Background
Chao was born about 1905 in Hopeh Province in north China.
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Chao I-min
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His early background is not recorded, but it is probable that he was a Party member by the start of the Sino-Japanese War. According to a Communist source, during the war four men served successively as the head of the Lu Hsun Fine Arts Academy, an important propaganda training institute established in Yenan in 1938. The four men, in the order listed, were dramatist Sha K’o- fu, Chao, Wu Yii-chang, and Chou Yang. In the latter stages of the war Chao served as vice-president and then as president of Yenan University, a school established in 1941 through the merger of the Lu Hsun Academy and six other institutes in Yenan.
Career
In the postwar period Chao continued in the educational field, being named to the presidency of the Hopeh-Chahar-Jehol-Liaoning Associated University when it was established in 1947. He was among the first officials to enter Peking after its fall to the Communists in early 1949. Throughout the spring and summer of 1949 Communist officials in Peking were engaged in the preparatory work that culminated in the fall in the formation of the central government and many of the “mass” or “people’s" organizations. Chao’s principal task at this time was apparently to contact leading literary and artistic figures (most of them non-Communists), many of whom were arriving in Peking from all parts of China and from abroad. For example, in March 1949 Chao attended a meeting to welcome returning literati, which was sponsored by the North China People’s Government and the North China Literary and Artistic Circles Association. He apparently remained in Peking through the fall of 1949; at any rate, he was named to membership on the First Executive Board of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association (SSFA), which was formed in early October, just a few days after the new central government was established. He retained his post in the SSFA until the end of 1954.
By no later than the end of 1949 Chao was assigned to central-south China, which had just been conquered by the advancing Communist armies. There he headed both the Party’s Central-South Bureau’s Propaganda Department and the Youth Work Committee, posts he retained until the Bureau was abolished in late 1954. The governmental administration for this area (covering Honan, Kiangsi, Hupeh, Hunan. Kwangtung, and Kwangsi) was set up in February 1950 under the name Central-South Military and Administrative Committee (CSMAC). The headquarters of both the CSMAC and the Party Bureau were located in Wuhan, and both organizations were headed by Lin Piao. Chao was named to membership on the CSMAC and in March 1950 was given concurrent assignments as director of the CSMAC’s Culture and Education Committee and its Culture Department. Three years later (January 1953), when the CSMAC was reorganized into the Central-South Administrative Committee (CSAC), he was reappointed as a member of the CSAC and director of its Culture and Education Committee (although he relinquished his post in the Culture Department). Thus, in the years from 1949 to 1954, Chao was one of the principal officials concerned with the development of cultural-propaganda affairs both in the Party and civil administrations throughout the six-province area. For example, it fell to him to deliver a major report on cultural and educational work in the region when the CSMAC met for its second meeting in Wuhan in September 1950. And in May 1952, to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Mao Tse-tung’s famous address on literature and art (delivered in Yenan), Chao reported on ideological remolding in central-south China, a talk in which he criticized Party cadres who were becoming estranged from the life of the workers and peasants.
In 1954 Chao was given an assignment that was a forerunner of much of his activity in latter years. In July of that year he was sent to Chile as head of a delegation to attend the birthday celebrations for a Chilean Communist poet, Pablo Neruda; his delegation visited Argentina briefly before returning to China in September. Chao is one of the very few ranking Chinese Communists who have visited Latin America (exclusive of Cuba). The regional administration in central-south China was abolished in 1954; as a consequence, soon after returning from Latin America, Chao was transferred to Peking. Since then he has devoted his time almost exclusively to two closely related activities international liaison on behalf of ostensibly non-governmental organizations (such as the China Peace Committee) and liaison work between the CCP and other Communist parties throughout the world. In the former category he received his first major assignment in March 1955, when he was named as a vice-chairman of the Chinese People’s Association for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (CPACRFC), an important mass organization whose activities are directed mainly toward nations that do not maintain diplomatic relations with Peking. In this capacity, for example, Chao was one of the signers in November 1955 of a joint communiqué with a Japanese delegation representing the National League for the Protection of the (Japanese) Constitution. In the following years Chao devoted much of his time to the CPACRFC; although he relinquished his vice-chairmanship in April 1959, he retains his seat on the organization’s Standing Committee. In June 1955 Chao was elected in absentia to the World Peace Council (WPC) at the World Peace Congress held in Helsinki. He was named to the Standing Committee of the China Peace Committee, the Chinese affiliate of the WPC, in July 1958, and in June 1965 he was promoted to a vice-chairmanship. Still another liaison organization with which Chao has been affiliated is the Asian Solidarity Committee of China, an organization formed in February 1956 and renamed the Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee in May 1958 to reflect Communist China’s growing interest in Africa. Chao became a member of the organization’s National Committee upon its formation and in June 1965 was elevated to the Standing Committee.
Politics
Like most major political figures in the early years of the regime, Chao also received extracurricular assignments that lay outside his major areas of responsibility. In March 1952 he received two such assignments, a vice-chairmanship of the Central-South Anti-Epidemic Committee and membership on the Ching River Flood-harnessing Committee. Within the “people’s” organizations, he headed the China Peace Committee’s Central-South Branch from 1951 and was from the following year a vice-chairman of both the Central-South and Wuhan branches of the SSFA (to which, as described above, he was affiliated at the national level). He was also identified in mid-1952 as the secretary of the New Democratic Youth League’s Central-South Work Committee.
Chao had received an even more important assignment, a fact revealed in July 1955 when Vietnamese leader Ho Chi-minh visited China. At that time Chao was identified as a “responsible official” in one of the departments of the Party Central Committee. Although the specific post has never been identified, inferential evidence strongly suggests that it is in a department relating to international Party liaison (possibly the International Liaison Department see under Wu Hsiu-ch’iian). Since 1955 Chao has dealt with scores of foreign Communist Party delegations that have visited Peking; it is a rare occasion, in fact, when he is not present for talks with such groups. His work in this field was given official recognition at the second session of the Party’s Eighth National Congress in May 1958 when he was elected an alternate member of the CCP Central Committee. In the same month he left Peking as a member of Party veteran Tung Pi-wu’s delegation to Communist Party congresses in Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany and returned to Peking in August. Two years later, in July 1960, Chao was back in Europe to attend the funeral of British Communist Party Chairman Harry Pollitt. He returned to England in March 1961 to represent the CCP at the 27th Congress of the British Communist Party.
Membership
In October—November 1964 he was a member of Foreign Minister Ch’en I’s delegation to Algeria for the 10th anniversary of the Algerian Revolution, and later in November he accompanied Liao Ch’eng-chih to Rome. Ostensibly the group went to Italy as a China Peace Committee delegation, but the significance of the mission rests on the fact that the Chinese were able to gain permission to open a permanent commercial mission in Rome (officially opened in early 1965 see under Lei Jen-min). Chao returned to Europe in March 1965 as a member of Chou En- lai’s delegation to the funeral of Rumanian Party First Secretary G. Gheorghiu-Dej. Afterwards the group visited briefly in Albania, Algeria, the United Arab Republic, Pakistan, and Burma before returning home in April. The following July Chao led a large delegation to the World Peace Congress in Helsinki; like virtually every Communist-sponsored meeting since the early sixties, this one quickly became a forum for airing the Sino-Soviet dispute. During the course of these meetings Chao rejected American offers of “unconditional negotiations” to end the war in Vietnam and warned the world to “remember Korea.”
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Born
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Nationality
China -
Ethnicity
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Political Party
Chinese Communist Party
Career
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1949 - 1954