Background
Hsia was a native of I-yang, a regional center in north Hunan not far south of Tung-t’ing Lake, and to judge from his student days he was probably born about the turn of the century or shortly before.
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Hsia Hsi
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Hsia Hsi, together with Mao Tse-tung, belonged to the small group which brought the CCP into existence in Hunan in the early 1920’s, and he remained a key provincial figure until the KMT-CCP break in 1927. He was also active in those years in establishing the Hunan provincial organization of the KMT when the Nationalists and Communists were working together.
Education
In 1917 Hsia was at the Hunan First Normal School in Changsha where Mao Tse-tung was also a student. In that year Mao and Ts’ai Ho-sen began to organize the Hsin-min hsueh-hui (New people’s study society), which was formally inaugurated in April 1918. The majority of the founding members, Hsia among them, came from the normal school. Aside from Mao, Ts’ai, and Hsia, other founding members included such important latter-day Communists as Ho Shu-heng, Hsu T’e-li, and Li Wei-han. The radical student group in Changsha soon aroused the vigilance of Hunan Governor Chang Ching-yao who, when students demonstrated against Japanese influences (December 1919), broke up their rally with force. The students replied by circulating a manifesto against Governor Chang, which some 13,000 students signed, and they also decided to seek outside assistance.
Career
To this end, in early 1920 Mao visited Peking, while Hsia was sent to Hengyang, in southern Hunan, then the headquarters of the powerful northern warlord Wu P’ei-fu, to solicit Wu’s aid in ousting Chang. It is doubtful if their endeavors were a significant factor in the downfall of Chang, but in any event he was driven from the province in mid-1920, and by the latter part of that year Chao Heng-t’i had become the dominant figure in Hunan.
In the latter half of 1920 several societies for the study of Marxism were established in major Chinese cities-groups which came to be the nuclei from which the CCP was established in mid-1921. The Hunan group was formed in September 1920, and its three most influential members were Mao, Lin Po-ch’ii and Hsia. Soon afterwards, Mao, Hsia, and others established what amounted to a Hunan brandh of the Socialist Youth League (see under Li Ta-chao), and with this act the New People’s Study Society was disbanded (many of its key members joining the new youth organization). During this period, and for the next several years, Hsia seems to have been most closely associated with Kuo Liang (1900-1928). According to Kuo’s biographer, the two young men lived in the same dormitory at the Hunan Normal School, and because of their involvement in revolutionary activities they often missed classes. In 1921, according to the same biography, Hsia and Kuo organized a strike among ricksha pullers in Changsha, which was purportedly carried out under Mao Tse-tung’s leadership. It was also in 1921, immediately after Mao and Ho Shu- heng returned from the founding congress of the CCP in Shanghai in July, that Mao and Ho established the Self-Education College (Tzu-hsiu ta-hsueh) in Changsha to attract young intellectuals into the CCP. A year later, in September 1922, the college set up a preparatory class, in which Hsia and Li Wei-han both taught. In 1922-23 Hsia was among the leaders in yet another organization with which Mao was associated, the Hunan Students’ Union, headquartered in the same building as the Self-Education College. For a period Hsia was editor of the Students Union organ, the Hu-nan hsueh-sheng lien-ho-hui chou-k’an (Hunan Students’ Union weekly), and he was also associated then with Mao’s younger brother, Mao Tse-min, who headed the business department of the student organization.
Hsia was elected to the CCP Central Committee at the Sixth Congress, held in Moscow in June-July 1928. He remained in the Soviet capital to study at Sun Yat-sen University where he came to be one of the more prominent figures in the group known as the Russian-returned student clique or the “28 Bolsheviks.” These were the favored Chinese students of the university chancellor and Comintern official Pavel Mif, who went to China with his protégés in the spring of 1930. In less than a year, with the help and guidance of Mif and the Comintern, the Russian-returned students ousted the strong Party leader Li Li-san, and at the crucial Fourth Party Plenum in January 1931 they defeated another rival group led by Lo Chang-lung and Ho Meng-hsiung. After gaming control of most of the key Party organs, the new leadership under Ch’en Shao-yii and Ch in Pang-hsien quickly moved to extend its control to the rural Communist bases which still other leaders had been developing in the years after the 1927 debacle at Nanchang. Thus, in March 1931, Hsia was sent to join Ho Lung in the latter’s West Hunan-Hupeh base.
Although Hsia was re-elected to the CEC of the Chinese Soviet Republic in early 1934 (as noted above), little more is known of his work after that time. There is conflicting information about his death. One of Mao’s biographers claims that he was drowned in 1934. Another and probably more reliable biographer of Mao states that Hsia was killed during the Long March in 1935.
Politics
Hsia had apparently joined the CCP at the time of its founding in 1921 or soon thereafter, and like so many Communists of that period he had joined the KMT by 1923 during the early phase of KMT-CCP cooperation. In April 1923, immediately after the above-mentioned student conference in Shanghai, Hsia and Liu Shao-ch’i were sent by the KMT to Changsha as organizers. As one observer has noted, the “fact that both men were dedicated Communists meant that from the beginning the KMT organization in Hunan during the national revolutionary period would have a more radical tint than in Kwangtung.” Hsia and Liu set up a joint KMT- CCP headquarters in Changsha, subordinate to which was a sub-section in nearby Ning-hsiang to the west and another one in P’ing-hsiang hsien across the border in Kiangsi. The CCP had already been working in these areas, and now with the additional backing of the KMT, Hsia was active in the next few years in building up a labor following in Changsha and engaged in similar activities among the railroad workers on the Chu-chou-P’ing-hsiang Railway and the miners in and around An-yuan and P’ing-hsiang, located just across the border in west Kiangsi. Thus, in the words of Li Jui (Mao’s biographer), after 1923 Hsia was one of the “responsible persons” for the CCP Hunan Committee, and in the ensuing years he also “carried out important work for the KMT Hunan Headquarters.” In January 1924, Hsia was included in the Hunan delegation which attended the First KMT Congress in Canton. It was indicative of the radical element in this group that five of its nine members were concurrently CCP members; among them, in addition to Hsia, were Mao, Lin Po-ch ii, and Li Wei-han.13 Mao and Lin were among the six Communists elected alternate members of the KMT Central Executive Committee (CEC). Hsia Hsi was not then made a CEC member, but when the Second KMT Congress met in January 1926, he joined Mao as a CEC alternate.
Hsia’s role in the KMT organization in Hunan was confirmed soon after the First KMT Congress; in March 1924, at the third meeting of the KMT CEC, he was appointed as the senior KMT official in Hunan. Hsia returned to Hunan from Canton, and for the next two years he was engaged in organizational work; ostensibly this was done under the aegis of the KMT, but because his work was carried out in secret, it was a “boon to the Communists who had an extensive underground network.” The importance of the work of Hsia and his colleagues was demonstrated in the early phase of the Northern Expedition. When the vanguard troops of Yeh T’in captured Changsha in July 1926, he was assisted by military units organized among the peasantry in three hsien to the east of the city, units which were already in existence by the time Yeh’s troops arrived there.
Immediately after the fall of Changsha, the KMT organization in Hunan convened a congress, the nine-member Executive Committee elected at that time included five Communists, one of whom was Hsia.16 At the end of 1926 Mao returned to Changsha, and for the next few months he and Hsia worked together again, although apparently not in complete harmony During this period, as both the CCP and the KMT struggled over questions of land tenure and taxation, which were making their cooperation increasingly difficult, Hsia and Mao disagreed publicly over a report Mao delivered to the KM l Central Land Committee. The committee, formed by the KMT CEC in Wuhan in early April 1927, had a membership of five, including Mao. During that month the committee held meetings open to members of the “Left-wing” KMT government in Wuhan, as well as to political activists in the peasant movement (from both the CCP and the KMT). At a meeting on April 22, Mao presented a resolution calling for a rather drastic confiscation of the land holdings of rich peasants and absentee landlords. Mao’s views encountered stiff opposition, not only from nonCommunists but also from Party members, among them Hsia, who found Mao’s resolution generally impracticable, “full of contradictions, and likely to lead to an “immediate struggle between the poor and rich peasants.”
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Born
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Died
1935 (aged 35) -
Nationality
China -
Ethnicity
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Political Party
Chinese Communist Party
Career
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1921
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1922 - 1923
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1934