Background
Chia, who has also used the names Chia Ming-kuang and Chia Yao-tsu, comes from Shen-mu, an old city on the Great Wall about 100 miles north of Sui-te.
Chia, who has also used the names Chia Ming-kuang and Chia Yao-tsu, comes from Shen-mu, an old city on the Great Wall about 100 miles north of Sui-te.
He attended normal school in the middle 1920’s. In 1926, probably during his student days, he joined the Communist Youth League. At that time a number of the urban schools in Shensi felt the impact of the May Fourth Movement, which had erupted in Peking and Tientsin in May 1919 and which had been brought back to Shensi by former students enrolled in Peking or Tientsin universities. After getting a generous exposure to the unsettling ideas of modernization engendered by the Movement, some of these students became teachers in the Shensi schools. A group of them teaching in the middle schools of Yenan, Sui-te, Mi-chih, and Yti-lin formed a teachers’ alliance, which soon came into conflict with the provincial authorities. In the early 1920’s many of the radical teachers in Shensi were imprisoned or dismissed from the schools.
Chia went to Kiangsi in 1934, possibly at the time of the Second All-China Congress of Soviets held in Juichin, Kiangsi, in January-February 1934. There he reportedly directed the “sabotage” division of the Red Army Political Department. Later he is said to have returned to Shensi with the Long March armies of Mao Tse-tung. Arriving in the fall of 1935 he was immediately given work on the Grain Supply Committee of Mao’s First Front Army. At the same time he continued to work in the Army’s Political Department. In October 1935 Chia was sent to contact the headquarters of the 15 th Army Corps, based in north Shensi not far from Pao-an where Mao had his headquarters. The 15th Army Corps had been created in September 1935 from the two local 26th and 27th Armies of Liu Chih-tan and Kao Kang, plus Hsu Hai-tung’s 25th Army, which had come from central China late in 1934. Thus when Mao came to Shensi at the end of the Long March he had to make contact with a Communist army already active in the province and somewhat larger than his own. The two armies met and joined forces in the fall of 1935, and it is noteworthy that Chia (who knew both groups) was one of the liaison officers who brought them together.
There is little reporting of Chia’s activities during the Sino-Japanese War. He is said to have returned for a time to the CCP underground in Sian, apparently in addition to the legal CCP activity undertaken in agreement with the Na-tionalist Government controlling the city. He was said also to have been a member of the Northwest CCP Bureau; presumably this post dated from the late I930's and continued until sometime in 1952. According to an unconfirmed report, from about 1937 Chia was also secretary- general of the Northwest Bureau. In December 1949 he was identified as secretary of the Bureau’s “Workers’ Work Committee.”
Aside from his positions in Sian, Chia was also the vice-chairman of the Finance and Eco¬nomics Committee of the Northwest Liberation Region, an administration created in February 1949 by the merger of the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia and the Shansi-Suiyuan Border Regions. The Northwest Liberated Region, headquartered in Sian, gave way in January 1950 to the North-west Military and Administrative Committee (NWMAC). Chia was a member of the NWMAC from its inauguration. He also chaired the NWMAC’s Finance and Economics Committee from March to August 1950, when he was replaced by P’eng Те-huai; from that date until 1953 Chia served as a vice-chairman under P’eng. Like many prominent regional leaders in the early years of the PRC, Chia also held various other less important positions.
Chia was a deputy from Honan Province to the First NPC which, at its inaugural session in September 1954, brought the constitutional government into existence. In the reorganized central government he relinquished his post on the Planning Commission, but at the same time he was given the portfolio for the Ministry of Light Industry, replacing non-Communist Huang Yen- p’ei. In the following month he was made director of the Fourth Staff Office, which was charged with coordinating the work of the various State Council commissions, ministries, and bureaus involved with light and consumer industries. Chia continued in his ministerial post until he was replaced by Sha Ch’ien-li in May 1956, and he directed the Fourth Staff Office until September 1959 when it was merged with two others. During the middle and late 1950’s Chia was among the more active economic administrators; he was, for example, a featured speaker at four of the five annual sessions of the First NPC held between 1954 and 1958, and he also made major addresses at important national conferences, such as the First National Congress of Handicraft Cooperatives in December 1957.
The newly founded CCP, quick to realize this discontent among students and intellectuals, had sent its own agents into Shensi to organize small Party cells among the intellectuals in the cities and the poorer peasants in the countryside. During this time Chia is reported to have been a leader of the student movement in Sui-te, but by 1928 he had become connected with other Shensi leaders who had been working among the peasants. Capitalizing upon local unrest, Liu Chih-tan led an uprising among the peasantry in 1928. This event, known to the Communists as the Wei-Hua Uprising, is described in the biography of Liu Chih-tan. It appears that Chia took part in the revolt. In any case, before the year had ended he was serving, under Liu as a member of the CCP North Shensi Special Committee. In addition, at some time between 1928 and 1934 Chia directed the CCP Shensi Committee’s Organization Department and worked in the Party underground in north Shensi and Sian.
Thus from 1950 he was a member of the Executive Committee of the Northwest Branch of the All-China Fed-eration of Labor, and he was the chairman by 1952. In December 1951 he became vice-president of the newly established Northwest Branch of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association, and in February 1952 he was appointed chairman of a special committee to increase production and to prevent droughts.
Chia was a deputy from Honan Province to the First NPC which, at its inaugural session in September 1954, brought the constitutional government into existence. In the reorganized central government he relinquished his post on the Planning Commission, but at the same time he was given the portfolio for the Ministry of Light Industry, replacing non-Communist Huang Yen-p’ei.