Together with such well-known Communist figures as Po I-po and Lei Jen-min, Jung attended the Kuo-min Normal School in Taiyuan, the Shansi capital, and while attending this school joined the Communist Party in 1928. Later he attended and graduated from Shansi University. Like many of his Shansi compatriots, Jung was caught up in the wave of anti-Japanese sentiment which swept the nation and especially north China in the mid-1930’s, as the outbreak of war approached.
After the war against Japan broke out in mid- 1937, Po I-po and others formed “Dare-to-Die” units, which fought against the Japanese in, southeastern Shansi. These were originally subordinated to the “New Army” of Shansi Governor Yen Hsi-shan, but in late 1939 the bulk of the New Army forces defected to the Communists. In this same period, Jung was working with Po I-po and other important Party leaders (such as Li Hsueh-feng) in the formation of the T’ai-yueh Anti-Japanese Base in southeastern Shansi, of which the military unit was known as the T’ai-yueh District Column, a subordinate unit of Liu Po-ch’eng’s 129th Division. Jung served as the commander of this column, apparently for the remainder of the war against Japan.
In 1940 and 1941 the Communists began to reorganize the T’ai-yueh, T’ai-hang (northern and eastern Shansi), South Hopeh, and the Hopeh-Shantung-Honan districts to form, in July 1941, the Shansi-Hopeh-Shantung-Honan Border Region Government. For the balace of the Sino- Japanese War this stood on a par with the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia and the Shansi-Chahar- Hopeh Border Region governments as one of the three most important administrative units in north and northwest China. Yang Hsiu-feng, a Peking university professor who had turned to guerrilla warfare and joined the Communists, was the chairman of this new government. Po I-po and Jung were named as the two vice-chairmen. At some point over the next few years Jung was also named to head the government Finance Department, and from this time onward his career was strongly oriented toward financial work. This was evident from an interview which Jung gave American journalist Anna Louise Strong at Han-tan (southwest Hopeh) in 1946, Jung’s comment to Miss Strong dealt with the attempts of the border region government to balance the budget in the face of attacks upon the region by Nationalist forces.
As the Communists were winning victories in north China in 1947, they were able to link together the Shansi-Chahar-Hopeh (Chin-Ch’a- Chi) and the Shansi-Hopeh-Shantung-Honan border regions. To formalize this merger, the North China People’s Government was brought into being by a conference held in August 1948, at which Jung gave one of the reports. At the close of the congress top Parly leader Tung Pi- wu was named as chairman, and Jung as one of the members of the government; in the following month (September 1948) he was named to head the Finance Department and to membership on the Finance and Economics Committee (which Tung Pi-wu concurrently headed).
Peking was peacefully surrendered to the Communist forces in January 1949, and because a number of senior officials of the North China People’s Government were in this area, they were called upon to assume posts in Peking to take over the municipal administrative posts vacated by the Kuomintang. As the Communist military forces were moving into the city in late January and early February 1949, the Communist authorities formed a “joint administrative office” for Peking, which operated under the jurisdiction of General Lin Piao’s Peking-Tientsin Front Command. The administrative office was composed of seven members, headed by Party veteran Yeh Chien-ying. The other six members half Communists and half from the Kuomintang were placed on one of three committees: military; political and cultural; or financial. On the Communist side, T’ao Chu was placed on the military committee, Hsu Ping was named to the political and cultural committee, and Jung to the financial committee. Jung was thus the first head of finance in the Communist capital-to-be. Less than a month after these events transpired, the North China People’s Government moved into Peking (February 1949), but then in October 1949 this government was dissolved when the central government was established. Jung received appointments under the central government comparable to those he had held in the North China Government. He was named to membership on the important Finance and Economics Committee, under the chairmanship of the senior economic specialist of that period, Ch’en Yun. He was also named as a vice-minister of Finance, a post he was to hold for the next 12 years, serving under three of the top members of the Party elite, Po I-po (Jung’s long-time colleague), Teng Hsiao-p’ing, and Li Hsien-nien.
Although never a deputy to the NPC, Jung has given several reports before this legislative organization, most notably in April 1959 and April 1960. Unlike many high-ranking Party leaders in Peking, he has not been engaged in the timeconsuming processes of entertaining foreign visitors. The overwhelming majority of the times that Jung has been mentioned in the press has been in connection with specific affairs of state such as budgetary matters thus suggesting that the authorities have attempted to utilize his fiscal talents to the maximum. For reasons which are not clear, Jung fell from public attention in 1960 and was subsequently removed as a vice-minister of Finance in July 1961. Nothing was heard about him for three years until July-August 1964 when he was a member of a delegation to Cuba led by Central Committee alternate Li Ch’ang for the 11th anniversary of the founding of Fidel Castro’s resistance movement. In March 1965 Jung was further identified, being mentioned as a “responsible member” of the Northwest Bureau of the Party Central Committee. This was clarified in June 1965 when he was identified as director of Bureau’s Finance Committee. The regional Party bureaus, abolished in 1954-55, had been re-created in 1961 and in the years following a number of senior specialists were sent from Peking to staff them. It is therefore possible that Jung was working in the northwest from about 1961.
During Jung’s long term as vice-minister of Finance, it was evident that he was one of the senior men in the ministry, serving, for example, as acting minister in 1953 for Po I-po. His importance was also emphasized by the frequency with which he gave official ministry reports before sessions of the Government Administration Council (1949-1954) and the State Council (1954 to date). When special organizations involving financial or economic work were set up, Jung was often a member, especially in the early years of the PRC. For example, in 1950 he was a member of the National Material Inventory and Appropriation Board and in late 1951 was named to membership on the Central Austerity Examination Committee. He received appointments of apparently longer duration when he was named in December 1954 as chairman of the Board of Directors of the Bank of Communications and in July 1957 when he received an appointment on the newly formed Central Relief Administration (an organization dealing with emergency measures such as floods and droughts.)
