Hsiao comes from a peasant family in Hsing-kuo hsien in east-central Kiangsi. Hsing-kuo city, the hsien seat where Hsiao spent some of his early years, is a walled town in a rather isolated mountain area some 50 miles from the Fukien border. The area was fought over by the Communists a number of times in the late 1920’s and the early 1930’s.
Living in Hsing-kuo, Hsiao probably witnessed some of the Red Army campaigns there such as those described by the American authoress Agnes Smedley, who talked with Chu Te about the battles he fought in Kiangsi before the Long March began. A number of young radicals were drawn to the city of Hsing-kuo in the late twenties by its good schools. One in particular, a middle school, had been the scene of local disturbances led by a young Communist and Whampoa graduate who incited an uprising in Hsing-kuo prior to the entrance into the city of the Communist army commanded by Chu Te and Mao Tse-tung in early 1924.
In 1936, when he was in northwest China, American journalist Edgar Snow interviewed him and learned that he had joined the Communists at Chingkangshan at the age of 144 It is possible that Hsiao had connected his career with Chingkangshan in order to indicate that he had been associated with Mao Tse-tung from the historic moment when Mao held together the small band of battle-weary soldiers who formed the nucleus of the Red Army. In fact, most of the Red Army led by Chu Te and Mao was driven out of Chingkangshan at the end of 1928 and on its route eastward toward the Fukien border had entered Hsiao’s native Hsing-kuo (February 1929), where it established a short-lived Communist regime. At this time Mao opened a youth training class in Hsing-kuo, in which Hsiao is said to have enrolled, so it may well have been at this moment that Hsiao first became formally connected with the Communists. Sometime in 1929 Hsiao became a member of the Communist Youth League and presumably he was admitted to the CCP soon afterwards. With only a month of training in Mao’s youth class, Hsiao joined a Red Army military unit commanded by Lin Piao, then a very junior officer with the Chu-Mao force (the Fourth Red Army). He was, however, to continue to engage in youth work with the Red Army up to and through the period of the Long March. He had a number of rather important positions in the political training and youth departments of certain of the Red Army units in Kiangsi before the Communists left in the fall of 1934 on the Long March. In 1932 he was identified as director of a “young people’s section” of the Political Department of the First Army Corps. This was the corps commanded by Lin Piao, which was subordinate to the First Front Army of Chu and Mao. In 1932 Lo Jung-huan was its principal political officer. Hsiao must have been closely associated with Lo from the moment he joined the Red Army, for in 1963 (in a eulogy for the deceased Lo) he commented that for more than 30 years after I joined the Fourth Red Army, I spent the greater part of my time working under Marshal Lo’s direct supervision.”
At the start of the Sino-Japanese War in mid-1937, Lin Piao’s army became the 115th Division, one of the three important units of the Communists’ Eighth Route Army in north China. Hsiao became director of the Organization Section of the Division’s Political Department, and when the Division went into battle in September 1937 he was attached to the 343rd Brigade (said to be a favorite unit of Mao Tse-tung). In postwar times Hsiao was cited for “meritorious service” in the fighting during the early war years.
At the end of September 1937 Lin’s 115th Division fought an important battle at P’ing-hsing Pass in northeast Shansi, defeating part of a major Japanese division. After the battle, Lin led two brigades of the 115th Division (the 343rd and the 344th) to the mountains of southeast Shansi, where he left them for a time to fight as semi-independent forces. (For descriptions of these brigades, see under Yang Te-chih and Yang Yung.) The 343rd Brigade, commanded by Ch’en Kuang (a secretary of the Kiangsu CCP Committee since 1956), made its headquarters in the border area of Shansi, Hopeh, and Shantung provinces, where it could command the route to Shantung. From the start of the war there were very active local resistance forces in western Shantung, which were at first able to harass the invading Japanese troops gaining control of the area. But when in November 1938 the Japanese turned upon the Shantung guerrillas in earnest, killing their commander, the resistance forces in western Shantung were temporarily broken up. Subsequently, in November 1938, the CCP decided to send troops to their rescue and called upon some of Lin’s forces, which were stationed in eastern Shansi. In March 1939 Ch’en Kuang’s 343rd Brigade, now also designated as the Eastern Advance Detachment (Tung-chin chih-tui), departed from the area along the Peking-Hankow (Pinghan) Railroad in southern Hopeh. By late spring it had established contact with local guerrillas in Yun-ch’eng, Shantung, some 50 miles south of Liao-ch’eng, where the resistance had been especially strong since the beginning of the war, though it too had suffered in the Japanese attacks of November 1938.
While Hsiao was abroad, the new central government was brought into existence at the inaugural session of the CPPCC in September 1949. He was elected to membership on the First National Committee of the CPPCC, a post he held until the Second CPPCC was formed in late 1954. And, when the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association was formed in October 1949, Hsiao was named a member of the First Executive Council (a post he still retains, having been named to the Second and Third Executive Councils in December 1954 and May 1959, respectively). More important, however, over the winter of 1949-50 Hsiao became a deputy director of the important General Political Department, then subordinate to the People’s Revolutionary Military Council. Hsiao’s superior in the Political Department was his long-time associate Lo Jung-huan. Within a brief time Hsiao had established himself as a major spokesman for the PLA, especially in relation to the political affairs of the military establishment. For example, he was the keynote speaker at a joint conference of “fighting heroes” and “labor models held in September-October 1950, and in June-1951 he published a major article (“The CCP and the PLA”) commemorating the 30th anniversary of the CCP. A year later, to mark the 25th anniversary of the PLA, he published another important article in which he emphasized the necessity for the PLA to participate in construction work (e.g., dam building), a view he reiterated on many occasions. From this period in the early fifties to the present, Hsiao has continued to be one of the most authoritative PLA spokesmen.
In January 1953 Hsiao became a vice-chairman of a short-lived committee to “implement” the Marriage Law. The following year he was elected as a PLA deputy to the First NPC, which opened in September 1954. (He was not, however, re-elected to the Second NPC in 1959.) In 1955, when the PRC awarded personal military ranks and military orders to its military veterans, Hsiao was made a colonel general (equivalent to a three-star general in the U.S. Army) and was given the Orders of August First, Independence and Freedom, and Liberation, covering service from 1927 to 1950. Throughout the fifties he was one of the more active PLA officers in the promotion of athletic activities-endeavors that the Communists regard as important in improving the physical condition of their soldiers as well as useful in promoting international relations. From June 1952 to October 1956 he was a vice-chairman of the All-China Athletic Federation, and in August 1952 he served as the chief judge of a nationwide PLA sports meet. He was also named as one of the vice-chairmen (January 1956) of the “Preparatory Committee for Participation in the 16th Olympic Games” in Melbourne. (The Chinese Communists, however, ultimately refused to take part in the games owing to the participation of Taiwan; see under Jung Kao-t’ang.) A month later (February 1956), Hsiao was named as a member of a committee established to promote the usage of “standard spoken Chinese” (p'u-t’ung-hua).
Hsiao’s lifetime service in the Communist movement was given official recognition at the Party’s Eighth National Congress in September 1956 when he was elected to the Central Committee. Then only 42, he was one of the youngest men elected to the Committee. At the First Plenum of the new Central Committee (held the day after the Congress closed), he was made a deputy secretary of the Party’s important Central Control Commission; of the five deputy secretaries, Hsiao was the only one on active military duty. Five years later, when a Standing Committee was formed within the Control Commission, Hsiao was named as a member. In December 1956 Lo Jung-huan relinquished his posts as director of both the PLA General Political Department and the General Cadres Department. T’an Cheng assumed the former post and Hsiao the latter. Thus, while heading one of the PLA departments, Hsiao continued to serve concurrently as a deputy director in the Political Department, now headed by T’an Cheng. Hsiao continued to hold both posts until about 1959 when the Cadres Department (in charge of promotion and movement of military personnel) was placed under the Political Department; at approximately the time this change was made, Hsiao apparently relinquished the Cadres Department directorship.
In September 1933 the Communists established the Young Communist International Division, with Hsiao as commander and political commissar. Hsiao, describing the division in an article written in 1957, claimed that it had more than 10,000 men, over 70 percent of whom were Communist Youth League members. Early in 1934 he was reported to be political commissar of the 15 th Division of the Red Army, but this identification is uncertain because the complete order of battle of this division is not known. Then, when the Long March began in 1934, Hsiao’s “International Division” was incorporated into the First Army Corps; Nieh Jungchen was by then political commissar of Lin Piao’s Corps, and Lo Jung-huan was head of the Political Department. During the March, Hsiao served with these officers and also with Liu Po-ch’eng, who commanded other vanguard troops.
When the Red armies entered southern Sikang in the spring of 1935 Hsiao was given a special assignment to contact the non-Han minority tribesmen (the Yi) who inhabited the area south of the Ta-tu River and to seek their permission to cross through their lands on the march north. Writing of this episode, Hsiao claims that it was he who made the initial contacts that enabled Liu Po-ch’eng to negotiate the agreement with the Yi. Now celebrated in Communist accounts, the agreement allowed the Red armies safe passage through Yi territory.
Hsiao, only 35 when the Communists came to power in 1949, spent the better part of that year engaged in youth work. He participated in the formation of two of the most important youth organizations, the New Democratic Youth League (NDYL) and the All-China Federation of Democratic Youth (ACFDY), established in April and May, respectively. He spoke on youth work in the PLA at the congress that set up the NDYL and at the close of the meetings was elected to membership on the NDYL Central Committee. He was promoted to Standing Committee membership in November 1951 but then relinquished all his posts in the League at its second congress in 1953. At the youth congress of May 1949, Hsiao became a member of the ACFDY’s National Committee, another post he held until 1953. On behalf of the ACFDY, Hsiao went abroad in mid-1949 on an extended trip that took him to several countries in the Communist bloc. Led by youth leader Liao Ch’eng-chih, with Hsiao as one of his deputies, the ACFDY sent a large delegation to the Second Congress of the Communist-dominated organization to which the ACFDY is affiliated, the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY). The Congress was held in Budapest in August-September 1949; at the close of the meetings Hsiao was elected to the WFDY’s Executive Committee, but it is not known how long he continued in this position. After the Congress, Liao Ch’eng-chih returned home, but Hsiao remained in Europe as leader of the delegation; the group visited Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and the Soviet Union before returning to China in January 1950.
