Background
Fang was born on July 16, 1899, in I-yang hsien, about 100 miles east of Nanchang, the Kiangsi capital. His father, Fang Kao-chu, farmed 20 mou of land in Hu-t’ang village.
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Fang Chih-min
Edit ProfileEducation
One of three children, Fang Chih-min was sent at age seven to a small private school for a traditional education, and in his 17th year he enrolled in the I-yang Higher Primary School in the hsien capital. There he became acquainted with Shao Shih-p’ing, also a native of I-yang. The young men became close friends and were closely associated until Fang’s death. They participated in student demonstrations against the Japanese in 1918, and in the summer of that year Fang graduated from the school. In the fall he went to Nanchang to study at the Kiangsi Provincial First Higher Industrial School, and he was there in May 1919 when the May Fourth Movement broke out in Peking. Like so many youths of his generation, Fang responded to this event by political activism. Under the auspices of the Nanchang Student’s Federation, he took part in demonstrations and made speeches advocating the boycotting of Japanese goods. After a year’s study in the preparatory department of the school (1918-19), Fang enrolled as a first-year student in the mechanical engineering course, and in the evenings he studied English and mathematics. Fang was motivated by a growing commitment to revolutionary ideas, gained in part from the pages of Ch’en Tu-hsiu’s Hsin ch’ing-nien (New youth) and was instrumental in setting up a student organization. His activities on behalf of the student group led to his expulsion from the industrial school, probably in late 1920.
In 1921 Fang became associated with a group of young Marxists at the Second Middle School in Nanchang. Among this group were Yuan Yii-ping and Huang Tao, both of whom later became Communists. By the time Fang joined them they had already established the Kiangsi Reformation Society (kai-tsao she) which, in May 1921, launched a journal known as the Hsin Chiang-hsi (New Kiangsi). It originally contained articles by Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and other reformers but became increasingly dominated by the Communists. Fang and his colleagues Yuan and Huang contributed to this journal, which under a slightly different title was published in Nanking as late as 1924. In the meantime, in the fall of 1921, Fang went to Chiu-chiang (Kiukiang) where he enrolled in William Nast College, known in Chinese as the T’ung-wen shu-yuan, a school established by American missionaries. He entered as a second-year student in the middle school.
Career
Fang was dissatisfied with conditions at the Kiukiang school (particularly the compulsory religious exercises) and as a result he organized a reading club during the winter of 1921-22, which later developed into a Marxist group. He soon got into trouble with the school authorities, who, it is alleged, were eager to have him expelled. In any case, Fang left school in the summer of 1922 of his own accord. He then went to Shanghai where, through the introduction of Chao Hsing-nung (also known as Chao Kan), he joined the Socialist Youth League. According to Miao Min, Fang’s wife and biographer, Chao Hsing-nung was a major influence in Fang’s life. He too was a native of Kiangsi, and when he was captured and executed in 1925 or 1926, Fang was deeply affected, both personally and professionally. Miao has written that while Fang was in Shanghai he audited classes at Shanghai University, a school that had on its faculty a number of top Communists (see under Ch’ii Ch’iu-pai). Fang may well have had some association with the university, but his wife mistakenly placed this in the year 1922, whereas the school did not open until 1923.
By the late summer of 1922 Fang and Chao Hsing-nung returned to Nanchang where they set up the Kiangsi branch of the Socialist Youth League. This group, initially consisted of only seven members, including Fang, Chao, and Yuan Yu-ping. Fang and his colleagues established the New Culture Bookstore (Hsin wen-hua shu-tien), which, like similar enterprises established by Mao Tse-tung in Changsha and by Ch’en T’an-ch’iu in Wuhan, served as a center for disseminating “progressive” and Marxist literature. The store sold such important journals as Chung-kuo ch’ing-nien (Chinese youth), Chieh-fang yii kai-tsao (Emancipation and reconstruction), and Hsiang-tao chou-pao (Guide weekly).
In May 1926 Fang was sent to Canton, then the revolutionary center of China, where he attended the Second Congress of the Kwangtung Peasants Association. While there he met P’eng P ai, one of the Party’s leading experts in agrarian affairs, and from P’eng he reportedly learned a great deal about the peasants’ movement. En route back to Kiangsi Fang once again fell ill, he was forced to get medical treatment in Shanghai for two months, after which he spent another three months in a sanatorium in Ku-ling, a mountain resort in Kiangsi. He was still bed-ridden in the fall of 1926, by which time the Northern Expeditionary forces had already captured many important Yangtze Valley cities. Fang soon returned to Nanchang; his responsibilities were now particularly heavy because Chao Hsing-nung was already dead and Yuan YU-ping was then studying in the Soviet Union. Fang was once again elected to the Executive Committee of the Kiangsi chapter of the KMT, and he was also put in charge of the work of the provincial peasant associations. Agnes Smedley’s biography of Chu Te notes that Fang was director of a peasant training school in Nanchang at this time, and that some 600 of the students took part in the Nanchang Uprising in mid-1927.
In early January 1927, by which time the KMT-CCP alliance had become more tenuous, the third congress of the Kiangsi branch of the KMT was held. Fang’s biographer asserts that concerted efforts were made to weaken the position of the Communists but that Fang nonetheless presided over the meetings and was re-elected to the Executive Committee. In the last week of February the Kiangsi Peasants’ Congress was convened. Chiang Kai-shek was among the speakers at the congress, which established the Kiangsi Provincial Peasants’ Association. Fang was elected secretary-general and a member of the association’s Standing Committee. In the previous month, however, the KMT forced Fang’s dismissal from his post as director of the Kiangsi KMT Peasants’ Affairs Department. At this time Fang held the counterpart post within the provincial CCP apparatus (serving as secretary of the Peasants’ Committee) and he reportedly received instructions directly from Mao Tse-tung, then deeply immersed in agrarian affairs, to’ resist KMT efforts to oust the Communists from positions of importance in Kiangsi.
Politics
Like so many of the Communists in the period after the Nanchang Uprising, Fang returned to the countryside; but now Party policy stressed the establishment of armed forces with which to fight the Nationalists. Fang went back to his native I-yang hsien about early September 1927, and from then until his death eight years later he devoted himself principally to the task of organizing armed forces and developing base areas from which these military units could op-erate. Beginning with only a rudimentary CCP apparatus and virtually no arms, he soon established a number of Party branches and formed a “peasants’ revolutionary corps,” which claimed a membership of 5-6,000 members. In the early fall Fang was made secretary of the CCP Committee in Heng-feng, a hsien a few miles east of I-yang, he was given this post because it was felt an appointment in I-yang would attract too much attention from the authorities. The counter-part post in I-yang was given to Huang Tao, his colleague in the Nanchang student group several years earlier.
Over the turn of the year 1927-28, Fang led a peasant revolt in Heng-feng, but this was suppressed in rather short order. At this juncture, Shao Shih-p’ing, Fang’s boyhood classmate, was sent to Heng-feng, and Fang in turn was trans-ferred to I-yang. Fang, Shao, and Huang Tao then united their forces to form the I-yang- Heng-feng Guerrilla District. The base reportedly consisted, of some 50 villages in the two hsien, but the Communist troops were still very poorly armed. The year 1928 was a bitter one for Fang and his colleagues, and from Miao Min s account it is clear that dissension was rampant within the ranks of the ill-equipped troops. Miao also makes the point that Fang and his colleagues had no prior military experience. In October 1928 Fang went to Hu-k’ou, a Yangtze River port city, where he attended a Kiangsi CCP Congress where the results of the Sixth National CCP Congress that had been held in Moscow during the previous summer were discussed. At the Moscow congress Fang was elected in absentia a member of the CCP Central Committee.
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Born
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Died
1935 (aged 35) -
Nationality
China -
Ethnicity
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Political Party
Chinese Communist Party
Education
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1916
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1921
Career
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1926
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1927