force in 1959, it seems likely that he relinquished it when he was given his ministerial portfolio in 1963. In any case, he was definitely replaced as the Artillery Force political commissar by February 1961, and by mid-1965 another man was identified as the commander.