He was born about 1910 in a village near Ju-nan in southern Honan. His family enjoyed a better than average middle class income derived from land holdings. Unlike most Chinese Communists, he comes from a Christian family and was baptized into the Lutheran church.
He also studied at Lutheran-sponsored schools and then took his degree in history from Hua-chung University, another missionary school, in Wuchang, Hupeh.
It was about 1935, while a student at Hua- chung University, that Ho joined the CCP. In that same year he went to Peking to help organize student demonstrations against the Japanese, an activity that was apparently connected with the December Ninth Movement (see under Li Ch’ang), which began in December 1935 when students in Peking staged large demonstrations in opposition to Japanese incursions into north China. He followed up his work in Peking by engaging in organizational work among students for the Party in Hankow in 1936-37 and then made his way to Shensi where he studied at the Anti-Japanese Military and Political Academy (K’ang-ta).
Ho spent at least part of the Sino-Japanese War serving as a battalion political commissar in the New Fourth Army (see under Ch’en I) in east-central China. In 1945, after hostilities ended, he was briefly active in Party circles in Hankow, an area with which he was familiar from his college days. However, when the civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists broke out in 1946, Ho was reassigned to the New Fourth Army, again serving as a political officer. Like many New Fourth Army officers, he took up political posts in areas in or near the operational sector of the Army as it swept over the mainland in 1949. In Ho’s case, he served briefly in 1949 as acting secretary of the Hupeh Party Committee, the ranking secretary of the Wuhan Party Committee, and as secretary-general of the Wuhan Military Control Commission following its occupation by the Communists in May 1949. However, he did not stay long in Hupeh but rather followed the Communist armies (presumably elements of Lin Piao’s Fourth Field Army) as they advanced southward in the latter half of 1949.
Ho was assigned to Kwangsi where he was to remain for the next two and a half years. He served briefly as the secretary of the United Front Work Department of the South China Party Sub-bureau (responsible for Kwantung and Kwangsi), but his most important work in this period was in Kwangsi where he served in a wide variety of positions: 1950-1952: mayor of Kweilin; vice-chairman, Kweilin Military Control Commission; (ranking) secretary, Kweilin Party Committee; member, Kwangsi Provincial People’s Government Council, 1951-1952: chairman, Land Reform Committee, Kwangsi Government; deputy-secretary, Kwangsi Party Committee; vice-president, Kwangsi People’s Revolutionary University; chairman, Kwangsi Trade Union Council. Although Ho ranked below such senior Party veterans as Chang Yun-i and Ch’en Man-yuan in Kwangsi affairs, he was among the more important provincial officials there from 1950 to 1952.
In mid-1952 Ho was transferred to Canton, south China’s most important city and the head-quarters of the South China Party Sub-bureau. He served briefly in 1952 as the second secretary of the municipal Party Committee but was promoted later in the year to the ranking secretaryship. In late December 1952 he also assumed the post of Canton mayor. Ho’s transfer to Canton was apparently directly related to a serious case of mismanagement of an expensive organic fertilizer factory by Chu Kuang, a veteran Party member who had been serving as both acting mayor and acting Party secretary in place of Yeh Chien-ying (Yeh being occupied with higher-level duties in the South China Party Sub-bureau). The charges against Chu were aired in two important meetings of the Canton Party Committee held in March-April 1953, with Ho delivering the main attack on Chu’s alleged mismanagement in Canton. Ho’s charges were summed up with the statement that “Chu Kuang was to a considerable degree motivated by the ideology of the petty bourgeoisie, and this petty bourgeois ideology had for a time replaced the ideology of the working class in assuming the major leadership in the Party (Although Chu Kuang was not purged from the Party and in fact has continued to hold a number of other positions in the government, his political career seems to have been permanently damaged by this case of mismanagement in Canton.)
In the same month that Ho assumed the mayoralty of Canton (December 1952), he was also identified as a member of the Standing Committee of the South China Party Sub-bureau having jurisdiction over Kwangtung and Kwangsi. Soon after, in January 1953, the regional governmental administration for the six provinces of Honan, Hupeh, Hunan, Kiangsi, Kwangtung, and Kwangsi was reorganized; formerly known as the Central-South Military and Administrative Committee, it was now changed to the Central- South Administrative Committee, with Ho named to membership on the new Committee. Other less significant positions that Ho held during his time in Canton include: 1952-1954: member, Executive Committee, Canton Federation of Trade Unions; member, Canton branch, China Peace Committee; 1954: chairman, Canton Committee for Discussing the Constitution of the PRC (adopted in September 1954).
In the fall of 1954, when the government constitution was promulgated, the central government underwent a reorganization at which time a number of provincial officials were called to Peking. Ho was among these and at this time (October 1954) entered into a new phase in his career when he was appointed as an assistant-minister of Foreign Affairs (one level below the vice-ministers). During the next three years he was often reported in the press media in activities normally attendant to such a position in the Foreign Ministry-conferring with many foreign visitors, taking part in negotiations with foreign diplomats and officials, and attending the innumerable banquets given in Peking. There is little to distinguish Ho's work in this period aside from the fact that he was a member of the Chinese team that negotiated with Polish counterparts in June 1955 as part of the Sino-Polish Scientific and Technical loint Cooperation Commission, negotiations that led to the signing of a protocol on June 11 providing for continuing technological cooperation. In the following month he was named to the board of directors of the Chinese People’s Institute of Foreign Affairs, a position he continues to retain.
In October 1957 Ho was removed as an assistant-minister of Foreign Affairs, thus paving the way for his assignment two months later as the ambassador to North Vietnam, one of Peking’s most important posts abroad. Ho presented his credentials to Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi in January 1958 and then spent the next four and a half years in Vietnam-years that saw a dramatic escalation of the North Vietnam-supported war in South Vietnam. Perhaps owing to the proximity of Vietnam to China,. Ho returned to Peking more frequently than most ambassadors that Peking sends abroad. Between 1958 and his recall in mid-1962, he returned to China four times; during three of these visits Ho took part in high-level negotiations between Chinese and Vietnamese leaders. He was also involved in important negotiations in Vietnam on several occasions, taking part in the talks in Hanoi during Premier Chou En-lai’s visit in May 1960, when Marshal Yeh Chien-ying led a military mission there in December 1961, and when Foreign Trade Minister Yeh Chi-chuang led a trade mission to Hanoi that resulted in the signing of a protocol covering trade for 1962. Ho himself also signed trade, aid (from China to Vietnam), and cultural exchange agreements in January 1960 and April 1961.
It was during Ho’s time in Hanoi that he became involved in the complex situation in neighboring Laos where pro-Communist, anti-Communist, and neutralist factions were fighting among themselves. In March 1961 a high Laotian official addressed an official note to Ho in Hanoi proposing the exchange of “economic and cultural missions” that would be “charged with the task of settling problems which may interest hoth countries.” Ho immediately replied, expressing complete agreement. It was not until several months later (October 1961), however, that he was formally named as “Chief of the PRC Economic and Cultural Mission” in Laos. He arrived the following month in Xieng Khou- ang, Laos, where he presented his credentials to Prince Souvana Phouma, the prime minister. In effect, Ho can be considered as the first official envoy to Laos (although in formal diplomatic terms the first ambassador, Liu Ch’un, was not appointed until September 1962). Ho Wei, in fact, spent rather little time in Laos, although he returned there in January 1962 at which time he negotiated and signed two agreements, one providing for the construction of a highway to link Yunnan Province in China to the town of Phong Saly, long a Communist stronghold in Laos, and another agreement providing for civil air transport between China and Laos.
