Background
Chang was born on the outskirts of Shanghai, into a well-to-do peasant family.
Chang was born on the outskirts of Shanghai, into a well-to-do peasant family.
After attending a middle school in nearby Woosung, he went to Nanking where he enrolled at the Ho-hai School of Engineering. In an interview with American journalist Nym Wales in 1937, Chang said that all his instructors at Ho-hai had been educated in the United States. This was obviously an overstatement, for the faculty member who seems to have influenced him the most was French-educated Tso Shun-sheng. Chang was in school at the critical time just prior to the outbreak of the May Fourth Movement and was influenced by some of those who played a part in it.
Chang had originally gone to Nanking to study the natural sciences, but under the influence of the new intellectual awakening he began to read widely (mostly from Western source materials) in literature, philosophy, and the social sciences. In 1919, joining with a friend from Shanghai, Shen Tse-min, he left the engineering school to pursue more literary interests. They soon found positions in Shanghai with the Commercial Press, China’s largest publishing house, where they probably got work with the aid of Mao Tun (Shen Yen-ping; the elder brother of Shen Tse-min), who was gaining recognition as a writer. In Shanghai Chang also held a position with the Chung Hua Book Company, editing a new series of cultural publications. In the fall of 1920 Chang and Shen went to Japan to study, but they returned to China after six months. Chang’s many-faceted interests apparently drew him for a time to Buddhism, because an item in Shao-nien Chung-kuo revealed that he was living in a Buddhist temple by the West Lake in Hang-chow.3 However, he soon returned to the political scene and in mid-1921 attended the initial conference of the Young China Association in Nanking. Reports that he went to the United States in 1921 (including Chang’s own account to Nym Wales) are apparently erroneous, for in the summer of 1922 he was living in Shanghai. He often visited the home of Kuo Mo-jo in Shanghai, where short story writer Yu Ta-fu was living.4 Yu had been studying at Tokyo Imperial University in 1921, probably while Chang was in Japan. Yu, Kuo, and Chang were close friends and all three belonged to a literary group, the Creation Society, which Yii and Kuo founded in 1921 with the aid of other Chinese students who had studied in Japan.
Chang apparently sailed for the United States in the latter half of 1922. He worked for a time in San Francisco as a translator for a Chinese newspaper, Ta-t’ung jih-pao (Universal daily). Founded in 1902 by a disciple of K’ang Yu-wei, the paper later supported Sun Yat-sen and was very well known among overseas Chinese in America. While there, Chang also had a part-time job in a library connected with the University of California at Berkeley and may have at-tended some university courses. A little is known of Chang’s life in America from a letter he wrote to Yii Ta-fu from the United States, which was published in the Creation Society’s Ch’uang-tsao chi-k’an (Creation quarterly). Written in November 1922, Chang’s letter was tinged with romanticism and a rather morbid introspection. He described a life in which he did a half-day’s work in the library but would have been as happy if he never had to leave. He was surrounded by many Chinese students but he found few with whom he could communicate. “Life is fundamentally boring,” Chang wrote, “and even art and literature are manifestations of the same,” with suicide “the best way to rid one’s self of all frustrations.” “Ta-fu, the masses cannot be reformed.This is something I have long since known, but from time to time I like to have a try.” He confessed to his friend that “we must be able to be a minority” and “we must not fear being rejected by the masses because we have long since rejected them.”
Chang was back in Shanghai by 1923, and from there he went to Szechwan where for the next two years he taught in normal schools and started a newspaper. By his own testimony he was working with Communists in Szechwan, but he had still not joined the Communist Party. However, he returned in 1925 to Shanghai and joined the Party. Chang worked for a period in Shanghai and Soochow; he gave up his literary pursuits and turned to writing Party polemics, and for over a decade wrote frequently for the leading CCP journals. In 1926 Chang went to Moscow, where for the next few years he attended the revolutionary Sun Yat-sen University and taught at the Lenin School. The latter institute had been set up to provide advanced training for Communists and was under the direct control of the Comintern. Chang is reported to have attended the CCP’s Sixth Congress, which was held in Moscow in mid-1928.7 Prior to his return to China in 1930, Chang had become associated with a group of fellow students who were to return to China and take over the principal Party organizations.
Because of the dangers from the KMT police, Party work in Shanghai was carried on at great risk between 1931 and 1933 and therefore little is known about it. The period also witnessed a struggle for control between the CCP leaders in Shanghai and those in the rural hinterlands, and because the controversy did not come‘to light until many years later (see under Ch’en Shao-yii) it remains all the more obscure. In these years Mao and Chu Te were building a strong Communist base in the rural areas of southeast Kiangsi, and largely because the KMT continued to close in on the CCP apparatus in Shanghai, a number of the Party’s leaders found their way to the Mao-Chu base during the year 1931. By 1932 Ch’in Pang-hsien and Chang Wen-t’ien were left as the principal leaders in charge of the Party office in Shanghai. Control stemming from this office was fairly well limited to the urban areas controlled by the KMT, and although there continued to be some contact between Shanghai and the hinterlands, it is questionable how much authority Ch’in and Chang could exert there. The later writings of Mao, which serve to introduce the controversy between himself and Shanghai to his followers, present the matter only from Mao’s side. As regards Chang’s position, the question becomes more complicated, because from some of the available documentary material surviving from the early thirties, Chang would appear to have been on Mao’s side, or at least on the side that Mao later claimed as his. Thus, writing under the pseudonym Szu Mei for the official Hung-ch’i chou-pao (Red flag weekly), in an article entitled “The Present Political Situation and Our Tasks,” Chang called for an expansion of guerrilla warfare, the development of mass organizations (in the rural bases), and the establishment of a Central Soviet Government. The last-mentioned proposal did in fact take place in November 1931, some months after the article was published. However, there remains no doubt that from 1931 the major burden of Party work shifted from Shanghai to the countryside, and it was in Shanghai that Chang’s authority was strongest. His importance in Shanghai at the time is suggested by one piece of evidence from the year 1932; in that year, as a representative from the Party Center in Shanghai, he journeyed to north China for a conference of the North China Party Bureau, which took place during four days in late February or early March. Here, as one of the two presiding officers, he led the conference attended by leading Party officials from Honan, Hopeh, Shantung, Shensi, and Manchuria, areas where at this time Party organizations were admittedly small, but where a thread of contact with the Center was being maintained. It is notable that the conference considered the basic question of the weakness of CCP work in north China, and more especially in Manchuria where the Japanese had been in complete control since 1931.
By his own statements Chang worked in the Shanghai headquarters for two years, until his whereabouts were reported to the police by an imprisoned colleague, forcing him to flee “to the Soviet districts.” A further description of the Party organization in Shanghai is contained in the biography of Ch’in Pang-hsien. Chang left Shanghai in 1933, the year often given as the official closing date of the Party headquarters there. Once in Juichin, the capital of the south-east Kiangsi base, he formally assumed the directorship of the CCP Propaganda Department, although quite possibly he had already been carrying on this work in Shanghai for his friend Shen. Chang also became editor of the Kiangsi edition of the official Party journal, Tou-cheng (Struggle), published there in the thirties before the Long March. The editor’s post was a logical one for the Party propaganda head, and while he retained it Chang contributed a number of articles on Party policies. Holding a post on the Party’s Central Committee and Politburo, he of course attended the Fifth CCP Plenum held at Juichin in January 1934 (see under Ch’in Pang- hsien). Chang’s report at the Plenum, “The Chinese Soviet Movement and Its Tasks,” was one of the three conference reports. A few days after the Plenum closed, the Second All-China Congress of Soviets was convened in Juichin January 22-February 1).
At the Party’s Seventh National Congress, held in Yenan from April to June 1945, Chang served on the presidium (steering committee), made a speech, and was re-elected to both the Central Committee and the Politburo. Toward the end of the summer of 1945, as the war was drawing to a close, the CCP sent some of its top leaders to Manchuria, a group that included Kao Kang, P’eng Chen, Lin Piao, Ch’en Yun, Li Fu-ch’un, and Chang Wen-t’ien. Chang was initially assigned to Hokiang (Ho-chiang) province, a province with its capital in Chia-mu-szu (Kia-musze) and absorbed by Heilungkiang province when the Communists came to power in 1949. He served in Hokiang (1945-46) as the provincial Party Committee secretary and as political commissar of the Hokiang Military District. To govern those portions of Manchuria controlled by them, the Communists established the North-east Party Bureau and a governmental body known as the Northeast Administrative Committee (NEAC). In the Party Bureau, Chang was a Standing Committee member from 1945 to about 1950, and it appears that he was also an important official (possibly the director for a brief period) of the Bureau’s Organization Department. Within the NEAC, he was by 1949 a vice-chairman of the Finance and Economics Committee. This important body was chaired by Ch’en Yun, and Li Fu-ch’un was one of Chang’s fellow vice-chairmen.
From the available writings of Chang Wen-t’ien in the early thirties he appears to have sometimes sided with and sometimes against Mao. Good examples of Chang’s position are drawn from an article he wrote for Tou-cheng in February 1933 in which he was strongly critical of the so-called Lo Ming line, a controversial policy of the provincial Party secretary in Fukien (see under Lo Ming). Mao now supports the Lo Ming line and has come out against its detractors in contemporary times. But at a later date, probably while the Fifth Plenum was in session, Chang seems to have been in harmony with Mao in the matter of the Party’s treatment of the Fukien rebels. Again the question of how Mao stood on the Fukien rebellion in 1934 is obscured by Mao’s stand on Fukien today when he states that the actions of the Party in 1934 were wrong. However, documentary evidence from the early thirties would seem to prove otherwise. The Fukien insurgents, led by Ts’ai T’ing-k’ai, Li Chi-shen, and other militarists, broke with the KMT in November 1933 and established a short-lived government at Foochow, capital of Fukien. Not long before the outbreak of the rebellion, the CCP apparently had entered into negotiations with the rebel leaders, but later the Party gave them no support and allowed them to be crushed by Chlang Kai-shek’s army (January 1934). Then in the aftermath of defeat, probably while the Fifth Plenum was meeting, the CCP found it necessary to review its position on the rebellion, and it fell to Chang Wen-t’ien and another of the “28 Bolsheviks,” K’ai Feng, to give the Party a report on Fukien and to justify the fact that the CCP had given no support to the insurgents, its reason being that their reliability as revolutionaries was not considered sufficient. At this time, despite his later attitude, Mao Tse-tung and Chu Te showed themselves in agreement with Chang’s and K’ai’s reports on the situation in Fukien and the Party’s response to it.
For whatever reason Mao allowed one of his supposed opponents to assume the post of Party general secretary at Tsun-i, Chang seems to have retained it until after the start of the Sino-Japa- nese War. There is one report indicating that by 1939 it had been taken over by Mao,19 but Chang continued to be very much in evidence in Yenan at least until the beginning of the cheng- feng period in early 1942. In 1936, when Edgar Snow was in Pao-an, the Communist capital in north Shensi after the completion of the Long March, Chang was a lecturer at the Hung-chiin ta-hsueh (Red Army academy), and he gave Snow a resume of CCP history that was the accepted one of the time. A year later, when Snow’s wife visited Shensi, she too interviewed Chang whom she knew as “Lo Fu,” and he told her that he had written a history of the Chinese Revolution that was being used in all Communist schools. Later Mao himself referred Mrs. Snow to Chang for an analysis of the historical stages of development in the Chinese Communist Movement.20 Hence, it is not surprising to find that by 1940 Chang was identified as president of the Marx-Lenin Institute, evidently a training school for higher Party cadres. It was in the early forties too that Chang took charge of the reference room of the Chieh-fang jih-pao (Liberation daily), which began publication in 1941 and was directed by his colleague Ch’in Pang-hsien.
Chang is one of the few among the Party’s top leadership who can claim literary distinction. As noted, he first contributed to the journal of the Young China Association in his student days. In the mid-twenties, when he returned tb China from America, he tried his hand at a number of translations from the works of such a wide- ranging group of Western writers as Henri Bergson (Le Rire), Oscar Wilde (The Ballad of Reading Gaol), and Russian dramatist Leonid Andreyev (The Waltz of the Dogs)', all were published by the Commercial Press.
Tso belonged to the Young China Association organized in Peking in mid-1919 by a group of politically minded students, many of whom had formerly studied in Japan. Among the Association’s founders was Li Ta-chao who was later one of the giant figures in the history of the Chinese Communist Movement. Through the efforts of Tso Shun-sheng, who was actively recruiting for the Young China Association in the Nanking-Shanghai area, Chang joined the organization during the winter of 1919-20.2 In doing so, he came in touch with such prominent young leftists (and latter-day Communists) as Mao Tse-tung, Li Ta-chao, Teng Chung-hsia, and Yun Tai-ying. Chang began at once to contribute to the Association’s journal, Shao-nien Chung-kuo (Young China), where some of his earliest writings are found. Published from mid-1919 to the spring of 1924, it was edited for a time by Chang’s former teacher, Tso Shun-sheng.
Chang Wen-t’ien, often known by his pen name Lo Fu, was awakened to an interest in Marxism during the May Fourth Movement.
Quotes from others about the person
In 1937 Nym Wales described Chang as “tall and thin, looking much overworked.” He wore thick glasses and had “thoughtful, irregular features.” Chang spoke very good English and in fact conducted the interviews with both Snows in English. Chang has been married to Liu Ying since at least the mid-thirties. Liu, a Hunanese, was born about 1908 and like her husband studied in Moscow in the late twenties. She was among the relatively few women who made the Long March and by 1936 was a member of the Communist Youth League’s Central Committee. When Miss Wales interviewed Liu in Yenan in mid-1937, she described her as being fully occupied with youth work. Liu was in Moscow with her husband in the early fifties and upon her return home with him was appointed (January 1955) as an assistant minister of Foreign Affairs. However, unlike most Foreign Ministry officials, very little was heard of her in the ensuing years, and finally, about 1960, she was dropped from her Foreign Ministry. It is normal practice for the PRC to announce the dismissals of top governmental personnel, but Liu’s removal from office was only revealed with the publication of the 1961 Jen-min shou-ts'e (People’s handbook) when, in contrast to the previous issue, her name had been deleted from the Foreign Ministry roster. Significantly, it coincided almost exactly with the political downfall of her husband. Liu had served as a Honan deputy to the Second NPC (1959-1964), but she was not, of course, re-elected to the Third NPC, which opened in late 1964.
Meanwhile, the Chung-hua Book Company published his translations of two novels, Gioconda by Gabriele L. D’Annunzio and The Blind Musician by V. G. Korolenko. In October 1923 the Ch’uang-tsao chou-k’an (Creation weekly) published an article by Chang on the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran. Chang also translated works by Tolstoy and Turgenev and, as mentioned, wrote a novel and a play of his own. But upon joining the CCP he ceased his literary efforts and wrote only polemics, his articles in the early thirties appearing in Shih-hua (True words), the official organ published by the CCP in 1930 and 1931, in Hung-ch’i chou-pao (Red flag weekly), and in Tou-cheng (Struggle). Chang wrote especially for the edition in Kiangsi, which he edited for a time. During the first years of the Sino-Japanese War he was one of the Party’s most prolific writers on the question of the united front and the anti-Japanese resistance, and many of his articles are found in the literature of this time. As a writer and polemicist Chang used the names of Lo fu and Szu Mei, the latter especially in the thirties.