Background
Not much is known about him in the years before he became a Party activist. However, it is known that he lost his father at an early age and was brought up by relatives.
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Chang Tai-lei
Edit ProfileEducation
He was a classmate of Ch’ii Ch’iu-pai at the Ch’ang-chou Middle School; Ch’ii was also to rise to prominence in the CCP, and the early ties probably account in part for the closeness between them in the Party. Chang also appears to have attended Soochow University briefly, but a chance meeting with a Peking University professor got him into the Law School of Peiyang University in Tientsin. One of the most important assets he possessed was a mastery of English, which he developed at this time and which made him an important early liaison official of the CCP with the Russians. In China he worked closely with Comintern agent Gregory Voitinsky and Soviet adviser Michael Borodin. Like Ch’ii Ch’iu-pai, he seldom questioned the policies laid down in Moscow.
Career
In August 1920 Chang was in Shanghai and was one of the founding members of the Socialist Youth League. In September he was also present as one of the nine individuals, led by Voitinsky and Ch’en Tu-hsiu, who formulated plans for the formation of a central Communist Party organization as well as for a foreign language school to prepare students who wanted to go to Russia to enroll in the University of the Toilers of the East. Then in October he returned to Tientsin, where he initiated the Tientsin branch of the Socialist Youth League, which was peculiarly free of anarchist dissensions plaguing so many other early Communist-oriented groups; Chang was made its first secretary.
In the following two years, 1921 and 1922, Chang’s activities were connected with the Comintern. In the spring of 1921 he reported to the Comintern’s Far Eastern Secretariat in Irkutsk and set up the Chinese section that was to act as the liaison between the Chinese Communists and the Comintern. He was designated as its secretary. As a Comintern functionary, he was named to its Organization Bureau in charge of preparing for the formation of the Korean Communist Party, and at its founding congress of May 4, 1921, Chang delivered a report entitled “The Japanese proletariat and the Korean poor.”
In June 1921, with another young Chinese Communist sent from Shanghai, he proceeded to Moscow to attend the Third Congress of the Comintern, held in June-July 1921. Chang and his colleague were the first Chinese delegates to have come from a bona fide Communist Party in China. (Delegates at earlier congresses were representatives of an émigré Chinese organization in the Soviet Union.) The Congress adopted a set of theses drafted by Chang on national and colonial questions, echoing Lenin’s theses of the second congress. Sharing the frustration of M. N. Roy and other Asian delegates, he urged the Russians to pay more attention to the East. After the Congress, with Japanese Communist Katayama Sen and others, he laid the groundwork for the convocation of a congress of revolutionary organizations in Asia and penned the appeal to these organizations to send delegates. Returning to China, he was assigned to assist Comintern emissary Maring, who sent him to Japan to re-cruit delegates for the Congress of Toilers of the East. The congress was originally scheduled to be held at Irkutsk to coincide with the opening of the Washington Conference on November 11, 1921, but the Russians, deciding to give it more substance than a propaganda show, moved the venue to Moscow, where the Congress lasted from January 21 to February 1, with a closing session in Petrograd on February 2. Representing the Socialist Youth League, Chang was among some 43 delegates, mostly students, drawn from various organizations in China. He delivered one of the key speeches and took part in the drafting of the manifesto of the Congress.
After the Congress, he returned to China and was put in charge of the Shanghai Masses’ Girls’ School (Shanghai P’ing-min Nii-hsiao), an institution sponsored by the CCP, whose faculty members included Ch’en Wang-tao and Shen Yen-ping. In July 1922 Chang was present at the Second CCP Congress as an observer. Later in the year he appears to have accompanied Ch’en Tu-hsiu and Liu Jen-ching to Moscow to attend the Fourth Comintern Congress held in November-December 1922. His Ch’ang-chou Middle School schoolmate Ch’ii Ch’iu-pai, whom he had initiated into the Moscow branch of the CCP, was also present as an interpreter.
Chang returned home in the early part of 1923 and in the middle of the year he joined Shanghai University, which was founded that year under KMT-CCP sponsorship. In July he went to Canton to attend the Third CCP Congress, meeting for the first time as a legal organization. At the Congress he sided with Li Ta-chao, Ch’ii Ch’iu- pai, Teng Chung-hsia, among others, who approved the Comintern line of forming a “bloc within” in collaboration with the KMT, beating down the opposition led by Chang Kuo-t’ao that resisted the merger. In August 1923 he was in Nanking for the Second National Congress of the Socialist Youth League, which was attended by some 30 delegates representing a membership of about 6,000. The Congress endorsed the Third CCP Congress resolution to implement the policy of the “bloc within” theory of cooperation with the KMT. At the First Congress of the Socialist Youth League, held in May 1922 during Chang’s absence in the Soviet Union, he had been elected a member of the Central Committee along with Ts’ai Ho-sen and Teng Chung-hsia. Now, at the Second Congress, he was elected secretary- general of the Socialist Youth League, with Yun Tai-ying and Teng Chung-hsia, among others, on the Central Committee.
Chang was one of the first Communists to enter the KMT. After its reorganization in the early part of 1923, he was made a member of the Propaganda Department. In August 1923 he was a member of the mission sent by Sun Yat-sen to the Soviet Union, which included Chiang Kai-shek, Wang Teng-yun, and Shen Ting-i; the purpose of the group was to study Soviet military institutions and obtain Soviet aid. The delegation set out on August 16 and stayed in Russia for three months. Chang appears to have remained in Moscow and spent the year 1924 at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East.
Chang was present at the Fourth CCP Congress in January 1925 and was elected an alternate member of the Central Committee. At the Third Congress of the Socialist Youth League held in the same month in Shanghai, he was re-elected secretary of the Central Committee, which he remained until the Fourth Congress in May 1927 when Jen Pi-shih succeeded him. After his return from the Soviet Union, he worked mainly in Canton as chief interpreter in Borodin’s office. He was one of the editors of the Communist journal Jen-min chou-k’an (People’s weekly) and participated actively in the organization of the Hong Kong-Canton strike and boycott against the British in response to the May 30th Incident in Shanghai.
In October 1926 he moved to Hankow with Borodin, serving as his secretary until the spring of 1927; concurrently, he was chief of political work in the National Revolutionary Army. Here his activities encompassed both the peasant associations and the trade unions as well. In the spring of 1927 he was appointed secretary of the Hupeh CCP Provincial Committee. At the Fifth CCP Congress in April-May 1927 he was a staunch supporter of Ch’ii Ch’iu-pai in his challenge to the Ch’en Tu-hsiu-P’eng Shu-chih leadership. He became a full Central Committee member at the close of the congress, and in July, as Ch’en Tu-hsiu was being eased out of power, Chang was named to a newly constituted Provisional Politburo.
Chang was present at the August 7 Emergency Conference, at which Ch’ii Ch’iu-pai succeeded Ch’en Tu-hsiu as Party chief; Chang was appointed secretary of the Kwangtung CCP Provincial Committee and at the same time head of the South China Bureau. Joining the expedition led by Yeh T’ing and Ho Lung, which headed southward after the failure of the Nan-chang Uprising, he was entrusted with the organization of peasant soviets. At Swatow and Ch’ao-chou these forces were routed by Chang Fa-k’uei, the Kwangtung general, in September 1927.
Politics
He once engaged Bertrand Russell, then lecturing in China, in a public debate, defending the view that the “menial proletariat,” rather than the “mental proletariat” (intelligentsia) was the foremost class that would bring about social progress. At this time he was deeply immersed in the investigation of labor conditions and the study of the labor movement. In several articles in the short-lived Communist tabloid Lao-tung chi eh (Labor circles), published in Shanghai by the Communists, he urged workers to organize themselves into labor unions. Meantime, as a member of Li Ta-chao’s Society for the Study of Marxism in Peking, he developed an interest in Marxism.
Membership
Chang was a founding members of the Socialist Youth League from 1920 in Shanghai.
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Born
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Died
December 12, 1927 (aged 29) -
Nationality
China -
Ethnicity
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Political Party
Chinese Communist Party
Career
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1919
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1920
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1921