Chang Ch’in-ch’iu

Background

Miss Chang was born in Chekiang about 1902.

Education

In 1924-25 she was a student at radical Shanghai University, which included on its faculty a number of important Communists (see under Ch’ti Ch’iu-pai). While there she came under the influence of Hsiang Ching-yii, the wife of Ts’ai Ho-sen and the most important woman Communist of that period. Many of the students were very active in the Shanghai labor movement. Chang, for example, was assigned in 1924 to work in a part-time night school in an industrial district of the city, and she also participated in numerous strikes of 1924-25 that were in part led by the Communists. The most important of these was the one resulting from the May 30th Incident. She was sent to Moscow about 1928 to attend Sun Yat-sen University, where she became one of the protégés of Pavel Mif, the University chancellor and a Comintern official. The group has been known both as the “28 Bolsheviks” and the “Russian-returned” students. With Mif and his other protégés, she returned to China in the spring of 1930 and in the summer of 1931 was sent with some of them to the Oyiiwan area. Chang Kuo-t’ao was also sent there in 1931 to take charge of reorganizing political work. Although he was not one of Mif’s students, he had known them well in Moscow and consequently used some of them in Oyiiwan.

Career

In 1932, pressured by Nationalist attempts to eradicate Communism in central China, most of the Oyiiwan group sought refuge in a remote area of northwest Szechwan, where they established another small soviet in the winter of 1932. The group was led by Chang Kuo-t’ao and Hsu Hsiang-ch’ien, head of the Oyiiwan Fourth Front Army. Chang accompanied them and served from 1933 to 1935 as director of the Army’s Women’s Work Department and as chairman of a hospital under its control.“ Because of poor health, Shen Tse-min remained in Oyiiwan, where he died or was in killed in 1934. At the Second All-China Congress of Soviets held in January-February 1934 at the Soviet capital in southeast Kiangsi, where Mao had his head-quarters, Chang was elected (probably in absentia) as a member of the Central Executive Committee of the Chinese Soviet Republic. The following year, the Fourth Front Army moved west to Mao-kung, west Szechwan, where it joined Mao Tse-tung’s Long Marchers in the summer. The biography of Chang Kuo-t’ao describes the army’s arrival in north Shensi in the fall of 1936. Miss Chang was probably still with the army at that time.

In 1937 Chang taught at the Yenan Chinese Women’s University and at the Shen-pei (North Shensi) Public School. She apparently remained in Yenan, the capital of the Shensi-Kansu- Ninghsia Border Region Government, throughout the Sino-Japanese War, for in November 1941 she was a deputy to the Second Assembly of the Border Region, which was held in that city. She also attended the Assembly’s second session when it met in December 1944.

After the war Chang devoted much of her time to the field of women’s work. In December 1948 she was one of 11 women in a delegation led by the senior woman Communist, Ts’ai Ch’ang, to the Second Congress of the Women’s International Democratic Federation in Budapest. In the following spring she was secretary-general of the Preparatory Committee for the All-China Federation of Democratic Women (ACFDW), the mass women’s organization. At the Federation’s inaugural congress in March-April 1949, Chang was elected to its Executive and Standing Committees. She was also made director of the ACFDW’s Production Department but was replaced toward the end of 1950. In June 1949, representing the ACFDW, Chang was elected as a member of the Preparatory Committee for the CPPCC. When the First CPPCC met in September to establish the central government, Miss Chang was made a member of the First National Committee of the CPPCC. Immediately following the inauguration of the PRC on October 1, 1949, she was appointed a vice-minister of the Ministry of Textile Industry, a position she still retains. The, appointment of a woman to this post was particularly appropriate for, as Chang herself has noted in a 1953 article, 60 per cent of the workers and staff members in the cotton textile industry are women. She held a closely related post in the early PRC years, when she served on the Preparatory Committee of the All-China Textile Workers’ Trade Union.After the war Chang devoted much of her time to the field of women’s work. In December 1948 she was one of 11 women in a delegation led by the senior woman Communist, Ts’ai Ch’ang, to the Second Congress of the Women’s International Democratic Federation in Budapest. In the following spring she was secretary-general of the Preparatory Committee for the All-China Federation of Democratic Women (ACFDW), the mass women’s organization. At the Federation’s inaugural congress in March-April 1949, Chang was elected to its Executive and Standing Committees. She was also made director of the ACFDW’s Production Department but was replaced toward the end of 1950. In June 1949, representing the ACFDW, Chang was elected as a member of the Preparatory Committee for the CPPCC. When the First CPPCC met in September to establish the central government, Miss Chang was made a member of the First National Committee of the CPPCC. Immediately following the inauguration of the PRC on October 1, 1949, she was appointed a vice-minister of the Ministry of Textile Industry, a position she still retains. The, appointment of a woman to this post was particularly appropriate for, as Chang herself has noted in a 1953 article, 60 per cent of the workers and staff members in the cotton textile industry are women. She held a closely related post in the early PRC years, when she served on the Preparatory Committee of the All-China Textile Workers’ Trade Union.

Like most of the higher-echelon government administrators, Chang also received posts in the many “mass” organizations. In October 1949 she was made a member of the National Committee of the China Peace Committee, and in the same month she was elected to the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association’s Executive Board. She was removed from the Peace Committee in 1950 but retained her post in the Friendship Association until late 1954 when it was reorganized. From 1950 to 1954 she was also active in the All-China Federation of Cooperatives, serving until 1952 on its Provisional Board of Directors and thereafter on the permanent board. In 1953 and again in 1957 she was re-elected to the Executive Committee of the Women’s Federation, and she still retains the post.

Since the mid-fifties Miss Chang’s work (which has not received much attention in the national press) has been increasingly centered around her position in the Textile Ministry and her commitments to other organizations have correspondingly decreased. In September 1953 she accompanied government administrator Li Jen-chiin to Bucharest for the inaugural session of the Joint Committee for Sino-Rumanian Scientific and Technical Cooperation, and 13 months later she attended the second session, which was convened in Peking. Chang was abroad again in December 1953, when she led an 11-member delegation from her ministry to Moscow to inspect the Soviet textile industry.

Miss Chang has represented her native Chekiang Province in the First, Second, and Third NPC’s, which opened their inaugural sessions in September 1954, April 1959, and December 1964, respectively. In April 1956 she delivered the opening speech at a national conference of “outstanding workers” in the textile industry. Addressing a conference of superintendents of textile mills in Shanghai in January 1957, she stressed the necessity of raising the quality and quantity of textile products, and in July of that year she emphasized the same theme in a report to the fourth session of the First NPC. Since the last-mentioned occasion, most of her public appearances have been ceremonial in nature. In the fall of 1962, for example, she attended a banquet for the wife of the Indonesian president, and in April 1964 she was present at a banquet for a delegation of women from Albania.

Connections

Shen Tse-min, the brother of the well-known writer Mao Tun, headed the local Party committee and Ch’en Ch’ang-hao was in charge of youth work. Chang was made responsible for work among women. It was probably during their time in Oyiiwan that she married the first of her three husbands, Shen Tse-min.

Chang divorced her second husband, Ch’en Ch’ang-hao, and in the late 1950’s married Su Ching-kuan.

Spouse:

Su Ching-kuan

Spouse:

Shen Tse-min