Background
He was born in August 1909 in a village in Chia-ho hsien in southern Hunan, the capital of this rural hsien is about 25 miles from the Kwangtung border.
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Hsiao K’o
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According to the autobiography which Hsiao gave to journalist Nym Wales (the major source for Hsiao’s early career), his family were impoverished gentry. His father was a Hsiu-ts ai degree holder, and Hsiao’s two elder brothers had careers which he said “ran no more smoothly than my own.” The eldest was executed in 1923 for his ties with “bandits,” and the next brother joined the CCP in 1925 and was killed in 1933 while serving in the Red Army. These experiences deeply affected Hsiao, and partially in response to them, and partially to escape an authoritarian father, he ran away from home when he was about 17. By then he had received five years of training in the Chinese classics, three years in a higher primary school, and two and a half years in a normal school. While still in normal school, Hsiao became interested in military science. He says that he read from the works of both Chinese and foreign military writers, as well as works by the famous scholar-general of the late Ch’ing period, Tseng Kuo-fan.
Career
Hsiao went to Canton in 1926 “because it was the center of the revolution” and because a cousin in a university there had been sending him “revolutionary books,” including works by Sun Yat-sen. Despite the reports that Hsiao was a cadet at the Whampoa Military Academy, he specifically denied this, explaining that he had wanted to attend but had arrived in Canton a bit too late to enroll in the class for that year. However, he soon gained first-hand military experience, first as a noncommissioned officer in one of Chiang Kai-shek’s gendarme regiments and later as a company-level political director in the 24th Division of Chang Fa-k’uei’s Fourth (“Ironsides”) Army. The division, commanded by Communist Yeh T’ing, served as a vanguard on the Northern Expedition, which began in mid-1926. Hsiao, however, did not take part in the first phase of the expedition, because he did not join Yeh’s division until it had already reached Wuhan. In June 1927, Hsiao joined the CCP after receiving a letter from his brother (a Party member) accusing Chiang Kai-shek of betraying the revolution. Two months later (August 1), Hsiao took part in the Communists’ historic uprising at Nanchang (see under Yeh T’ing).
After the Communists were routed from Nanchang in early August, Hsiao took part in the southward march to Kwangtung where the Communists were again defeated at Swatow in September. The defeat at Swatow was so disastious that many of the Red Army units were totally dispersed. Left to fend for himself, Hsiao joined a Nationalist Army unit in Kwangtung simply to get enough to eat. His identity as a Communist was, of course, unknown to the Nationalists, but after a month he returned to his native village in south Hunan. Hsiao soon learned (early 1928) that Communist units led by Chu Te were not far away, like Hsiao, Chu had taken part in the march south from Nanchang, but Chu had been able to hold together a small unit, which he led to the Hunan-Kwangtung border after the losses in the Swatow area. Even before Chu arrived, there had been Communist-backed partisan activity in this area (see under Li T’ao). Hsiao made contact with these partisans and campaigned with them for the next few months. Chu moved north to the Chingkangshan area in the spring of 1928 and, merging his men with those led by Mao Tse-tung, established the Fourth Red Army. A short time afterwards, Hsiao moved his small and badly equipped partisan band from south Hunan to Chingkangshan where he placed his men under the command of the Chu-Mao forces. Hsiao was placed in command of a company under the Fourth Red Army, and then over the turn of the year 1928-29 he was made a regimental commander. At that juncture, the Fourth Red Army left the Chingkangshan area, and for most of the next two years it fought against Nationalist troops in a wide area in central and southeast Kiangsi, southwest Fukien, and northeast Kwangtung. They passed several times through the area around Juichin (southeast Kiangsi), which later became the Communists’ headquarters. By 1930 Hsiao had been promoted to a division commander, and from the end of that year through 1931 he took part in the battles to defend the Communist-held bases from the continual onslaughts of the Nationalist armies.
In September 1932 Hsiao was sent to command the Sixth Red Army, which was operating in the general vicinity of the old Chingkangshan base on the Hunan-Kiangsi border. In the next spring Jen Pi-shih was sent to join Hsiao as secretary of the CCP Hunan-Kiangsi Border Region Committee and as political commissar of the area’s military region. Under severe attack from Nationalist armies in the fall of 1933, Hsiao’s forces were reorganized and redesignated the 17th Division. In early 1934 they were forced to retreat from the base; they made a lengthy and circuitous march which took them in a northerly direction into Hupeh, before they returned to the Hunan-Kiangsi base. By approximately the time they returned, Hsiao’s units were known as the Sixth Red Army Corps. In January-February 1934, while Hsiao was making this march, he had been elected a member of the Chinese Soviet Republic’s Central Executive Committee at the Second All-China Congress of Soviets in Juichin.
Early in 1937, not long after reaching Shensi, Hsiao was made commander of the 31st Army (about which little is known), but a few months later, in the summer of 1937, the Sino-Japane.se War began. The Communists immediately reorganized their forces into the Eighth Route Army, composed of three divisions. Hsiao was appointed deputy commander of Ho Lung’s 120th Division and concurrently commander of the division’s 358th Brigade. In'September 1937 Ho moved his division across the Yellow River into northwest Shansi. During the winter of 1938-39 Hsiao took the major elements of his 358th Brigade eastward into Hopeh on a mission to aid Communist guerrillas in east Hopeh where Sung Shih-lun and Teng Hua had been sent half a year earlier. (The remaining elements of Hsiao’s brigade were left in northwest Shansi under the command of P’eng Shao-hui). In east Hopeh the Communists had initially been able to mobilize peasant unrest against the Japanese with enough success to provoke savage counterattacks, and by the autumn of 1938 the main Sung-Teng force was almost “obliterated.” After arriving in east Hopeh (not far from Peking), Hsiao contacted the two Red guerrilla leaders and together they began a program to rebuild Communist resistance. In August 1939 Hsiao presided over a meeting in Ning-ho hsien, Hopeh, some 30 miles northeast of Tientsin on the railroad leading to Manchuria. It was decided that Communist strategy in east Hopeh should henceforth depend more upon political than military operations; it was also decided to request that a greater number of political agents be sent to the area.
In 1954 Hsiao was elected a deputy to the First NPC from the North China Military Region. When the NPC held its first session in September 1954, at which time the national government was reorganized, the PRMC was abolished and some of its functions were taken over by the PLA Headquarters. The General Training Department was placed under the PLA, and Liu Po-ch’eng, a more senior military figure, succeeded Hsiao as director. According to unconfirmed reports, Hsiao served as a deputy to Liu, in any event, he once again assumed the directorship in November 1957. Hsiao was last reported in this post in early 1958, and it seems probable that he relinquished it by the fall of 1959 when he was relieved of all his active military assignments (see below). At the time of the 1954 government reorganization Hsiao was also made a member of the National Defense Council (the less important successor to the PRMC), and a vice-minister of National Defense. A year later, when the Communists created personal military ranks and awarded decorations to its officer corps (September 1955), Hsiao was made a colonelgeneral, the equivalent to a three-star U.S. Army general, and was awarded the Orders of August First, Independence and Freedom, and Liberation, the three top decorations. In September 1956, at the Party’s Eighth National Congress, he was elected a member of the CCP Central Committee.
Politics
By the summer of 1934 the encircling Nationalist armies were making the soviet bases in central-south China untenable. Therefore, the various Communist armies began to make the moves which eventually resulted in the Long March to the northwest. Hsiao’s Sixth Army Corps was one of the first to leave its original base. In August 1934 Jen, Hsiao, and Wang Chen (the Sixth Corps’ political commissar) received orders to leave the Hunan-Kiangsi base and to join Ho Lung’s Second Army Corps in northeast Kweichow. The two armies met in October (the same month that Chu, Mao, and the others began the Long March from Kiangsi). The merged forces were designated the Second Front Army, Ho Lung became the commander, Jen Pi-shih the political commissar, and Kuan Hsiang-ying (formerly Ho’s chief political officer) the deputy political commissar. Hsiao retained his command of the Sixth Army Corps. During the course of the next year the joint force expanded its area of control and established the Szechwan- Hupeh-Hunan-Kwcichow base, and during this same period Ho Lung and Hsiao married sisters in Hunan.
In November 1935, a month after Mao Tse- tung’s forces had already completed their Long March to north Shensi, the Ho-Hsiao armies left northwest Hunan. They crossed Kweichow, passing within a few miles of Kweiyang, the provincial capital which was a Nationalist stronghold, and from Kweichow they went north across Szechwan into eastern Yunnan, and then to Sikang where the Fourth Front Army was headquartered. This extended march had taken half a year and was not completed until June 1936. After a serious dispute concerning the destination of the Second and Fourth Front Armies (see under Chang Kuo-t’ao), the two large forces began to move northward in July 1936 to rendezvous with Mao in Shensi.
Membership
Hsiao was apparently transferred to Peking by the early fall of 1950, because he was there then to attend a national conference of “fighting heroes” (that is, members of the PLA). In any case, he was definitely stationed in the capital by March 1951 when he was identified as director of the Military Training Department of the People’s Revolutionary Military Council (PRMC). Except for a few ceremonial occasions, Hsiao was not often reported in the press during the early fifties, but from mid-1952 to 1956 he was a member of the National Committee of the All-China Athletic Federation. In this capacity Hsiao made his only trip abroad when in June-July 1955 he went to Prague to attend the First Czechoslovakian National Spartakiade.
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Born
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Nationality
China -
Ethnicity
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Political Party
Chinese Communist Party
Career
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1928 - 1929
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1931
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1937
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1954
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1954