Background
Chang was born in 1900 in Liu-yang hsien, Hunan, some 50 miles east of Changsha near the Kiangsi border. Liu-yang is also the home of such prominent Communists as Sung Jen-ch’iung, Wang Shou-tao, Wang Chen, and Lo Changing.
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Chang Chi-lung
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Chang Ch’i-lung was a Communist Party member since the 1920’s, served as a political officer and Party-government official in Manchuria in the late forties and early fifties. He was a key figure in the All-China Federation of Supply and Marketing Cooperatives throughout the 1950’s, and in the latter part of the decade was the de facto head of this organization. He has been an alternate member of the Party Central Committee since 1956.
Education
Nothing is known of Chang’s early life except that he is reported to have studied for a year at a normal school in Changsha, after which he became a teacher. In 1924 he joined the CCP.
Career
Chang was presumably in Changsha on May 21, 1927, a time of rapidly deteriorating relations between the Communists and the KMT, when Hsu K’o-hsiang, a regimental commander of T’ang Sheng-chih’s Nationalist Army, launched a sudden attack on labor and leftist organizations there. These groups had been sympathetic to the CCP, which had hoped to organize them to cooperate with peasant associations that had been formed in the surrounding countryside in preparation for further revolutionary work. However, Hsu’s attack decimated the Party in Changsha and forced it underground. Afterwards, in the winter of 1927, Chang and two fellow Party workers, Wang Shou-tao and Wang Chen, escaped to Liu-yang, which was the native hsien of all three, to carry on their underground work. There had been a peasant insurrection in Liu- yang in September 1927 during the Autumn Harvest Uprisings, and as early as 1928 a small Communist soviet was established there, which Chang is reputed to have founded in association with Wang Shou-tao and Huang Kung-lueh. While in Liu-yang, Chang was briefly imprisoned by the Nationalists. After his release he served as secretary and chairman of the Liu-yang hsien soviet. By 1933 Chang was identified as a vice-chairman and head of the Justice Department of the Hunan-Hupeh-Kiangsi Soviet Government. The Hunan-Hupeh-Kiangsi base, which included the Liu-yang area, was part of the Chinese Soviet Republic established in November 1931 and was one of 14 guerrilla bases evacuated by the main Communist armies when they left for the northwest on the Long March in 1934. Between 1933 and 1937 Chang’s activity remains undocumented. However, there are two reports that, in view of other events, may indicate his political affiliations at the time.
According to an account from a Communist newspaper of the period, he was sentenced to 14 months imprisonment in September 1933 for accepting a bribe to free captive Nationalist General Chang Ch’ao.1 A 1951 article commemorating Jen Pi-shih also states that Jen, who was assigned to the Hunan-Hupeh-Kiangsi Soviet in May 1933, “saved” Chang from “leftist dogmatism” (see under Wang Shou-tao). The term “leftist dogmatism,” with reference to the 1930’s, is ordinarily associated with the so-called Russian-returned student clique (see under Ch’en Shao-yü) that had won control of the CCP Central Committee at the Fourth Plenum held in Shanghai in January 1931. Because of Nationalist harassments the “returned students” were subsequently forced to seek refuge in the rural Communist base in southeast Kiangsi, where Mao Tse-tung, Chu Те, and other Communist military and political leaders had made their headquarters. A political struggle ensued between the local and newly arrived leaders, in which each side tried to discredit the other. The reports about Chang’s “dogmatism” suggest that he may have been censured by the Mao group, but there is no further clarification of his alleged imprisonment. He was not identified again until 1937 when he was reported in Yenan.
By 1947 Chang was identified as a deputy political commissar in Lin Piao’s Northeast Democratic Allied Army. This army (renamed the Fourth Field Army in 1949) was responsible for the Communist takeover of Manchuria. Chang’s next assignment was in northern Manchuria, where he became the ranking Party secretary of the Heilungkiang Provincial Committee. He only held the post briefly, however, for Chao Te-tsun replaced him by April 1950. Chang was then transferred to southern Manchuria, where by July 1950 he was the ranking Party secretary in Liaotung Province. From August 1951 he also served as chairman of the Economic Planning Committee of the Liaotung People’s Government, and from September as a member of the Northeast People’s Government (NEPG) established by the Communists in 1949 to govern Manchuria. The NEPG was reorganized into the Northeast Administrative Committee in January 1953, at which time Chang was dropped from membership. It was probably about this time that he also relinquished his post on the Liaotung Planning Committee, as well as the secretaryship of the Liaotung Party Committee, to which Kao Yang succeeded by May 1953.
In 1950, while still in Manchuria, Chang began his work in the cooperative movement, in which he has since become a leading specialist. The Communists organized their chief mass organization for cooperatives at the first conference of the All-China Federation of Cooperatives in July 1950. At the close of the Congress a provisional Board of Directors was elected. Po I-po, a leading economic specialist, became chairman, and Chang was named as a Board member. The Federation underwent a minor reorganization in July 1952, the provisional board becoming a permanent one. By 1953 Po I-po, heavily occupied elsewhere, turned over the leadership of the Federation to Ch’eng Tzu-hua, who became the acting director. At the same time Chang was promoted to a deputy directorship, ranking immediately after Ch’eng. At a congress held in July 1954, the Federation was again reorganized and renamed the All-China Federation of Supply and Marketing Cooperatives (ACFSMC). Chang was made a member of the First National Committee and the Standing Committee. Immediately after the congress, new officers were elected. Ch’eng Tzu-hua became director, and Chang the senior deputy director. By about 1957 Chang was de facto head of the Federation in place of Ch’eng Tzu-hua, who was occupied with other responsibilities. Throughout the 1950’s Chang was a frequent speaker at numerous Federation meetings. For example, in February 1957 at the third session of the First National Committee of the ACFSMC, he reported on the Federation’s work during 1956 and its tasks for 1957. He has also had many contacts with foreign visitors who come to China to inspect cooperatives, and on two occasions in 1957 he went abroad in connection with work in this field. One trip took him to the U.S.S.R. in the summer of 1957, and in December he attended the Fourth Congress of the Hungarian Consumers Cooperatives in Budapest.
Chang’s work with cooperatives has also brought him into the top government legislative councils. In December 1954 he was elected a representative of the ACFSMC to the Second National Committee of the CPPCC. He continued to serve in the CPPCC through the term of the Second National Committee but was not re-elected to the Third Committee, which held its first session in April 1959. However, in 1958 he had been elected as a Hunan deputy to the more important legislative branch, the NPC. When the first session of the Second NPC was held in April 1959, he became a member of the NPC Standing Committee. At the Eighth National Party Congress in September 1956, Chang was elected an alternate member of the Central Committee. In October 1958 he was identified as a deputy director of the Central Committee's important Organization Department. Although Chang has been mentioned in the latter post only this one time, he may still hold it.
Chang has also given some time to such activities as spare-time education; he was one of 18 members named to the Spare-Time Education Committee, established under the State Council in January 1960. Similarly, in June 1960 he was a member of the presidium of the national conference for “advanced” cultural and educational workers. In April of that year he accompanied the head of the Mongolian Communist Party on a visit to Wuhan and Chengchow, and in November 1962 he attended a banquet given by Politburo members Liu Shao-ch’i, Chou En-lai, and Teng Hsiao-p’ing for a visiting delegation from the Norwegian Communist Party. Since 1962, however, Chang has not often been mentioned in the news. Moreover, his role in the NPC was reduced following the formation of the Third NPC in late 1964. As already described, Chang was a deputy from his native Hunan to the Second NPC (1959-1964) and served on the important Standing Committee. When the elections were held for the Third NPC, he was elected from Heilungkiang (where he had served 15 years earlier) but was not named again to the Standing Committee. He did serve on the NPC Credentials Committee, but this is a much less important body than the permanent Standing Committee. Paralleling his less active role in the NPC has been Chang’s relative inactivity in the cooperative movement, the work that occupied so much of his time through the 1950’s. He was listed as the senior deputy director of the Federation of Supply and Marketing Cooperatives in the semi-official Jen-min shou-ts'e (People’s handbook) as late as the 1962 edition. In subsequent editions, however, his name was omitted, thereby confirming the fact that he was removed from this important position. Furthermore, P’an Fu-sheng officially succeeded Ch’eng Tzu-hua as head of the ACFSMC in 1963, ending Chang’s tenure as de facto head.
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Born
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Nationality
China -
Ethnicity
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Political Party
Chinese Communist Party