Background
It is known that he was born in 1902, China.
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Chou Pao-chung
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also known as
Hsi Shao-huang or Yii Shao-huang
Education
He finished primary school and then went to a junior middle school before joining the army about 1915. Within three years he had become a company commander. Then in 1921 he decided to further his military education by entering the Yunnan Military Academy, the school that Chu Te had graduated from 10 years earlier. Chou graduated with distinction in military engineering in 1923. After leaving the Yunnan academy, he then went to Moscow for two years of study at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East (1923-1925) , other accounts claim that he studied in the USSR somewhat later, attending the Red Army Staff College between 1928 and 1931. In any case, Chou was known to have been in China in 1925 when he was on the staff at the Whampoa Military Academy in Canton.
Career
Entering the Nationalist army from Whampoa, at the start of the Northern Expedition in mid- 1926 he became a deputy commander and concurrently the chief-of-staff of a regiment in the Sixth Army of Hunanese General Ch’eng Ch’ien (who defected to the Communists in 1949). At Whampoa, Chou must have met some active Party members, because there were a number on the teaching staff as well as among the cadets. Possibly he followed one of his colleagues, Party veteran Lin Po-ch’u, into the Hunanese Sixth Army. In 1926 Lin was head of the Political Department with the army. Ch’eng Ch’ien’s army captured Nanking for the Nationalists in 1927. Chou joined the CCP that same year, but he continued to be a member of the Nationalist military forces, and in 1928 became a deputy commander of the 18th Division and concurrently the garrison commander of eastern Hunan. However, when he failed to suppress some of the Communist-led peasant uprisings in eastern Hunan, he was relieved of these posts with the Nationalist armies. He then managed to escape to Shanghai where he is said to have worked with the CCP underground until after the Japanese entered Manchuria in September 1931. The period is also one in which there are reports that he went to the USSR and may have attended the Red Army military school.
The notable years of Chou’s career were those he spent in Manchuria fighting the Japanese and later the Nationalists from about 1931 to 1948. The Party sent him into Manchuria immediately after the Mukden Incident (September 1931) to make contact with other Communists who were working there. It was then that he look the name Chou Pao-chung by which he came to be well known in the Manchurian resistance by the end of the Sino-Japanese War. Chou was assigned to work under Lo Teng-hsien, then in the Harbin area as secretary of the Manchurian Provincial Committee of the CCP. Accounts of Party activity in Manchuria at this time are sketchy, but there was known to have been considerable opposition to the CCP’s working there on the part of Korean Communists who were also active in and around Harbin. Chou’s connections with the Korean Communists are not known, but in addition to his contacts with Lo’s CCP group, he worked with the non-Communist National Salvation Army of Li Tu and became Li’s chief-of-staff. In the early 1930’s Chou was active in the resistance around Ning-an hsien in eastern Kirin (now southeastern Heilungkiang), an area not far south of the important city of Mu-tan-chiang and about 100 miles from the Russian border. Most of the Manchurian resistance suffered severe losses in combat with the Japanese in 1932-1933. Resistance leaders such as Li Tu were forced to leave the area (Li fled across the Soviet border), Lo Teng-hsien left for Shanghai in late 1932, and eventually Chou seems to have assumed Lo’s post with the Manchurian CCP Committee.
In 1951 he became president of the Yunnan Nationalities Institute and spoke at the institute’s inaugural ceremonies on August 2, 1951. By the winter of 1952 Chou’s health took a turn for the worse; according to his wife’s account he had been much overworked in Yunnan. Hoping that a change of scene might relieve the pressures of work, the CCP sent him to Chungking, Szechwan, the capital for the southwest regional government. There his health continued to worsen. Then, in mid-1954 he was forced to return to Peking for medical treatment.
Shortly after his death in 1964, Chou’s widow, Wang I-chih, wrote an account of his life making it evident that the last nine years of his life were marked by chronic ill health.8 In 1959 he was hospitalized and confined to the hospital or his home for most of the time until his death. In view of this it is noteworthy that the records at the time made it appear that he was still fairly active. In 1954 he was elected a Yunnan deputy to the First NPC (1954-1959) and was re-elected in the same capacity to the Second NPC (1959-1964). In both congresses his Min-chia origins won him a seat on the NPC Nationalities Committee. In September 1954 he was named a member of the newly created military advisory National Defense Council and was reappointed in 1959. When national military honors were created in 1955, Chou received all three top national awards (the August First, the Independence and Freedom, and the Liberation Orders, covering military service for the period from 1927 to 1950). Personal military ranks were designated for officers that same year, Chou was made a lieutenant-general, equivalent to a two-star general in the U.S. Army.
Chou died in Peking on February 22, 1964. Politburo member P’eng Chen headed his funeral committee, which numbered 52 top-ranking CCP officials. These included 10 members of the Polit¬buro, among them CCP General Secretary Tcng Hsiao-p’ing, Premier Chou En-lai, and Foreign Minister Ch’en I.
Politics
By 1945 Chou had emerged as the leader of Communist resistance in Manchuria, thereby serving as a focus for the Communist vanguard that began to infiltrate Manchuria at the time of the Japanese surrender in August 1945. When the CCP dispatched elements of the former Eighth Route and New Fourth Armies into Manchuria, these forces came together with Chou. Lin Piao was in charge of these forces moving in from China proper, with two deputy commanders who were veteran Communists, Hsiao Ching-kuang (now head of the PLA Navy) and Manchurian-born Lii Cheng-ts’ao. Soon Chou’s army formed a part of the larger Northeast Democratic Allied Army organized by Lin Piao in 1946, with Chou, Hsiao, and Lii as his deputy commanders. When he joined Lin, Chou was assigned to the Kirin-Liaoning Military Region established under the army’s control; in this area he became top military commander as well as commander of the garrison force in the principal city of Changchun. He held both posts from 1946 to 1947.
Membership
When the CCP held its Eighth National Con¬gress in September 1956, Chou was made an alternate member of the Central Committee. In 1958 he was able to journey as far as Tung-hua in Kirin, Manchuria, to attend a memorial serv-ice held for his former commander in the resist¬ance, Yang Ching-yii. In April 1959, when the Third CPPCC met for its opening session, Chou was named to the new National Committee. And although he was now critically ill, he was also named to the governing body of the Third CPPCC, its Standing Committee. He was holding all the above posts at the time of his death. In June of 1961 Chou’s contribution to the Communists’ wartime history was published in the fourth volume of Red Army memoirs: A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire.
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Born
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Died
February 22, 1964 (aged 62) -
Nationality
China -
Ethnicity
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Political Party
Chinese Communist Party
Education
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1923