Background
Chou Lin was born in 1910, China.
- Photos
- Works
- Photos
- Works
Chou Lin
Edit ProfileEducation
Little is known about his early career, according to Japanese sources he graduated from Kweichow University. He first came to prominence in December 1948 when the Communist forces led by Liu Po-ch’eng and Ch’en I captured Hsu-chou (Suchow) in northwestern Kiangsu, one of the major targets of the Communist armies during the important Huai-hai campaign.
Career
In October 1951 Chou was elected to two important posts in the southwest. He was made a vice-governor of his native Kweichow and was named to membership on the Southwest Military and Administrative Committee (SWMAC), chaired by Liu Po-ch’eng under whom he had worked during the Huai-hai campaign. When the SWMAC was reorganized into the Southwest Administrative Committee in February 1953, Chou was reappointed to membership, continuing in this post until the regional governments were dissolved in 1954.
Chou Lin received his first post in the national administration in 1956 when, in by-election, he was named to replace a deceased colleague as a deputy from Kweichow to the First NPC. Immediately he was also appointed (at the third session of the First NPC in June 1956) to membership on the NPC Nationalities Committee. Although Chou is a Han Chinese, he owed his seat on the Nationalities Committee (representing non-Han peoples) to the large concentration of minority peoples residing in Kweichow whom a provincial deputy ostensibly represents. He also served as a Kweichow deputy to the Second NPC (1959-1964) and was again named to its Nationalities Committee. He was once again elected a Kweichow deputy to the Third NPC that opened in December 1964, but he was not reappointed to the Nationalities Committee. In addition to annual trips to Peking to attend NPC sessions, Chou is known to have attended important Party meetings in Peking and elsewhere outside Kweichow. For example, he attended the Eighth Party Congress in September 1956 where he submitted a written speech on the development of mountainous regions in Kweichow. He was also at the Second Session of the Eighth Party Congress in May 1958, as well as the important Sixth Plenum of the Party Central Committee (held in Wuhan, November-December 1958) when it was decided to curb some of the excesses of the commune movement.
Until the turn of the year 1964-65, Chou’s career gave every indication of a man rising steadily in the Party hierarchy. Although he was elected to the Third NPC in late 1964, he was not (as already noted) reappointed to the NPC Nationalities Committee. In this connection, a mitigating factor was his election as a representative of minority nationalities to membership on the Fourth National Committee of the CPPCC that met simultaneously with the opening session of the Third NPC (December 1964- January 1965). However, in the first half of 1965 Chou lost both his key positions in Kweichow the Party first secretaryship and the governorship. He was replaced in the former post by alternate Party Central Committee member Li Ta-chang in February 1965 and by Li Li, formerly a Honan Party official, as the Kweichow governor in July 1965. It has been normal Chinese Communist practice for leaders who fall ill to be carried in their official positions for rather lengthy periods (with another person serving, for example, as the acting governor). Hut as Chou was rather quickly removed, it appears that he may have run into political difficulties, being allowed to retain only his post in the NPC and the rather unimportant CPPCC.
Politics
During the decade after the mid-fifties when Chou became the key Party leader in Kweichow, his activities were frequently reported in the Chinese press. He was often reported, for example, making inspection tours of national minority areas, delivering keynote reports before Party and government meetings, or accompanying senior Party leaders (as in May 1960 when Chou En-lai visited an iron and steel factory in Kweiyang, the Kweichow capital). He was identi-fied in August 1958 as the political commissar of the Kweichow Military District but apparently held this position for only a brief time. Chou’s position as the ranking Party-government leader in Kweichow was unusual in two respects. First, he was one of the relatively few Party first secretaries and governors who did not belong to the Central Committee, and second, he was one of the few men who (after the mid-fifties) held the post of provincial governor and Party first secretary concurrently.
Membership
Chou served there briefly as a member of the municipal Military Control Commission and as the mayor. Soon after, however, he transferred to Shanghai when that city fell to the advancing Communist armies in May 1949. There Chou was initially a deputy secretary-general of both the Shanghai Military Control Commission and the Shanghai Municipal People’s Government
-
Born
-
Nationality
China -
Ethnicity
-
Political Party
Chimese Communist Party
Career
-
1951
-
1956