Background
He was born in 1909 in Yii-lin hsien in northern Shensi.
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Chang Te-sheng
Edit ProfileEducation
It was in Yii-lin that such prominent Communists as Liu Chih-tan and Kao Kang studied during their school days in the 1920’s, and it may have been through contacts with Liu or Kao that Chang began his revolutionary activities. (For a longer discussion of Communist activity in Shensi dur-ing the twenties, see under Chia T’o-fu.) Chang joined the Communist Youth League in 1927 and three years later was admitted to the CCP.
Career
According to Chang’s obituary (the source for most of the information about his career prior to 1949), he spent the years from 1930 to 1934 as an underground worker, serving first in Fu-ku hsien in northeast Shensi (not far from Yii-lin) as head of the Party’s Organization Department. He was subsequently head of the Organization Department of the Kansu-Ninghsia-Tsinghai Special Party Committee and later the director of the Propaganda Department of the Han-chung Special Party Committee. (Han-chung is the name of an area along the Han River that includes portions of Shensi, Szechwan, and Hupeh.) When Chu Те and Mao Tse-tung arrived in the northwest at the end of the Long March, Chang engaged in political work among those portions of the First and Fourth Front Armies of the Chinese Peasants’ and Workers’ Red Army that Chu and Mao commanded.
Chang’s rise in the CCP continued during the Sino-Japanese War. Specializing in Party activities, he first headed the Party’s Shensi Provincial Committee. Later, he was secretary of the Kuan-chung District Party Committee; Kuan-chung, located in southern Shensi, was one of the five major subdivisions of the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia (Shen-Kan-Ning) Border Region that was established in 1937. In addition to his Party post in Kuan-chung, by the spring of 1943 he was also political commissar of the Kuan-chung Military Sub-district. Under the Party’s Northwest Bureau, he also served during the war as secretary-general of the Bureau and as head of its United Front Work Department. In April 1946, when the first session of the Third Assembly of the Shen-Kan-Ning Border Region Government met in Yenan, Chang attended as a deputy from Hsin-ning hsien (located in southern Shensi in the above-mentioned Kuan-chung District).
From 1947 to 1949, during the course of the civil war with the Nationalists, Chang was a deputy director of the Political Department of the First Field Army, a position that placed him under political officer Kan Szu-ch’i, the head of the Political Department for most of this period.
After P’eng Te-huai's First Field Army captured Lanchow, the Kansu capital, in August 1949, Chang served briefly under Chang Tsung-hsun as a deputy director of the Lanchow Military Control Commission. More important, however, he became the ranking secretary of the Kansu Party Committee, his major post for the next five years. Chang also held several positions within the Kansu Provincial People’s Government after it was established in January 1950. He was a Kansu vice-governor from 1950 to 1954 and also headed two of this government’s most important subordinate bodies, the Finance and Economics Committee (1950-1954) and the Land Reform Committee (1951-1954). Although Chang did not receive any post of importance in the national government that was established in the fall of 1949, he served as a member of the preparatory committee (representing the First Field Army) of the All-China Athletic Federation from October 1949 to June 1952.
During the early years of the PRC, both the CCP and the government had regional subdivisions; in the northwest, the government administration covering the provinces of Shensi, Kansu, Ninghsia, Tsinghai, and Sinkiang was known as the Northwest Military and Administrative Committee (NWMAC). From its formation January 1950 Chang served as one of the members of the NWMAC that was chaired by P’eng Te-huai. He was reappointed to membership when the NWMAC was reorganized into the North-west Administrative Committee in January 1953, continuing in this post until the regional administrations were dissolved in 1954. In the North-west Party Bureau, he was a deputy director of the Organization Department by 1951 and head of the Bureau’s United Front Work Department by 1954, presumably holding these posts until the Bureau was abolished in mid-1955. In 1954 (to an uncertain date) Chang became chairman of the preparatory committee for the Northwest Branch of the Academy of Sciences. Although his main tasks in the early fifties kept him in Lanchow, the Kansu capital, Chang’s assignments in the Party's Northwest Bureau and the NWMAC (NCAC) took him on occasion to Sian where they were headquartered.
Politics
Chang Te-sheng joined Chinese Communist Party in 1930.
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Born
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Died
1965 (aged 55) -
Nationality
China -
Ethnicity
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Political Party
Chinese Communist Party
Career
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1930 - 1934
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1946
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1954