Background
Chang was born in the small town of Wen-ch’ang in northeastern Hainan Island.
Chang was born in the small town of Wen-ch’ang in northeastern Hainan Island.
He began his formal education in Canton at a military primary school, later seeking further military training in the well-known military academy at Paoting, where so many of China’s military leaders of the Republican period (1911-1949) were trained. Chang graduated in 1919 as a member of the sixth class (see under Yeh T’ing). Having been a member of the revolutionary T’ung-meng hui before attending Paoting and a participant in the 1911 Revolution, upon graduation he continued his military career.
He returned to south China where he served for three years (1919-1921) in the army of a local Kwangsi warlord before becoming a staff officer in the First Division of the Kwangtung Army. Chang remained for at least a year in the Army’s First Division, serving under Li Chi-shen, the chief-of-staff, who later became an influential leader in south China. Chang’s career is not documented for the next few years during which time he may have continued to take part in the military exploits conducted by Li’s army in south China.
Chang was serving with the Kwangtung Army when the Nationalists embarked in mid-1926 on the Northern Expedition to unify China under the KMT Government. Some reports state that he joined the CCP that year. In mid-1925 Li Chi-shen’s Kwangtung Army had been renamed the Fourth Nationalist Army, and as such it participated in the Northen Expedition. Chang, by this time a staff officer with the rank of lieutenant-colonel, moved north with the army into the Yangtze Valley region in the latter half of 1926. The Fourth Army was mostly composed of Cantonese soldiers; initially commanded by Li Chi-shen, it had two other south Chinese leaders serving successively as commanders-in-chief after the Northern Expedition began. Ch’en Ming-shu, the first of the two, was contemporary in age to Chang and was also a graduate of the Paoting Military Academy. In the summer of 1927 the Fourth Army reached an area north of Nanchang, the Kiangsi capital, and made its headquarters at Chiu-chiang (Kiukiang). It then became known as the Fourth Army Group (or the Second Front Army), and by this time was commanded by Kwangtung General Chang Fa-k’uei. Because it contained a large component of officers recruited from the revolutionary Whampoa Military Academy at Canton (whose president was Chiang Kai-shek), service with this army gave Chang Yun-i an opportunity to work with the young men who had come from the disbanded Workers’ Guard, a Communist organization formed among the Whampoa cadets. Consequently, it may have been at this time that he joined the Party. When the Second Front Army reached Chiu-chiang, Chang was serving as the chief-of-staff of the 25th Division, which made its headquarters at Te-an on the rail line between Chiu-chiang and Nanchang, a strategic location in relation to Nan-chang. When the Second Front Army’s pro-Communist units received the signal to rebel, they, with the help of Chu Te’s garrison force guarding the city, were able to capture the Kiangsi capital (August 1, 1927). All relations between the CCP and the KMT were immediately broken, the Party center was forced to go underground, and after five days Chang Fa-k’uei drove the Communists out of Nanchang.
The course of their evacuation and the route that they followed south through Kiangsi and Fukien are episodes covered in the biographies of Chu Te and Ho Lung, who were among the top leaders of the routed Communist army. After the Communists’ defeat at Nanchang, Chang Yun-i followed Chu Te south into the North River area of Kwangtung, where they remained on the outskirts of Swatow when, at the end of September, Ho Lung and others captured the city. Then, when the Communists suffered a second defeat at Swatow, Chu retreated across Kwangtung and into southern Hunan and formed a unit of the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army in which Chang assumed command of the Third Division.
Chang’s next assignment took him to Kwangsi Province, possibly to resume contact with some of the provincial military forces he may have known during the period of the Northern Expedition. He arrived in Kwangsi during the year 1928-1929, possibly sent there by the Party center at Shanghai, which was then controlled by Li Li-san. Political feuding between the lesser and smaller provincial leaders in Kwangsi gave the Communists an opportunity to exploit the uneasy balance of power, and Chang was able to infiltrate forces of one of the lesser warlords, Li Ming-jui, whose headquarters were at Nanning in southeast Kwangsi. Li Ming-jui’s political loyalties had already shifted several times. During the Northern Expedition he had been a deputy commander to powerful Kwangsi leader Li Tsung-jen, serving in the latter’s Seventh Army. (There is also a report that Chang Yun-i served briefly as a high-ranking officer on the Seventh Army staff during the Northern Expedition). Later, however, Li Ming-jui came to oppose the stronger leaders Li Tsung-jen and Pai Ch’ung-hsi, both of whom came originally from Kweilin in northeast Kwangsi. By the time Chang arrived in Kwangsi, Li Ming-jui was described as “somewhat anti-Chiang Kai-shek.” Thus the Communists found him willing to cooperate temporarily in their plans to organize military forces in western Kwangsi. Li Ming-jui’s army was the easier for the Communists to penetrate because he had on his staff two cousins of high officer rank, both of whom were favorably disposed to the CCP. One of them, Yu Tso-po, had been with the Seventh Army on the Northern Expedition and had worked with the Communists before that as head of the Kwangsi provincial Bureau of Agriculture; the other man, Yu’s brother Yii Tso-yii, had already been recruited into the Party.
Chang Yun-i had had more success when he led the Fourth Brigade into the Pai-se area along the upper reaches of the Yu Chiang. Establishing a small base there, he had been able to expand his territory to include the Communist base to the northeast, which centered around Tung-lan. In this area, which was chiefly populated by the non-Han minority, the Chuang, Wei Pa-ch’iin (a Chuang member of the CCP) had been active since the mid-1920’s. Wei, born in Tung-lan hsien in 1894, had been active in his native hsien reorganizing the peasants of the Yu Chiang region. A brief description of developments in the Pai-se area is contained in the biography of Teng Hsiao-p’ing, a young CCP political agent who had been sent to Kwangsi from the Party center in Shanghai. Teng first came to Kwangsi in 1929, apparently not long after Chang arrived there. Party writers' always eager to link historic events to the anniversary of a prior well-known incident, state that on December 11, 1929 (the second anniversary of the Canton uprising, see under Chang T’ai-lei), the Yu Chiang Soviet was established and the Seventh Red Army activated. Chang Yun-i was named commander of the Seventh Army, and Lei Ching-t’ien headed the soviet government. (Lei remained with the Communists and died in 1959 while holding the post of president of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.) The capital of the Yu Chiang government was at P’ing-ma, near Pai-se on the Yu River. When the Tung-lan base was included under Chang’s territory, the larger area was sometimes referred to as the Pai-se Soviet.
Chang’s stature grew considerably during the Sino-Japanese War. For a brief time before war began he was based in north Shensi where, in August 1936, he was identified as chief-of-staff of the Revolutionary Military Council, the top organ of the Party with jurisdiction for military affairs. The Council was headed by Mao Tse-tung, but it is not known how long Chang continued to serve as Mao’s chief-of-staff. The position was held by T’eng Tai-yuan as of 1940; Chang must have relinquished it before that date because soon after the Sino-Japanese War broke out he was assigned to other duties outside of north China. From 1937 to 1938 he was said to have acted as a CCP liaison officer with Na-tionalist military officers in south China and Fukien, probably with the Kwangsi leaders with whom he had once associated.
Chang was elected in 1954 as a Kwangsi deputy to the First NPC, when the first session of the Congress was held in September 1954, he was named to membership on the Standing Committee, a position to which he was re-elected in April 1959 for the Second NPC and in January 1965 for the Third NPC. He was also named in September 1954 as a member of the new National Defense Council (NDC), the successor (though less important) organization to the People’s Revolutionary Military Council. He also continues to sit on the NDC, having been re-elected in April 1959 and January 1965. In September 1955, when the PRC first gave its officer corps personal military ranks and decorations, Chang received the Orders of August First, Independence and Freedom, and Liberation, awards for service in the Red armies covering the period from 1927 to 1950. He was also made a colonel-general at this time (the equivalent of a three-star general in the U.S. Army), and by 1963 had been promoted to senior general (only one rank below that of marshal).
Chang Yun-i joined the Communist movement in the mid-1920’s. For the next three decades he participated in many of the keynote events in Chinese Communist military history, including the Long March.
Soon after the war began the Communists entered into negotiations with the Nationalists to gain official permission to operate an army in east-central China (in addition to the Eighth Route Army in northwest China). This force, known as the New Fourth Army, came into being early in 1938 with Yeh T’ing as its commander, and soon afterwards Chang must have been assigned to the new army. He was commander of its Fourth Detachment by the late fall of 1939 when American author Agnes Smedley visited Communist military bases in central China and interviewed Chang. According to Chang, he had first been sent to investigate the Fourth Detachment late in 1938 after Kao Chun-t’ing, the commander, had become “a local militarist.” The Fourth Detachment of the New Fourth Army had had a history somewhat different from the other three detachments, which were staffed by guerrilla forces that had been fighting in central China for some time. In 1938 the first three New Fourth Army units were established south of the Yangtze below Nanking, in a region that extended roughly from Tan-yang on the Grand Canal in southwest Kiangsu to Wu-hu in Anhwei, while the Fourth Detachment (a force of some 1,000 men) was sent directly from Hankow in March 1938 to an area north of the Yangtze around Huang-an in north-west Hupeh. Huang-an had been part of the Communists’ base at Oyiiwan in the early 1930’s (see under Chang Kuo-t’ao).
During 1938 the detachment increased its strength by local recruitment and in January 1939, probably about the time that Chang Yun-i assumed command, it moved its headquarters eastward to Shu-ch’eng hsien in central Anhwei. Units from this Fourth Detachment soon split off to form a Fifth Detachment based at Lu-chiang in Anhwei (see under Lo Ping-hui), while the Fourth Detachment continued to function largely as a unit to train other forces. In April 1939 the Fourth Detachment moved its base from Shu-ch’eng to an area near the small town of Ting-huan, not far to the southeast of Huai-nan (see under Fang I). Then early in 1940 the Detachment ran into serious opposition from the Kwangsi forces commanded by Chang Yun-i’s former protagonist, Li Tsung-jen, commander of the Nationalists’ Fifth War Zone, whose army was then acting as a semi-independent unit allied with Chiang Kai- shek’s forces. So severe were the pressures put upon the Fourth Detachment, not only by Li’s army, but also by the Japanese, that the unit lost contact with the rest of the New Fourth Army south of the Yangtze, and by mid-1940 it again moved its headquarters eastward, crossing the Tientsin-Pukow railroad into north Kiangsu to settle near Hsu-i on the shores of Lake Hung- tse.G Chang presumably continued to head the Fourth Detachment all this while, although by November 1939 he also assumed other and more important posts with the headquarters command of the New Fourth Army.
As already described, Chang had been a member of the Party Central Committee from the Seventh Congress in 1945. When the Eighth Congress was held in September 1956, he served on the Congress Presidium (steering committee) and was elected at the close of the proceedings to membership on the new (Eighth) Central Committee. Since that time, however, Chang has been mentioned in the Party press infrequently. Inferential evidence suggests that one of his con-tinuing assignments may be to keep watch over the state of affairs in his native Kwangsi. For example, in April 1957 he participated in talks in Peking related to the change of Kwangsi from a province to the Kwangsi-Chuang Autonomous Region (a step formally taken in March 1958- see under Wei Kuo-ch’ing). Similarly, in March 1963 he was in Kwangsi to attend the celebrations marking the fifth anniversary of the Region, and in November 1964 he was once again re-ported there (although the nature of his activities was not revealed).
