Background
He was born about 1905 in Yung-feng, a town in central Kiangsi east of the Kan River and slightly northeast of Kian (Chi-an).
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Huang Yung-sheng
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In the late 1920 s and early 1930’s there was considerable peasant unrest and guerrilla fighting in this area and Huang, who was a peasant, took part.
Career
At the time of the Autumn Harvest Uprisings in 1927 he was with a Nationalist unit which defected to the Communists. He subsequently made his way to Chingkangshan on the Hunan-Kiangsi border where Mao’s forces met Chu Tc’s in the spring of 1928. By 1930 he was commander of the Guards Regiment of the Red Army Headquarters (Kiangsi). Two years later, in 1932, he was still with the Chu-Mao army (called the First Front Army in the early 1930’s) as commander of the First Division’s Third Regiment. Later, Huang attended the Red Army Academy, which the Communists opened at Juichin in 1933. When the Communists arrived in north Shensi in the fall of 1935 after the Long March, the military academy was relocated there with Lin Piao as its head. Huang, who made the Long March, enrolled in the first class in 1936.
After the Sino-Japanese War began in 1937, Huang was a regimental commander in the Communist Eighth Route Army’s 115th Division, which was led by Lin Piao and Nieh Jungchen. He served throughout the war in guerrilla units under Nieh, which defended the Shansi-Chahar-Hopeh (Chin-Ch’a-Chi) Border Region whose headquarters was in the Wu-t’ai Mountain area of Shansi. Most of Huang’s time was spent in western Hopeh where, sometime before 1945, he was commander of the Shansi-Chahar-Hopeh Military Region’s Third Sub-district. Although no specific post is mentioned, he was identified in the same area at the end of the war, when he was said to be a commander of Communist units operating in the vicinity of the Hopeh cities of Shih-chia-chuang and Paoting. After August 1945, when the war ended, Nieh’s army moved north from the Shansi-Hopeh region into Jehol and Manchuria. In 1945 they occupied Kalgan, the capital of Chahar Province. Huang probably accompanied Nieh’s forces, but in any case by 1947 he was in north China serving as commander of the 23rd Sub-district of the Hopeh-Jehol Military Region. Later he was commander ol the Jehol-Liaoning Military Region.
By 1949 Huang had been transferred to Lin Piao’s Fourth Field Army. After taking control of Manchuria, Lin’s forces moved south to prepare for the attack on Tientsin and Peking in January 1949, capturing the former in mid-month and “peacefully liberating” the latter on January 31. Huang took part in some of these operations as a corps commander in the Fourth Field Army. He apparently remained with the Army as it moved south, occupying Kwangsi and its principal cities, Kweilin and Nanning, in November-December 1949. In December Huang became a deputy commander of the newly established Kwangsi Military District under Commander Chang Yun-i. In March 1950 Huang received two civil posts when he was named as a member of the Central-South Military and Administrative Committee (CSMAC), the regional administration governing the territory occupied by the Fourth Field Army, as well as of the Kwangsi Provincial People’s Government. He was removed from the Kwangsi post in June 1952. However, these positions in the civilian administration never equalled his standing in the military establishment. As of 1950 Huang was a deputy commander of the Fourth Field Army’s 13th Army Corps. The following year he was promoted from deputy commander to commander of the Kwangsi Military District.
However, he must have held this post only briefly because in 1951 he was also identified as deputy commander of the Kwangtung Military District (to 1953) and commander of the Kwangtung Air Defense Command.
In addition to his provincial military posts, Huang has been given responsibilities at the regional level. In 1951-52 he was a deputy commander of the South China Military Region (SCMR), being promoted to commander in 1953. The SCMR, controlling Kwangsi and Kwangtung, was a sub-district of the Central-South Military Region. From 1952 to 1954 Huang was chief-of-staff of both the Central-South Military Region and the Fourth Field Army, and in 1954 he became a deputy commander of both. In the 1954-55 period the Central-South Military Region was reorganized and the provinces subordinate to it were placed under three different regions, one of which was the Canton Military Region (responsible for Kwangtung, Kwangsi, and Hunan). Huang became the commander and has retained the post except for the years from 1958 to 1962 when Li T’ien-yu temporarily replaced him.
Although Huang’s career has been centered in central-south China, he has received recognition at the national level. When the constitutional government was inaugurated in September 1954 he became a member of the newly created National Defense Council, a military advisory organ of little authority but considerable prestige. He was reappointed to the Council in April 1959 and January 1965. In September 1955 Huang was one of the recipients of the first national military awards, but the specific honors given him were not reported. (However, in June 1957 he received the Order of Independence and Freedom, the decoration denoting service during the Sino-Japanese War.) Personal military ranks in the PLA were also created in 1955, and by February 1956 Huang was identified as a colonel-general, the equivalent of a three-star general in the U.S. Army. Finally, in September 1956 at the Eighth Party Congress in Peking, he was elected an alternate member of the Central Committee.
Politics
Huang’s active role in the military establishment has continued in the late 1950’s and 1960 s. In September 1958, in an effort to curtail the development of special privilege in the officer class, the PLA ordered all officers to do an annual tour of duty in the ranks. Huang is reported to have made such tours in 1958, 1962, and 1964. In December 1961 he made his first trip outside China as a member of Yeh Chien- ying’s military delegation, which spent two weeks in North Vietnam. Moreover, the fact that his headquarters is in Canton has brought him into official contact with other foreign leaders. For instance, in April 1963 he welcomed the Indonesian Army commander-in-chief and in February 1964 he was on hand to greet a leader of the Japanese Communist Party. On the latter occasion Huang was identified for the first time as a secretary of the Central-South Party Bureau. The regional Party bureaus had been recreated in January 1961, with the Central-South Bureau being headed by T’ao Chu, another veteran of Lin Piao’s Fourth Field Army.
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Born
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Nationality
China -
Ethnicity
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Political Party
Chinese Communist Party