Ho Lung was one of the foremost Red Army commanders, joined the CCP in 1927 immediately after the Nanchang Uprising in which he played a leading role. From 1928 to 1935 he was the commanding officer of Communist troops in their base on the Hunan-Hupeh border, and after completing the Long March he led one of the three divisions in the Eighth Route Army throughout the Sino-Japanesc War.
Background
Ho was born in March 1896. His father, a minor military officer, belonged to the Ko-lao-hui (Elder brother society), an important secret society dating from the beginning of the Ch’ing dynasty. Such connections contributed to the prestige of the family name in the Sang-chih community, and Ho was able to capitalize upon them when he entered upon his own military career. Both Communist and non-Communist reports have stressed his peasant origins, an emphasis perhaps overplayed in view of the fact that his father belonged to the lower ranks of the official class.
Education
Ho received no formal education, and as late as the 1930’s he was still only semi-literate. In his youth he was a cowherd in his native hsien, a poor, undeveloped, and sparsely settled region of northwest Hunan. Peasant unrest had long been prevalent there, and this intimately affected Ho’s family. Two of his sisters were Communist activists who were killed in civil strife, one, a guerrilla fighter, was killed in Hunan in 1934.
Career
Ho’s early career treads that narrow line between bandit and revolutionist. One account (based on interviews with Ho’s colleagues in Ycnan during the Sino-Japanese War) claims that an uncle had been killed by the local magistrate for tax defaults and that to avenge this death Ho murdered the magistrate and “so became an outlaw.” This took place in Ho’s twentieth year, and for the next two years he lived the life of a bandit in rural areas. About 1918 he joined a provincial army in Hunan and rose to the position of divisional commander. Sometimes described as a modern Robin Hood who never enriched himself nor harmed the poor, Ho had become an important local military figure by the mid-1920’s. In 1925 he was garrison commander in a small town in northwest Hunan, an area where he established a Communist guerrilla base a few years later. In that same year a KMT “propaganda committee” was sent to Ho’s area to try to win him over to the Nationalist cause. Heading the committee was one of Ho’s relatives, Chou I-ch’iin, a Whampoa graduate and a CCP member. The attempt was successful. Ho left Hunan and joined the Nationalist armies, retaining Chou to head a KMT training school in his new command. These initial contacts with the KMT brought Ho into close touch with the CCP, because many of the training school students were Communists.
In the National Revolutionary Army, Ho successively commanded a regiment, the First Division of the Ninth Army, the Independent 15th Division, and the 20th Army. The last two commands were subordinate to Chang Fa-k’uei’s Fourth Army (later redesignated the Second Front Army), which was one of the major Nationalist units on the Northern Expedition, which began in mid-1926. By the end of that year Ho was posted in the Wuhan area, and in the spring of 1927 he was among those who moved north with Chang to Honan on the so-called Second Northern Expedition. However, Chang soon returned to the Yangtze Valley, and in July 1927 most of his troops were in north Kiangsi between Nanchang and Kiukiang (Chiu- chiang), Ho’s 20th Army was concentrated between Kiukiang and Wu-hsueh (on the north bank of the Yangtze nearby Kiukiang). CCP cooperation with the right wing of the KMT had ended in April 1927 with Chiang Kai-shek’s anti-Communist coup, and in mid-July the Communists’ tenuous alliance with the left-wing KMT government in Wuhan collapsed. The state was thus set for the bold Communist counter-stroke: the Nanchang Uprising.
Ho’s area on the Hunan-Hupeh border controlled six or seven. With this merger, the area became known as the West Hunan-ffupeh (Hsiang-o-hsi) Border Region (or “soviet”). Immediately after the formation of the Second Army Corps, Ho was ordered by Li Li-san, then the dominant Party leader, to move against Wuhan in coordination with troops from the Hupeh-Honan-Anhwei (Oyiiwan) base. At the same time Mao Tse-tung and Chu Te were supposed to capture Nanchang and P’eng Te- huai was to assault Changsha. Except for P’eng, who held Changsha for a few days from the end of July 1930, the grandiose Li Li-san plan-soon collapsed and shortly thereafter Li fell from power and was “exiled” to Moscow. Ho’s drive against Wuhan had ended in failure, and in a short time he witnessed his area of control shrinking to only two or three hsien in west Hu-nan. However, within the next half year or so he was able to expand his base until, in the spring of 1931, it included seven hsien and apparently a restoration of Communist strength around Lake Hung in southern Hupeh.
By the end of the war Ho had emerged as something of a legend one fed by accounts which Ho and his colleagues gave to Westerners who seem to have been intrigued by his rise from bandit to commander in the Red Army. Most such descriptions emphasize his personal bravery in battle; one account, for example, claims that when Ho received orders in 1938 to “threaten” Japan-held Taiyuan, he personally sneaked into the city to investigate the Japanese fortifications. His value as a troop commander was given recognition when the CCP met for its Seventh Congress in Yenan from April to June 1945. Ho served on the Congress presidium (steering committee) and was elected one of the 44 full members of the Central Committee. In the postwar years he remained in northwest and north China as commander of the Shansi-Suiyuan PLA until 1948 and of the Northwest PLA in 1948-49. Aside from the primary task of garrisoning the Communist capital at Yenan, in the months immediately after the war, troops under Ho’s jurisdiction moved in force into northernmost Shansi to secure the route for Communist troops and cadres then being moved into Manchuria. By the late summer of 1946 he had some 60,00 troops around Ta-t’ung, a vital rail center in north Shansi. In March 1947, not long after the collapse of the cease-fire agreement between the Communists and the KMT, Yenan fell to the Nationalists. The Communists had anticipated the attack on Yenan and made no effort to defend the city. Rather, Ho fought a series of delaying actions in the Yenan area which were designed to tie down the maximum number of Nationalist troops. This, in effect, continued to be his strategy for the next year as his troops campaigned in Shensi, Shansi, and Suiyuan.
In mid-1954 Ho was relieved of all his assignments in the southwest and transferred to Peking where he has since worked. As a deputy from the PLA he attended the inaugural session of the First NPC in September 1954 when the constitutional government came into being. (He also served as a PLA deputy to the Second and Third NPC’s, which opened in 1959 and 1964, respectively.) With the reorganization of the central government in 1954, Ho became a vice-premier of the State Council and a vice-chairman of the less important military advisory body that replaced the PRMC, the National Defense Council. He continues to hold both posts. A year later, in September 1955, his long military career was given recognition when the PRC for the first time awarded national military honors and established military ranks. Ho was given the three top awards, the August First, the Independence and Freedom, and the Liberation Orders, and he was also made one of the 10 marshals.
Liberation Orders, and he was also made one of the 10 marshals. At the Party’s Eighth Congress in September 1956, Ho was re-elected to the Central Committee, and at its First Plenum, held the day after the Congress adjourned, he was elected a member of the Politburo. Aside from Marshal Ch’en I (whose duties as foreign minister have taken him abroad quite frequently), Ho is the most widely traveled member of the Chinese Communist military elite. He was abroad for the first time from October to December 1953 when he led a delegation to North Korea to “comfort” the Chinese troops still stationed there. In July- August of the following year he headed a group to Moscow to participate in a sports festival, and in mid-1955 he was in Warsaw leading a delegation sent there for the 10th anniversary of the establishment of the Polish People’s Republic.
He led a similar group to Karachi in March 1956 to attend the inauguration of the Pakistani Islamic Republic, and en route home he stopped over in India where he conferred with leading officials, including Prime Minister Nehru. In November 1956 he embarked on what is probably his most important trip to date, accompanying Chou En-lai to southeast Asia on a good will mission. The delegation had visited North Vietnam, Cambodia, India, Burma, and Pakistan and was again in India when Chou and Ho were suddenly called back to Peking. Early in January 1957 they set out for Moscow, evidently to patch up difficulties following the outbreak of the Hungarian Rebellion in the fall of 1956. Stressing the theme of “socialist solidarity” in their public statements, Chou and Ho also made quick trips to Warsaw and Budapest before returning to Moscow for further talks with Soviet leaders. Then in the latter part of January they went directly from Moscow to Southeast Asia to resume their tour, visiting India, Afghanistan, Nepal, and Ceylon before returning home in February.
Politics
Ho had little opportunity to exercise his authority during the brief period (five days) that the Communists held Nanchang, but when they were defeated there and moved south to Kwangtung he took an important part in directing military operations. Chang Kuo-t’ao, who also made the march, described Ho’s 20th Army as an “old-fashioned army which showed sympathy’ toward the Communists but which was by no means well disciplined. Chou I-ch’iin provided a more detailed description: it was composed of “five regiments of old soldiers” (dating from the period of Chang Fa-k’uei’s command), a “sixth regiment of entirely new soldiers” whose officers had been “conscripted by force,” a “four-battalion Training Regiment . . . composed of newly recruited students,” plus another “two battalions recruited from reserves at Nanchang whose officers were all Whampoa students.”
In the meantime, in March 1931, another political emissary was sent to join Ho. The new man was Hsia Hsi, who was a leading member of the “28 Bolsheviks” faction, which had taken over control of the Party Center in early 1931. Hsia established the CCP Central Sub-bureau for the West Hunan-Hupeh Soviet, and as head of this organ he controlled both political and military affairs. In the same month that Hsia arrived, Ho’s Second Corps was redesignated the Third Red Army, and it was not until 1934 that it reverted to the Second Army Corps. It is not known what relationship Hsia had with Teng Chung-hsia, but because the stay of the two political
Ho Lung emissaries coincided for a time, it may have been some of Hsia’s reports which caused Teng to be retired from the area under a political cloud later that year. Hsia’s relationship to Chou I-ch’iin is clearer: he shunted him aside to lesser tasks, and soon thereafter Chou was killed while on an inspection trip (May 1931).
According to the more conservative of Communist estimates, Ho’s troop strength was upwards of 20,000 men by the time Chiang Kai-shek opened the Fourth Annihilation Campaign in June 1932. The first three campaigns had been largely confined to the Red bases in Kiangsi and Fukien, but now, especially at the start of the campaign, the main targets of attack were the two Communist soviets that threatened the Wuhan area, the Oyiiwan Soviet (see under Chang Kuo-t’ao) and the West Hunan-Hupeh Soviet of Ho Lung. The height of Ho’s expansion came about August 1932 when his troops made their way from the Lake Hung area and vanguard units reached the vicinity of Wuhan to make contact with units from the Fourth Front Army from Oyiiwan, thereby threatening Wuhan in a pincer-like movement from the north and south. But the tide began to turn in the Nationalists’ favor by the fall of 1932. By mid-September Ho’s forces had been driven back into the Lake Hung area where they were regrouped after having been overextended and badly shattered. Ho began a trek of many months, which took his forces through western Hupeh to southern Honan, then into southern Shensi, and eventually back again to the west Hunan-Hupeh border where, in early 1933, the Red forces again occupied Sang-chih in northwest Hunan and Ho-feng across the border in southwest Hupeh. Half a year later, in mid-1933, Ho’s troops were driven from Sang-chih and Ho-feng; they moved in a southwest direction and established a new base in four hsien in northeast Kweichow.
Membership
Но spent most of the early fifties in the southwest but on occasion he went to Peking for meetings of the CPGC or the CPPCC. He has been credited by the Communists with having “personally planned” the military expedition into Tibet, which began in late 1950 (although he himself did not lead troops into Tibet.)“. Like most prominent Communist leaders, he also held nominal assignments in the various “mass” organizations in the early years of the PRC; from 1949 to 1954 he was an Executive Board member of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association, and when a southwest chapter was formed in February 1951, he became its chairman. Aside from his military duties, he received his most important assignment in the southwest in the fall of 1952 when he succeeded Teng Hsiao-p’ing (who had been transferred to Peking) as secretary of the Party’s Southwest Bureau. At this same time he was also appointed to the newly established Physical Culture and Sports Commission in the central government, a position to which he devoted more of his time after his transfer to Peking in 1954.
Connections
Ho has at least two children, a boy and a girl. The daughter, born in the mid-thirties, was a student in the mid-1950’s at Peking University where she was said to have been on friendly terms with a number of foreign students. In 1964 Hsueh Ming was identified as Ho’s wife (and is not to be confused with the Hsueh Ming who has been an economic planning official in Manchuria since the early fifties).
