Background
No specific facts are available about Chang’s career before the Sino-Japanese War.
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Chang Kuo-hua
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Chang Kuo-hua commanded the Communist troops that conquered Tibet in 1950-1951. He has remained in Tibet since that time, serving as the top military official there. He was the second most important Communist leader in Tibet until 1965 when he succeeded First Secretary Chang Ching-wu, thus being placed in command of both the military district and the Party committee.
Education
Nothing is known about his education.
Career
The supposition that Chang was a Long Marcher seems all the more probable from the first account of his activities in Sino-Japanese War times when he was serving as the political commissar of the Fourth Training Brigade of the 115th Division of the Communists’ Eighth Route Army. The command was a significant one, for a brigade is the major subordinate element of a division. The 115th Division, under the command of Lin Piao, was largely made up from troops that had formerly belonged to the First Front Army, the well-known force that Chu Te and Mao Tse-tung had brought from Kiangsi to northwest China on the Long March. Chang was identified with the training brigade at some time prior to 1944, but by that year he had transferred to the staff of the 129th Division of Liu Po-ch’eng and was serving in the Hopeh-Shantung-Honan Military Region in the dual capacity of secretary of a district Party committee and political commissar of a military district, that was in turn a part of the three-province border area military base. The Hopeh-Shantung-Honan Military Region belonged to the larger Shansi-Hopeh-Shantung-Honan (Chin-Chi-Lu-Yti) Border Region (see under Liu Po-ch’eng and Yang Hsiu-feng), which gave the Red armies the necessary line of communications between the Communist capital at Yenan and the military operations in coastal Shantung Province. Important Party members also operating at Chang’s military base area at the same time were Yang Te-chih, Yang Yung, and Su Chen-hua, high-ranking officers on Liu Po-ch’eng’s staff. Liu’s 129th Division was responsible for military control of the Chin-Chi-Lu-Yii Region.
Early in 1950, when most of the southwest was already under Communist control, Chang began to participate in the plans for the conquest of Tibet. In what is probably the most extensive account of the invasion of Tibet, Chang has written that the over-all planning was directed by Liu Po-ch’eng, Ho Lung, and Teng Hsiao-p’ing, the Communists’ top officials in the southwest in the early days of the PRC. More specifically, he stated that Ho Lung “personally planned and made preparations for the expedition” into Tibet. Thus, in the spring of 1950, Chang marched westward from Szechwan on the difficult route to Lhasa, the Tibetan capital. By October his forces had captured Chamdo (Ch’ang-tu), the capital of the Chamdo area of Sikang Province. Following this defeat of the badly organized and ill-equipped local Tibetan forces, the Tibetans, in effect, sued for peace by agreeing to send a negotiating team to Peking. Chang returned to Peking himself, and on May 23, 1951, he was one of the signers of the “Agreement on Measures for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet.” The other negotiators for the Chinese side were chief delegate Li Wei-han, then head of the Party’s United Front Work Department, Chang Ching-wu, who was to become the top Party official in Tibet, and Liao Chih-kao, then the Communists top official in Sikang, the province closest to Tibet.
While Chang had been leading his forces into Chamdo in the summer of 1950 he had been named to membership on the Southwest Military and Administrative Committee (SWMAC), formed in July 1950 under the chairmanship of Liu Po-ch’eng. Although the SWMAC did not officially control Tibet, it is evident that it maintained close links with Tibet and provided the logistic support that was necessary to garrison Communist forces there. When the SWMAC was reorganized into the Southwest Administrative Committee in February 1953, Chang was reappointed to membership, holding the post until the dissolution of the regional governments in 1954. After he had taken part in the 1951 negotiations described above, Chang returned to the command of his troops in the Chamdo area and, in July 1951, began to move west again. The ensuing difficulties his troops encountered were due more to the extraordinarily difficult terrain than to organized resistance by the Tibetans. Finally, in October, his forces reached Lhasa, only a short time after the arrival of Chang Ching-wu, the official representative of the PRC in Tibet, who had gone to Lhasa via India.
The processes of consolidating Communist rule in Tibet are described in the biography of Chang Ching-wu, the top Communist official there from his arrival in 1951 until his transfer in 1965. Chang Kuo-hua was clearly the number two man until 1965, and his principal duties were in the military establishment a role of special significance in view of the fact that Communist rule in Tibet has been essentially a military occupation. One of the initial steps taken by the Chinese was the formation of the Tibet Military District in February 1952 under the command of Chang Kuo-hua, who continues to hold the position. By the following year he was also secretary of the Military District’s CCP Committee, a post he held to about 1955. Although Chang’s prime responsibilities have been in Tibet, from time to time he has returned to Peking and has been given various posts in the national government. He has been a deputy from Tibet to the First, Second, and Third NPC’s, which held their initial sessions in September 1954, April 1959, and December 1964 January 1965, respectively, and for the NPC sessions held in 1955 and 1958 he served on the presidium (steering committee). Chang has also been a member of the PRC National Defense Council since its formation in September 1954, and when military awards were first given in 1955, he received first class Orders of Independence and Freedom and of Liberation, and, as already noted, a second class Order of August First. These three awards cover military service from 1927 to 1950. At this same time he was also made a PLA lieutenant-general, the equivalent of a two-star general in the U.S. Army. Since December 1957 he has also been a member of the Eighth Executive Committee of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, although nothing in his background seems to have been connected with the labor field. Chang’s most important trip back to China took place in September 1956, when he spoke before the Party’s Eighth National Congress on conditions in Tibet.
The next step in the process of establishing a government in Tibet occurred in Lhasa in April 1956 when, amidst much fanfare, Vice-Premier Ch’en I arrived with a large delegation from Peking to take part in the formal inauguration of the Preparatory Committee, the body that ostensibly served as the highest organ of government in Tibet until 1965. Not long before the Ch’en I mission to Tibet, Chang had been identified as the deputy secretary of what the Communists then called the Tibet Work Committee of the CCP, a post that placed him below Secretary Chang Ching-wu. It is probable, however, that both Changs had held these Party posts from the time of their arrival in Tibet in 1951. The term deputy secretary was changed to second secretary in 1962, but the post, in effect, was the same.
The period of the greatest amity between the Han Chinese and the Tibetans seems to have been in the mid-fifties. It fell to Chang to articulate some of the more conciliatory policies enunciated by the central government. Thus, in the spring of 1957, Chang revealed the decision to delay various “democratic reforms” (e.g., land reform) for a period of six years, that is, until the end of the Second Five-Year Plan (1962). He even added, “Whether or not reforms will be carried out during the Third Five-Year Plan will depend upon the conditions at that time.” In addition, Chang stated that large numbers of Han cadres sent into Tibet would be withdrawn. Within two years, however, Communist policies underwent an about-face in the wake of the Tibetan Rebellion of March 1959, which witnessed the flight of the Dalai Lama to India together with a number of the members of the Tibetan Preparatory Committee. The Communists immediately reorganized the Committee. Because the official line was that the Dalai Lama had been “abducted by imperialists,” the Pan-chen Lama was made the acting chairman the theory being that the real chairman, the Dalai Lama, would return in due course. Chang was appointed as the ranking vice-chairman, although he obviously continued to be the power behind the scenes on the Preparatory Committee. He received an additional assignment under the Preparatory Committee in November 1959 when he was named to head the newly established Land Reform Committee, a clear indication that the six-year moratorium on “reforms” had been swept aside.
Chang Kuo-hua moved to the top position in the Communist hierarchy in Tibet in 1965 with the departure for China Proper of Chang Ching-wu. Thus, by August 1965, Chang Kuo-hua had assumed the Party first secretaryship in Tibet. Then, in the following month, the Preparatory Committee was transformed into the permanent Tibet Autonomous Region Government, being placed on par with other autonomous regions in China (e.g., the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region). At this time Ngapo Ngawang Jigme (A-p’ei A-wang-chin-mei) became chairman of the Region. Ngapo, whose wife is the sister of the Dalai Lama, is one of Tibet’s most important political figures. It was he who had negotiated the above-mentioned 1951 agreement providing for the entry of Chinese troops into Tibet, and after that date he had served the Communists in a variety of posts. He has been, for example, a deputy commander (under Chang) of the Tibet Military District since 1952, and he had also served as secretary-general of the Tibet Preparatory Committee from its inauguration in 1956. The Communists further illustrated their trust in Ngapo by naming him acting chairman of the Preparatory Committee after the denunciation of the Panchen Lama in late 1964.
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Born
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Nationality
China -
Ethnicity
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Political Party
Chinese Communist Party
Career
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1950
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1951 - 1965