Background
Huang came from Shao-hsing, an important intellectual center in Chekiang. His real name was Yu Ch’i-wei, and he was also known as David Yui and David Huang. He is known in CCP histories as Huang Ching, a name he seems to have adopted about the time of the Sino-Japanese War. Huang had a number of prominent relatives. One uncle, Yii Ta-wei, held cabinet posts in the Nationalist government, and another uncle was an adviser to the Japanese-sponsored Hopeh-Chahar Political Council in the mid-1930’s.
Education
Huang studied physics at Shantung University in Tsingtao, where he was enrolled when the Jap-anese marched into Manchuria in September 1931. Student demonstrations were immediately held throughout the nation to protest this event. Huang took part in demonstrations in Tsingtao, as well as Nanking, the national capital, where many students went from all over China to protest directly to the KMT government. In 1932, when Huang was back in Tsingtao, he joined the CCP and was made a member of the Party’s committee there. At approximately this time, his activities as an agitator brought him to the attention of the authorities. He was arrested and imprisoned, but then he was put on probation through the influence of his prominent family. Afterwards, Huang went to Shanghai to join his sister (some say cousin), Yii Shan. She was then making a name for herself in dramatics and introduced Huang to some of her politically minded theatrical friends who were interested in modern drama. He worked with them in Shanghai for a time, but by 1933 he was back in Tsing-tao where he was placed in charge of the Party Committee’s Propaganda Department.
Career
In the period from 1933 to 1935 Huang worked in the Party underground in Tsingtao, Tientsin, and Peking. His special responsibility seems to have been liaison work with students, a group particularly sensitive to the steady incursions by the Japanese upon Chinese sovereignty in north China. By the fall of 1935 Huang was permanently assigned to Peking where he took part in the activities of the Peking Students’ Federation, which was formed in secret in late October. Working with Huang at this time were Yao Min, a Tsinghua University student and secretary of the Students’ Federation, and P’eng T’ao, a student at Fu Jen (Catholic) University. Both later became alternate members of the CCP Central Committee. The Students’ Federation, with its Party backers, played an important part in the student protests that first erupted on December 9, 1935; these were provoked in part by the prospect of the Japanese-sponsored Hopeh-Chahar Political Council, the Chinese puppet government for north China which was scheduled to be inaugurated on December 16. As the movement spread to student groups in other cities it came to be known as the December Ninth Movement, and the groups of students it aroused later provided a core of younger leaders for the ranks of the CCP.
At this time, Huang was nominally a student at Peking University. However, it is reasonably clear from his intensive political activities over the next year and a half that his student status was principally a convenient means of maintaining contacts with Peking’s important student groups. One such group was formally organized in February 1936 into the National Liberation Vanguards of China (NLVC, described in greater detail in the biography of Li Ch’ang). Most of the original NLVC members were not then Communists, but through intensive efforts on the part of the CCP (in which Huang apparently played a leading role), many of them had joined the Youth League or the Party by mid- 1936. In the meantime, Huang was moving back and forth between Peking and Tientsin in his efforts to stimulate the development of the student movement. When the NLVC underwent a reorganization in August 1936, Huang was sent as a representative of the CCP Peking Committee to the NLVC headquarters; he had been sent, in the words of one of the NLVC leaders, in order “to lead us.” During this period, 1936-37, Huang was secretary of the CCP Peking Committee and also director of its Propaganda Department.
By the latter half of 1936 the CCP was rapidly moving toward a united-front policy-designed to rally all sectors of society to take a determined stand against Japan. In the year prior to the outbreak of war in Japan, this policy was supported by Chinese of many political persuasions. The National Salvation Association, for example (see under Shih Liang), received strong support from CCP propaganda organs, and Communist operatives like Huang were called upon to work closely with these groups. It was in this atmosphere that the NLVC met for its first congress in February 1937, if Huang did not actually attend, it can be presumed that he was working behind the scenes. The congress proclaimed, in the words of one authority on the student movement, that the NLVC “was more than a mere promoter of the united front; it was itself a united-front organization, and would welcome to its ranks all who shared its anti-Japanese national salvation views.”
In the spring of 1937, presumably to strengthen relations with student groups in Peking, the Communists invited a number of the NLVC members to visit Yenan, the Communist capital. Huang accompanied the NLVC leaders, including Li Ch’ang, and they arrived in time to take part in May Day celebrations. They heard a talk by Mao Tse-tung on the question of the role of young people in resisting Japan and also attended a CCP conference, at which Huang delivered a report on the student movement. While Huang was in Yenan he saw American writer Nym Wales, whom he had previously known very well in Peking, and he claimed to her that he was the number two Party leader in north China. This may have been a slight exaggeration, but there is little doubt that Huang was one of the more important Party figures in north China where, at one time or another, he probably took his orders directly from such top men as Liu Shao-ch’i and P’eng Chen.
By mid-1948 the Communists had nearly completed their conquest of north China. Therefore, in August 1948 they created the North China People’s Government (NCPG), which continued in existence until October 1949 when its functions were taken over by the newly created central government in Peking. During its brief existence, Huang was a member of the NCPG Council, a vice-chairman of the Finance and Economics Committee, and director of the State- operated Enterprises Department (the organization in charge of industry). His connection with this department was his first in the field of industrial development, to which he was to devote the final years of his career.
Huang nominally retained his Party and government posts in Tientsin and North China until 1953, but by the late summer of 1952 he had been transferred to Peking to assume a ministerial assignment. In August 1952, sections from the Ministry of Heavy Industry were split off and established as the First and Second Ministries of Machine Building. Huang was named to head the First Ministry. Four years later, in May 1956, he was made chairman of the newly established State Technological Commission. For the two remaining years of his life he held these two ministerial-level posts, an unusual but not completely unprecedented assignment. His stature as a leading government administrator was recognized when the Eighth Party Congress was held in September 1956. Huang served on the Congress presidium, spoke on the development of China’s machine building industries, and at the close of the meetings was elected a member of the CCP Central Committee. The following May he received still another important post as a vice-chairman of the national government’s Scientific Planning Commission. In this capacity, he presided over an expanded session of the commission in June 1957. Less than a year later, on February 10, 1958, he died in Canton.
Politics
Huang returned to Peking on the eve of war with Japan in mid-1937. When hostilities began, most of the student leaders in north China fled from the cities or went underground. Members of the NLVC and officials from the CCP North China Bureau left Peking immediately. Huang went to Tientsin for a short time and then accompanied a number of his student colleagues to Taiyuan, the Shansi capital, which was still held by the Nationalist-allied general, Yen Hsi-shan. For a brief period rather strong anti-Japanese forces were assembled in Taiyuan, but when it fell to the Japanese in November 1937, they were dispersed. A bit earlier, as the Japanese pushed into the north China cities, the three divisions of the Communists’ Eighth Route Army crossed the Yellow River from Shensi to Shansi to engage the enemy. Of these, the 115th Division under Lin Piao and Nieh Jung-chen advanced to the Wu-t’ai mountain area of northeast Shansi, and from his headquarters Nieh dispatched Party agents over the border into the Fou-p’ing area of Hopeh. Huang was one of those sent to Hopeh to build up resistance to the Japanese among the peasants of the countryside and the people of the towns. As a Party representative he attended and was one of the speakers at the conference held at Fou-p’ing in January 1938, which brought the Shansi-Chahar-Hopeh (Chin-Ch’a-Chi) Border Region Government into being. The development of this Communist base is described in the biographies of Sung Shao-wen, chairman of the Chin-Ch’a-Chi government, and of Lu Cheng-ts’ao. Lii was the military head of the central plains area of Hopeh, an integral part of the Chin-Ch’a-Chi Border Region, and the part of the region to which Huang was first sent.
Connections
At the time of his death, Hang was married to Fan Chin, a prominent journalist and a member of the CCP. She was a vice-mayor of Peking and head of the Pei-ching jih-pao (Peking daily) until the late spring of 1966, when she became one of the earliest victims of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
