Background
Chu was born on November 30, 1886, in a village in I-lung hsien, located in a hilly and isolated section of north Szechwan some 120 miles north of Chungking. He came from a large farming family, but their economic status is a matter of dispute. Edgar Snow was told by a member of Chu’s staff that his family were landlords, but a year later Snow’s wife was told by Chu that his family were “poor tenant farmers.”1 Agnes Smedley, whose biography of Chu is a major source of information about his career, accepts the version that he came from humble origins. Because Chu’s forebears had come to Szechwan from Kwangtung, his generation was reared with a knowledge of both the Cantonese and the Szechwanese dialects.
Education
Chu began his education in his fifth year at a private school. In 1906, when he was 20, he went to nearby Shunking (Shun-ch’ing, now Nan-ch’ung) where he attended a middle school. In the next year he went to Chcngtu to study physical education at a higher normal school. After graduating in 1908 he returned home to teach physical education at a higher primary school, but he left within the same year for Yunnan. In 1909 Chu embarked upon his half-century long military career by enrolling in the newly established Yunnan Military Academy. The school had been set up under the auspices of the Manchu government, but the faculty included many members of Sun Yat-sen’s T’ung-meng hui and the academy soon became a center of anti-Manchu activities. Chu had already come under the influence of Sun’s revolutionary ideas, and soon after entering the academy he secretly joined the T’ung-meng hui. At approximately the same time he also secretly joined the Ko-lao-hui, the important secret society which had a large following in southwest China. His membership in both organizations proved to be useful in advancing his career during the ensuing years. Chu graduated with the first class in mid-1911, after which he was assigned as a platoon commander in forces commanded by Hunanese military leader Ts’ai O, who maintained close ties with T’ung-meng hui members in Kunming.
Career
On October 30, 1911, just three weeks after the uprising in Wuchang which triggered the Revolution of 1911, Chu took part as a company commander under Ts’ai O in the revolt in Kunming, which brought down the Manchu authorities in Yunnan. A half-century later, on the anniversary of the 1911 Revolution, Chu wrote a lengthy description of these events for the JMJP. During the decade after the revolution he was a middle-ranking officer in the provincial army which operated in Yunnan and Szechwan. In 1912 Chu joined the KMT and from 1912 to 1913 he was a detachment commander and instructor at the Yunnan Military Academy. Once again under Ts’ai O’s command, Chu took part as a regimental and then a brigade commander in the campaign of 1916 to thwart Yuan Shih-k’ai’s attempt to restore the monarchy. In describing these events to Agnes Smedley, Chu stressed the help his troops received from peasants who were members of the Ko-lao-hui. After Yuan’s death in June 1916, Ts’ai O became the Szechwan governor, and he in turn appointed Chu to command a brigade of the Yunnan Army in Szechwan. For the next few years Chu spent most of his time in south-west Szechwan, operating out of his headquarters in Lu-chou (Lu-hsien).
In the years before 1920 Chu, in the apt words of Agnes Smedley, “was caught in the net of warlordism without recognizing it as such.” He led an unproductive and dissolute life and smoked opium. However, he had met Sun Ping-wen during the anti-Yuan campaign of 1916, and during the next few years Sun had an important influence on Chu’s intellectual and political development. Sun, a graduate of Peking University, was from a scholarly Szechwanese family and had worked with Sun Yat-sen in Japan. Through Sun and his friends, Chu was introduced to some of the revolutionary literature which was beginning to find a nation-wide audience in the period before the May Fourth Movement of 1919. Sun later accompanied Chu to Europe (see below) where he joined the CCP, he worked in the Whampoa Military Academy in the mid-1920’s and was killed in Chiang Kai-shek’s anti-Communist coup in 1927.
In September 1922 Chu, then in his mid-thirties, embarked on a new phase of his career when he sailed for France. In the next month, after a brief stay in Paris, he arrived in Berlin. He soon met Chou En-lai and joined the CCP, apparently with Chou as his sponsor. Chu’s background was strikingly dissimilar to the majority of the earliest members of the CCP; not only was he several years older than the average member, but he was also one of the very few who had military academy training and several years experience as a troop commander. His military experience was probably not appreciated in 1922 to the extent it would be later when the CCP first took up arms to maintain its very existence. Chu spent the next months studying Marxist works and German, and then for about a year (1923-24) he attended lectures in the social sciences at the University of Gottingen. Partly because of his inadequate knowledge of German, he regarded his formal study at Gottingen as a waste of time and far less useful than trips to many German cities where he visited factories, mines, and places of cultural interest. In 1924 he returned to Berlin where he edited the Cheng-chih chou-pao (Political weekly), which was published under the auspices of the German chapter of the KMT. Many politically active Chinese students in Germany and France participated in the work of both the KMT and the CCP at this period. Chu, in fact, was elected in 1924 to alternate membership on the Central Executive Committee of the Berlin chapter of the KMT.
In the period from 1931 to 1934 Chu was principally occupied commanding the Red Army as it sought to fend off the successive attacks by KMT armies. Most of this time was spent in central and southeast Kiangsi, and in the western portion of Fukien. Chu seems to have felt most comfortable when he was on the front lines with his troops, and he is probably due much of the credit for building the Red Army into a formidable force. At its peak, the army totalled about 200,000 men, and through the skills of Chu and his fellow officers, inoluding P’eng Te-huai, Huang Kung-lueh. and Lin Piao, the Red Army was successful in defeating the Second, Third, and Fourth Annihilation campaigns (1931-1933).
The Communists institutionalized the Kiangsi Soviet in November 1931 at the First All-China Congress of Soviets. Chu was elected a member of the Central Executive Committee (CEC), the highest political body of the newly established Chinese Soviet Republic. The Council of People’s Commissars (the cabinet) was set up under the CEC, and in this organ Chu was appointed People’s Commissar for Military Affairs. He was also made chairman of the important Central Revolutionary Military Council, where he was assisted by two vice-chairmen, Wang Chia-hsiang and P’eng Te-huai. In effect, Chu replaced Hsiang Ying as council chairman, but according to Hsiang’s own account, he sometimes acted as the chairman when Chu was at the front during the next few years. Finally, at the 1931 congress, Chu’s role as commander of the entire Red Army was reconfirmed. Two years later, at the CCP’s Fifth Plenum in January 1934, Chu was elected (or perhaps, as noted above, re-elected) to the Politburo. In the same month, at the Second All-China Congress of Soviets, Chu made one of the keynote speeches. This dealt with the build-up of the Red Army in face of the Fifth Annihilation Campaign, which had already begun. He was re-elected to the CEC, and he was also elected a member of the 17-man Presidium, which acted for the CEC when it was not in session. Chu was again reconfirmed in his other top military posts at the first session of the CEC, held in early February 19.34 immediately after the congress.
Chu’s return to Yenan during the winter of 1939-40 coincided with the marked deterioration of KMT-CCP relations. From the Communist viewpoint, the situation was sufficiently serious for them to redeploy many front-line troops back to the Yenan area in order to counter the pressures from nearby KMT forces. The situation reached a climax in January 1941 at the time of the New Fourth Army Incident (see under Yeh T’ing). New Fourth Army commander Yeh T’ing was captured, deputy commander Hsiang Ying was killed, and several thousand Communist troops were put out of action. Mao and Chu responded with a declaration demanding Yeh’s release and a promise that the Nationalists would not further molest the New Fourth Army; failure to meet these terms, according to Mao and Chu, would end the united front. In fact, the united front was already dead. Pressed by both the Japanese and the Nationalists, the Communists were forced to turn their attention during the early and mid-1940’s to concerted efforts to become more self-sufficient, For example, some Eighth Route Army units in the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia (Shen-Kan-Ning) Border Region spent much of their time cultivating crops. These activities were given strong support by Chu and other top leaders who, from time to time, engaged in manual labor as an example for all to follow. Similarly, the theme of self-sufficiency ran through the speeches and articles by Chu during this period, many of which are listed in Chiin-tu Hsiieh’s bibliography of the Communist movement.
In the new government hierarchy, Chu received top posts in three key organs, each chaired by Mao. He was appointed a member of the Standing Committee of the CPPCC, one of the six vice-chairmen of the Central People’s Government Council, and one of the five vice-chairmen of the People’s Revolutionary Military Council. In addition, he continued as commander-in-chief of the PLA. He retained all these posts until September 1954 when the central government was reorganized, and during these same years Chu was also an Executive Board member of the then active Sino-Soviet Friendship Association. During the formative years of the PRC he spent most of his time in Peking. For the period after 1949 Chu is often characterized as one of the “grand old men” of the Party who played only a peripheral role in affairs of state. There may be some truth in this assumption, but the public record indicates that he continued to be very active. For example, although complete attendance records are not available, he is known to have participated in the majority of the 34 meetings between 1949 and 1954 of the highly important Central People’s Government Council. He also attended and frequently spoke at many national conferences sponsored by the government or “mass” organizations. Such meetings were especially frequent in the first year or two of the PRC as the Communists set about organizing and formulating plans for many segments of Chinese society. During the year 1950, for example, Chu attended at least 15 national conferences, predictably, several of these concerned the PLA, but others dealt with such varied topics as the textile industry, the Academy of Sciences, export trade, and publishing. During these same years he also delivered speeches or wrote articles about the history of the Red Army, the most useful of which was published in 1952 to mark the 25th anniversary of the Red Army.
Politics
In 1925 Chu was twice arrested for political activities, but on each occasion he was immediately released. There are conflicting accounts concerning his whereabouts and work in 1925—26, the Smedley biography asserts that he was deported from Germany in 1926, but other and apparently more reliable accounts claim that he was deported in July 1925 after which he spent some time in the USSR. There, according to Edgar Snow, he studied at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East. Chu returned home in mid-1926 just as the Northern Expedition was getting underway from Kwangtung. The Nationalists and Communists were still working together closely, and one of their chief tactical goals was to woo warlords to the cause of the revolution or, failing that, to neutralize them. As a consequence, because of Chu’s previous ties to General Yang Sen, then the most powerful figure in east Szechwan, he was sent to Szechwan to convince Yang to join the revolutionary cause. Yang agreed to join the Northern Expedition, and for a brief time in late 1926 Chu headed the Political Department of Yang’s 20th Army. Almost immediately afterwards, however, Yang became suspicious of the Communist influences among his troops. Chu, barely managing to escape arrest, left Szechwan for Nanchang, Kiangsi, then a key center of revolutionary activity.
From April to June 1945 Chu was among the 752 full and alternate delegates who attended the Party’s Seventh Congress in Yenan. He was listed second only to Mao on the congress presidium (steering committee). The delegates heard three major speeches: a political report by Mao, a speech on military affairs by Chu, and a report on revisions to the Party Constitution by Liu Shao-ch’i. Chu’s address, published in English in 1952 under the title On the Battle-fronts of the Liberated Areas, represented the official Party version of the Sino-Japanese War. Aside from a brief section on “future military tasks,” it is perhaps most useful for its exposition of the growth of the Red Army and statistics on friendly and enemy casualties. At the close of the congress Chu was re-elected to the Central Committee, and immediately afterwards, at the inaugural plenum of the new Central Committee, he was re-elected to the Politburo and elected for the first time to the Secretariat (a kind of inner-Politburo). In the most official sense, Chu was then the second-ranking member of the CCP. But in reality he was probably already a notch below both Liu Shao-ch’i and Chou En-lai. For example, when Mao went to Chungking later in 1945 to talk with Chiang Kai-shek, it was Liu not Chu who was made acting chairman of the Party. By 1952 even the most official listings of the inner-elite placed Chu in the fourth position after Mao, Liu, and Chou. This same sequence, as noted below, was maintained after the Eighth Party Congress in 1956.
Connections
Like so many other CCP leaders, Chu’s turbulent revolutionary career is reflected in his personal life. In 1912 he married a woman from Szechwan, who was a normal-school teacher with “progressive ideas.” A son was born to them in 1916, and soon afterwards his wife died. In the next year he married a woman from a well-to-do scholarly family, who was also active in the Revolution of 1911. They apparently lived a pleasant life together, but Chu never saw her again after his departure for Europe. In the mid-30’s she and Chu’s son were allegedly murdered by warlords. In 1928 Chu married a woman from Changsha, whom he described as a writer and a member of an intellectual family that had been active in the revolution. She was soon captured and beheaded, and then in 1929 Chu married K’ang K’o-ch’ing. Then in her late teens, K’ang was a leader of a partisan unit in the Red Army, and she later made the Long March. Since 1949 she has been one of the more politically active women in the PRC, especially in the National Women’s Federation, of which she has been a vice-chairman since 1957. A sketch of her early life is contained in Nym Wales’ Red Dust (Stanford, Calif., 1952).
