Background
Ho was born in northern Hunan in Hua-jung on the shore of Lake Tung-t’ing.
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Ho Ch’ang-kung
Edit ProfileEducation
With help from brothers and sisters, he received an early education in his native Hua-jung and then won scholarships for middle school study and for later study in Europe. Ho enrolled at the Third Middle School in the nearby town of Yueh-yang, a school jointly financed by Yueh-yang and three neighboring hsien, Hua-jung, Lin-hsiang, and P’ing-chiang. Ho was to engage in Party work in the last-named area a decade later. While in middle school he became a leader in a student organization that worked to expose the principal, who was involved in corrupt practices, and as a result was expelled from Yueh-yang. Although the corruption was later righted and Ho could have returned to school, he chose instead to go to the Chia-chung Technical School in the provincial capital of Changsha. There he came into contact with Mao Tse-tung’s student colleagues as a member of the Hsin-min hsueh-hui (New people’s study society see under Ts’ai Ch’ang). After about a year of specializing in mechanical engineering at Chia-chung (which he entered in 1917), he went to Peking to join the Hunan students led by Mao and Ts’ai, to embark upon the work-and-study program for university study in France (see under Ts’ai Ho-sen). Ho’s own account of his student days (cited below) mentions that in Peking the students divided into three groups for this program, those who were in Peking proper, those who went for some preliminary study at Pao-ting, and those who were assigned to the Ch’ang-hsin-tien station workshops on the important Pinghan (Peking-Hankow) Railroad. The last-cited group, to which Ho belonged, was the only one having students who practiced for the work-and-study program before going to France, they worked in the railroad each morning and studied in the afternoons, often on their own.
When the May Fourth Movement of 1919 broke out among the students in Peking and Tientsin, students at the Ch’ang-hsin-tien station joined with the railway workers in what was one of the first of the sympathy strikes in support of the May Fourth Movement with its demand for a boycott of the Japanese. Not only did these students hold combined labor and student demonstrations, but they began to engage in labor organizing. In the next months Ho must have spent more time agitating for the strike movement than studying, but in the fall of 1919 he was able to take advantage of a public grant from the Hunan provincial administration, which assisted the Hunanese students in their program for study in France. Thus, in the fall or early winter of 1919, he embarked for France, as did Ts’ai Ho-sen and a number of others from the Changsha group.
In the winter of 1922-23 the Party selected Ho for advanced technical study in Belgium. He arrived there early in 1923 to enroll at the Université de Travail at Charleroi where the Belgium Socialist Party had got a scholarship for Nieh Jung-chen from about 1921 to 1923. Ho entered a program in architectural engineering but when he ran short of money he went to Zeebruge to find work in a shipyard. There he contracted tuberculosis and after several months, on the advice of his doctor, went home, arriving in China in the early winter of 1924.
Career
Once in France most of the Changsha students went south of Paris to Montargis, where they enrolled at the Collège de Montargis, and there began to organize a chapter of the student association from which they had come in Changsha (see under Hsiang Ching-yii). Possibly because his connections with these students were not so strong (Ho having worked with the group at Ch’ang-hsin-tien) and possibly also to follow his desire to learn French, he cut himself off from the rest of his provincial colleagues and went to the west Normandy coast where he entered a church-sponsored school to study mechanical engineering. It so happened that both the school headmaster and his assistant were Communists. After about six months, Ho’s money ran out and so in the summer of 1920 he returned to Paris to find work, taking on a number of menial and ill- paying jobs to help defray his expenses. One of these was in the Renault Motor plant outside of Paris where he spent four months. In the course of his stay in France Chou En-lai also worked there for a short time. During the year Ho joined the Work-and-Study Cooperative Society, an organization founded to help the Chinese students in France (see under Li Fu-ch’un), and once more he came into contact with Ts’ai, Wang Jo-fei, and Hsiang Ching-yü, and some of the others who later joined the CCP. By February 1921 this society had increased its membership to some 300 and formed a nucleus for the small CCP unit that was officially established in mid-1922.
Once in France most of the Changsha students went south of Paris to Montargis, where they enrolled at the Collège de Montargis, and there began to organize a chapter of the student association from which they had come in Changsha (see under Hsiang Ching-yii). Possibly because his connections with these students were not so strong (Ho having worked with the group at Ch’ang-hsin-tien) and possibly also to follow his desire to learn French, he cut himself off from the rest of his provincial colleagues and went to the west Normandy coast where he entered a church-sponsored school to study mechanical engineering. It so happened that both the school headmaster and his assistant were Communists. After about six months, Ho’s money ran out and so in the summer of 1920 he returned to Paris to find work, taking on a number of menial and ill- paying jobs to help defray his expenses. One of these was in the Renault Motor plant outside of Paris where he spent four months. In the course of his stay in France Chou En-lai also worked there for a short time. During the year Ho joined the Work-and-Study Cooperative Society, an organization founded to help the Chinese students in France (see under Li Fu-ch’un), and once more he came into contact with Ts’ai, Wang Jo-fei, and Hsiang Ching-yü, and some of the others who later joined the CCP. By February 1921 this society had increased its membership to some 300 and formed a nucleus for the small CCP unit that was officially established in mid-1922.
Ho’s career in the next two decades must be constructed from the very meager reporting of his activity. He is said to have been elected to the Party Central Committee at the Fourth CCP Congress held in early January 1925. He probably worked as an undercover agent in the labor movement for the two following years, in any case, when American authoress Nym Wales met him on her visit to northwest China in the summer of 1937, he was known to her as having been active in labor organizing upon his return from France. In 1927 Ho is mentioned as belonging to certain Nationalist military guard units, but there is no indication of how he came to be associated with these forces. Following the break in KMT-CCP relations in August 1927, he became involved in the Party-directed peasant insurgency known as the Autumn Harvest Uprisings, campaigns with which Mao Tse-tung is closely connected. In this connection there are also indications that he may have belonged to the renegade unit from the troops of Hupeh militarist Hsia Tou-yin, which joined Mao during the Autumn Harvest Uprisings (August and September 1927). This unit made an attack upon P’ing-chiang but was badly defeated and subsequently the regiment broke up, only a small number of its soldiers following Mao to his mountain base at Chingkang on the Hunan- Kiangsi border. Ho was among the few who followed Mao, and for about the next year he seems to have been at Chingkangshan.
During a partial reorganization of the national government in August 1952 Ho was transferred from the Heavy Industry Ministry to become the ranking vice-minister of the newly established Ministry of Geology, a position he still retains. He works under Minister Li Szu-kuang, a prominent Western-trained scientist, but in political terms Ho is far more important than Li, as demonstrated by the fact that Ho was identified as secretary of the ministry’s CCP Committee in 1958. He was reappointed to his vice-ministership in October 1954, and two months later, representing the CCP, Ho was named to membership on the CPPCC’s Second National Committee. Five years later he was named again as a CCP delegate to the Third National Committee (April 1959).
Politics
There is little reporting on Ho during the later war years, and significantly, when the Party met for its Seventh National Congress in April-June 1945, he was not among those elected to the Central Committee. Chang Kuo-t’ao suggests that Ho’s apparent political decline was related to the fact that he suffered from poor health for a num¬ber of years, having received a serious leg wound prior to or during the Long March. However, when Miss Wales saw Ho she made no mention of this and wrote of him as one of the “three tallest and handsomest of the Red commanders.” Two very useful accounts written in later years by Ho are part of the extensive Party literature of personal reminiscences describing important revolutionary events. These include a number of details about Ho’s life. One account describes his student days in Paris, and the other, entitled Party life in the Eighth Army, deals with his military experiences in the late twenties and early thirties.
Membership
In the early part of 1934, as a delegate from the Red Army, he attended the Second All-China Congress of Soviets held in Juichin and was elected a member of the governing Central Executive Committee of the Chinese Soviet Republic. By the time the Long March began in October 1934 he had become political commissar to Lo Ping-hui. Ho made the first part of the march with Lo’s force, which formed a unit of the Chu-Mao First Front Army. Lo’s separation from Mao in west Szechwan in mid-1935 is described in his biography, as is his subsequent joining of forces with Chang Kuo-t’ao and his march west into Sikang to spend the winter of 1935-36 at Kan-tzu. Chang himself is the source for the statement that Ho followed his commander Lo and therefore attached himself to the Chang Kuo-t’ao army, survivors of which eventually found their way to north Shensi to re-join Mao and his army during the year 1936-37.
He was also selected as a member of the Standing Committee, which is in charge of CPPCC affairs when the National Committee is not in session. When the Fourth CPPCC first met in December 1964-January 1965, Ho was again named to both the National and Standing Committees, this time representing the China Scientific and Technical Association, a professional organization including in its membership many officials who work in technically oriented government departments.
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Born
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Nationality
China -
Ethnicity
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Political Party
Chinese Communist Party
Education
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1923
Career
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1925
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1952