Background
Huang K'o-ch’eng, who has occasionally used the alias Huang Chen-hsing, is a native of Yung-hsing, Hunan.
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Huang K’o-ch’eng
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Tseng Hsi-sheng, a colleague on the CCP Central Committee, also comes from Yung-hsing in southern Hunan, and as the two men are contemporaries in age and probably attended Whampoa Military Academy at about the same time, it is possible they were early associates. Huang graduated from the Third Normal School in Heng-yang, Hunan, before going to Canton to attend Whampoa. At the military academy he was in the first class, which began in June 1924, and graduated in February 1925. Two years later Huang joined the CCP. He is said to have become a Party member while he belonged to Mao Tse-tung’s small insurrectionary army, which fought the Autumn Harvest Uprisings in Hunan in September 1927. When the insurrection ended in failure, Mao led the survivors, among them Huang K’o-ch’eng, to the retreat he established in the Chingkang Mountains on the Hunan-Kiangsi border. Huang thus belongs to the small group of the CCP elite who survived the difficult winter of 1927-28 at Chingkangshan and formed the nucleus of the Red Army.
Career
In the fall of 1928 Mao was joined by another group of founding members of the Red Army, the Fifth Army of Peng Te-huai that came to Chingkangshan after being defeated at P’ing-chiang in northern Hunan (the area where Mao had also been during the Autumn Harvest Uprisings of September 1927). Huang joined P’eng’s army when it returned to P’ing-chiang in the fall of 1929 and remained with the unit for the next six years, during which it was involved in much of the fighting that took place in the Communist-held areas of Kiangsi before these were evacuated in the fall of 1934, at the start of the Long March.
During the years from 1929 to 1935 when Huang served with P’eng’s Army (known after 1930 as the Third Army Corps), he held several different posts. Although most of his work was that of a political officer, he also served as a military commander at the divisional level. In 1932 he was the political commissar of the Fourth Division of the Third Army Corps, a little later he became the director of the Corps’ Political Department. In this post he came directly under the command of P’eng’s principal political officer, T’eng Tai-yuan. There are reports that at some time before the Communists embarked upon the Long March T’eng was forced to seek medical treatment in the USSR for a brief period, and if T’eng were absent some of his responsibilities as chief political officer of the Third Army Corps would have fallen upon Huang. Huang made the Long March with Peng's army as the officer in charge of procuring food supplies, but he also continued to do political work with the troops.
When the Communists reached north Shensi in the fall of 1935, Huang began to do important political work for the Party itself, serving for a time as the director of the CCP Organization Department. After the Sino-Japanese War broke out in the summer of 1937 and the CCP created its Eighth Route Army in north China, he entered the ranks of the new army. Official accounts indicate that he was for a time connected with Jen Pi-shih’s Political Department of the Eighth Route Army. In 1938 Huang was in charge of rear services (logistics) and he appears to have been connected with the 115th Division commanded by Lin Piao and Nieh Jung-chen and to have been briefly in the Wu-t’ai Mountains of eastern Shansi where the division made its headquarters.1 There is also an account stating that as of 1940 he was connected with Tso Ch’iian, deputy chief-of-staff of the Eighth Route Army then stationed in the T’ai-hang Mountain area of southern Shansi, where Liu Po-ch’eng’s 129th Division made its headquarters; he was also with Yang Te-chih, who was operating in the Hopeh-Shantung- Honan (Chi-Lu-Yu) Border Region in 1940. This border area was one of the strategic regions controlled by the Communists during the war, an area facilitating a communications route between the military bases in Shansi and Shantung. Huang carried a letter from Tso to Yang in the spring of 1940 that may have laid the groundwork for the transference of some of the Second Column troops (then under Tso) to Chi-Lu-Yu, an event that also took place in the spring of 1940.
Huang and his own troops must have passed through Chi-Lu-Yu in the first half of 1940 on their way to Anhwei to aid Lo Ping-hui of the New Fourth Army. The first unit (numbering about 1,000 men) of Huangs Fifth or Eighth Column of Eighth Route Army troops passed through Shantung into Anhwei and joined forces with Lo Ping-hui on the Anhwei shores of Lake Kao-yu in January 1940. These were soon followed by the main body of Huang’s force of 15,000 men, a force that proceeded via Hopeh and Shantung into northern Anhwei, where in August 1940 it joined forces with the Sixth Detachment of the New Fourth Army at Ko-yang, a small town in northern Anhwei (see under P’eng Hsueh-feng). In the following weeks Huang moved farther eastward into Kiangsu, and after crossing the Grand Canal he eventually made his headquarters at Fou-ning. By the fall of 1940 Huang’s Column had officially become a part of the North Yangtze Command of the New Fourth Army troops commanded by Ch’en I. Huang fought in east Kiangsu with his Eighth Route Army Column from the fall of 1940 until February 1941 when, following the New Fourth Army Incident of January (see under Yeh T’ing), the top echelons of the Army staff were reorganized. At this time Ch en I became the Army’s acting commander and Huang was made commander and political commissar of the newly created Third Division of the New Fourth Army.
Ha was commander of the Third Division of the West Manchurian force of Lin’s army, known as the Northeast Democratic Allied Army from early 1946. In the next two years Huang took part in a number of the important battles of the Manchurian campaign, serving as commander of the Third Division and later as commander of field operations in the Jehol-Liaoning Military District. He participated in the campaigns of Lin’s army through Manchuria and entered China proper with the army late in 1948. Early in 1949 (by which time Lin’s army became the Fourth Field Army), Huang was political commissar of the 12th Army Corps, the unit commanded by Hsiao Ching-kuang.
Immediately after the Communists captured Tientsin in mid-January 1949, Huang was named to chair the municipal Military Control Commission and to serve as the political commissar of the Tientsin Garrison Command. The Garrison commander was Hsiao Ching-kuang, Huang’s colleague in the Fourth Field Army’s 12th Army Corps. Huang did not, however, remain long in Tientsin but rather continued with the Fourth Field Army as it pushed southward. When Ch’eng Ch’ien, the Nationalist governor of Hunan, and Ch en Ming-jen, the KMT garrison commander in the Hunan capital of Changsha, went over to the Communists in the late summer of 1949, the Fourth Field Army moved into the province with virtually no fighting. Huang immediately assumed key positions within the province, most notably as secretary of the Hunan Party Committee, a post he held until the latter part of 1952. He was also the political commissar of the Hunan Military District (HMD) from its formation in late August 1949 to 1950, here he was once again associated with Hsiao Ching-kuang, the HMD Commander. Hsiao relinquished his Hunan post in 1950 to assume command of the Chinese Navy and was apparently replaced by Huang K’o-ch’eng, in any event, Huang was the commander in Hunan at the time of his transfer to Peking in 1952. He was also made a member in August 1949 of the Changsha Military Control Commission (chaired by Hsiao Ching-kuang), presumably holding this post until 1952.
As already described, Huang had been elected an alternate member of the Party Central Committee in 1945. Then, as the top man on the alternate list, he was promoted to full Committee membership following the death of Central Committee member Jen Pi-shih in October 1950. As stated, Huang continued to work in Hunan until mid-1952, although he was seldom mentioned in the press in 1951 and early 1952.
By August 1952 Huang had been transferred to Peking to become a deputy chief-of-staff of the People’s Revolutionary Military Council (PRMC), the highest military organ within the central government. In this position Huang served under veteran military leader Nieh Jungchen, the acting chief-of-staflf until the PRMC was abolished at the time of the government re-organization in 1954. Not long after Huang’s transfer to the capital, the State Planning Commission was established (November 1952) in preparation for the First Five-Year Plan launched in 1953. As originally constituted, the Commission had a chairman, one vice-chairman, and 15 members. Huang and P’eng Te-huai were the only two active military figures appointed to Commission membership.
Huang was elected as a deputy from the Central-South Military Region to the First NPC, which inaugurated the constitutional government in September 1954. At this time he relinquished his posts as a deputy chief-of-staff of the PRMC and as a State Planning Commission member. However, he received posts of equal if not greater importance. At the close of the NPC session he was named to membership on both the NPC Standing Committee and the National Defense Council, the latter being the successor to the PRMC. Within the next few weeks he was given even more important assignments when he was named (October 1954) as a vice-minister in the newly created National Defense Ministry (serving here under P’eng Te-huai) and as director of the PLA’s Rear Services Department (November 1954).
Politics
The Third Division was based in north Kiangsu in an area north of a line drawn between Huai-an and Fou-ning. This area east of the Grand Canal was known to the Communists as the North Kiangsu Military District. Huang operated here from 1940 to 1946, and from 1941 until 1946 was the military commander of the District. For at least part of this period he also headed the Party Committee in the District, but it is uncertain when he assumed the latter post, because in 1941 it was held by Liu Yen who was then also the political commissar of Su Yu’s First Division of the New Fourth Army. Between the end of 1940 and early March 1941 the New Fourth Army set up about 10 units to train soldiers and civil administrators for the areas the Party controlled. The most important of these, known as the Fifth Branch of K’ang-ta (the Anti-Japanese Military and Political Academy), a branch of the well-known military school in north Shensi, was established in late 1940 at Yen-ch’eng, the site of Ch’en I’s headquarters, not far south of Fou-ning in east Kiangsu.
The Fifth K’ang-ta Branch was formed from two older army schools started by the New Fourth Army, plus a training unit that accompanied Huang’s guerrilla column of the Eighth Route Army, it may have been staffed with some personnel from the original K’ang-ta. Once Huang’s training unit became part of the Fifth Branch of K’ang-ta there is no direct evidence that he continued connections with the training school. However, there are several reports that tell of his earlier connections with the Fifth Branch of K’ang-ta when his forces were still in north China and before the school was created in New Fourth Army territory. It is possible that these reports refer to his connections with the training unit he brought from north China, or they may refer to connections that he maintained with the military academy once it was established in Yen-ch’eng.
Huang’s importance among the CCP elite was reaffirmed at the Party’s Eighth National Con-gress in September 1956. He served on both the Presidium (steering committee) and the Credentials Committee, and at the close of the meetings was re-elected to the Party Central Committee. More important, at the First Plenum of the new Central Committee (held the day after the Congress closed), he was elected as a member of the Party’s Central Secretariat. Headed by Teng Hsiao-p’ing and charged with the task of executing the policies of the Politburo, the Secretariat then consisted of only seven full and three alternate members. Huang and T’en Cheng were the only members then on active duty with the PLA. Possibly because of this new assignment with the Secretariat, Huang was replaced in December 1956 as director of the PLA Rear Services Department by Hung Hsueh-chih, a PLA officer who had served under Huang in the 1940’s and who was to share Huang’s political difficulties in 1959 (see below).
Huang’s political troubles were confirmed by the secret Chinese Communist military journal known as the Kung-tso t’ung-hsun (Bulletin of activities). Issues of this journal for the year 1961 (released by the U.S. Government in 1963) revealed that P’eng Te-huai and Huang had been accused of constituting an “anti-Party group.” “Modern revisionism,” the Chinese euphemism for Soviet policies, was also linked with the “erroneous” line of P’eng and Huang, which suggests that these two men had been willing to make political compromises with the Soviet Union in order to continue the flow of Soviet military assistance to China.“ Several other charges against P’eng and Huang were revealed in the Kung-tso t’ung-hsun. These included the direct or indirect assertions that the two men had advocated or condoned a “simple military viewpoint” and “militarist” practices, that they had neglected Party organizations in the PLA, and had disregarded the military thought of Mao Tse-tung. Hung Hsueh-chih, Huang’s longtime colleague and the man who had replaced him in the Rear Services Department in 1956, was also involved in the charges revealed in the Kung-tso t'ung-hsun.
Membership
An important Party official in north Kiangsu by 1945 when the CCP held its Seventh National Congress (meeting in Yenan, April-June), Huang received recognition for his services when he was elected to the CCP Central Committee as an alternate member. At the end of the war he was separated from the New Fourth Army and given other important assignments with the army that Lin Piao took to Manchuria when hostilities with the Japanese concluded. Thus Huang went to Manchuria in 1946 where he was in charge of some of the military operations in the Jehol-Liaoning Military District.
As described, Huang had been reappointed in 1959 (not long before his political difficulties were revealed) to membership on the National Defense Council (NDC). He continued to be officially listed in this capacity until the NDC officials were again reappointed at the close of the first session of the Third NPC in Jahuary 1965.
Personality
Little is known of Huang’s personal life aside from the fact that in May 1957 he was said to have written to a nephew in Hunan advising him to “take part in agricultural production” if he could not get into a military academy or university after completing senior middle school.
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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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1929 - 1931
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1946
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1952
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1954