Chang Ting-cheng

1898

Chin-sha, China

Again the record is obscure, but it suggests that he returned to south-west Fukien during the year 1925 to teach again in a primary school. This was a primary school in Feng-lang village in Shang-hang hsien, the neighboring county to Yung-ting. The latter information is drawn from a biography of Liu Yung-sheng, a fellow radical from Shang-hang hsien who later commanded local forces in Yung-ting belonging to the army of Chang Ting-ch’eng. Liu became a Party member in 1928 and is today a commander of the Fukien Military District. According to his biography his first introduction to the radical political ideas of the day came from his teacher, Chang Ting-ch’eng, who was then at the Feng-lang primary school. After the split between the CCP and the KMT following the Nanchang Uprising of August 1927, Chang went to work with the peasants in southwest Fukien. He may have been engaged in this work when the Red armies traveled close to his native area on their way to attempt the coup at Swatow in September 1927. That year he joined the CCP and the following year, in collaboration with Liu Yung-sheng and Teng Tzu-hui, he organized a peasant uprising in Yung-ting. All three men came from adjoining areas in southwest Fukien and were to remain active there until the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War. Their respective skills and training must have complemented one another, all were of rather humble origin, though Teng, a middle school graduate, had had a year’s study in Japan. Both Liu and Chang had had only primary school training. Chang, the son of a peasant, had been to the revolutionary training institute for peasant organizers, while Liu, who earned his living making charcoal before becoming a Communist, joined the Party when he entered the Fukien Red guerrilla forces in 1928 as a common soldier. Soon after the peasant uprising took place in Yung-ting, the Communists established a base there and Chang, in 1928, became chairman of the local Communist administration in this part of Fukien. By sometime in 1930, when the seat of the soviet government in west Fukien was located at Hu-kang near the capital of Yung-ting hsien, the soviet had within its boundaries both a Red Army school (for West Fukien) located at Lung-yen to the north and a military hospital in Shang-hang hsien. Chang was the commander of a 21st Red Army in 1931. Almost nothing is known about this army, but it may have been allied with the 12th Red Army, as were some of the guerrilla units in southwest Fukien in about 1930.4 The 12th Army, commanded by Lo Ping-hui and T’an Chen-iin, fought in west Fukien, especially in the area around Ch’ang-t’ing to the north of Yung-ting in the early 1930's. In November 1931, when the Communists created the Chinese Central Soviet Republic with its capital in southeast Kiangsi at Juichin, Chang was made a member of the soviet’s governing body, the Central Executive Committee (CEC). In addition, he was made “People’s Commissar for Land,” the equivalent of a cabinet post. Both T’an Chen-lin and Teng Tzu-hui were also elected to the CEC, and Teng was made Commissar for Finance in the government. Only Chang was re-elected to full membership on the CEC at the meeting of the Second All-China Congress of Soviets of January-February 1934; Teng was dropped to an alternate CEC member at this time. In addition, at the 1934 Congress, Chang and Teng were both dropped from their cabinet posts. No reasons have been given for Chang’s demotion, but those of Teng and T’an relate to the attack made at the time upon the so-called Lo Ming line with which the two men were associated (see under Teng Tzu-hui). Once the war broke out the Communists entered into negotiations with the Nationalists to allow for the continuation of the Red armies. First they created the Eighth Route Army to operate in north China, then in September 1937 negotiations were begun for the creation of a Communist army that was to operate in east- central China in the plain of the lower Yangtze Valley. Early in 1938 Yeh T’ing, the commander of this New Fourth Army, established his headquarters in Nanchang, the Kiangsi capital. By the spring, contact had been made with all the scattered units of Red guerrilla forces operating south of the Yangtze. Thus the New Fourth Army went into operation with four major detachments, only one of which was initially active north of the river. Chang Ting-ch’eng was given command of the Second Detachment, a force that included his own troops from south-west Fukien, plus those of Su Yil, who had been operating north of Chang’s territory along the borders of Fukien and Chekiang. Chang brought all the units under his command together and in March 1938 left Lung-yen, his old west Fukien soviet base. When the New Fourth Army went into the field of battle in May 1938, it moved into strategic areas along the important railroads connecting the industrial cities Shanghai, Wuhu, and Hangchow with Nanking. For the first year of its existence Chang’s Second Detachment made its headquarters not far south of Nanking city at Chin-t’an north of Tao Lake, while his forces scattered over a territory immediately south of the Yangtze and Nanking, stretching from Tang- t’u hsien in southern Anhwei (through which the Nanking-Wuhu railroad crossed) into south Kiangsu around Tan-yung and Chii-jung on the Grand Canal (and crossed by the railroad running from Nanking to Shanghai). As political commissar of the Second Detachment Chang had Su Yil, and for a time from early 1939 Lo Ping-hui served as his deputy commander. Lo’s troops from the Second Detachment were among the first units of the New Fourth Army to be moved north of the Yangtze (see under Yeh T’ing), a move that Lo had completed by May of 1939. A year later, at the end of June 1940, Ch’en I, commander of the New Fourth Army’s First Detachment, brought his own detachment and some troops from the Second Detachment north of the Yangtze to give the Communists control of north Kiangsu east of the Grand Canal. At about this time Ch’en established his new headquarters at Yen-ch’eng, in the central part of north Kiangsu. Thus, by mid-1940, a large part of Chang’s force had been brought north of the Yangtze into the area that became the new headquarters for Ch’en I and his army. Some units from Chang’s Second Detachment, however, remained south of the Yangtze and were not moved north until late 1940 when they accompanied the headquarters forces commanded by Yeh T’ing. Chang was one of the deputy commanders of the East China PLA from 1947 to 1948, serving in this post with Su Yii, Chang Ai-p’ing, and T’an Chen-lin. He held the same position from early 1949 with the newly renamed Third Field Army. In this capacity he took part in the battle for Huai-hai in north Kiangsu late in 1948, the campaign that proved a major turning point in the civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists. When it was concluded early in January 1949, Ch’en I’s Third Army and the Second Field Army of Liu Po-ch’eng continued their coordinated operations, moving south to the Yangtze Valley to conquer Nanking in April 1949. At Nanking the two armies separated; Liu turned into the southwest and Ch’en’s army continued down the coast to take over the rest of Kiangsu and move into Chekiang and Fukien. The army began its march into Fukien in June, capturing Foochow on August 17 and Amoy on October 17. In early 1953 Chang was named to head the east China branch of a nationwide committee to implement the Marriage Law, an assignment that lasted through 1954. In a rare disclosure, the Chinese press revealed that Chang had missed a plenary session of the ECAC in October 1953 because of ill health. This was apparently short-lived, because he was back in public by early 1954. In 1954 Chang was elected to the First NPC, the body that inaugurated the constitutional government at its initial session in September 1954. He sat in the NPC as a deputy from Fukien and was re-elected to the Second and Third NPC’s, which opened their first sessions in April 1959 and December 1964, respectively. At the close of the September 1954 Congress, Chang succeeded Lo Jung-huan as procurator-general of the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, the approximate equivalent of the U.S. Attorney-General’s Office. Chang has continued in this position, having been officially reappointed in April 1959 and January 1965. The post of the procurator-general is one of the most important within the PRC government, standing on a par with the premier of the State Council and the chief justice of the Supreme People’s Court. In theory, the Procuratorate has the right to protest any decision made by the State Council (over which the premier presides). Similarly, the procurator-general is specifically enjoined to attend the meetings of the Supreme Court’s Judicial Committee and has the right to protest any decision taken. Disputes between the Procuratorate and the State Council or the Supreme Court must be resolved by the NPC (or the NPC Standing Committee). As procurator-general, Chang is also required to report on the work of the Procuratorate before the NPC. Consequently, he has made periodic reports before the NPC Standing Committee and the sessions of the full NPC that meet approximately once a year. Chang attended the Party’s historic Eighth National Congress in September 1956 and during the meetings served on both the Presidium (steering committee) and the Credentials Committee. At the close of the Congress he was re-elected to the Party Central Committee and at the First Plenum of the new Central Committee (held the day after the Congress closed), he was named to membership on the Party’s Central Control Commission. Thus, as procurator-general in the government and a member of the Control Commission, Chang is in a pivotal position in terms of the inner workings of two key organs deeply involved in matters of security, supervision, and control of the Chinese Communist system.

Chang Ting-cheng

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politician

Background

Chang was born in Chin-sha village, Yung-ting hsien, a rural area in southwest Fukien not far from the Kwangtung border.

Education

Communists were actively working there with the peasants from the late 1920’s and the area was traversed by Red armies making their way to Swatow after the Communists’ defeat at Nanchang in August 1927. Although Chang was of poor peasant origin, he received some education in rural schools in Fukien and later seems to have taught for a brief time in a primary school in his native Chin-sha village. According to Japanese sources, he went to Canton to study at the Peasant Movement Training Institute about the year 1925. The Institute opened in 1924 under KMT auspices (but mainly staffed by CCP members) for the training of revolutionary cadres to work among the peasants, and the students recruited for its first three classes that were held in the first year and a half of the Institute’s brief existence are all presumed to have been recruited from Kwangtung. Hence, the date when Chang attended classes there cannot be definitely established. According to one report he joined the KMT before becoming a Communist. Both events may have occurred while he attended classes at the Peasant Movement Training Institute.

Career

Again the record is obscure, but it suggests that he returned to south-west Fukien during the year 1925 to teach again in a primary school. This was a primary school in Feng-lang village in Shang-hang hsien, the neighboring county to Yung-ting. The latter information is drawn from a biography of Liu Yung-sheng, a fellow radical from Shang-hang hsien who later commanded local forces in Yung-ting belonging to the army of Chang Ting-ch’eng. Liu became a Party member in 1928 and is today a commander of the Fukien Military District. According to his biography his first introduction to the radical political ideas of the day came from his teacher, Chang Ting-ch’eng, who was then at the Feng-lang primary school.

After the split between the CCP and the KMT following the Nanchang Uprising of August 1927, Chang went to work with the peasants in southwest Fukien. He may have been engaged in this work when the Red armies traveled close to his native area on their way to attempt the coup at Swatow in September 1927. That year he joined the CCP and the following year, in collaboration with Liu Yung-sheng and Teng Tzu-hui, he organized a peasant uprising in Yung-ting. All three men came from adjoining areas in southwest Fukien and were to remain active there until the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War. Their respective skills and training must have complemented one another, all were of rather humble origin, though Teng, a middle school graduate, had had a year’s study in Japan. Both Liu and Chang had had only primary school training. Chang, the son of a peasant, had been to the revolutionary training institute for peasant organizers, while Liu, who earned his living making charcoal before becoming a Communist, joined the Party when he entered the Fukien Red guerrilla forces in 1928 as a common soldier. Soon after the peasant uprising took place in Yung-ting, the Communists established a base there and Chang, in 1928, became chairman of the local Communist administration in this part of Fukien. By sometime in 1930, when the seat of the soviet government in west Fukien was located at Hu-kang near the capital of Yung-ting hsien, the soviet had within its boundaries both a Red Army school (for West Fukien) located at Lung-yen to the north and a military hospital in Shang-hang hsien. Chang was the commander of a 21st Red Army in 1931. Almost nothing is known about this army, but it may have been allied with the 12th Red Army, as were some of the guerrilla units in southwest Fukien in about 1930.4 The 12th Army, commanded by Lo Ping-hui and T’an Chen-iin, fought in west Fukien, especially in the area around Ch’ang-t’ing to the north of Yung-ting in the early 1930's.

In November 1931, when the Communists created the Chinese Central Soviet Republic with its capital in southeast Kiangsi at Juichin, Chang was made a member of the soviet’s governing body, the Central Executive Committee (CEC). In addition, he was made “People’s Commissar for Land,” the equivalent of a cabinet post. Both T’an Chen-lin and Teng Tzu-hui were also elected to the CEC, and Teng was made Commissar for Finance in the government. Only Chang was re-elected to full membership on the CEC at the meeting of the Second All-China Congress of Soviets of January-February 1934; Teng was dropped to an alternate CEC member at this time. In addition, at the 1934 Congress, Chang and Teng were both dropped from their cabinet posts. No reasons have been given for Chang’s demotion, but those of Teng and T’an relate to the attack made at the time upon the so-called Lo Ming line with which the two men were associated (see under Teng Tzu-hui).

Once the war broke out the Communists entered into negotiations with the Nationalists to allow for the continuation of the Red armies. First they created the Eighth Route Army to operate in north China, then in September 1937 negotiations were begun for the creation of a Communist army that was to operate in east- central China in the plain of the lower Yangtze Valley. Early in 1938 Yeh T’ing, the commander of this New Fourth Army, established his headquarters in Nanchang, the Kiangsi capital. By the spring, contact had been made with all the scattered units of Red guerrilla forces operating south of the Yangtze. Thus the New Fourth Army went into operation with four major detachments, only one of which was initially active north of the river. Chang Ting-ch’eng was given command of the Second Detachment, a force that included his own troops from south-west Fukien, plus those of Su Yil, who had been operating north of Chang’s territory along the borders of Fukien and Chekiang. Chang brought all the units under his command together and in March 1938 left Lung-yen, his old west Fukien soviet base.

When the New Fourth Army went into the field of battle in May 1938, it moved into strategic areas along the important railroads connecting the industrial cities Shanghai, Wuhu, and Hangchow with Nanking. For the first year of its existence Chang’s Second Detachment made its headquarters not far south of Nanking city at Chin-t’an north of Tao Lake, while his forces scattered over a territory immediately south of the Yangtze and Nanking, stretching from Tang- t’u hsien in southern Anhwei (through which the Nanking-Wuhu railroad crossed) into south Kiangsu around Tan-yung and Chii-jung on the Grand Canal (and crossed by the railroad running from Nanking to Shanghai). As political commissar of the Second Detachment Chang had Su Yil, and for a time from early 1939 Lo Ping-hui served as his deputy commander. Lo’s troops from the Second Detachment were among the first units of the New Fourth Army to be moved north of the Yangtze (see under Yeh T’ing), a move that Lo had completed by May of 1939. A year later, at the end of June 1940, Ch’en I, commander of the New Fourth Army’s First Detachment, brought his own detachment and some troops from the Second Detachment north of the Yangtze to give the Communists control of north Kiangsu east of the Grand Canal. At about this time Ch’en established his new headquarters at Yen-ch’eng, in the central part of north Kiangsu. Thus, by mid-1940, a large part of Chang’s force had been brought north of the Yangtze into the area that became the new headquarters for Ch’en I and his army. Some units from Chang’s Second Detachment, however, remained south of the Yangtze and were not moved north until late 1940 when they accompanied the headquarters forces commanded by Yeh T’ing.

Chang was one of the deputy commanders of the East China PLA from 1947 to 1948, serving in this post with Su Yii, Chang Ai-p’ing, and T’an Chen-lin. He held the same position from early 1949 with the newly renamed Third Field Army. In this capacity he took part in the battle for Huai-hai in north Kiangsu late in 1948, the campaign that proved a major turning point in the civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists. When it was concluded early in January 1949, Ch’en I’s Third Army and the Second Field Army of Liu Po-ch’eng continued their coordinated operations, moving south to the Yangtze Valley to conquer Nanking in April 1949. At Nanking the two armies separated; Liu turned into the southwest and Ch’en’s army continued down the coast to take over the rest of Kiangsu and move into Chekiang and Fukien. The army began its march into Fukien in June, capturing Foochow on August 17 and Amoy on October 17.

In early 1953 Chang was named to head the east China branch of a nationwide committee to implement the Marriage Law, an assignment that lasted through 1954. In a rare disclosure, the Chinese press revealed that Chang had missed a plenary session of the ECAC in October 1953 because of ill health. This was apparently short-lived, because he was back in public by early 1954.

In 1954 Chang was elected to the First NPC, the body that inaugurated the constitutional government at its initial session in September 1954. He sat in the NPC as a deputy from Fukien and was re-elected to the Second and Third NPC’s, which opened their first sessions in April 1959 and December 1964, respectively. At the close of the September 1954 Congress, Chang succeeded Lo Jung-huan as procurator-general of the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, the approximate equivalent of the U.S. Attorney-General’s Office. Chang has continued in this position, having been officially reappointed in April 1959 and January 1965. The post of the procurator-general is one of the most important within the PRC government, standing on a par with the premier of the State Council and the chief justice of the Supreme People’s Court. In theory, the Procuratorate has the right to protest any decision made by the State Council (over which the premier presides). Similarly, the procurator-general is specifically enjoined to attend the meetings of the Supreme Court’s Judicial Committee and has the right to protest any decision taken. Disputes between the Procuratorate and the State Council or the Supreme Court must be resolved by the NPC (or the NPC Standing Committee). As procurator-general, Chang is also required to report on the work of the Procuratorate before the NPC. Consequently, he has made periodic reports before the NPC Standing Committee and the sessions of the full NPC that meet approximately once a year.

Chang attended the Party’s historic Eighth National Congress in September 1956 and during the meetings served on both the Presidium (steering committee) and the Credentials Committee. At the close of the Congress he was re-elected to the Party Central Committee and at the First Plenum of the new Central Committee (held the day after the Congress closed), he was named to membership on the Party’s Central Control Commission. Thus, as procurator-general in the government and a member of the Control Commission, Chang is in a pivotal position in terms of the inner workings of two key organs deeply involved in matters of security, supervision, and control of the Chinese Communist system.

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Chang Ting-cheng

Background

Education

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Born

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Education

1925

Career

1947 - 1948

1953