Background
Nothing is known about his background.
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Chang Lin-chih
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Chang Lin-chih was an early north China Party organizer, Chang Lin-chih has held important ministerial posts in Peking since the early fifties. He was a Party member in the early thirties working in the southern part of his native Hopeh. By 1932 Chang was engaged in Party organizational work in and around Nan-kung and Wei-hsien in southeastern Hopeh.
Education
Nothing more is known of Chang’s wartime activities, but in March 1946 he was in Han-tan (southwest Hopeh), where he was a member of the presidium for the second session of the First Shansi-Hopeh-Shantung-Honan Assembly.
Career
Chang Lin-chih was appointed as the two vice-mayors, again serving under Liu Po-ch’eng. However, Chang only remained there a brief time, for by the end of November the Communist forces with which he was associated had moved into the southwest and had captured the key city of Chungking in Szechwan. In early December 1949, as the Communists began to set up their organs of control, Chang received three posts: deputy secretary of the Municipal Party Committee, vice-chairman of the Municipal Military Control Commission, and member of the preparatory committee of the Chungking General Labor Union.
With Chungking as his base, Chang was active in southwest China between 1949 and 1952, a period in which he held important positions on the civil administrations governing the area, as well as in the Party Committee for Chungking. Thus he was made deputy director of the southwest branch office of the All-China Federation of Labor in Chungking (1950), a member of the Southwest Military and Administrative Committee (1950), the regional administration for south-west China that governed Szechwan, Kweichow, Yunnan, Sikang, and Chungking, and also a member of the Committee’s important Land Reform Committee. From 1950 he served as a member of the Chungking Municipal People’s Government Council, and sometime in 1952 he was promoted to the position of ranking secretary of the Chungking Party Committee.
In mid-1952 there was a partial reorganization of the central government that brought about the transfer from the provinces to Peking of a number of persons to fill newly created positions. Chang was one of these. In August 1952 the Second Ministry of Machine Building was created from sections of the Ministry of Heavy Industry with Chao Erh-lu as the minister and Chang Lin-chih as one of the vice-ministers. In this capacity Chang was a member of the delegation to Prague led by Liu Lan-po in July 1954 to attend the second meeting of the Joint Committee for Sino-Czech Scientific and Technical Cooperation. Liu signed a protocol on scientific cooperation on September 2, and then the delegation left for China.
In 1954 Chang was elected as a deputy from his native Hopeh to the First NPC, which held its initial session in September 1954. However, he was switched to the Yunnan constituency for the Second NPC (1959-1964) and then back to Hopeh for the Third NPC, which held its first session in December 1964-January 1965. In April 1955, as a reflection of the growing complexities of Chinese industry, the central government created the Third Ministry of Machine Building to manage the electrical power engineering industries. Chang was relieved of his vice-ministership and named to head this new industry. Then, in May 1956, during a partial government reorganization, the name was changed to the Ministry of Power Equipment Industry, with Chang continuing as the minister. He received Party recognition for his work in industrial development in September 1956 when he was made an alternate member of the Central Committee at the Eighth National Party Congress.
Since 1955 Chang has held a ministerial post and for a brief period he held two. The government had continued to reorganize its ministries dealing with industrial problems, and thus the Ministry of Power Equipment Industry, established in May 1956, was merged with other industrial ministries in February 1958, at which time Chang lost the Power Equipment portfolio. However, in September 1957 he had succeeded Ch’en Yii (appointed governor of Kwangtung) as the Minister of Coal Industry, and from that time he has been chiefly concerned with China’s developing coal industry.
Since 1952, when he was brought into the national government, Chang has been quite active in public affairs. For example, he has served on preparatory committees for national conferences of “advanced workers” in 1956 and 1960; he is occasionally reported away from Peking, as in February 1959 when he attended an industrial conference in Shanghai and in May 1960 when he spoke at a conference in Shantung regarding the utilization of coal. Unlike many figures of national stature, Chang has not been called upon to take part in the activities of the many “people’s” organizations, presumably an effort to utilize fully his technical skills in the important ministries with which he has been associated.
Personality
Among his writings are: “The Coal Industry Will Catch Up with Britain Next Year,” JMJP, June 6, 1958; “Continue to Launch Mass Movements in the Coal Industry,” Hung-ch’i (Red flag), December 1, 1958; “Carry Out a Revolution in the Organization of Production in Coal Mining Enterprises,” Hung-ch’i, December 1, 1959; “Fight for the Development of the Coal Industry at High Speed,” JMJP, October 7, 1959.
