Background
Ho was born in Hsiang-t’an, the capital of the hsien in east Hunan which is the birthplace of Mao Tse-tung.
Ho was born in Hsiang-t’an, the capital of the hsien in east Hunan which is the birthplace of Mao Tse-tung.
After graduating at age 16 from a higher primary school in Hsiang-t’an, he went to live with an uncle in Peking, who was then a member of parliament. Ho audited classes at Peking University where he became involved in the May Fourth Movement, which broke out first in Peking in May 1919. He seems to have come quickly under the influence of the more extreme leftist-minded students at Peking University, and he belonged to the group that ineluded Chang Kuo-t’ao, Li Ta-chao, Teng Chung-hsia, and Lo Chang-lung, men who were active in forming a group to study Marxism and who became Party members as soon as the CCP was founded in 1921. Along with Lo, Teng, and others, he belonged to the Society for the Study of Marxism, which was officially formed at the University soon after the CCP was founded in Shanghai, again with Teng and Lo he was drawn into the labor movement about the time that he joined the CCP. In 1922 Ho helped organize the badly paid railway workers on the Peking-Hankow Railroad. Later he is credited with having taken the lead in organizing the union for railway workers on the Peking-Suiyuan rail line.
The next years of Ho’s career have been studied in some detail, but because the documentation for the controversial episodes in which he was involved comes largely from CCP sources who were his opponents, much remains obscure. It appears that Ho openly opposed Li Li-san at least from early 1930 when the Kiangsu Provincial Committee held its second congress. He was again critical of his chief when Li called the important Conference of Delegates from the Soviet Areas in May and set up the Preparatory Committee for the All-China Soviet Congress. At the Shanghai conference Ho had one of his clashes with Li, but it was Li’s policies that were adopted. Later that year Li’s platform for a central Soviet government was criticized by the Comintern as partially Trotskyist in spirit. Li continued to be victorious in his clashes with Ho through most of 1930, but meanwhile Ho’s opposition was gathering supporters. In the summer certain Red armies directed by Li’s head-quarters in Shanghai unsuccessfully attempted to capture some of the important industrial cities in central China from stronger Nationalist forces.
After taking Changsha, the capital of Hunan, at the end of July, the Communists were forced to evacuate the city on August 9, thereby losing many of their followers in the bloody battles. When the Party met in Shanghai on August 20 to consider these defeats, Ho not only attacked Li for his failure at Changsha but also accused him of “violating the Comintern line.” Ho is also said to have denounced Li (evidently in his presence) at a meeting of Party secretaries from Shanghai on September 1. Among other things he accused Li of failure to build up a strong Red Army, and of having recruited some 70 per cent of his party membership from the peasantry, with a mere 5.5 per cent from labor. This time Ho’s attacks on Li struck home and on September 4 Ho was removed as secretary of the Central Shanghai District Committee. Pre-sumably at this time he was also dismissed from his leading post in the Kiangsu Provincial Committee, because in his letter of September 8, 1930, to the Party’s central authorities he complained of having been demoted from all.his positions and presented a 12-point criticism of the Li Li-san leadership. On matters of theory and policy these criticisms did not differ greatly from the criticism to be made two months later by the Comintern. Ho Ch’ang, a Li Li-san supporter who later recanted, replaced him in the Provincial Committee.
Although Ho had been expelled from the Party when he died, the Maoist “Resolution on Some Questions in the History of Our Party,” which was adopted by the Seventh Plenum of the Central Committee in April 1945, stated that Ho, Lin Yii-nan, and Li Ch’iu-shih as well as many others had been wrongly condemned as “rightists” by the Ch’en Shao-yii leadership. It went on to say that they had performed “much useful work for the Party and the people” and after being arrested had “stood up firm to the enemy and became noble martyrs.”
Following the Third Plenum Ho’s challenge to the CCP leadership continued with considerable vigor. In November the Party decided to act on the advice of the Comintern and dismiss Li Li-san, who was ordered to Moscow (see under Li Li-san). With Li out of the way tension between Ho Meng-hsiung and the Russian-returned student clique sharpened. The particulars about Ho’s role in the controversy are difficult to uncover because they come from sources that are in themselves subject to prejudice-reports released by a Politburo in which the new Ch’en Shao-yii leadership and Li’s supporters must still have been struggling for supremacy. From such sources it would appear that Ho had been forced to recant in October before Li was removed from his posts. Yet even with his apologies Ho had managed to make it clear that he objected to being called an opportunist and being left without work to do. Then in mid-December 1930, several weeks after Li had been dismissed, the Politburo apparently decided that Ho had been unjustly treated and earlier Party decisions inflicting penalties on him were reversed. Upon re-examining Ho’s September 8 statement, the Politburo found it to be in line with Comintern views and its condemnation of Li’s strategy to have been correct.
The Politburo reversal could not have been immediately implemented because on December 24, 1930, two weeks after the decision was made, Ho appears to have written to the Far Eastern Office of the Comintern complaining of having no work and asking that his previous statements concerning Li Li-san be made a matter of public record. These were officially released early in January 1931 on the eve of the Fourth CCP Plenum held in Shanghai. However, it is not known whether or not Ho was reinstated in his former posts. If he was, it could only have been briefly, since he was expelled from the Party shortly thereafter.
Details of the Fourth Plenum are given in the biography of Lo Chang-lung, Ho’s former colleague at Peking University who by this time had risen to be a leading figure in the All-China Federation of Labor as well as a Central Committee member. In brief, after putting up a determined struggle, Lo, Ho, and their followers were defeated by Ch’en Shao-yii and his Comintern-supported leadership. They subsequently withdrew from the Plenum and set up a separate organization of their own, whereupon the successful Ch’en Shao-yii group promptly expelled them from the Party.
While continuing to work as a labor organizer, Ho became increasingly influential in the Kiangsu Provincial Party Committee. After the Sixth Party Congress the CCP was torn by internal dissension, largely over the work of the controversial Li Li-san, who had come away from the Sixth Congress as head of the Party Propaganda Department. Li’s “highhanded behavior” in his efforts to control all the CCP organizations by his own machine began to meet stiff opposition from several quarters, not only from his colleagues in China but also from the Russians and the Comintern. One of Li’s most vociferous opponents was the Kiangsu Provincial Committee (with Ho as one of its leaders), which “continued in its unruly tradition and frequently took issue with the Li Li-san leadership.” Then in the spring of 1930 the Comintern sent Pavel Mif, the chancellor of Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow, to China accompanied by some of his favorite Chinese students (who were sometimes known as the “28 Bolsheviks”) to checkmate Li Li-san. At the time of their return the local Party committees in Shanghai, as well as the Kiangsu Provincial Committee, were fairly well controlled by Ho Meng-hsiung, who now began to be rivaled by Mif and his group as well as by Li Li-san and his followers.
