Chang was born in 1912. According to his obituary, the major source of information on Chang’s career before 1949, he was a native of Fukien who was reared in a family of overseas Chinese tobacco factory workers in Java. (Considering the Chinese use of the term “native,” he may well have been born in Indonesia.)
He began his revolutionary career upon returning to China in 1925 when he was 13. Two years later he joined the CCP. At some time in these years he attended a university.
Chang’s obituary lists his major posts, and although no dates are given many of them can be surmised from the history of the period. His first known post, presumably in the early thirties, was as secretary of the Shanghai-Woosung District Party Committee. Afterwards, he advanced to the provincial Party apparatus governing Shanghai, becoming executive officer (kan-shih) of the Organization Department of the Kiangsu Provincial Committee. He was then transferred to the Communist rural base area in the Kiangsi-Fukien borderlands where he became secretary- general of the Fukien CCP Committee. Later he was made director of the National Defense Bureau (Kuo-chia pao-wei chii) in Juichin, Kiangsi. In the latter post it seems probable that he was associated with Teng Fa, a key figure in Party intelligence and security operations. Chang’s obituary stated that he had been “captured by the enemy on three occasions.” The course of his career suggests that these episodes occurred in the late twenties or early thirties, when large numbers of Communists were arrested by the Nationalist police in Shanghai.
Chang continued in the Defense Bureau post during the Long March that began in 1934 from Kiangsi. During the latter stages of the March, or perhaps after arriving in north Shensi, he was a member of the 30th Red Army, serving as head of the Organization Department’s Political Section and concurrently as director of the Defense Department. The 30th Army was part of Hsu Shiang-ch’ien’s Fourth Front Army, which separated from Mao Tse-tung’s forces during the Long March and did not reach Shensi until the latter part of 1936 or early 1937. After war with Japan began in mid-1937, Chang was less directly involved in military affairs, for during the early war years he was associated with two of the more important cadre training institutes. He served as director of the Political Departments of both the North Shensi (Shen- pei) Public School and the North China Associated (Hua-pei lien-ho) University. The former was established in Yenan in November 1937, and the latter was set up behind enemy lines in the Shansi-Chahar-Hopeh (Chin-Ch’a-Chi) Border Region in 1939, drawing some of its staff from the North Shensi Public School. The duration of Chang’s work with the North China Associated University is not known, but by the latter stages of the war and in the postwar period he was in Hopeh. At some time during this period he served successively as head of the Social Affairs Department (intelligence and security) of the Central Hopeh Party Committee, and as deputy secretary and concurrently director of the Social Affairs Department of the Kalgan (Chang- chia-k’ou) Municipal Committee. This important city in north Hopeh (then Chahar) was held by the Communists until October 1946 and retaken in December 1948. He also served as deputy secretary and head of the Social Affairs Department for the Shansi-Chahar-Hopeh Party Bureau. To this point in his career Chang had worked principally in military or security assignments, but his obituary reveals that in the Shansi-Chahar-Hopeh Party Bureau he was also deputy director of the Finance Committee’s Staff Office. This was the first of a number of posts in the economic sector that Chang held in the ensuing years.
As the Communists began to consolidate their position in north China in late 1940’s, they established the North China People’s Government (NCPG), which, in essence, was a merger of the Shansi-Chahar-Hopeh and the Shansi- Hopeh-Shantung-Honan Border Regions. Under the NCPG, which existed from August 1948 to October 1949, Chang headed the Business Section of the Communications Department. When the national government was established in October 1949, he was named as director of the Communications Section of the Central Financial and Economic Planning Bureau headed by Sung Shao-wen, who had probably been a colleague of Chang’s from their days in Hopeh. Chang’s Communications Section was expanded in June 1950 to become the Communications and Transport Planning Section. During this same period he received two other posts involving communications. In December 1949 he was named to the eight-member Board of Directors of the Central Air Transport Company and in August 1951 he was appointed to a special committee charged with supervising the reconstruction of T’ang-ku, the port city for Tientsin.
With the advent of the constitutional government in the fall of 1954, Chang was made a deputy director of the Sixth Staff Office of the State Council (October), an office that coordinated the work of government organs concerned with transportation and communications. He held this post until the Staff Offices were reorganized in September 1959, at which time he was transferred to a vice-chairmanship in the important State Economic Commission. When the Scientific Planning Commission (also under the State Council) was established in March 1956, Chang was named a deputy secretary-general; he remained in this post until a reorganization of May 1957, after which he was simply a Commission member, retaining this position until still another reorganization in November 1958.
After 35 years as a Communist Party member Chang died from illness in Peking on July 21, 1962, at the age of 50. At the time of his death his principal post was a vice-chairmanship on the State Economic Commission. His few public appearances in the years immediately before his death suggest his health had been failing for some time. Chang’s funeral committee was headed by the chairman of the State Economic Commission, Po I-po.
