Hsu was born in Wu-t’ai, a hsien in northeast Shansi near the Hopeh border, which was also the home of the prominent Shansi warlord Yen Hsi-shan. According to Hsu’s account of his life given to journalist Nym Wales, which is a major source of information about his career until the mid-thirties, his family were small land-owners and Hsu’s father, a Hsiu-ts’ai degree holder, taught school.
Hsu had an older brother and three sisters. After six years of primary schooling in Wu-t’ai, he worked as a bookshop clerk before entering Taiyuan Normal School in the provincial capital. After graduation he taught in the primary school attached to a Wu-t’ai middle school founded by Yen Hsi-shan. His interest in revolution,” he told Miss Wales, dated back to his early teenage days when the Japanese presented China with the famous Twentv-One Demands in 1915, an act which had brought Hsu to lead an anti-Japanese student demonstration.
In 1924, in order to escape his father’s conservatism, he left for Canton where he immediately joined the KMT and enrolled at the newly opened Whampoa Military Academy, whose commandant was Chiang Kai-shek. After about six months’ training Hsu graduated from the first class (February 1925). Among his classmates were such prominent Communists (or latter-day Communists) as Ch’en Keng, Hsiao Ching-kuang, Huang K’o-ch’eng, and Tso Ch’iian. Immediately after his graduation in early 1925, Hsu took part in the First Eastern Expedition against Kwangtung warlord Ch’en Chiung-ming (see under P’cng P’ai).
At approximately this time the KMT, with strong support from the Soviet Union, began to court northern warlord Feng Yii-hsiang, and by the spring of 1925 an agreement was reached which allowed the KMT to have political workers in Feng’s famous Kuo-minchiin (Nationalist Army). It was apparently under these circumstances that Hsu was dispatched to Honan as a political worker in the Second Kuominchun Army, commanded by General Hu Ching-i until his death in April 1925 and thereafter by General Yueh Wei-chun. For more than a year Hsu campaigned in several north China provinces, principally against warlord generals Chang Tso-lin and Yen Hsi-shan. Hsu was ill for a period and recuperated in Peking, and by the time he recovered, the Northern Expeditionary Forces had occupied Wuhan (fall 1926). He went to Wuhan where he became an instructor at the Central Political and Military Academy (in effect, a branch of the Whampoa Academy).
According to Hsu’s own account, after his arrival in Wuhan he delved into and was influenced by Marxist works and, as a result, joined the CCP. (Hsu told Nym Wales that he joined in 1926, but the official biography of Hsu uses the year 1927) After the split between the KMT and the CCP in mid-1927, he worked covertly for a short time as an officer on Chang Fa-k’uei’s general staff. He then “escaped” from Chang’s army and made his way to Shang-hai where the CCP assigned him to work in the labor movement in Canton. For the next several weeks Hsu secretly trained a group of ill-armed workers in preparation for the December uprising in Canton; because he could not speak Cantonese he was forced to use an interpreter. When the Canton Commune was established on December 11, 1927 (see under Chang T’ai-lci), Hsu was in command of a detachment of workers, but within less than three days the Communists were driven from Canton. Regrouping their 1,200 men north of the city, they established the Fourth Division of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, which consisted of three regiments.
The Oyiiwan base had its origins in northeast Hupeh in the latter half of 1927. Working in and around Huang-an and Ma-ch’eng hsien, Hsu Hai- tung, Cheng Wei-san, Wang Shu-sheng, and others set up small guerrilla bands. These developments led to the establishment in July 1928 of the 31st Division of the 11th Red Army, and when Hsu arrived in Hupeh he was made deputy commander of this division and later the commander. The base was considerably expanded in the period from the end of 1928 to the beginning of 1930 by uprisings in Shang-ch’eng in southeast Honan and Liu-an and Huo-shan in southwest Anhwei. These, in turn, led to the formation of the 32nd and 33rd Divisions. At this juncture, in March 1930, the CCP Oyiiwan Border Region Special Committee was established, and the above-mentioned divisions were reorganized into the First Red Army under the command of Hsu Chi-shen, a former Whampoa cadet. Hsu Hsiang-ch’ien’s men, now designated the First Division, had some successes in attacking the Nationalists along the Peking-Hankow Railway north of Wuhan in njid-1930.
By the fall of 1930 the First Red Army numbered about 5,000 men who had, in Hsu’s term, “sovietized” portions of 10 hsien in Oyiiwan. The Oyiiwan forces were augmented by 2,000 men over the winter of 1930-31 when they were joined by the 15th Red Army, commanded by Ts’ai Shen-hsi, another Whampoa graduate. The 15th Army had been operating in eastern Hupeh, both north and south of the Yangtze. With this merger, the Communists established, in early 1931, the Fourth Red Army (some sources use Army Corps). Hsu was made the chief-of-staff, serving under K’uang Chi-hsun, who had earlier campaigned with Ho Lung in west Hunan and Szechwan. However, judging from Hsu’s account, it appears that he soon replaced K’uang as Fourth Army commander.
While these developments were taking place in Oyiiwan, important changes were being made in the top Party leadership in Shanghai. At the Party’s Fourth Plenum in January 1931, the Russian-returned student leadership (or “28 Bolsheviks”) assumed control of the chief Party organs (see under Ch’in Pang-hsien and Ch’en Shao-yii). The new leadership soon dispatched a number of key political figures to the various Communist military bases. Thus, in the spring, Chang Kuo-t’ao arrived in Oyiiwan, accompanied by two important members of the Russian- returned group, Ch’en Ch’ang-hao and Shen Tse-min. Under Chang’s jurisdiction, a new Party organ was established the Oyiiwan Central Sub-bureau. Before long, in the late summer of 1931, the Oyiiwan military structure was rocked by a major “counterrevolutionary plot,” which led to wide-scale purges in the Fourth Army by the Chang Kuo-t’ao leadership (see under Ch’en Ch’ang-hao). Hsu attributed the direction of this conspiracy to the above-mentioned Hsu Chi-shen, but curiously he also asserted that Hsu Chi-shen was still one of his division commanders about three years later.
Hsu reached north Shensi in mid-1937, just before the Sino-Japanese War broke out. The Communists immediately reorganized their units into the Eighth Route Army, composed of three divisions. Hsu’s Fourth Front Army was absorbed into the 129th Division under the command of Liu Po-ch’eng. Hsu was made deputy commander, as well as commander of the 385th Brigade. The other brigade, the 386th, was led by Ch’en Keng. In September 1937 all three divisions crossed the Yellow River into Shansi, the 129th taking the southernmost route, moving south of Taiyuan toward the Hopeh and finally establishing its headquarters in the vicinity of Liao-hsien in east Shansi. The Communists soon sent political organizers into south Hopeh, and then in the spring and summer of 1938 Hsu led major elements from two regiments of his 129th Division and one regiment from the 115th Division across the Peking-Hankow Railway into Nan-kung and Chii-lu hsien in south Hopeh. There, combining with Yang Hsiu-feng’s guerrilla units, they established the South Hopeh Military District, which proved to be of particular value as a communications route into Shantung.
In the meantime, to consolidate their gains in north China, the Communists established the North China People’s Government (NCPG) in the Shih-chia-chuang area (west Hopeh) at a congress held in August 1948. Hsu’s responsibilities were primarily in the military sphere during this period, but he was named a member of the government Council, which was headed by Tung Pi-wu. The NCPG was dissolved in October 1949, immediately after the Communists’ national government was established. When Hsu’s troops captured Taiyuan in April 1949, he was named chairman of the Taiyuan Military Control Commission. However, inferential evidence suggests that his chronic ill health prevented any active military or political life for the next several years. Nonetheless, when the central government was established in September-October 1949 in Peking, Hsu received several key appointments. In September he was a delegate from the First Field Army to the CPPCC and was elected a member of the CPPCC National Committee (to 1954). In the next month he became a member of the People’s Revolutionary Military Council (PRMC) and chief-of-staff of the PRMC. However, his deputy, Nieh Jung-chen, immediately began to serve as acting chief-of-staff and continued to do so until the PRMC was abolished in 1954. Hsu was also a member of the Central People’s Government Council (CPGC), which was chaired by Mao Tse-tung. The CPGC, the highest organ in the PRC, held 34 meetings between 1949 and its dissolution in 1954, but Hsu did not attend a meeting until the end of 1953 (and only two meetings in all). Similarly, he is known to have been absent from the important first, second, and third sessions of the CPPCC National Committee (held in June 1950, October-November 1951, and February 1953).
Hsu appears to have partially recovered by late 1953, and from June to September 1954 he served as a vice-chairman of the PRMC. He was present at the CPGC meeting in early September, which tentatively approved the national constitution, and a few days later he attended the inaugural session of the First NPC, which formally adopted the document. He represented the PLA in the First NPC and was re-elected to the Second Congress (1959-1964) as well as the Third NPC, which opened in December 1964. In both the First and Second NPC’s he was elected a member of the permanent Standing Committee and was advanced to a vice-chairmanship at the close of the first session of the Third NPC (January 1965). In recognition of his long military career, Hsu was also appointed in September 1954 a vice-chairman of the National Defense Council (a position he still retains), although this organ is less important than its predecessor, the PRMC.
In September 1955 the Communists awarded its officer corps personal military ranks and decorations. Hsu was made one of the 10 PLA marshals, the highest rank, and was given the three top decorations, the Orders of August First, Independence and Freedom, and Liberation, awards that covered three periods from the founding of the Red Army in 1927 through the victory over the Nationalists in 1950. Hsu’s participation in military and political affairs, which had been virtually nil in the early fifties, picked up slightly in the middle and late fifties. At the Party’s Eighth National Congress in September 1956 he was a member of both the presidium (steering committee) and credentials committee, and was one of the executive chairmen for two of the Congress sessions. He was re-elected to the Central Committee. Significantly, however, when the new Central Committee elected the Politburo on the day following the Congress, only three of the 10 PLA marshals failed to be elected to this key organ-Hsu, Nieh Jung-chen, and Yeh Chien-ying. Similarly, in May-July 1958, at an important conference of the Military Affairs Commission (MAC), the Party’s highest military organ, Hsu was the only one of the 10 marshals who did not speak. A year earlier (March 1957), a Radio Peking broadcast described Hsu’s simple life and love of books in terms that suggested that he was in virtual retirement. Chinese Communist media seldom comment on the state of health of the elite, but in the secret Kung-tso t’ung-hsun (Bulletin of activities) it was explicitly noted that Hsu had not taken part in inspections being conducted by top military leaders in early 1961 because of his “poor health.” Nonetheless, this same journal revealed that by 1961 Hsu was a member of the MAC’s Standing Committee, a group constituting the PRC’s key military figures.
After the collapse of the Hai-lu-feng Soviet, Hsu escaped to Shanghai in March 1928. His statements regarding his whereabouts during the next year are seemingly contradictory, at one point he told Nym Wales that he left Shanghai for a Communist guerrilla base in Hupeh after only three weeks in Shanghai, and at another point he mentioned his arrival in Hupeh as being in June 1929. In any case, Hsu was one of the eailiest Communist military men to arrive in the base, which was soon to grow into the Oyiiwan (Hupeh-Honan-Anhwei) Soviet and which came to be second in importance only to the base formed by Chu Te and Mao Tse-tung in Kiangsi. The historians’ task in unraveling the complex events in Oyiiwan is complicated by the fact that Maoist histories have both neglected the base and distorted its history-principally because it came to be the political stronghold of Chang Kuo-t’ao, one of Mao’s greatest enemies, after Chang’s arrival in Oyiiwan in 1931. However, a rough reconstruction of the events can be made largely on the basis of Nym Wales interviews with Hsu and a lengthy article by Hsu in the JMJP (July 29, 1961).
In the spring of 1939 Hsu was sent into Shantung to coordinate the activities of several guerrilla units, which became known as the First Column. Hsu commanded this column, and his official biography credits him with a “leading part” in creating a base in Shantung. However, rather little is known about his activities after 1939 and it appears that the major responsibilities there fell to Lo Jung-huan, whose biography provides details on Communist-led guerrilla activities in Shantung during the early war years. Because of poor health Hsu left the front lines in 1941, and for the next year he was without an assignment. Then from 1942 to 1946 he was in Yenan as a deputy commander under Ho Lung of the Joint Defense Command, which controlled the military units subordinate to the Shansi-Suiyuan and the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia Border Regions. He is also reported to have been president in 1945 of the Anti-Japanese Military and Political Academy (K’ang-ta), apparently assuming the post from Lin Piao toward the end of the war.
When the Party held its Seventh National Congress in Yenan from April to June 1945, Hsu was one of only 15 men who served on the Congress Presidium (steering committee). At the close of the meetings he was elected one of the 44 full members of the Central Committee. He was still in the Yenan area in mid-1946, but by the end of 1947 he was in command of PLA units in the Shansi-Hopeh-Shantung-Honan Border Region, which, in coordination with P’eng Te-huai’s Northwest Field Army, scored notable victories over Nationalist troops in southwest Shansi. For the next year and a half Hsu campaigned in central and southwest Shansi. In 1948 his forces were incorporated into Nieh Jung-chen’s North China Military Region; Hsu became a deputy commander of the region and concurrently the commander and political commissar of its First Army Group. With his deputy Chou Shih-ti, Hsu fought a successful campaign against Yen Hsi-shan’s forces, which began in the fall of 1948 and culminated after bitter fighting in the capture of Taiyuan, the Shansi capital, on April 24, 1949.15 An unusual aspect of the battle for Taiyuan is that the city was defended by thousands of Japanese, as well as Chinese, troops. The Japanese were, in effect, mercenaries employed by Shansi Governor Yen Hsi-shan after the Sino-Japanese War. Moreover, when Yen fled Taiyuan in March, he left his troops under the command of a Japanese general, who, when the city fell to the Communists, committed suicide.
Hsu worked very closely for five years with Chang Kuo-t’ao, who probably knew him better than any other major Communist leader. Chang has described Hsu as a capable military commander who had little interest in political affairs as such and one who was a good organizer and steady and cautious in his work methods.
