Hsu was born in Huang-p’i (Huang-pei), an agricultural community not far north of Wuhan. Snow spoke of Hsu and Ho Lung as the two “pure proletarian” military leaders among the many he interviewed in 1936. Hsu’s family had been pottery workers for generations, and in his grandfather’s time they were landowners. But afterwards the combination of floods, droughts, and taxes had completely “proletarianized” the family.
Hsu was the youngest of six sons and evidently intelligent, because the family pooled its meager resources to send him to school. He attended a primary school for about four years, but then left because of the injustices he felt he suffered there.
Then only 11, he went to work at the family trade, becoming an apprentice to a potter. He won his journeyman’s rating in his 16th year and, according to his own claim, was the highest paid potter among 300 fellow workers. Hsu worked for five more years, but then after quarrelling with his family, he left for Hankow, and from there went to Kiangsi where he worked another year as a potter until he fell ill from cholera. He exhausted his savings while recovering, so instead of returning home he decided to join a warlord army in which he received “only beatings,” instead of the small pay he had been promised. The army was infiltrated by Communists, and under their influence he defected and went south to Canton where he joined the KMT Fourth Army under General Chang Fa-k’uei. He remained with Chang’s army until 1927, serving as a platoon commander during the Northern Expedition which began in mid-1926 and which reached the Wuhan area in the fall. When the “Left” and “Right” factions of the KMT began to split in the early part of 1927, Hsu, “siding with the radicals,” was forced to flee to his native Huang-p’i. By then a CCP member, he set about organizing a Party branch and recruiting his own small peasant “army,” which was modestly equipped with “one revolver and eight bullets” for its 17 men.
The next few years of Hsu’s career belong to the period of Communist expansion in the rural hinterlands and are closely related to the development of the Hupeh-Honan-Anhwei (Oyii-wan) base, which by the early 1930’s grew to be second only in size to the Central Soviet area in Kiangsi where Chu Te and Mao Tse-tung were in command. The growth of the tnilitary strength of the Oyiiwan base is described in the biography of Hsu Hsiang-ch’icn, a Whampoa graduate who was sent to the area in 1928 and who, in November 1931, became commander of the Fourth Front Army, the military arm of the base area. The two major components of the Fourth Front Army were the Fourth Army and the 25th Army; Hsu was by then or soon thereafter in command of the latter.
In 1934, shortly before the Chu-Mao armies began the Long March from Kiangsi, Ch’cng Tsu-hua was sent to the Oyiiwan base to convey orders that Hsu’s 25th Army should move from Anhwei westward into Hupeh. As it turned out, this became an order to begin one of the phases of the Long March, which finally ended in north Shensi in the early fall of 1935. Many accounts state that Hsu led the 25th Army on this march, but according to Ch’eng Tzu-hua’s version (as related to American authoress Nym Wales), Hsu was the deputy commander under Ch’eng at this time. Hsu himself has described the march of the 25th Red Army to Shensi in an account published in Peking in 1957. The Oyiiwan forces moved out with about troops, but subsequent fighting and general hardship reduced these numbers to some by the time the 25th Army joined forces in north Shensi (shortly before the arrival of Mao Tse-tung) with the Shensi guerrillas led by Liu Chih-tan. Liu had conducted guerrilla campaigns for several years in Shensi. Prior to joining Liu, Hsu and his colleagues had set up a small soviet in south Shensi, but they soon moved from Shensi, leaving operations there to Cheng Wei-san.
Leaving south Shensi, Ch’eng Tzu-hua and Hsu moved into Kansu and then into north Shensi (constantly fighting guerrilla skirmishes en route). Finally, in September 1935, their units joined forces with Liu Chih-tan, after which they were known as the 15th Army Corps. Hsu was placed in command, Liu became deputy commander, Ch’eng Tzu-hua was the political commissar, and Kao Kang was put in charge of the Political Department. In the next month the 15th Corps was joined by the troops led by Mao Tse-tung. According to figures supplied to Edgar Snow by Chou En-lai in 1936, the Liu-Hsu combined armies had about 13,000 men (in contrast to Mao’s troops who numbered some 7,000). However, in Hsu’s account he states that the combined strength of his and Liu Chih-tan’s men came to about 7,000.
Despite Hsu’s rather impressive military career throughout the 1930’s, he was not elected to the Party Central Committee at the Seventh Party Congress in 1945, and when the PRC was established in 1949, Hsu did not receive any position in the government, nor even an honorific post in one of the many “mass” organizations. In fact, he was not reported in the press until June 1954 when he was added as a member of the PRC’s People’s Revolutionary Military Council (PRMC), the military advisory organ of the central government. Three months later, when the national government was reorganized, Hsu was made a member of the newly established National Defense Council (NDC), the successor to the PRMC. Hsu was twice reappointed to the NDC, in April 1959 and January 1965. In 1955 the PRC created personal military ranks for its officer corps and established three decorations to cover military service from the birth of the Red Army until 1950. Hsu’s name appeared on a composite list of those receiving one or more of the three awards, and thus it is not known which he received. By mid-1957 he was identified as a senior general in the PLA, a rank equal to a four-star U.S. Army general and second only in the PLA to the highest rank of marshal.
Despite a series of Annihilation Campaigns by the Nationalists in the early 1930’s, the Oyii-wan base survived as a viable Communist stronghold until a campaign begun in mid-1932. By October, Chang Kuo-t’ao, the top political leader, and Hsu Hsiang-ch’ien decided to evacuate the area and move westward into Szechwan. Chang and Hsu took the major elements of the Fourth Front Army with them, but Hsu Hai-tung and Shen Tse-min, another top political figure, were left in Oyiiwan to sustain a guerrilla operation and a Party organization. Chang Kuo- t’ao, who was, of course, an eyewitness to these events, claims that Hsu was left behind because he had been wounded in 1932. In the course of the next two years Hsu and his men underwent extraordinary difficulties as they attempted to fight off continuing Nationalist attacks. These hardships, as well as a useful description of the military tactics employed by Hsu, are related in detail by Edgar Snow in a chapter in Red Star over China.
At the Party’s Eighth National Congress, held in September 1956, Hsu was elected a member of the Central Committee. He has been mentioned in the press very infrequently since then and usually in connection with ceremonial tasks such as attending a reception in August 1957 to mark the anniversary of the PLA or serving as a member of a funeral committee for one of his former colleagues.'
