Fang was born into the family of a petty merchant in a village of P’u-ning hsien near Swatow in eastern Kwangtung, an area that witnessed much peasant strife in the period from the twenties to 1949. A relative of Fang’s has been described as one of the biggest landlords in the province.
While a student at a middle school Fang became active in the May Fourth (1919) Movement and was chairman of the hsien’s students’ association when still in his middle teens. This was apparently the catalyst that brought him into the revolutionary movement. By 1923 he was a member of a peasants’ association formed by P’eng P’ai in Hai-feng hsien, and in the following year Fang joined the KMT.
He rose quickly in the Nationalist organization, serving in 1925-26 as secretary of the KMT branch in P'u-ning. He also gained military experience at this time as a participant in Chiang Kai-shek’s two “Eastern Expeditions” against Kwangtung militarist Ch’en Chiung-ming. In about 1926 he enrolled in the Peasant Movement Training Institute in Canton, and was probably there when Mao Tse-tung headed the school.
In March 1926 Fang was implicated in an allegedly Communist-inspired plot against Chiang Kai-shek (the Chung-shan Incident see under Chou En-lai). When this was suppressed by Chiang, Fang was among those who withdrew from the KMT and joined the CCP, and for the next year he organized peasants and laborers in the Chao-chou and Swatow areas. In the summer of 1927 Communist units led by Chu Tc, Yeh T’ing, and others had tried to capture and hold Nanchang, the Kiangsi capital. When this failed they withdrew their forces and marched southward to the Swatow area where Fang had been working. Presumably because of his knowledge of the area, he was named as the CCP representative of the Third Regiment of Communist Red Guards, which, under the leadership of Ho Lung and Yeh T’ing, captured and briefly held Swatow in September 1927. This operation also failing, the remaining Communist units moved westward to P’eng P’ai’s Hai-lu-feng Soviet, but Fang remained in the vicinity of Swatow where for the next three years he undertook guerrilla war operations against the Nationalists. In the fall of 1927 Li Li-san reviewed for a Party journal the Nanchang disaster and the equally disastrous events that followed. In a report that is replete with criticisms of many leading Communists, it is noteworthy that Li spoke in favorable terms about "Comrade Fang” (almost certainly a reference to Fang Fang). In describing the actions in and around Swatow he wrote: “Only the peasant army led by Comrade Fang of Ch’ao-yang immediately to the south of Swatow extensively slew counter-revolutionaries after the capture of the city, and the peasants welcomed him in an extraordinary way.”
In 1930 Fang moved his units northward to join the forces operating in west Fukien under the leadership of Teng Tzu-hui, Chang Ting-cheng, and T’an Chen-lin. Over the next four years he held a number of military, Party, and quasi-governmental posts in the west Fukien region. A fuller description of the work of the Communists in Fukien during these years is found in the biographies of Teng and Chang. Fang was among those who attended the Chinese Soviet Republic’s Second All-China Congress of Soviets at Juichin, Kiangsi, in January-February 1934, but he was apparently not important enough to be elected to the Republic’s Central Executive Committee.
Fang returned to the mainland in 1949 and took part in coordinating the operations of the Communist guerrillas in Kwangtung with the forces of Lin Piao, which pushed into Kwangtung in the early fall and captured Canton in October. Fang’s long career in Kwangtung won for him a number of key appointments in the government and Party apparatus in south China.
In the fall of 1950 Fang was named to head the Kwangtung Government’s Land Reform Committee, one of the most important posts within provincial administrations during the early PRC years. At a major meeting in October of that year he gave the keynote address inaugurating land reform in Kwangtung, a speech that was characterized by its relatively moderate tone, stating that land reform should proceed in a gradual and orderly fashion. Soon alter this, however, Party policies stiffened, accordingly, Fang spoke again on the subject in January 1951 in Canton, noting that land reform was not simply a division of land” but that it also involved a “political struggle.” Despite his seeming accommodation to this sterner political approach, Fang’s work was apparently viewed by higher authorities to be less than satisfactory. This was initially suggested at a cadres meeting in April 1951 when Fang told his audience that it was necessary for “local” (i.e., Kwangtung) cadres to subordinate themselves to the thousands of northern Party workers who had come south and who were rapidly taking over a high percentage of the key jobs in Kwangtung.
When the Long March began in the fall of 1934, Fang remained behind and for the next three years engaged in guerrilla operations in Fukien. He is reported to have gone to Yenan in early 1937 to be briefed on CCP policies as they pertained to his Fukien guerrillas. He returned to the Fukien region in the same year which was also the year that war with Japan erupted. After hostilities began, most of the Fukien guerrillas moved north and were incorporated into the Communists’ New Fourth Army (see under Su Yu), but Fang remained throughout the war in the Fukien-Kwangtung-Kiangsi border area where he and his men were credited in a 1951 Party history with having engaged in valuable guerrilla skirmishes under difficult conditions in more than 20 hsien. In the fall of 1943 Fang was called to Yenan for a period of study, and early in 1946 he was assigned as a political adviser to Yeh Chien-ying, a fellow native of Kwangtung, who headed the Communist team at the Peking Executive Head-quarters, which had been set up in January in accordance with the Cease-Fire Agreement signed in that month through the mediation efforts of U.S. Special Envoy George C. Marshall. Later in the same year he was sent to Canton to serve as the Communist representative on the Executive Headquarters’ field team in that city. But when the truce collapsed in early 1947, Fang was sent to Hong Kong, then the center of CCP activities in south China. Although Fang was one of the Party’s key officials in Hong Kong, he was probably taking orders at this time from Liao Ch’eng-chih, a man under whom he worked again in later years in Peking. Under the pseudonym of Yeh Ts'ao, Fang published a book in Hong Kong (1948) describing conditions in Fukien in the mid-thirties when he had been a guerrilla leader there.
Because of Fang’s intense involvement in overseas Chinese affairs, his various speeches and articles are the source of many of the available statistics on the subject. Speaking in 1959, for example, he revealed that nearly 5,500 overseas Chinese from 50 different countries had returned to China for visits and that 48 overseas Chinese “tourist service centers” had been established to accommodate them. He also claimed that between 1955 and 1958 nearly 116,000 overseas Chinese, including students, had returned permanently. In contrast, Fang, writing four years later, asserted that over 400,000 had returned to stay in China. The reason for this startling increase is to be found in the bitter disputes with the Indonesians (I959-60) and Indians (1962-63), the controversy with the Indonesians centered largely on policies adopted by the Jakarta government, which overseas Chinese regarded as discriminatory, whereas the exodus of Chinese from India was a direct result of the brief Sino-Indian War in late 1962. In response to these problems, the PRC established ad hoc committees in both instances to handle the huge influx of overseas Chinese; Liao Ch’eng-chih headed both committees, established in February 1960 and April 1963, respectively. On the former Fang was a member and director of the Staff Office, and on the latter he was one of three vice-chairmen. In both cases the Chinese press gave extensive coverage to the events surrounding the return of the repatriates, and to judge from the frequency with which Fang was mentioned it appears that he, rather than Liao, was the CCP member with the principal responsibilities for handling the problems of resettling the returnees
In private life Fang is married to Su Hut, whose career since 1949 has closely paralleled that of her husband. In the early fifties she was a member of both the Canton Government Council and its People’s Supervision Committee, serv-ing also as a vice-chairman of the Kwangtung chapter of the All-China Federation of Democratic Women (ACFDW) and as chairman of its Canton committee. At the national level, Su has been an Executive Committee member of the ACFDW since 1953. She transferred to Peking with her husband in 1954 and has worked closely with him since then in overseas Chinese affairs. She has been a Standing Committee member of the All-China Federation of Returned Overseas Chinese since 1956, Su was also an overseas Chinese deputy to the Second NPC (1959-1964) and was elected again to the Third NPC, which opened in late 1964. In addition to this legislative post, she has worked on a related assignment in the PRC’s executive arm, serving since September 1959 as a member of the State Council’s Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission.
