K’o was born into a “middle-class landowning family” in “Huangshan,” Anhwei (presumably a reference to the Huang-shan mountain range in southern Anhwei). In the early twenties or just before, K’o spent some time in Wu-hu, then a rather important center for revolutionary activities (see under Li K’o-nung).
He was educated locally and joined the Socialist Youth League in 1920, the year it was founded in Shanghai by Ch’en Tu-hsiu and others.
The details of K’o’s career in the twenties and thirties are not available, but a broad picture can be painted on the basis of his obituary, his 1960 interview with Snow, and an article written by Li K’o-nung’s son. K’o’s obituary states that during the “long period from 1920 to 1936, he engaged in Party work and led the working class movement, the peasant movement, and the soldiers’ movement ping-yun in Shanghai, Nanking, Wuhan, Anhwei, and other places. He was the secretary of the Anhwei CCP Committee, director of the Political Department of the Eighth Army of the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, secretary-general of the CCP Central Committee, secretary of the Front Committee and concurrently director of the Front Committee’s Organization Department under the Hopeh CCP Committee.”
Snow records that when the Sino-Japanese War broke out in mid-1937, Liu Shao-ch’i and K’o “went into the villages together to organize« guerrillas. This assignment was apparently of brief duration, for by the latter part of 1937 K’o was in Hankow where the Communists maintained a liaison office. In 1938 he must have been associated with Ch’en Shao-yii, who came to Hankow that year as a CCP representative to the fiist Peoples Political Council. Both men were in Yenan by 1938, at which time Ch’en had assumed the directorship of the Party’s United Front Department, a post he held throughout most of the war period. K’o spent most of the war in Yenan as Ch’en’s deputy in the United Front Department, and in 1944 was serving as its acting director. In the postwar period he was assigned to the Chin-Ch’a-Chi (Shansi-Chahar- Hopeh) Border Region Government (see under Sung Shao-wen), where he served as deputy director of the Finance Committee and director of the Civil Affairs Office.
In November 1947 Shih-chia-chuang fell to the Communist forces. An important rail junction in western Hopeh, it was the first important city in north China captured by the Communists. Possibly because of his familiarity with the north China area, K’o was named as the mayor. He held this post until he was replaced by Liu Hsiu-feng in April 1949. The reason for K’o’s transfer became apparent in the following month when the onrushing Communist armies captured Nanking. Liu Po-ch’eng, one of the military conquerors of Nanking, became the mayor and K’o one of his vice-mayors. In the latter part of 1949 Liu left Nanking to lead his forces into the south-west, and thus K’o became the acting head of the Nanking government, a post that was formalized in May 1950 when he was appointed as mayor. (From 1951 to 1952 he was also a member of the Nanking government’s Finance and Economics Committee.) In October 1949 he had also become a member of the Nanking Military Control Commission, then headed by Su Yti. In 1949 he additionally assumed the vice-chairmanship of the Nanking chapter of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association, and by 1952 the chairmanship. Finally, by early 1950 he was the ranking secretary of the Nanking CCP Committee. In brief, from 1950 to the end of 1952, K’o was the top Communist official in Nanking.
In November 1952 the Communists merged the northern and southern sectors of Kiangsu (which they had established in 1949 as separate administrative districts) into the traditional provincial boundaries. T’an Chen-lin became the governor and K’o one of the vice-governors. However, T’an was principally occupied with his duties with the Party’s East China Bureau (headquartered in Shanghai) and thus K o was probably the de facto governor. His pre-eminence in Kiangsu is best illustrated by the fact that he was the first secretary of the provincial Party committee from the end of 1952 until succeeded by Chiang Wei-ch’ing in early 1955. Moreover, he served during this same period as political commissar of the Kiangsu Military District.
K’o received his first post in the national government in 1954 when elections were held for the First NPC, the organ that brought the constitutional government into existence at its initial session in September. He was a deputy to the First NPC from Kiangsu, but owing to his later transfer to Shanghai (see below), he represented that city in the Second NPC (1959-1964) and the Third NPC, which opened in December 1964. By January 1955 K’o had been transferred from Nanking to Shanghai where he became the ranking secretary of the Shanghai Bureau of the Party’s Central Committee and first secretary of the Shanghai Municipal CCP Committee. The jurisdiction of the Shanghai Bureau has never been revealed; in fact, virtually nothing was heard about its activities and it apparently went out of existence by the early sixties. K’o continued to head the Municipal Party Committee until his death in 1965.
From February 1955 to 1958 he was also a member of the Shanghai Government Council under Mayor Ch’en I. The latter, however, was mainly occupied (after September 1954) with his duties in Peking as a vice-premier and consequently spent little time in Shanghai. For this reason Ko succeeded him as the mayor in November 1958 and held the post until his death. He also held other positions in Shanghai that were largely ceremonial; these included the chairmanship of the Shanghai Committee of the CPPCC (1955-1958) and the presidency of the municipal chapter of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association (1955-1959).
For a figure who was not yet a Party Central Committee member, K’o had a significant role in the proceedings of the Party’s Eighth National Congress in September 1956. He served on both the Congress Presidium (steering committee) and the Credentials Committee and addressed the gathering on the “reform” of “capitalistic commerce.” (Most of China’s few remaining private businesses had, in effect, been nationalized during the previous winter; many of these were located in Shanghai where K’o was working.)
At the close of the congress K’o was elected a nomic or ideological questions (issues of February 16, 1959, May 1, 1959, November 1, 1959, and August 15, 1964). He seems to have taken a special interest in the Chinese drama. In a speech given before the East China Drama Festival in December 1963 he attacked traditional Chinese dramas and insisted that drama companies present works reflecting “real life and struggle,” a theme that was repeated by K’o in his Hung-ch’i article of August 15, 1964.
Like most important east China officials, K’o was affiliated with the regional East China Military and Administrative Committee (ECMAC), established in Shanghai in January 1950. In the following month he was appointed to membership on the ECMAC’s Finance and Economics Committee, and in September 1952 he was named as a member of the ECMAC, retaining his membership when the ECMAC was reorganized into the East China Administrative Committee (1953-54).
Virtually nothing is known of K’o’s personal life apart from the fact that at the time of his death he had at least two sons and a daughter.
