Hsiang Ching-yii

Background

Hsiang was born in Hsu-p’u hsien in western Hunan about 130 miles west of Changsha, the Hunan provincial capital.

Education

She began with a traditional education, but through the influence of an older brother who had studied in Japan she was introduced to modern literature when she was 12. In 1912, when she was 17, she went to Changsha to attend a teachers’ training school for women but, disliking it, she transferred to the “more progressive” Chou-nan Girls’ School from which she graduated in 1915. During her last term she became interested in the contemporary political scene. She began to organize her fellow students and spoke in public against Yuan Shih-k’ai’s tolerance of the harsh Japanese Twenty-One Demands and his attempts to restore the monarchy with himself as emperor. After graduation Hsiang returned to Hsu-p’u to start a co-educational primary school. Wang I-chih (the widow of Chou Pao-chung), who has written a short biography of Hsiang, taught at the primary school a few years later.

Career

Hsiang continued to teach in Hsu-p’u for three years, but she apparently retained close connections with friends and colleagues in Changsha. Through her school mate Ts’ai Ch’ang she came to know the Ts’ai family, which made its home a meeting place for politically minded Hunanese students, among them Mao Tse-tung. Ts’ai Ch’ang’s brother, Ts’ai Hosen, and Mao were the prime founders of the Hsin-min hsueh-hui (New people’s study society), an association of young reformers formed in April 1918 in Changsha. Hsiang was one of its earliest members. Over the course of the next year she and Ts’ai Ch’ang were responsible for organizing the women’s group among the Hu- nanese students who were preparing to go to France to take part in the work-and-study program. Roughly one fourth of all the Chinese students who went to France came from Hunan, many of them Hsin-min hsueh-hui members.

The Changsha group set out from Shanghai in November 1919, and upon arriving, most of them went to Montargis, south of Paris, where they formed a branch of the Hsin-min hsueh- hui. Others in the group were Li Wei-han, Li Fu-ch’un (later the husband of Ts’ai Ch’ang), and Li Li-san. At Montargis Hsiang enrolled in a French course at a public school for women and worked part-time in a rubber plant and later a textile mill. She married Ts’ai Ho-sen in 1921 by which time he had become the acknowledged leader of the Hunan student group. However, neither academic life nor work was as important as politics to most of the Chinese students. Many of them had a taste of political agitating before going to France and they vigorously continued this work after their arrival. A number of their French teachers were interested in Marxism and taught them from the pages of l’Humanité, the organ of the French Communist Party. In February 1921 Hsiang was briefly detained by the French police for demonstrating in front of the Chinese Legation in connection with a financial dispute between the students and the Chinese Government. A Socialist Youth League and a Communist Party branch for Chinese students in France eventually grew out of these activities, but the Ts’ai’s were deported some eight months before the French CCP branch was founded in mid-1922.

They returned to China in late 1921 or early 1922 to work for the CCP, which had been founded in Shanghai a half a year earlier. Hsiang immediately joined the CCP and became active in the women’s and labor movements in Shanghai. In July 1922 the CCP held its Second National Congress in Shanghai. Hsiang and her husband were among the few delegates present and both were elected to the Central Committee. Hsiang was the first woman member of the Central Committee. She was also named to head the Party’s Women’s Department, which was organized at this time, continuing in this post until her departure for Russia in 1925. For almost four years Hsiang directed most of her attention to the women workers of Shanghai, and she is credited with having recommended to the Party most of the proposals regarding the women’s movement in the early twenties. She reportedly spent many hours visiting workers in their homes and organized and taught in night schools for them. In 1924 she took part in the strikes in the Shanghai silk mills and the Nanyang Tobacco Plant. And in the next year Hsiang was active in the serious labor disturbances that broke out in May (see under Li Li-san) and soon spread to other industrial cities.

Hsiang and her husband left for Moscow in late 1925 to attend the Sixth Plenum of the Comintern’s Executive Committee (February- March 1926). Afterwards, they spent a little over a year in Russia where Hsiang studied at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East. They returned to China in the spring of 1927 and were on hand for the Fifth CCP Congress in Hankow in April-May. Ts’ai Hosen was elected to the Politburo and re-elected to the Central Committee. However, it appears that Hsiang was not re-elected to the Central Committee. In fact, it seems that after her election in 1922 she was not re-elected at the Third and Fourth Congresses, perhaps because her personal relationship with P’eng Shu-chih, a protégé of Party leader Ch’en Tu-hsiu, had angered other leading Communists (see under Ch'ii Ch’iu-pai).

After the Congress Hsiang remained in the Wuhan area where she worked as a propagandist for the Wuhan Federation of Trade Unions. In this capacity she may have attended the Fourth Congress of the Communist-backed All-China Federation of Labor, which was held in Hankow in June 1927. In any event, at this juncture the CCP and its affiliated organizations were rapidly moving toward an extraordinary crisis. Chiang Kai-shek had already delivered a devastating blow to the CCP two months earlier in Shanghai, and in Hupeh and neighboring provinces the Communist-led labor movement was being harassed by both Chiang’s “Right-KMT” and elements from the “Left-KMT” in Wuhan. In fact, the Wuhan labor federation for which Hsiang had been working was disbanded in late June by Wang Ching-wei’s Wuhan government, and in a few weeks Wang.’s “Left-KMT” broke all its ties with the Communists. The CCP was now an underground organization throughout China. In these circumstances, Hsiang was transferred to a propaganda post in the Hankow CCP Committee. Concurrently, she served as an editor of a Party journal entitled Ch’ang-chiang (Yangtze River), which was being published covertly, and within «a brief time she replaced Huang Sung-ling (an important education official in the post-1949 period) as editor-in-chief. By this time Hsiang was also engaged in underground work for the Party’s Hupeh Committee. She continued her work in Hupeh until the spring of 1928 when she was arrested in the French Concession in Hankow and executed on May 1.

Politics

Although Hsiang was not on the faculty at the radical Shanghai University, she worked closely with many of its staff members, including Ch’ii Ch’iu-pai, Chang T’ai-lei, and Jen Pi-shih. In fact, she must have been well acquainted with virtually all the top Communists in Shanghai in the early twenties because, lacking a formal Party office, the CCP used the Ts’ai home as its headquarters in the early twenties. Hsiang is also credited with an important role in the training of two women Communists, Chang Ch’in-ch’iu, presently a vice-minister of the Textile Industry Ministry, and the wife of Ch’ü Ch’iu-pai (Yang Chih-hua).

Connections

Married to Ts’ai Ho-sen while they were students in France, she, along with her husband, played a major role in the founding and growth of the CCP.

Spouse:

Ts’ai Ho-sen