Background
Chou Huan was born in 1904, China.
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Chou Huan
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Chou’s activities are not recorded until the early 1930’s when he was serving as a political officer with a Red Army unit commanded by Huang Kung-lueh .
Career
By 1948 Chou had become a deputy director of the Northeast Military Region’s Political Department. The main elements of Lin Piao’s forces moved into China in the winter of 1948-49, but Chou remained in Manchuria where he assumed an increasingly important role as a political-military leader. In 1949 he advanced to the directorship of the Political Department, and in August of that year, on the eve of the establishment of the PRC, Chou was appointed a member of the Northeast People’s Government (NEPG), the civil administration for Manchuria, headed by Kao Kang. Kao was also commander and political commissar of the Northeast Military Region, and thus when Chou was promoted to deputy political commissar by December 1952 he was again directly subordinate to Kao. The NEPG was reorganized in the Northeast Administrative Committee (NEAC) in January 1953; Chou was reappointed to mem-bership, retaining this post until the NEAC was abolished in 1954. Concurrently, from April 1950 to September 1954, he was a member of the NEPG-NEAC People’s Supervision Committee.
Chou’s prominence in the northeast enabled him to participate in the inauguration of the PRC. He made one of his few trips away from Manchuria to attend the inaugural session of the First CPPCC in September 1949 as a representative of the “Northeast Liberated Areas.” Five years later, when the Communists were preparing to establish their constitutional government, committees were set up throughout China to discuss the draft constitution and Chou was chosen as a vice-chairman of the one in Manchuria. Subsequently, when the First NPC was convened (September 1954), he was a deputy from the Northeast Military Region. He continued to serve in the First NPC, but was not re-elected to the Second NPC, which first met in 1959.
At about the same time as Kao Kang’s purge in early 1955, the Northeast Military Region was redesignated as the Shenyang (Mukden) Military Region, the territorial boundaries remaining un¬changed. By the latter part of the year Chou had become political commissar of the region, in effect replacing Kao Kang. A year later, at the Eighth Party Congress in September 1956, Chou was elected as an alternate member of the Party Central Committee. During this period he was mentioned rather frequently in the press because Shenyang is often visited by leading Chinese and foreign officials. For example, Chou served as a host for East German Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl during the latter’s tour of Shenyang in December 1955, and he was on hand to welcome Chou En-lai back from North Korea in February 1958.
By September 1959 Chou had become a secretary of the Liaoning Provincial Party Committee. Two months later Lai Ch’uan-chu replaced him as political commissar of the Shenyang Military Region and at the same time Ch’cn Hsi-lien replaced Teng Hua as the commander. Since then, both Chou and Teng have fallen into relative obscurity, which suggests that they have encountered political difficulties. Only a short time before the Shenyang commands were changed, Defense Minister P’eng Te-huai was removed from his post and fell into political disfavor. Teng Hua’s career had been closely linked to P’eng’s, and it is probable that Chou Huan had been an associate of P’eng in the early 1930’s. Nonetheless, this circumstantial evidence is tempered by the fact that Chou continues to serve as a secretary of the Liaoning Party Committee.
Politics
In 1955 personal military ranks were established for the first time in the PLA and military orders were conferred for outstanding service in the period between 1927 and 1950. Though Chou may have been given a rank at this time, he was not identified as a colonel-general in the PLA (equivalent to a three-star general in the U.S. Army) until late 1957. However, he did receive one or more of the orders, although it is not known which ones. The fact that Chou received any national citation in 1955 is significant, since he and one other man were the only recipients among the seven top military leaders who had been active in the Northeast Military Region in the early 1950’s. The omission of the others was due to the alleged “anti-Party” plot led by Kao Kang, which had been “uncovered” in Manchuria in 1954-55. In addition to Kao, who was Chou’s immediate superior and the most important figure in the region, one of Chou’s fellow deputy political commissars, Chang Hsiu-shan, was among those implicated. Chou had served under Chang when the latter chaired the People’s Supervision Committee of the NEPG. Although it is not known if Chou played any role in the downfall of Kao Kang and Chang Hsiu-shan, it is obvious that he was not implicated in the “plot” and he clearly profited from their purge.
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Born
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Nationality
China -
Ethnicity
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Political Party
Chinese Communist Party