Chao Erh-lu

Background

Chao was born about 1905 in Yuan-p’ing hsien, 60 miles north of Taiyuan, Shansi.

Education

A graduate of a middle school in Taiyuan, he began his career as a revolutionist in June 1927 and was admitted into the CCP two months later. In the following year Chao went to Chingkangshan on the Hunan-Kiangsi border, where he served as the Party representative in a company of the 28th Regiment, one of the six regiments in the Fourth Red Army established by Chu Te and Mao Tse-tung in the spring of 1928. (A brief history of the Fourth Army is contained in the biography of Chu Te.)

Career

At sometime prior to the end of 1929 Chao was promoted to the post of Party representative in the Communists’ First Column and then took command of the Fourth Red Army’s 29th Regiment. In the early thirties he was chief of a regimental-level supply department within the Chu-Mao First Army Corps. Chao is reported to have attended a military academy in the early thirties, possibly the Red Army Academy that opened near Juichin in 1933.

Chao made the Long March in 1934-1935 as director of the Supply Department of Lin Piao’s First Army Corps. After arriving in north Shensi, he attended the first class of the AntiJapanese Military Academy in mid-1936. A year later, when war with Japan broke out, Chao was assigned to Lin Piao’s 115th Division, one of the three divisions of the Communists’ Eighth Route Army. He spent most or all of the war years as a commander and political officer in the Shansi- Chahar-Hopeh (Chin-Ch’a-Chi) base (see under Nieh Jung-chen). The exact dates are not available, but Chao’s obituary revealed that he held the following positions: commander and political commissar of the Second Sub-district of the Chin-Ch’a-Chi Military Region, commander and political commissar of the Hopeh-Shansi Column, and chief-of-staff of the Chin-Ch’a-Chi Military Region. He remained in this area in the immediate postwar period and by 1947 was identified as a member of the Chin-Ch’a-Chi CCP Central Bureau. In the meantime, in 1946, when General George C. Marshall’s Peking Executive Headquarters was attempting to implement the terms of the cease-fire agreement (January 1946) between Communists and Nationalists, Chao was the Communist member of the truce team sent by the Executive Headquarters into the area around Chang-chia-k’ou (Kalgan), the capital of Chahar Province. As a truce team member he had the simulated military rank of a major-general.

In August 1948 the Communists established the North China People’s Government to administer those areas of north China then under their control. The government lasted only until October 1949 when the PRC came into being and absorbed the North China Government. From 1948 to October 1949 Chao held three posts in north China, he was chief-of-staff of the North China Military Region, a member of the North China People’s Government Council, and a member of the Council’s Finance and Economics Committee headed by the veteran Tung Pi-wu.

At some time in 1949 Chao transferred to Lin Piao’s Fourth Field Army, the Communist force that had conquered the Nationalists in Manchuria and had captured Tientsin and Peking in January 1949. In the spring of 1949, with'Hsiao K’o as chief-of-staff of both the Fourth Field Army and of the Central-South Military Region (CSMR), this army moved into Hupeh, Kiangsi, and Hunan, and later into Kwangtung and Kwangsi. Chao served under Hsiao as deputy chief-of-staff of the CSMR and of the Fourth Field Army.

After approximately three years in central-south China, Chao was transferred in 1952 to Peking, where he was given administrative posts in accordance with his background as a military leader. He was made director in 1952 of the Ordnance Department of the Rear Services Department under the People’s Revolutionary Military Council, the military advisory branch of the PRC Government. In a reorganization of some of the government ministries, the Communists took offices away from the Ministry of Heavy Industry in August 1952 and from these created the First and Second Ministries of Machine Building. Chao was made minister of the Second Ministry of Machine Building (while continuing to hold the Ordnance post). His Ministry was said to deal with munitions production. After six years in this post, Chao’s responsibilities were considerably widened during another partial reorganization of the State Council in February 1958. The First and Second Ministries of Machine Building were merged, and to them was added the former Ministry of Power Equipment to form a single First Ministry of Machine Building; there was, in addition, a new Second Machine Building Ministry. Chao was made chief of the First Ministry, holding the post until September 1960 when he was succeeded by Tuan Chiin-i. On the same day that Chao relinquished the ministerial post, he was assigned to the State Economic Commission as one of the vice-chairmen. He continued to hold this post, his principal governmental responsibility, until his death in 1967.

Achievements

• In September 1955, when national military honors were first awarded, Chao received all three top decorations: the Orders of August First, Independence and Freedom, and Liberation, awards that covered military service during the period from 1927 to 1950. Personal military ranks were also designated for PLA officers for the first time in 1955. However, it was not until July 1963 that Chao was identified as a colonelgeneral, the equivalent of a three-star general in the U.S. Army. Chao’s long career in the CCP was given official recognition in September 1956 when he was elected a member of the Party Central Committee at the Eighth Party Congress. He was one of only 33 men elected to full membership who had been neither an alternate nor a full member of the Seventh Central Committee elected in 1945.
  
  

Politics

A Party member since 1927.

Membership

He was a member of the Wuhan Military Control Commission subsequent to the Communist takeover of that important Yangtze River city in May 1949. In 1950 Chao succeeded Hsiao as chief-of-staff of both the CSMR and its field army, continuing in these posts until 1952. Concurrently, Chao was the garrison commander of Wuhan. During these same years he was a member of the Central-South Military and Administrative Committee (CSMAC), the governmental organ for the area under the jurisdiction of the Military Region. In addition, he was a member of the CSMAC’s Finance and Economics Committee. He received two further assignments when he was named as vice-chairman of both the Central-South Flood Prevention Headquarters and the Central-South Anti-Epidemic Committee, two organizations formed in the spring of 1952, the first under important Party leader Teng Tzu-hui.

He was named to membership on the National Defense Council in September, when that organization was created, and was reappointed in April 1959 and in January 1965. From 1954 to 1959 he was also a member of the Second CPPCC, representing the CCP, but he was not re-elected to the Third CPPCC that opened in April 1959. Chao was not a member of the First NPC, which had inaugurated the constitutional government in 1954, but he was elected to the Second NPC (1959-1964) and was re-elected to the Third NPC, which opened in December 1964. During the term of the Second NPC he had represented Szechwan, but he was transferred to the Kwangsi- Chuang Autonomous Region for the Third NPC.

Personality

From the mid-fifties to 1960 Chao’s name appeared in the press with some regularity, particularly in connection with conferences related to the machine building industries. He was a featured speaker, for example, at the first “National Second Machine Industry Advanced Producers Conference” held in April 1956. However, after he relinquished his ministerial portfolio in the First Ministry of Machine Building in 1960 he was mentioned in the press almost exclusively in connection with military affairs, as on July 31, 1963, when he took part in celebrations marking the anniversary of the PLA. Chao’s obituary revealed that at the time of his death he was holding three important posts in organizations theretofore not mentioned in the Communist press.