Background
He was born in 1912 in Fu-p’ing hsien, about 30 miles north of Sian, the Shensi capital. (Other sources suggest he was native to Yao-hsien, a few miles northwest of Fu-p’ing.)
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Chang Chung-Iiang
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In 1928, when still in his teens, Chang was active in the peasant movement in his native Shensi, probably in association with Liu Chih-tan, the leading Communist in Shensi.
Career
Chang reportedly spent a few years in jail in the early thirties, but he was back with the Communists in north Shensi in the mid- 1930’s when he attended the Anti-Japanese Military and Political Academy (K’ang-ta) in Yenan. During the Sino-Japanese War he was an Eighth Route Army officer in Shensi, and by 1946 he was a deputy commander of the Third Garrison Brigade, a unit subordinate to the Shensi-Kansu- Ninghsia-Shansi-Suiyuan Joint Defense Army. Chang was a military representative in the Third Assembly of the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia Border Region Government, which first met in Yenan in April 1946. He remained in the northwest during the civil war and by 1948 was identified as a political commissar in P'eng Te-huai’s forces.
In the early years of the PRC, Chang was the top official in Tsinghai Province. Soon after P’eng Te-huai’s First Field Army captured Sining in September 1949, Chang became the ranking secretary of the Tsinghai Party Committee. In January 1950, upon the establishment of the Tsinghai Provincial People’s Government, he was appointed a vice-governor, and later in the year he added to his roster of key posts in Tsinghai when he became political commissar of the provincial military district. His dominance in the province was further illustrated when he was appointed to head two of the Tsinghai Government’s most important organs: the Finance and Economics Committee (August 1950) and the Land Reform Committee (July 1951). From 1950 to 1953 Chang was a member of the Northwest Military and Administrative Committee (NWMAC), the over-all administration for the northwest region. He retained his membership when the Committee was reorganized into the Northwest Administrative Committee in January 1953. Moreover, from March 1950 he also served as a member of the NWMAC’s Finance and Economics Committee.
In July 1952 Chang was selected to head a study group organized by Tsinghai cadres to study the Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung. Four months later, in November, he became the Tsinghai gov-ernor, replacing Chao Shou-shan, who was transferred to Shensi. Chang remained in Tsinghai as the top official for two more years.
In mid-1954 Chang was transferred to Kansu. It was just at this time that Ninghsia Province was being incorporated into neighboring Kansu. Chang was present at a Party meeting in Lanchow in early August 1954 that was attended by delegates from Kansu and Ninghsia. At the close of the conference he was named as one of 41 men (being listed first) to form a “new” Kansu Party Committee. He thus replaced Chang Te-sheng as the ranking Party secretary in Kansu, a position that was redesignated as first secretary by November 1956. Chang Chung-liang’s new responsibilities placed him in charge of an enlarged province of some 13,000,000 people, of whom one tenth were non-Han Chinese. Also in August 1954, he was elected a deputy from Kansu to the First NPC, and when the Congress held its first session in September 1954 he was appointed a member of the permanent Nationalities Committee of the NPC, presumably because of his experience in the northwest where so many non-Han Chinese live. He was not, however, re-elected to the Second NPC that first met in April 1959. In addition to his role as the senior Party leader in Kansu, Chang was also elected as the chairman of the First and Second Kansu Provincial Committees of the quasi-legislative CPPCC (in February 1955 and December 1959, respectively) .
In May 1958, presumably in recognition for his work in the northwest, Chang was elected an alternate member of the Party Central Committee at the Second Session of the Eighth Party Congress. In the same month he took part with Mao Tse-tung and other important leaders in the building of a reservoir near Peking, a demonstration given nationwide press coverage to illustrate the Party’s respect for physical labor. In November 1958 he attended the CCP’s important Sixth Plenum in Wuhan, the meeting that sharply cut back the more extreme measures connected with the Great Leap Forward. These appearances outside Kansu were rather exceptional for Chang; almost all his time in the middle and late 1950’s was spent in Kansu, where he was the top Party official. During these years his activities in Kansu received rather regular coverage in the national press. Chang, in fact, was a contributor to the JMJP on at least three occasions during the Great Leap Forward years, writing articles on this subject for the issues of May 17, 1958, October 6, 1958, and September 20, 1960.
Chang made regular appearances in Kansu through November 1960 and then quite suddenly fell from political favor. Within two months a new Kansu first secretary was identified, after which nothing further was heard of Chang for five years. He reappeared in late 1965 in Nanking, identified only as a “responsible” official.
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Born
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Nationality
China -
Ethnicity
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Political Party
Chinese Communist Party