Chang Yu-yii

Background

Chang was born about 1899 into a peasant family in Ling- shih, central Shansi.

Education

He graduated from the law school at Peking University and then received further training at the Tokyo Law College. In the twenties and thirties Chang divided his time between the field of journalism (reporting for papers in both Shanghai and Peking) and law. He taught law at such prominent schools as Peking and Yenching Universities.

Career

Chang’s first contact with the left-wing movement in China apparently came through the National Salvation Association, an organization that was particularly active in the mid-thirties in its attempts to arouse the Chinese populace against the repeated incursions of the Japanese into north China, In 1937 he worked briefly in Peking for the 29th Army, commanded by General Sung Che-yuan and ostensibly under the control of the Nationalist Government. In fact, however, Sung had a large degree of autonomy and his forces were apparently heavily infiltrated at the lower levels by young left-wing students in the Peking-Tientsin area, many of whom were under the influence of the CCP-dominated National Liberation Vanguard of China (see under Li Ch’ang). When the Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937, Chang fled to the Communist Shansi- Chahar-Hopeh Border Region, apparently making his first direct contact with the Communists. In view of his later career it seems likely that he had joined the Party by this time.

Chang went from the Shansi-Chahar-Hopeh Border Region to Hong Kong in 1940, then still under British control. For about a year he was the editor of the Hua-shang Pao (China commercial news). When Hong Kong fell to the Japanese (just after Pearl Harbor), Chang went to Chungking, the wartime capital of the Nationalists', where he worked as a reporter for the important Communist newspaper, the Hsin-hua Jih-pao (New China daily).

By 1945 Chang was the editor of this newspaper, as well as a deputy secretary of the CCP Szechwan Committee, director of the Propaganda Department of the same committee, and an alternate member of the Party’s Chungking Committee. Although the Party committees were covert at this time, their existence was probably known to the Nationalists. Chang’s work in these years probably brought him into close contact with Chou En-lai, Tung Pi-wu, Wu Yu-chang, and Wang Wei-chou, all important Communist leaders who were working in the Communist mission in the Nationalists’ capital.

On January 10, 1946, the cease-fire agreement worked out by U.S. Special Envoy George C. Marshall was signed, thus bringing about a brief cessation of hostilities between the Communists and the Nationalists. On the same day, the Political Consultative Conference opened in Chungking, attended by such top CCP leaders as Chou En-lai and his wife, Tung Pi-wu, and Lu Ting-i. Chang served as an adviser to the Communist delegation, but shortly after the conference adjourned in late January he was briefly detained by the Nationalist authorities. After his release, Chang returned to the Communist-held regions in north China, being assigned to the Shansi-Hopeh-Shantung-Honan (Chin-Chi-Lu-Yii) Border Region. He served in this government for about two years as a vice-chairman and secretary-general. In these positions Chang served directly under Border Region Chairman Yang Hsiu-feng who, like Chang, had been a professor in Peking during the thirties. Concurrently, Chang was also the secretary-general of the Party’s North China Bureau, a position he held until at least 1951.

Chang also held critical posts in the Party’s Peking Municipal Committee, serving by 1952 as a member of the Standing Committee, as a deputy secretary from 1956 to 1957, and from 1957 to 1958 as a secretary all of which placed him under ranking Secretary P’eng Chen. During the fifties he also served in a number of lesser (or ad hoc) posts. For example, from 1949 he was a vice-chairman of the Peking chapter of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association, then a highly active organization. In 1953 he was named to chair the municipal committee to implement the marriage law, and in the following year he became the chairman of the Peking committee to discuss the draft (national) constitution. Chang’s only position in the national government in the early years of the PRC was a member of the First National Committee of the CPPCC (1949— 1954); he was not re-elected to the Second CPPCC in 1954 but returned in later years to this organization (see below).

Until the constitutional government was inaugurated by the NPC in 1954, China was divided into six large administrative areas. From 1953 to 1954 Chang served as a member of the North China Administrative Committee headed by veteran Party leader Liu Lan-t’ao. When the NPC was established in 1954, Chang was elected as a deputy from Peking and since that time has been one of the NPC’s more active members. He was re-elected to the Second NPC (1959— 1964) and to the Third NPC, the first session of which opened in December 1964. In this legislative body, the PRC has utilized Chang’s training as a lawyer by placing him on the Motion’s Examination Committee (which serves for the life of each annual NPC session) and the perma¬nent Bills Committee. Chang served as a member of the former committee for the sessions held in 1956 through 1958, and since 1959 he has chaired the committee. On the Bills Committee, he served as a vice-chairman from 1959 to 1964. In his dual capacity as a Peking Government official and as a NPC deputy, Chang served as a member of the Peking Government-NPC delegation that visited the U.S.S.R., Rumania, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Albania, and Yugoslavia from November 1956 to January 1957 (see under P’eng Chen, the delegation leader).

Politics

Like so many of the officials in the Chin-Chi- Lu-Yii Government, Chang took part in the administration of the north China cities as they were captured by the PLA in 1949. Thus, when Tientsin fell to the Communists in January 1949, he was named as the vice-mayor. It is quite possible that Chang was acquainted with the mayor, Huang Ching, who had been an active Party organizer among students in Peking during the thirties. Chang only held the Tientsin post briefly before he was reassigned (April 1949) to Peking, where he would spend the next nine years as a top government and Party official. He was named as a vice-mayor, post that placed him directly subordinate to three of the most important of the Communist leaders, Mayors Yeh Chien-ying (1949), Nieh Jung-chen (1949-1951), and P’eng Chen (the mayor after early 1951). Chang was also engaged in a wide range of other activities, as the following positions indicate: director, Labor Bureau (1949-?); chairman, Finance and Economics Committee (1949— 1950); vice-chairman, same committee (1950-?; he was replaced as the chairman by the more senior P’eng Chen); vice-chairman, Planning Committee (1950-?).

Coincidental with his more active role in the legislative affairs of the NPC, Chang relinquished his posts in the Peking government and municipal Party Committee in 1958 and entered, in effect, upon a new phase in his career, becoming involved with mass organization work. This reorientation probably derives from the fact that the fields of political science and law were found to be staffed by persons who, from the Party viewpoint, were considered untrustworthy a situation that was brought into the open during the 1957-1958 “rectification” movement. A large number of officials, mainly non-Communists, were sharply criticized during the movement and were subsequently purged from their posts in various professional organizations and institutions of higher learning. It was in this atmos-phere that Chang was named as a vice-chairman and as a member of the newly created Secretariat of the Political Science and Law Association of China (PSLAC) in August 1958. The elderly Party veteran Tung Pi-wu nominally continued to head the PSLAC, but the real authority passed to Wu Te-feng, the first secretary of the Secretariat. Wu’s authority was made more explicit in 1964 when he succeeded Tung as the chairman, while continuing also as the first secretary. By the middle of 1959 Chang had been identified in two further posts closely related to the work of the PSLAC. By April he had become the director of the Institute of Jurisprudence, one of the many institutes subordinate to the Academy of Sciences. Within two months he was also identified as a deputy director of the Philosophy and Social Sciences Department of the Academy, one of its four major academic departments and the one that coordinates the work of all subordinate institutes (such as the Institute of Jurisprudence) in the social sciences. As a further reflection of his new assignment to work with social scientists, Chang was named to the Third National Committee of the CPPCC in April 1959 as a representative of social science organizations. (As described above, Chang had served on the First National Committee, 1949-1954, but had not been re-elected to the Second Committee in 1954.) He was once again named to represent social scientists when the Fourth CPPCC' was formed in late 1964.

Since 1959 Chang has also been fairly active in China’s international relations. His first assignment in this field came in November 1959 when he was elected president of the China-Burma Friendship Association, replacing Cheng Chen-to, who had died in an air crash a year earlier. It was probably because of his affiliation with this organization that he was assigned to take part in a parliamentary delegation, led by Kuo Mo-jo, that visited Indonesia and Burma in August-September 1961. Also in this capacity Chang is often present to entertain visiting Burmese leaders, as he was in October 1961 when Burmese Prime Minister U Nu was in China. He was given still another assignment in the foreign relations field in April 1962 when he was named to the national council of the newly-formed Asia-Africa Society of China, an organization ostensibly devoted to academic research.

Apart from his visit to Burma and Indonesia in 1961, Chang has been abroad on three other occasions. In October 1960 he led a delegation of jurists to the Seventh Congress of the Communist-dominated International Association of Democratic Lawyers (LADL), to which the Chinese Political Science and Law Association is affiliated. In June of the following year he was reported returning from Moscow as the deputy leader of an Academy of Sciences delegation led by physicist Wu Yu-hsun, an Academy vice-president. From March 1961 Wu had toured through Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Rumania before visiting in the U.S.S.R.; presumably Chang was also with him for these portions of the trip. In October 1962 Chang led another delegation of Chinese jurists to the Second Afro-Asian Lawyers’ Conference held in Conakry, Guinea. Chang’s increasing international contacts were probably useful to him when the Chinese held the Peking Scientific Symposium in August 1964. The symposium was attended by 367 delegates from 44 nations, mainly in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Chang served as one of the six deputy leaders of the large Chinese delegation to the conference, which held panels on both the natural and social sciences.

Connections

Chang has been married to Han Yu-t’ung since 1931. Born in 1908 in Ning-an, Heilungkiang, and of Hui nationality, Han (like her husband) was trained at the Peking University law school and in Japan. She participated in revolutionary work from her student days, activities for which she was twice imprisoned. Han was with her husband in Hong Kong just before Pearl Harbor and was also with him in Chungking during the war. She has served as a Heilungkiang deputy to the three NPC’s and has been a member of the Executive Committee of the National Women’s Federation since 1957. Among the numerous positions she has held, the most important was a vice-presidency of one of the divisions of the Supreme People’s Court (1952-1959). Beginning in 1947, when she participated in the Communist World Congress of Women in Budapest, Han has attended several international conferences abroad, most of them related to the field of law.

The most dramatic of these took place in March-April 1964 when she led the Chinese delegation to the Eighth Congress of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers in Budapest. Although still members of this organization, since the Sino-Soviet ideological split of the early sixties the Chinese have used these international meetings principally to denounce the Russians. At the conference in question, a Chinese resolution denouncing the United States was defeated, whereupon Han walked out of the final plenary session. In a parting speech, widely reported in the international press, Han is reported to have shouted: “Come on, attack us. This does not worry us. We fight to the last.” Her actions, of course, were approved by the CCP, a fact made completely evident by the favorable coverage given to her delegation by the Chinese Communist press.

Spouse:

Han Yu-t’ung