Hsueh Mu-ch’iao

Background

Little is known of Hsueh’s early life.

Education

He graduated from Tsinghua University in Peking. It is not substantiated by a listing of graduates published by the university in 1937. He has also been described as “probably” Soviet-trained, but in any case it is clear that he received some higher education in economics.

Career

In the mid-thirties Hsueh was editing an irregular periodical entitled Chung-kuo nung-ts’un (Chinese peasant villages). By 1937 he was with the Communists in Yenan, where he taught at the Anti-Japanese Military and Political Academy, often known by its abbreviated name in China, K’ang-ta. Lectures delivered there by Hsueh in 1938 were published in Hong Kong in a revised edition (1948) under the title Chung-kuo ko-ming chi-pen wen-t’i (Fundamental problems of the Chinese revolution). This is one of the better-known of his many works on political economics.

By 1943 Hsueh had been transferred from Yenan to east China, and from that year until 1947 he taught at Shantung University, located in Lin-i, an area under the control of Ch’en I’s New Fourth Army forces. From 1946 to an uncertain date he served concurrently as director of the Industry Department and secretary-general of the Shantung Provincial Government then headed by Governor Li Yii. Shantung was not then completely controlled by the Communists, and portions of the province were hotly contested during the latter stages of the civil war between the Communists and Nationalists (see under Ch’en I). Hsueh’s activities in the late forties are not documented, but he was in Peking soon after it was surrendered to the Communists in January 1949. In July 1949 he chaired a meeting of economists who decided to establish the Preparatory Committee of the China New Economic Research Association. Hsueh was named as a Preparatory Committee vice-chairman under ideologue Ch’en Po-ta, but nothing further was heard of the organization after 1953.

Hsueh s stature as a Party economist was clearly evident by 1949. In October of that year, when given an appointment in the new central government, he was identified as the former secretary-general of the Party Central Committee’s Finance and Economics Department. Because there was no central government until October 1949, it is probable that the Party undertook direct responsibility for the Department until the new government was established. This supposition seems to be born out by the fact that Hsueh was appointed in October as secretary-general (as well as member) of the Finance and Economics Committee (FEC), now under the Government Administration Council (the cabinet). The FEC, one of the four major committees under the Council, was chaired by Chen Yun, the top economic specialist during the first decade of the PRC.

Politics

Soon after the government was established Hsueh was also named to head the Privately Operated Enterprises Control Bureau, then subordinate to the FEC. Over the next three years much of his time was devoted to the work of this Bureau; thus, in December 1950 and January 1951, respectively, it fell to Hsueh to report before the cabinet on regulations governing private enterprises and on rules for the “liquidation” of public holdings and assets in industrial enterprises. Similarly, he took part in establishing a special office in October-November 1951, which led to the convocation of a large meeting of businessmen (most of them not Communists) in Peking in June 1952. This meeting, in turn, established the Preparatory Committee of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce (see under Hsu Ti-hsun). Hsueh was named to membership on the Federation’s Preparatory Committee, holding the post until November 1953 by which time he was involved in other activities. On August 1, 1952, just a month after the Preparatory Committee was formed, Hsueh delivered a report before the cabinet on the Federation s draft rules. Hsueh held another economic post in the early fifties, serving from July 1950 to July 1954 on the Board of the All China Federation of Cooperatives (see under Ch’eng Tzu-hua).

A number of organizational steps were taken in the latter half of 1952 in preparation for the launching of the First Five-Year Plan in January 1953. In August 1952 the State Statistical Bureau was established under the jurisdiction of the cabinet’s FEC, and three months later the State Planning Commission was set up at a level parallel to the cabinet. Paving the way for new assignments, Hsueh relinquished to Sung Shao- wen in August the secretary-generalship of the FEC (although he remained a member until 1954), and in the same month he was also succeeded as director of the Privately Operated Enterprises Control Bureau by Hsu Ti-hsin. Relieved of these assignments, Hsueh was now appointed to head the Statistical Bureau (August) and to membership on the State Planning Commission (November).

Few officials in the history of the PRC have so completely dominated a field of endeavor as Hsueh did that of economic statistics. Aside from directing the Statistical Bureau, he was the keynote speaker at the annual national statistical conferences and his articles and speeches filled the pages of T’ung-ch’i kung-tso t’ung-hsin (Statistical work bulletin; known as T’ung-chi kung-tso after 1957) until the late fifties. Indeed, Professor Choh-ming Li’s The Statistical System of Communist China, the definitive work on Communist statistics, is virtually a catalog of Hsueh’s contributions to the establishment of a nationwide statistical system in the years from 1952 to the late fifties.

Hsueh’s principal task in the fifties was the establishment of the statistical network, but during these same years he undertook other assignments as well. In 1954 he was elected a Kiangsu deputy to the First NPC; he was re-elected to the Second NPC (1959-1964) as well as to the Third NPC, which held its initial session in December 1964-January 1965. During the term of the First NPC he was a member of its Bills Committee, and since the establishment of the Second NPC he has been a vice-chairman of the Budget Committee. In October 1954 he was elevated to a vice-chairmanship on the State Planning Commission, which was now placed under the State Council; here Hsueh served under economic planner Li Fu-ch’un. He has been a member of the Academy of Sciences’ Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences since its formation in May-June 1955, and from 1956 to 1958 he served first as a deputy secretary-general and then as a member of the State Council’s Scientific Planning Commission.

Even after the inauguration of the Great Leap Forward in 1958, Hsueh continued to make numerous public appearances and to write for the nation’s top political and economic journals. He received still another important post in October 1958 when he became a vice-chairman of the State Economic Commission. This commission is in charge of anriual planning, as opposed to the long-range planning of the State Planning Commission. Thus, when Hsueh received this appointment he was head of the national statistical system, a vice-chairman on the commissions in charge of short-range and long-range economic planning, and still a member of the Scientific Planning Commission. Yet within a year he fell victim to the excesses of the Great Leap. In September 1959 a large number of changes were made in the State Council that resulted in the removal of many men, who, apparently, had opposed the Great Leap. The most important of these affecting Hsueh was his removal as head of the Statistical Bureau.

Interests

• Hsueh published an article in the April 16, 1963, issue of the authoritative Hung-ch’i (Red flag) urging that better use be made of the so- called free market (in contrast to over-reliance on the planned market). Coinciding almost exactly with the publication of this article, the State Council created the National Commodity Price Commission. Five months later, in September, Hsueh was appointed as Commission director, a post he still holds. Commenting on Hsueh’s appointment, Choh-ming Li has written: “The establishment of the new machinery under his leadership seems to augur for a much more flexible state pricing policy than before, which would take into account the effects of prices in both the state trading channels and the uncontrolled rural markets on production and market supply.” It is doubtful that Hsueh has regained the prestige and authority he enjoyed in the mid-fifties, but in the relatively relaxed economic atmosphere that prevailed in the early sixties in the wake of the Great Leap failures, he seems to have again become one of the PRC’s more important economic officials.