A native of Hupeh, in all probability he came from the proletarian class and may have had his first contact with Communism through the night school indoctrination classes for the workers in the Wuhan area started soon after the CCP was founded in 1921.
Nothing is known about his family or his early education.
He is said to have been moved to join the Party while working in the shipyards of the Hanyang Arsenal through the influence of Shih Yang. (Hsiang’s sponsor is not to be confused with Chao Shih-yen who sometimes used Shih Yang as a Party alias.) Shih also came from Hupeh; as a lawyer in Wuhan, he served as an adviser to the Wuhan labor unions. Before joining the CCP, soon after it was founded, he belonged to the KMT. He was killed in line of Party duty during the strike on the Pinghan (Peking-Hankow) Railroad that was put down by the army of northern militarist Wu P’ei-fu (February 7, 1923). It was under Shih’s tutelage that Hsiang first became active as an organizer on the Pinghan line and worked to bring about the strike.
After the death of his sponsor Hsiang turned to organizing the miners of the famous iron mines at Han-yeh-p’ing in the Wuhan area; by 1925 he had risen to the post of general secretary of the Han-yeh-p’ing General Labor Union. That same year, in recognition of his work as a labor organizer and probably also to give recognition to one of its few leaders with true proletarian origins, the CCP decided to send Hsiang to Moscow for further study. He remained there about two years but returned to China by the spring of 1927. In that year he became the chairman of the Hupeh General Labor Union, an important organization both for the CCP and the KMT because Hupeh and Wuhan were the industrial heartland toward which both parties directed their revolutionary forces. At the Fifth CCP Congress in April 1927 he was elected to the Party Central Committee. Despite his limited outlook and abilities, Hsiang was said to have been quite effective as a labor organizer. He could speak to a labor audience and had considerable support among the rank-and-file workers in Hupeh, a group with whom such intellectual Party leaders as General Secretary Ch’en Tu-hsiu did not have much following. When in August 1927 the final split occurred between CCP and KMT, and the Party held its emergency strategy conference on August 7, Hsiang Chung-fa was one of the small number called to the conference to help unseat Ch’en and allow Ch’ii Ch’iu-pai to assume his post.
Thereafter, Hsiang was among the top Party leaders who sought refuge in the Soviet Union. He was in Moscow and present at the Sixth CCP Congress held there in the summer of 1928. By this time there were rather strong opposing factions within the CCP leadership, and the Congress had a difficult time attempting to reconcile them. According to Chang Kuo-t’ao, who also attended the Congress, the principal rivals were a leftist faction led by Chou En-lai and Ch’ii Ch’iu-pai and a faction whose policies were more to the right, which included Chang, Ts’ai Ho-sen, and Hsiang Ying. The Comintern, with Sun Yat-sen University Chancellor Pavel Mif as one of its chief spokesman, was anxious to pull the different factions together.
Thus Mif singled out Hsiang Chung-fa, with his labor record and proper proletarian background, as a good condidate for general secretary to effect the necessary compromise. During Hsiang’s term of office other and stronger leaders were to become far better known than he (see under Li Li-san and Ch’in Pang-hsien). However, Hsiang proved himself sufficiently flexible and was thus able to retain the post of general secretary during the next three difficult years when Li Li-san was to emerge as the dominant Party leader and then to be ousted by the Russian-returned student clique led by Ch’en Shao-yii, Ch’in Pang-hsien, and Pavel Mif. The latter group took over the Party apparatus from Li’s supporters at the Fourth CCP Plenum of January 1931, but after he had confessed to a certain amount of wrong-doing under the previous Li Li-san leadership, Hsiang was retained as the general secretary of the Party. He remained in Shanghai where the Party maintained its headquarters, but the records do not suggest any special accomplishments during this time.
