Background
Little is known about his background.
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K’uei Pi
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K’uei Pi is the second-ranking Mongol in the CCP and one of the few members of the Party’s top elite who is not a Han Chinese. Like Ulanfu, the top Mongol in the Party, he belonged originally to the Tumet Banner of the Bayan Tala League, a minor sinicized Mongol group living in the area west of Kweisui (Huhehot).
Education
K’uei apparently had some secondary schooling, because when he went to Peking from Inner Mongolia at the age of 20 he was able to enroll in a leading Chinese institution for the training of his fellow Mongols as well as for Tibetans. A former Chinese ambassador to Mongolia, Chi Ya-t’ai, also a Tumet Banner Mongol, has written about K’uei’s education from mid-1923 when he arrived in Peking with a group from his native banner, including Ulanfu, Chi (the author of the account), To-sung-nien, and Li Yii-chih. To-sung-nien has been described by the Communists as a “prominent Inner Mongolian revolutionary.”
Li, whose Mongol name was Batochir, commanded the People’s Revolutionary Army of Inner Mongolia in 1926. All of them were slated to play a part in Sino-Mongol ian relations; The last two were killed between 1926 and 1927, but Ulanfu, Chi, and K’uei have been active in the Communist Revolution from its beginning. In 1923 the Mongol newcomers enrolled at the Mongolian and Tibetan Institute, which had been established not long before by a Chinese government intent on educating and training future leaders of the two minorities. The CCP, then in existence only two years, had a very active branch in Peking led by Li Ta-chao, one of the Party founders and a Peking University proféssor. Quick to search out those who had become disenchanted with the existing Chinese society, the Party made the national minorities one of the principal targets for its work. Already in the winter of 1923-24, Li Ta-chao made overtures to the Tumet Banner Mongols at the Peking Institute, and Chi reports that they joined the CCP at this time, becoming the first Mongols to enter the ranks of the Party.
Career
In Peking, elements of the political scene affected K’uei and the others from early 1925. Hoping to bring China together under one central government, Sun Yat-sen traveled to Peking to negotiate with the northern leaders and died there in March 1925 without accomplishing his purpose. According to the Chi account, the Tumet Banner group at the Peking institute was organized to support Sun when he came to Peking. To arouse support for the cause of uniting China, the Party had sent K’uei back to his native area early in 1925 to organize a “Suiyuan Association for Promoting the National Assembly”; the National Assembly, which had been suspended a few years earlier, was the national parliament which Sun was hoping to reopen. In the fall of 1925 the Tumet Banner group from the school in Peking was instrumental in founding the Inner Mongolian People’s Party (IMPP), inaugurated at a congress of Mongols held in Kalgan in October 1925. Ulanfu and his associates immediately became active in the new party, which, at its opening meeting, had received congratulations from Feng Yii-hsiang, the left-KMT, and representatives of the Outer Mongolian Government. Among the aims enunciated at the 1925 congress were full self-determination for nationality groups within China. The new party was soon embroiled in Chinese politics. In April 1926 Feng Yii-hsiang was defeated by the combined forces of rival warlords and fled to Outer Mongolia and then to the Soviet Union. Somewhat earlier, Ulanfu had also gone to Moscow by way of Outer Mongolia. No longer under the protective influence of Feng’s troops in western Inner Mongolia, the remnants of the IMPP and its military forces probably went underground. When Feng returned to China in September 1926 and resumed command of his forces in northwest China, he may for a short time have continued to support the IMPP with its inner core of Communists, but when by June 1927 he decided to join forces with the KMT, there was the need to weed out former more radical supporters. When the Communists and KMT split in August 1927, Feng must have been obliged to purge from the Inner Mongolian People’s Party the Mongol Communists who were not willing to follow his line of cooperation with the KMT. It was probably at this time that Tumet Banner Mongols To-sung-nien and Li Yii-chih were killed.
After 1925 little is known of K'uei’s career, but he was in Outer Mongolia as a student at the “Higher Party School of Mongolia,” graduating about 1929. Because his career has always been closely connected with that of Ulanfu, it is reasonable to suppose that K’uei went to Outer Mongolia with Ulanfu about 1925. However, he was back in China after the start of the Sino- Japanese War, when he was a political officer with Pai Hai-feng’s forces. Pai, a Mongol, was the commander of the Peace Preservation Corps for Suiyuan, a military group probably belonging to the Suiyuan-Mongolian Local Autonomous Political Council and organized during the war with CCP support to offer resistance to the Japanese, whose troops nominally controlled Suiyuan. In 1937 Ulanfu was a political commissar with the same Suiyuan Preservation Corps, and K’uei may have been attached to the Corps at this time.
In 1941 K’uei was serving under Ulanfu at the Communists’ headquarters in Yenan. Ulanfu then held several posts, among them the directorship of the Nationalities Affairs Commission under the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia Border Region Government. If K’uei was in fact' serving with Ulanfu on the Commission, this was the beginning of a career in minority affairs, which has since become one of his principal occupations. Since at least 1945 he has been active in Inner Mongolia and has participated in every development of the CCP program to integrate his people into “New China.”
K’uei was in Inner Mongolia from at least 1945. From November 1945 to May 1947 he was a member of the Standing Committee of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Movement Association, headed by Ulanfu. At the same time he was director of the Association’s Organization Department, and from about 1947 until 1952, director of the IMAR government’s Civil Affairs Department.
Although K’uei has held various posts in the national government and Party bureaucracies, most of his time since 1949 has been spent in Inner Mongolia. From 1949 to 1954 he was a member of the IMAR Government Council, and from the latter year to the present he has been a vice-chairman; during all these years he has served under Chairman Ulanfu. In a rather unusual arrangement, K’uei also held positions of authority in Suiyuan province from 1949 until it was absorbed by the IMAR in 1954. He was a Suiyuan vice-governor during these years, and from early 1950 he also headed the Suiyuan government’s Nationalities Affairs Committee. Within the CCP, K’uei was a member of the Inner Mongolia Sub-bureau from 1949 until July 1952, when the Party organizations in Inner Mongolia and Suiyuan were merged to form the Inner Mongolia—Suiyuan Sub-bureau. At the time of the merger he was promoted to be second deputy secretary, and a year later he was advanced to the post of deputy secretary. In the year 1953-54 K’uei concurrently headed the Sub-bureau’s Organization Department and its Discipline Inspection Committee. Following the dissolution of Suiyuan Province in 1954, the name of the Party organization reverted to the Inner Mongolia Subbureau, but then in 1955 it was renamed the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Committee. K’uei’s title was changed from deputy secretary to secretary in 1956, but he still remains subordinate to First Secretary Ulanfu. He attended the Party’s Eighth National Congress in September 1956, submitting a written report to the Congress entitled “The Victory of the Party’s Nationalities Policy in Inner Mongolia.” At the close of the meetings he was elected an alternate member of the Party Central Committee; Ulanfu and K’uei are the only two Mongols on the Central Committee.
Politics
The rising generation of Mongols in the 1920’s found themselves involved in the struggles of national and international politics whether they remained at home for their education or journeyed to Moscow or Peking. Rivalry between China and the Soviet Union over the fate of Outer Mongolia inevitably affected the fate of the Mongols. Within China there was the struggle between left and right wings of the KMT, and between the KMT and the Communists, each group playing upon Mongol aspirations. Within the domains of Chinese Mongolia, these aspirations were affected also by fortunes of the local warlord, Feng Yii-hsiang. Feng had his own political ambitions to satisfy by siding with the KMT, the Chinese Communists, other local warlords, or with the Russians. There were, in addition, the Mongols themselves, compounding the difficulties because they differed among themselves on the solutions for their future. When the government of the Mongolian People’s Republic was inaugurated in November 1924, its opening meeting was attended by one group of Chinese Mongols who supported a union of Mongols from Inner and Outer Mongolia, that is, panMongolism (even if under Soviet influence) and independence from China. Several other approaches to pan-Mongolism also attracted Chinese Mongols who did not attend the meeting, but there were many others whose aim was a larger degree of self-government for the Mongols within a federative framework of China. K’uei and his colleagues supported the latter view.
In June 1949 K’uei was in Peking to attend the meetings of the Preparatory Committee chaired by Mao Tse-tung in preparation for the convocation of CPPCC, the organization that brought the PRC into existence that fall. K’uei was not an official member of the Preparatory Committee but rather attended as a substitute for Ulanfu, who was occupied elsewhere. When the CPPCC first met in September, he attended as a representative of the national minorities and was elected a member of the CPPCC’s First National Committee. However, he was not re-elected to the Second CPPCC, which opened in December 1954, by which time he had been transferred to the more important NPC. He also held a seat on the Nationalities Affairs Commission of the Government Administration Council (the cabinet) from 1949 to 1954. At the time K’uei was a Commission member, Ulanfu was one of its vice-chairmen.
Membership
In 1953-54 K’uei was a member of the IMAR Election Committee, established in preparation for the nationwide elections to the NPC. He was then elected an IMAR deputy to the First NPC, which opened in September 1954. He was reelected to the Second NPC (1959-1964), as well as the Third NPC, which held its initial session in December 1964-January 1965. Representing the Mongols, K’uei has also been a member of the NPC Nationalities Committee since 1954, and since 1955 he has also served as a vicechairman of the committee. Among the more active members of the NPC, K’uei was a member of the presidium (steering committee) for eight of the 10 NPC sessions held between 1954 and 1965.
He has made two trips abroad since the PRC was established, one of them in connection with Mongolian affairs. In August-September 1959 he was a member of Politburo member Lin Po-ch’ii’s NPC delegation to Outer Mongolia. While in Ulan Bator K’uei received an honorary degree from the Advanced Party School of Mongolia, from which he had graduated 30 years before. He also made an earlier trip abroad as a member of a delegation led by Mme. Sun Yat-sen to the Communist- sponsored World Peace Congress in Vienna in December 1952. He was identified at this time as a member of the North China Bureau of the China Peace Committee (CPC). From 1950 to 1954 K’uei served as a vice-chairman of the Suiyuan branch of the CPC, and since mid-1958 he has been a member of the CPC’s National Committee.
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Born
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Nationality
Mongolian -
Ethnicity
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Political Party
Chinese Communist Party
Career
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1925
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1941
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1945 - 1947
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1949 - 1954