Ch’u was born in February 1899 in Wen-shan hsien. Wen-shan, also known as K’ai-hua, is located some 40 miles from the Indochina border in southeastern Yunnan, and the hsien capital is located on the P’an-lung River, a tributary of the Red River.
He completed middle school in Yunnan and then attended Peking Normal University, graduating as a history major in 1923. While at Peking Normal, Ch’u was a member of an organization for the study of Marxism, one of the many such organizations that flourished in the twenties in the wake of the May Fourth Movement (see under Chang Kuo-t’ao). He was also a contributor to the monthly Kung-hsueh (Work-and-study), described by Chow Tse-tsung as a “significant student magazine.” It was published by the Kung-hsueh hui (The Work-and- Study Society), established in May 1919.
Ch’u taught at a middle school in Peking for a brief time after graduation and then returned to his native Yunnan where he was a middle school teacher until 1928. In that year he was forced to flee Yunnan by the KMT authorities; he proceeded to Manchuria where he was arrested and imprisoned until 1931. From 1931 to 1937 Ch’u taught in middle schools and universities in Peking, Shanghai, Shantung, and Honan, but when the war broke out in mid-1937 he returned to Yunnan to become a professor at Yunnan University in Kunming. He remained there until 1946, and during a portion of this period was head of the University’s History Department. In 1945 he joined the important China Democratic League (CDL) and in October of that year was elected to the League’s Central Committee. The League was founded during the vyar by middle-of-the-road political figures, in the latter stages of the war and during the postwar period it became increasingly oriented to the political left and was finally outlawed by the KMT in 1947 and taken over by the Communists in 1949 as a minority party. In addition to CDL Central Committee membership, Ch’u also became chairman of the Yunnan branch in 1946.
In July 1946 well-known CDL leaders Wen I-to and Li Kung-p’u were assassinated in Kunming. Because Ch’u himself was allegedly marked for assassination, he fled to Shanghai where he taught in the Shanghai College of Law and Commerce (1946—47). In 1948 he made his way to Communist-held areas and by 1949 he was in Peking. There Ch’u taught at Peking Normal University (his alma mater), and in the summer of 1949 was active in the preparations that led to the establishment of the many “mass” organizations and the central government. Representing the CDL, Ch’u was a member of the CPPCC Preparatory Committee established under the chairmanship of Mao Tse-tung in June 1949. Later in that month he became a member of the Preparatory Committee of the China New Legal Research Society, and in July he attended two large conferences, one of literary and art “workers” and the other of philosophers. At the former meeting the All-China Federation of Literary and Art Circles was founded, and although Ch’u was not then named to the permanent National Committee, he was elected to the organization’s Third National Committee in August 1960. In 1949 Ch’u was also advanced in the hierarchy of the CDL. He was promoted from Central Committee to Standing Committee membership in 1949, a decade later (December 1958) he was elected a vice-chairman, a position he still retains.
In September 1949 Ch’u attended the inaugural session of the CPPCC, the organization that brought the PRC Government into existence (October 1). He attended as a CDL delegate and was elected to the First National Committee (1949-1954), In October he became an Executive Board member of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association, one of the most active of the “mass” organizations in the early years of the PRC. Ch’u was affiliated with the Association until it was reorganized in late 1954. Soon after the central government was formed he was assigned to the southwest and, except for his attendance at the third session of the CPPCC National Committee in October-November 1951, he remained there for the first three years of the PRC’s existence. From 1950 to 1952 he was the “special representative” of the CDL in the southwest, and when a Southwest branch Preparatory Committee of the League was formed in 1952, he became chairman. From 1950 to 1954 Szechwan, Sikang, Kweichow, and Ch’u’s native Yunnan were governed by the Southwest Military and Administrative Committee (SWMAC), known in 1953 and 1954 as the Southwest Administrative Committee. When the SWMAC was established in July 1950 Ch’u was named as a member. Concurrently, he was appointed chairman of the SWMAC Culture and Education Committee as well as director of the Committee’s Culture and Education Department, the two posts that occupied most of his time until his transfer to Peking in late 1952.
In February 1953, when the SWMAC was reorganized into the Southwest Administrative Committee, Ch’u was reappointed to membership. He nominally retained this post until 1954 when the Committee was abolished, but in fact he was transferred to Peking in November 1952 to become chairman of the Commission for the Elimination of Illiteracy, a body that existed under the Government Administration Council (the cabinet) until the constitutional government was inaugurated in September 1954. Though little is known of the work of the Commission, Ch’u was singled out for praise in a mainland China journal in early 1953. His work in 1953-54 was apparently devoted principally to the Commission, as suggested by his report to a meeting of the Government Administration Council in May 1953 and by his speech in August 1954 at a national conference to promote culture and education among peasants.
To judge from the number of major reports that Ch’u delivered before meetings of the SWMAC, he seems to have been the dominant figure in the field of culture and education in the southwest. However, as a non-Communist, there is little doubt that he was subordinate to leading Party figures (e.g., Chang Tzu-i, an important propagandist and ostensibly subordinate to Ch'u on the Culture and Education Committee). In 1951-52 he was a member of the SWMAC’s Land Reform Committee and chairman of the Southwest branch of the China Peace Committee, the latter post seems to have been a prelude to his work in the international Communist-sponsored “peace” movement in the fifties and sixties.
In 1954 Ch’u was elected a deputy from Yunnan to the First NPC, which brought the constitutional government into existence at its first session in September 1954. At the close of this session he was named a member of the NPC Standing Committee. He has continued to be a Yunnan deputy, serving in the second term of the NPC (1959-1964) and then being elected to the Third NPC, which held its first session in December 1964-January 1965. He has also continued to be a member of the NPC Standing Committee, and in addition, he was made a member of the NPC Credentials Committee in December 1964.
The year 1954 also witnessed Ch’u’s first trip abroad -the first of many he was to make in the ensuing years. These extensive travels are outlined below: 1954 member, delegation led by Kuo Mo-jo to the “Conference for the Relaxation of International Tension” (sponsored by the World Peace Council), Sweden, June; 1955: member, delegation led by Kuo Mojo to the Asian Countries Conference, India, April, member, delegation led by Shen Yen-ping to the World Peace Congress, Finland, June, leader, classical opera theater group touring Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and the Soviet Union, September-December; 1956, leader, folk art troupe touring Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, and Argentina, August-November. (Some members of the troupe were killed in an air crash in Switzerland en route home.) 1957, leader, cultural delegation to Nepal, June, deputy leader, delegation led by Kuo Mo-jo to the Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference, Egypt, December 1957-January 1958. (The conference was held as an outgrowth of the Asian Countries Conference that Ch’u had attended in 1955.) 1958, member, delegation led by Kuo Mo-jo to an extraordinary session of the World Peace Council (WPC), Sweden, May, 1959, leader, cultural delegation to North Korea, February, member, delegation led by Kuo Mo-jo to a special session of the WPC, Sweden, May, 1960, leader, cultural and friendship delegation to Burma, January-March; 1961, leader, friendship delegation to Cuba, April-May 1961, leader, cultural and friendship delegation to Japan, November-December, 1963, leader acrobatic troups to Pakistan and Burma, November-December.
A member of the World Peace Council since June 1955, Ch’u has also been a Standing Committee member of the China Peace Committee, an affiliate of the international organization, since July 1958. In March and April 1960, respectively, he was appointed president of the China-Latin American Friendship Association and a Standing Committee member of the China-Africa People’s Friendship Association. In addition, he has been a vice-president of the Asia-Africa Society of China since its formation in April 1962, established on the seventh anniversary of the Bandung Conference, the Society is ostensibly a research organization. He has also been affiliated with two “friendship” organizations, serving as a Standing Committee member of the China-Cuba Friendship Association (formed in December 1962) and as a Council member of the China-Japan Friendship Association (established in October 1963).
