Hsiao Ching-kuang

Background

Hsiao comes from a military family in Changsha, the Hunan capital.

Education

After receiving an elementary school education, he entered the First Middle School in Changsha (c.1918). Mao Tse-tung had studied at this school a few years earlier, before he entered the more famous Hunan Provincial First Normal School. Among Hsiao’s fellow students was Jen Pi-shih, who was destined to become one of the CCP’s top leaders. Changsha was then a center of liberal and anarchist thought, and while Hsiao and Jen were in school the May Fourth Incident (1919) took place. Hsiao claims that he and Jen were deeply influenced by this famous incident, as well as by the short-lived Hsiang-chiang p’ing-luti (Hsiang River review), which Mao edited. Jen (and apparently Hsiao) graduated from the middle school in 1920. Mao was then sponsoring a program to encourage students to study in the Soviet Union, and it appears that Hsiao was in contact with him in this connection. In any case, Jen and Hsiao went to Shanghai that year, where they studied Russian at a foreign language school set up by Comintern representative Gregory Voitinsky and his Chinese assistant, Yang Ming-chai. Jen and Hsiao also joined the Socialist Youth League, founded at the instigation of Voitinsky in August 1920. It is not certain when Hsiao joined the CCP. One report states that he did not join until 1927, but it seems more likely that he followed the example of his companion Jen Pi-shih who joined in 1922.

In late 1920 or early 1921 Jen and Hsiao left for Moscow, traveling via Vladivostok, which was then still occupied by the Japanese. From 1921 to 1924 they studied at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East, officially established in April 1921 and by the fall of 1922 offering a three-year program to some 800 Asian students. Hsiao was back in China in 1924 in time to enter the first class of the Whampoa Military Academy, where Chiang Kai-shek was the commandant. Among his classmates were Hsu Hsiang-ch’ien, Ch’en Keng, and Chou Shih- ti, all of whom became important Communist leaders in later years. From Whampoa, Hsiao entered the Hunan army of T’an Yen- k’ai, which was incorporated into the national revolutionary force in mid-1925 as the Second Army. In 1926-27 Hsiao participated in the Northern Expedition as a “party” representative attached to the Second Army’s Fifth Division. The reference to the “party” might refer to the CCP, but it could refer to the KMT, which also had pofitical officers, many of them Whampoa graduates.

Career

After the final KMT-CCP break in mid-1927 Hsiao returned to the Soviet Union, where he studied at the Red Army Academy until 1931. Thus by 1931 he had spent a total of eight years in the USSR, a figure matched by few members of the CCP elite. There are conflicting reports about his activities after his return to China. Apparently he was active in west Fukien in 1931 as commander of the Seventh Red Army, and he may have been associated with a military academy there or in Juichin in southeast Kiangsi. But by the end of 1931 he was the political commissar of the Fifth Red Army Corps. This Corps was organized in December 1931 from the troops that had defected from the Nationalists’ 26th Route Army at Ning-tu in eastern Kiangsi.

In 1933 Hsiao was garrison commander of Li-ch’uan, a town in eastern Kiangsi on a tributary of the Fu River and a strategic point in the Kiangsi-Fukien base because of its location in the foothills of the mountain chain forming part of the provincial boundaries. When Li- ch’uan was lost to the Nationalists in September 1933 Hsiao was held responsible by the Party headquarters in Juichin. The accusations brought against him were connected with political policies which the Party leaders in Juichin called the Lo Ming line. Lo, the acting secretary of the Fukien Party Committee in 1933, was carrying out policies in the Kiangsi-Fukidn Soviet which he felt were necessitated by the special circumstances there. Apparently the peasants in the area had become apathetic if not hostile to the Communist programs, especially the aggressive land appropriation programs then being promoted by the group in control of the Party in Kiangsi (see under Ch’in Pang-hsien). Consequently, Lo favored a less aggressive program, which made him the target of attacks from such prominent Party leaders as Li Wei- han and Chou En-lai. In December 1933 Chou published an article in the Communist journal Tou-cheng (Struggle) describing Lo’s principal mistakes as “retreat, escape, vacillation, and right opportunism.” Hsiao was blamed for all the errors of the Lo Ming line as it affected military policy. This was a matter of grave concern to the Communists at a time when they were trying to stiffen their resistance in preparation for the Nationalists’ Fifth Extermination Campaign. Chou’s article described Hsiao as the “executer, leader, and promoter of the Lo Ming line in the Red Army.” It is not entirely clear where Mao stood in this controversy, but his later writings have repudiated Chou’s and Li’s position and approved of Lo and his supporters.

Hsiao apparently returned to Juichin after his failure at Li-ch’uan in 1933. He was subsequently attached to the headquarters of the Chu-Mao First Front Army, with which he made the Long March in 1934-35. He was reported to have served as chief-of-staff of the Cadres’ Regiment of the Red Army during the march. Not long after arriving in north Shensi, Hsiao participated in the Communists’ thrust across the Yellow River into Shansi in early 1936, a campaign described in the biography of Liu Chih-tan. One of the major purposes of this operation was to recruit soldiers for the Red Army, whose forces had been badly depleted during the Long March. Hsiao helped recruit these men, whom the Communists formed into the 29th Independent Army, numbering about 8,000 under Hsiao’s command. The Communist campaign in Shansi ended in the spring of 1936 when they were driven back into Shensi. Hsiao continued to head the 29th Army until 1937, concurrently serving as chairman of the Kansu Soviet Government’s Military Committee.

In the immediate postwar period Hsiao was one of the many military leaders sent to Manchuria, where Lin Piao established the Northeast Democratic Allied Army (known later as the Northeast PLA). Chou Pao-chung, Lii Cheng-ts’ao, and Hsiao were Lin’s three deputy commanders. Hsiao served concurrently (c. 1947-48) as commander of the North Manchurian Military Region and also as a member of the Party’s Northeast Bureau. As the Communists completed their conquest of Manchuria and moved into north China in 1948-49, he participated in the battles for Changchun, Kal-gan, and Tientsin. In February 1949, shortly after Tientsin fell, Hsiao was appointed as the garrison commander. When Lin’s army (named the Fourth Field Army in early 1949) pushed southward into Hupeh, Hsiao became the Wuhan Garrison commander and a member of the Wuhan Military Control Commission (May 1949). Continuing their southward advance, the Communists won control of Hunan by the end of the summer. Hsiao, already a deputy commander of the Fourth Field Army, became chairman of the Changsha Military Control Commission and commander of the Hunan Military District. In the early part of 1950 he received two civilian posts, one as a member of the Central-South Military and Administrative Committee and the other as a member of the Hunan Provincial People’s Government.

In 1954 Hsiao was elected a Navy deputy to the First NPC, which, at its initial session in September, inaugurated the constitutional government. (He was not re-elected to the Second NPC in 1959, but he was again elected a Navy deputy to the Third NPC, which opened in December 1964.) In September 1954 he became a member of the newly created National Defense Council, a post he still retains. At this same time he was also made one of the vice-ministers of the newly established Ministry of National Defense, serving under P’eng Te-huai until 1959 and thereafter under Lin Piao. Of the 12 men who have been National Defense vice-ministers only Hsiao, Wang Shu-sheng, and Liao Han-sheng have served continuously from 1954 to the mid-1960’s. Since late 1954 Hsiao has also been a member of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association’s Executive Board.

Achievements

• In September 1955 the Communists first awarded national military honors and gave their officers personal military ranks. Hsiao was made a senior (four-star) admiral and was given the three top awards, the Orders of August First, Independence and Freedom, and Liberation-decorations covering military service from 1927 to 1950. Exactly a year later he was promoted from alternate to full membership on the Party Central Committee at the Eighth CCP Congress. In November-December 1957 Hsiao made his first postwar trip abroad as a member of P’eng Te-huai’s 12-member delegation which was part of the larger entourage that Mao Tse-tung led to Moscow for the 40th anniversary of the Russian Revolution.

Politics

During the Sino-Japanese War years Hsiao’s main assignments were with the rear echelon of the Communists’ Eighth Route Army and the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia (Shen-Kan-Ning) Border Region Government. As commander of the rear echelon, Hsiao’s duties included the defense line demarcated by the Yellow River to the east of Yenan. Troops under his command clashed in December 1939 with the forces of the Nationalist governor of Kansu, Chu Shao-liang (the East Kansu Incident). Although the fighting soon ended it has been characterized by the Communists as the Nationalists’ “first anticommunist upsurge.” At some time in the early 1940’s Hsiao served as second deputy commander of the Joint Defense Command, the forces established to protect the Shansi-Suiyuan and Shen-Kan-Ning Border Regions (see under Ho Lung, the commander). Apart from his military duties, Hsiao represented Hsia-hsien (Shensi) in the Second Assembly of the Shen-Kan-Ning Border Region. At the Assembly’s inaugural session in November 1941, Hsiao gave a report on military affairs and was elected to the Council, the executive branch of the Border Region Government. He was also present in December 1944 for the second session of the Assembly. When the CCP held its Seventh National Congress in Yenan from April to June 1945, Hsiao was elected one of the 33 alternate members of the Party Central Committee.

Connections

Hsiao’s wife, who also studied in Moscow, was imprisoned in Shanghai in the early thirties and was not released until mid-1937. In 1936 he told Edgar Snow that he had one son studying in Moscow and another in Shanghai. Because of his very extensive military training in China and the Soviet Union, it might be expected that he would have regularly published articles on military policy or strategy.