Background
He was born in Changsha, the capital of Hunan.
He was born in Changsha, the capital of Hunan.
Chou is reported to have made the Long March and was serving as a personal secretary to Mao Tse-tung when the Communists moved to Yenan in 1936. According to fragmentary reports, he was engaged in guerrilla warfare in Hopeh and his native Hunan at some period during the Sino-Japanese War. However, he apparently spent part of the time in Sinkiang, because an account by General Sheng Shih-ts’ai, the powerful governor of Sinkiang with whom the Communists cooperated during the early years of the war, mentions that Mao Tse-tung sent Chou there “to tell us'of the difficulties besetting the Eighth Route Army during the winter of 1940 . . .” Chou’s mission was reportedly to get assistance from Sheng; the latter claims that in response to Chou’s requests he sent money and 50,000 “fur coats” to the Communists in Yenan.
Another of Sheng’s references suggests that Chou may have been in Sinkiang as late as early 1942. (See also under T’eng Tai-yuan.) Nothing further is known of Chou’s wartime or postwar activities, but he must have held posts of some significance within the CCP, for by the early fifties he had emerged as a leader of prominence in his native Hunan. His most important positions were under the jurisdiction of the Hunan Party Committee. By early 1950 he was head of the Hunan Propaganda Department (a post he held to about 1952), and from about 1952 to 1953 he was secretary of the West Hunan CCP District Committee. In the early fall of 1953 the ranking Hunan Party Secretary, Chin Ming was assigned to a post in the central government. Chou replaced Chin as the Human secretary (redesignated as “first” secretary in 1956), a position he retained until mid-1959 (see below).
In addition to his role in the Hunan Party hierarchy, Chou also participated in the work of the Hunan government. He was a member of the Hunan Provincial People’s Government Council from early 1950 until his promotion to a vice-governorship in February 1955. In addition, from July 1950 he served under Chin Ming as a vice-chairman of the government’s Land Reform Committee. In February 1955 Chou was also named as chairman of the Hunan Committee of the CPPCC, and in September of the next year he attended the Eighth National Party Congress in Peking where he presented a written speech on the subject of strengthening agricultural producers’ cooperatives. The peak of Chou’s career was clearly reached in the years from 1956 to 1958 when, as the key Hunan Party official, he was constantly reported in the Chinese press making inspection tours of the province, speaking before conferences, and presiding over rallies marking important national holidays.
In the spring of 1958 Chou was identified in still another position of importance, the political commissarship of the Hunan Military District. He was identified in this post when he accompanied Mao Tse-tung on an inspection tour of a military unit in Changsha. In the following month (May 1958), at the second session of the Eighth Party Congress, Chou was elected an alternate member of the Party Central Committee. Two months later, at a session of the Hunan Provincial People’s Congress, Chou gave the keynote report on Hunanese governmental affairs. At the same time he requested to be relieved as a vice-governor owing to the “complicated and heavy” work of the Hunan Party Committee. Chou continued to play an active role in Hunanese affairs through 1958 and was among those who attended the Party’s Sixth Plenum in Wuhan (November-December 1958) at which time the goals of the “Great Leap Forward” were sharply cut back.
After the Sixth Plenum in 1958, Chou made only a few more appearances in the first half of 1959, the last in June. Within less than a year Chang P’ing-hua replaced Chou in the latter’s three major positions in Hunan as Party first secretary, chairman of the Hunan Committee of the CPPCC, and political commissar of the Hunan Military District. The reason for Chou Hsiao-chou’s political fall has never been made public. It might have had some relation to the Great Leap Forward. The timing of his disappearance might also suggest some connection with the purge of Defense Minister P’eng Te-huai who faded from the public scene at ap-proximately the same time as Chou. However, there is no evidence to support this. Whatever the reason, Chou’s purge seems to have been more serious than other Central Committee-level provincial leaders who fell from power during the Great Leap period (e.g., P’an Fu-sheng, Chao Chien-min, Shu T’ung). In virtually all cases these men made a comeback after three or four years of political oblivion. However, there has been no mention of Chou since 1959 even though he nominally continues to be an alternate member of the Party Central Committee.
