Kan was born into a poor peasant family in Hunan. It is probable that he grew up in or near Ning-hsiang, located some 50 miles west of Changsha, because during his teenage years he was active in Ning-hsiang in the widely supported movement to rid Hunan of the hated and rapacious governor-general, Chang Ching-yao.
Kan, a middle school graduate (probably from a Changsha school), received his next taste of political life in the period immediately following the May 30 (1925) Incident. This had begun in Shanghai as a result of broadly backed demonstrations to protest foreign encroachments upon Chinese sovereignty, but when a number of demonstrators were killed, the “incident” quickly mushroomed into a “movement” that spread to most major Chinese cities, including Changsha. Kan, then in Changsha, helped organize students to support the May 30 Movement and also worked in the nearby rural areas to organize the peasantry for the same goals. Work of this kind apparently drew him to the Communist movement, for in 1925 he joined the Communist Youth League, and at approximately the same time he left for Moscow where in 1926 he joined the CCP.
During his four or five years in the Soviet Union, Kan attended Sun Yat-sen University, the name of which was changed to the Communist University of the Toilers of China in the late 1920’s. After finishing his course work there, he remained with the school as a translator.
In 1930 Kan returned to China; he was assigned as a political officer to the Hunan-Kiangsi base where Hsiao K’o commanded the Sixth Army Corps. The territory under the control of Hsiao’s forces included the original stronghold of Mao Tse-tung and Chu Te at Chingkangshan. In the years before the Long March, Kan served as director of the Propaganda Department of the CCP Hunan-Kiangsi Provincial Committee and as political commissar of the Hunan-Kiangsi Military Region. In the spring of 1933 Jen Pi-shih was sent from Juichin to assume the political commissar post, presumably replacing Kan. In addition to these political and military assignments, Kan also held two posts in the Hunan-Kiangsi Provincial Soviet Government: director of the Finance Department and director of the National Economic Department (Kuo- min ching-chi pu). These two departments were local counterparts to the “ministries” of the same titles subordinate to the Chinese Soviet Republic, which was established in Juichin, southeast Kiangsi, in November 1931.
Sometime after the arrival of Jen Pi-shih in 1933, Kan became political commissar of the 18th Division of the Sixth Army Corps. He was holding this post in mid-1934 when the Corps retreated from its Hunan-Kiangsi base and moved west into northeast Kweichow (see under Hsiao K’o) to join the Second Army Corps led by Ho Lung. When the two units met in October 1934, Kan became director of the Political Departments for both corps, and still later, he held the same position for the Second Front Army (the name given to the overall command for the two army corps after their rendezvous and merger). In this post Kan worked under the Second Front Army’s two top political officers, Jen Pi-shih, the political commissar, and Kuan Hsiang-ying, the deputy political commissar (who had been Ho Lung’s chief political officer before the merger). Kan continued to head the front army’s Political Department throughout the Long March (see under Ho Lung).
The Second Front Army arrived in north Shensi in the latter part of 1936. Half a year later, when war with Japan began in mid-1937, Kan remained with Ho Lung’s unit, now known as the 120th Division of the newly established Eighth Route Army. Kan continued in his role as political officer, serving as head of the division’s Political Department, a post which placed him under division political commissar Kuan Hsiang-ying. In the earliest days of the war Ho led his division into northwest Shansi where it began to take part in the battles against the Japanese. Kan apparently remained in northwest Shansi throughout the war years. In 1938 he assumed two concurrent posts, one as a member of the Party’s Northwest Shansi District. Committee and the other as director of the Political Department of the newly formed Shansi-Suiyuan Military Region.
In the postwar years Kan was assigned to the units led by P’eng Te-huai, Ho Lung, and Hsi Chung-hsun, known as the Northwest PLA until the winter of 1948-49 when it was redesignated the First Field Army. Kan continued in his familiar post as director of the army’s Political Department. After defeating Nationalist forces in Shensi, Ninghsia, Kansu, Tsing- hai, and Sinkiang during the late forties, the Northwest Military Region was established; Kan was now given the concurrent assignment of director of the Region’s Political Department. During the course of these campaigns, Sian, the Shensi capital, fell to the Communists in May 1949, The Sian Military Control Commission was immediately established under the chairmanship of Ho Lung, and Kan was named as one of the three vice-chairmen. Fighting continued for several more months, but when the vast northwest region was under almost complete Communist control by the turn of the year 1949-50, the Northwest Military and Administrative Committee (NWMAC) was set up to administer the area. In early 1950 Kan was made a member of the NWMAC, as well as a member of its Land Reform Committee and director of its Public Security Department.
In October 1950 the Chinese entered the Korean War. Soon afterwards, Kan was relieved of his duties in Sian, the capital of the NWMAC, and transferred to Korea to become a deputy political commissar in P’eng Te-huai’s Chinese People’s Volunteers (CPV). Kan was concurrently director of the CPV’s Political Department until the winter of 1952-53 when he was replaced by Li Chih-min. In October 1952 he returned to Peking for a brief period to lead a CPV delegation which took part in celebrations marking Chinese National Day (October 1). In February 1953 he was awarded the National Flag Medal, the highest award of the North Korean government, and then in July (the month the war ended), he returned to Peking where he was made a deputy director of the General Political Department, at that time under the top military body, the People’s Revolutionary Military Council (PRMC). When the constitutional government was established in September 1954 and the PRMC abolished, the department was transferred to the PLA Headquarters, with Kan continuing to hold this post in the Political Department until his death in 1964. He was elected to the First NPC (1954-1959) as a representative of the Northwest Military Region and he also sat on the NPC Bills Committee. However, he was not re-elected to the Second NPC which opened in April 1959.
In September 1955 Kan was among a group of military leaders to receive the first military honors given by the PRC; he was awarded the three top PRC honors the August First, the Independence and Freedom, and the Liberation Orders. With the creation of personal military ranks in the same year, he was made a colonelgeneral. He won high Party recognition in September 1956 when the Eighth National Party Congress elected him an alternate member of the Central Committee.
There is rather little information on Kan’s wartime activities, but it is fairly clear that he was more deeply involved in political than in purely military affairs. For example, in the early years of the war the Communist troops in Shansi fought in relatively close coordination with units under the jurisdiction of Yen Hsi-shan, the Shansi warlord. The Communists, anxious to maintain these relations with Yen, often called upon their political and military figures to write articles supporting the united front with the Shansi governor. Kan was among those who contributed to this effort, but after relations with Yen were severely strained in the middle years of the war (see under P’eng Shao-hui), the Communist military leaders in north China were forced to turn their attention to the severe economic shortages which beset the military regions under their control. The extensive efforts to gain economic self-sufficiency (tzu-li keng-sheng) in northwest Shansi were described by Kan in an article for the Yenan Chieh-fang jih-pao (Liberation daily) of February 24, 1942.
After attaining high national ranks in Party and government, as well as in the army, Kan was very active in Peking; from 1953 until his death his activities were constantly reported in the press. Examples of this include his address to the Third Session of the NPC (June 1956) on military expenditures and to the Fifth Session (February 1958) on the PLA and its share of work for the socialization program; there was also frequent mention of the conferences he attended that ranged from high-level technical meetings on military logistics to less important conferences to promote morale among military dependents. In his last years Kan attended an average of one social function a week given for important visitors to Peking whom he often saw in the company of high-ranking members of the Party. By the end of his 40-year career in the Chinese Communist Movement, he ranked high on its list of political generals. Kan remained active until his death in Peking on February 5, 1964.
Kan’s wife, Li Chen, the only woman general officer in the PLA, has been a member of the party since 1927. Born in Liu-yang hsien, Hunan, about 1908, she too has spent a lifetime in political work for the army. Li is one of the relatively small group of women who made the Long March and was awarded the Order of Liberation in 1955 for her military services in the postwar period. Since 1957 she has been a deputy chief procurator of the Military Procuratorate. Like her husband, she was a deputy to the First NPC (1954-1959), representing her native Hunan, and in the same capacity she was re-elected to the Second NPC (1959-1964) and to the Third NPC, which opened in December 1964. Li Chen spent at least part of the Korean War period in Korea where in 1953 she was secretary-general of the CPV’s Political Department, which her husband had headed until early that year. She is easily one of the most important among the few prominent women in the present Chinese Communist elite.
