Jao Shu-shih

Background

Jao was born in Lin-ch’uan hsien, located in Kiangsi just south of P’o-yang Lake and not far from the provincial capital at Nanchang, which has also been cited as his birthplace.

Education

He graduated from a middle school in Nanchang, probably about 1920. Jao is reported to have studied in the early twenties at Shanghai University, an institute that produced a number of important Communists and that had on its faculty such outstanding Party members as Ch’ii Ch’iu-pai, Teng Chung-hsia, and Jen Pi-shih.

Career

Joining the CCP in 1925, Jao was active in the mid-twenties as a labor organizer in Wuhan, doing work that may have placed him close to the important Communists who participated in the Northern Expedition (e.g., Liu Shao-ch’i).The murkiest period of Jao’s career falls in the decade after the KMT-CCP split in 1927. Unauthenticated reports place him in the Soviet Union, East Europe, France, Canada, and the United States, while yet another asserts that he was imprisoned in Manchuria until the Japanese takeover there in 1931. In connection with the report regarding the United States, one knowledgeable former PRC official claims that it was widely rumored in the early 1950’s that Jao had studied at an American university.

According to Japanese sources, Joi once worked with the newspaper Chiu-kuo shih-pao (Salvation news), established by Party veteran Wu Yii-chang in Paris in 1935 in response to the Comintern policy adopted that year to propagate an international united front. The possibility that Jao worked for this paper in Paris gains credence when it is noted that Miss Lu Ts’ui, who became his wife, went to Paris about 1936, where she helped establish a branch of the National Salvation Association (see under Shih Liang). The Association was one of the most active Chinese organizations in propagating the united front theme in China a theme frequently expressed in the term chiu-kuo (“salvation” or, literally, “save the nation”).

By 1939 Jao was back in China and in that year was sent from Yenan to south Anhwei where he became deputy political commissar of the New Fourth Army, the major Communist military force operating in the lower Yangtze River Valley under the overall command of Yeh T’ing, whose biography contains a discussion of the New Fourth Army’s operations. Following the New Fourth Army Incident in January 1941 (also described in Yeh’s biography), the Communist units and the CCP committee in charge of the area were reorganized. Ch’en I became the Army’s acting commander and Liu Shao-ch’i became the political commissar as well as the secretary of the Central China (Hua-chung) Bureau. Jao served directly under Liu in two capacities; he continued as deputy political commissar and by this same year (1941) he was also deputy secretary of the Party’s Central China Bureau. Moreover, he also directed the Bureau’s Propaganda Department.

Like virtually all key regional leaders, Jao was also given important posts in the central government, established at Peking in the autumn of 1949. He was named to membership on the Central People’s Government Council (CPGC), which was chaired by Mao Tse-tung and which was the most important organ of government until the constitutional government was established in 1954. In addition, he was appointed as a member of the People’s Revolutionary Military Council (also chaired by Mao), and from 1949 to 1954 he served on the First Executive Board of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association (concurrently heading the Association’s East China branch when it was formed in November 1951). However, Jao worked principally in east China and did not attend many of the CPGC meetings until his transfer to Peking in 1952. His dominance in east China during the early fifties was demonstrated by his frequent public appearances and, more significantly, by the fact that he usually gave the keynote policy speeches before the ECMAC and the Party’s East China Bureau. Similarly, the issues of Hsin-hua yueh-pao (New China monthly), the equivalent of a government gazette, carried a large number of Jao’s speeches and reprints of his articles for the Shanghai Chieh-fang jih-pao (Liberation daily), the organ of the East China Bureau.

As the period of “reconstruction and rehabilitation” drew to a close in the latter half of 1952, a number of organizational and personnel changes were made in the central Party organs and the central government, principally to prepare for the inauguration of the First Five-Year Plan in 1953. By the late summer of 1952 Jao was identified as director of the Party Central Committee’s powerful Organization Department, a position he assumed from P’eng Chen, a key member of the Politburo. With the assumption of this post in Peking, Jao’s most important position in east China, the first secretaryship of the Party’s East China Bureau, fell to T’an Chen-lin. In October 1952 Jao received his next assignment, accompanying Liu Shao-ch’i to Moscow for the 19th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, the last held before Stalin’s death. Then in November, while Jao was still abroad, the State Planning Commission was created. As originally constituted, the Commission had Kao Kang as its chairman, Teng Tzu-hui as its vice-chairman, and 15 members, a group composed of some of the most powerful figures in the Party hierarchy, including, Jao, Ch’en Yun, Lin Piao, P’eng Chen, P’eng Te-huai, and Teng Hsiao-p’ing. In a little over two years Kao and Jao were to be linked in an “anti-Party” plot and purged in what was probably the most important intra-Party struggle from the fall of Chang Kuo-t’ao in the late thirties through the mid-fifties.

But before the drama unfolded, Jao gave every appearance of being a rising star in the Party’s inner elite. Already the head of the Organization Department, he was appointed in January 1953 to membership on a committee chaired by Mao Tse-tung, which was established to draft the PRC constitution, and in May of that year he was elected a member of the Seventh Executive Committee of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions. Similarly, Jao’s public appearances had an aura of high-level authority, as when he spoke before the Second National Women’s Congress in April 1953 “on behalf of the CCP Central Committee” or in November when he attended Mao Tse-tung’s reception for North Korean leader Kim II Sung. He continued to appear in public until New Year’s Day of 1954, and then, with no advance warning, he dropped from sight. His disappearance coincided with the Party’s Fourth Plenum (February 1954) when Liu Shao-ch’i, in a report on Party unity, noted that “certain high- ranking cadres . . . regard the region or department under their leadership as their personal property or independent kingdom.” These key lines, in retrospect, obviously referred to Kao Kang and Jao Shu-shih and suggested that Kao regarded Manchuria as his “kingdom” and the State Planning Commission as his “personal property,” and it appears that the same charges applied to Jao in regard to the east China region and the Party’s Organization Department.

Politics

When Liu Shao-ch’i left the New Fourth Army area of operations in 1942, Jao assumed the senior Party post, becoming also the acting political commissar and rising to political commissar in the last year of the war. His place among the Party elite was confirmed when he was elected (possibly in absentia) to membership on the CCP Central Committee at the Party’s Seventh National Congress held in Yenan from April to June 1945. Jao remained in east China until early 1946 when he was sent to Peking to be a senior political adviser to Yeh Chien-ying, the head of the Communists’ mission at the Peking Executive Headquarters, which had been established in accordance with the January 1946 cease fire agreement worked out between the CCP and the KMT under the auspices of the U.S. Special Envoy George C. Marshall. It may have been at this time (if not a decade earlier in Paris) that Jao married Lu rs’ui, who was also a member of the Communist mission in Peking. Holding the simulated rank of lieutenant general, Jao remained in Peking until the late spring when he was named as chief of the Communist mission at the Chang-chun (Manchuria) Advance Headquarters of the Peking Executive Headquarters.

Robert B. Rigg, an American assistant military attaché in China at this time, has described the diminutive Jao as “shrewd” and “well liked by some Americans” who knew him in Peking and Chang-chun. In mid-1946 warfare between the Communists and Nationalists intensified, and as a result the Communists began to withdraw some of their key officials from the Executive Headquarters, Jao among them. He returned to his former post as political commissar in east China where the Communist military forces were now known as the East China Field Army, the designation was later changed to East China PLA (1947-48), and then in early 1949 to the Third Field Army. In the late forties, working in conjunction with units in north-central China led by Liu Po-ch’eng and with others led by Lin Piao that had come south from Manchuria, the east China armies took part in the operations resulting in the Communist victories in portions of central China. Finally, in the early months of 1949, the Third Field Army bore the brunt of the fighting that led to the conquest of the coastal provinces, battles described in the biography of Ch’en I, with whom Jao had now been associated for a decade. Jao is seldom mentioned in Communist accounts of these battles, including those written before his political fall, the implication is that he devoted most of his time to political work behind the front lines in areas the Communists were trying to consolidate under their rule.

Connections

Jao was married to Lu Ts’ui, one of the more prominent women leaders in China until the political fall of her husband. A native of Chekiang, she entered Tsinghua University in 1934 and was one of the most active participants in the December Ninth Movement (see under Li Ch’ang), a name taken from the date of student demonstrations held in Peking on December 9, 1935, in opposition to KMT policies regarded as inadequate in the face of steady Japanese encroachments on Chinese sovereignty. Lu’s presence in Paris in the mid-thirties and her participation in the Peking Executive Headquarters have been described above. In the spring of 1949, when the All-China Federation of Democratic Women (AC-FDW) was established, Lu was named to the Standing Committee and she was re-elected in April 1953 at the next women’s congress. From 1949 she was also the deputy director of the Federation’s International (liaison) Department and then succeeded to the directorship in late 1952, at the same time as her husband’s transfer to Peking. Representing the ACFDW, Lu had attended the first session of the CPPCC in September 1949 when the new national PRC government was brought into existence. In the next month she was named to the National Committee and Executive Board, respectively, of the China Peace Committee and the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association. Between 1953 and 1954 she made three trips abroad, the first to the Communist-sponsored World Congress of Women in Copenhagen in June 1953. Both her other trips were to attend meetings of the Communist World Peace Council, one in Vienna in November 1953 and the other in Berlin in May 1954.

In May 1954 she was named to the Standing Committee of the Chinese People’s Association for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, and in December of the same year she attended the Second National Conference of the Sino- Soviet Friendship Association and was also named to membership on the Second National Committee of the CPPCC (representing the ACFDW). All these appointments in 1954, as well as her trip to Berlin in the same year, are of particular interest because they post-date the Party Central Committee’s Fourth Plenum (February 1954) and the disappearance of her husband. The two appointments in December 1954 less than three months before her husband was openly accused of plotting against the regime-suggest that the CCP hierarchy was still in the process of building its case against Jao and did not want to reveal its hand. For example, Lu’s prominence in the Women’s Federation made her a logical choice to serve as one of its representatives in the CPPCC, and thus the Party may have felt that it would be more conspicuous to omit than to include her. Also of interest is the fact that the annual issues through 1957 of the Jen-min Shou-ts’e (People’s handbook) continued to list Lu in her various official positions. However, she dropped from sight at the end of 1954, and since that date nothing further has been heard of her.

Spouse:

Lu Ts’ui