Background
K’ung, whose original name was Ch’en T’ieh-cheng, was born in P’ing-hsiang hsien, west Kiangsi, the locale of one of China’s largest coal mine areas.
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K’ung Yuan
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Under the direct guidance of Mao Tse-tung, Liu Shao-ch’i, and Li Li-san, the CCP had been active in P’ing-hsiang and neighboring An-yuan from the early 1920’s, and in the late 1920’s the newly formed Red Army drew many of its recruits from the same region (see under Huang Kung-lueh). At sometime in the late twenties or early thirties, K’ung left middle school in P’ing-hsiang to join the Red Army, and at approximately this same time he also joined the CCP. Little is known about his activities over the next decade, but he was a contributor to a volume of essays entitled Lieh-shih chuan (Biographies of martyrs), which was published in the Soviet Union in 1936. Although K’ung may not have been in Moscow in 1936, it is noteworthy that he has a command of Rus¬sian and that he studied in the Soviet Union from 1939 to 1940.
Career
K’ung went to Yenan from the Soviet Union, and at the end of the war in 1945 he was among the thousands of administrators who accompanied the Communist military units into Manchuria. By 1946 he was head of the CCP Committee in Fushun, the important iron and coal center near Mukden. In October 1949, when the Communists established the central government, he received two important posts : membership on the Finance and Economics Committee of the Government Administration Council (GAC) and the directorship of the Customs Administration, a position which until 1952 came under the direct jurisdiction of the GAC. In December 1952 the Customs Administration was absorbed by the Ministry of Foreign Trade, which had been created in August. K’ung held both posts until 1954. (He was replaced in the Customs Administration by Lin Hai-yun Iq.v.j.) Especially in the early 1950’s he was active in customs work, attending conferences, and frequently addressing government meetings of cadres in customs administration. His speeches stressed the need to eliminate corruption and waste, to simplify customs procedures, and to avoid bureaucracy.
In January 1953 K’ung was named a vice-minister of Foreign Trade under Yeh Chi- chuang, a position he held until September 1957. In his four and a half years with the Foreign Trade Ministry he was very actively engaged in negotiations with Communist and non-Communist countries and made a number of trips abroad for this purpose. From June to August 1954 he headed a trade delegation to Indonesia, which negotiated a Sino-Indonesian trade protocol and a payments agreement, signed by K’ung on September 1. From Indonesia he went to India to work out final terms for the first trade agreement of its kind between China and India, signing it on October 14, 1954. In Peking, on December 31, 1954, he signed the Sino-Korean protocol on the exchange of goods for 1955, and another on the granting of aid to Korea. In June 1955, when the China-Indonesia Friendship Association was formed, Kung became a member of the council.
On September 9, 1957, K’ung was relieved of his position as a vice-minister of Foreign Trade, but in February 1958 a new Foreign Affairs Office was added to the seven functional offices of the State Council. The new office was headed by Ch’en I, the foreign minister, and K’ung was made a deputy director (March 1958), along with important Party members Liao Ch’eng-chih, Liu Ning-i, and Chang Yen.
In May 1958 K’ung was elected an alternate member of the Party Central Committee at the second session of the Eighth Party Congress. This was followed by appointments to legislative and quasi-legislative branches of the PRC. In October 1958 the Kiangsu Provincial Congress elected him a deputy to the Second NPC, which first met in April 1959. Five years later he was re-elected to the Third NPC (this time as a deputy from Kweichow), and when the first session of the Third NPC met in December 1964-January 1965, he was elevated to the Standing Committee, the important body that runs the NPC between the annual sessions. K’ung’s assignment in the quasi-legislative CPPCC came in 1959 when the Third National Committee was formed. K’ung was named as a representative of the CCP and when the Committee held its first session in April 1959, he was named to the Standing Committee. He was not, however, re-elected to the Fourth National Committee, which first met in late 1964.
When the China-Africa People’s Friendship Association was formed in April 1960, K’ung became a member of the Council, whose chairman is Liu Ch’ang-sheng, an important Party member and veteran trade union leader. In August 1960 Foreign Minister Ch’en I led a delegation to Afghanistan, where on August 26 the China-Afghanistan Treaty of Friendship and Non-Aggression was signed. K’ung was present as a member of the Chinese delegation. He was abroad again in 1963-64 accompanying Premier Chou En-lai and Ch’en I on their historic tour of 10 African nations and Albania. From mid- December 1963 to early February 1964, the delegation visited the United Arab Republic, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Ghana, Mali, Guinea, the Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia in a major bid to enhance the prestige of Communist China in Africa. After a brief rest in south China, Chou took his entourage to Burma, Pakistan, and Ceylon for short goodwill visits during February 1964.
Connections
K’ung’s second wife, Hsu Ming, was with her husband in the late forties in Fushun, where she was secretary-general of the municipal Party Committee and concurrently headed its Women’s Work Committee. Then, when her husband headed the Customs Administration in the early fifties, Hsu was in charge of the Administration’s Personnel Office. In her capacity as chairman of the Tientsin Women’s Federation, Hsu spoke on the “reform of capitalists” at the Party’s Eighth Congress in September 1956, and one year later she was elected to the Executive Committee of the National Women’s Federation, a post she still holds. In February 1960 Hsu became a deputy director of the Staff Office of the Premier (i.e., Chou En-lai), and five years later she assumed the concurrent post of deputy secretary-general of the State Council. She has also served as a deputy from Hopeh to the Third NPC, which opened in late 1964. The couple had two children as of 1950.
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