Background
Born in Tsinghai, Kao has spent his entire career in his native northwest as a Party and government official.
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Kao Feng
Edit ProfileEducation
He was educated locally.
Career
He was first reported in 1946 as a delegate from Yen-ch’ih hsien to the Third Assembly of the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia (Shen-Kan-Ning) Border Region, the first session of which was held in April 1946. He presumably remained a delegate until the dissolution of the Border Region in early 1949. Yen-ch’ih hsien is located in present-day Ninghsia, just south of the Great Wall where Ninghsia merges with Inner Mongolia and Shensi. By 1947 Kao was the ranking "Party secretary of the San-pien District Committee, San-pien being one of the five districts into which the Shen-Kan-Ning Border Region was divided (and the district controlling Yen-ch’ih hsien). In this same year he attended a conference of high-level cadres of the Northwest Party Bureau, which was also attended by such senior Party leaders as Lin Po-ch’ii and Ho Lung. At this conference Kao and others admitted shortcomings in their work and promised to improve. Such self-confessions are not uncommon among the Chinese Communists and are usually thought of in the sense of self-reform rather than as a preliminary to a purge.
Although there is no record of Kao’s activities in the late forties and early fifties, he must have been rather important in the northwest because he suddenly emerged in 1954 as the ranking Party secretary for Tsinghai province. By August 1954 Kao had replaced Chang Chung-liang as the ranking Tsinghai Party secretary, a post redesignated as first secretary by 1956. In the closing days of 1954, Kao was elected a member of the Tsinghai Provincial People’s Council under Governor Sun Tso-pin, later purged in the 1957-58 Rectification Campaign. Kao was re-elected to the Tsinghai Council in mid-1958, and in the interim was elected as chairman of the first Tsinghai CPPCC Committee in May- June 1955 and then elected to the second committee in January-February 1959.
Then, rather suddenly, Kao disappeared at the end of 1960, and by the next October another man (Wang Chao) was serving as acting first secretary of the Tsinghai Party Committee. The time that Kao fell from the public limelight coincided with the period generally considered the worst point in the wake of the failure of the Great Leap Forward, but there is no specific evidence relating his disappearance to those troubled days. Kao technically remained as head of the Tsinghai CPPCC, but in December 1963 he lost even this rather unimportant post when Yang Chih-lin was elected chairman.
Politics
Kao’s stature was such by 1956 that he attended the historic Eighth Party Congress and spoke on the execution of the Party’s policies toward the national minorities in Tsinghai. During the next two years he was reported rather frequently in the press, often in connection with the 1957-58 Rectification Campaign. Part of this campaign involved the performance of manual labor as a means of getting “closer to the masses,” and Kao was among the first to participate. In May 1957 he was named to head the Tsinghai “rectification movement leadership team.” Kao attended the second session of the Eighth Party Congress (May 1958) and immediately afterward joined Mao Tse-tung and other top leaders in performing manual labor at the Ming Tombs Reservoir north of Peking. It was not long after that the New China News Agency (July 1, 1958) reported that Kao had contributed an article entitled “Liberate Your Thinking to Build Up Tsinghai” for the leading organ of the Tsinghai Party Committee, a local counterpart of Hung-ch’i (Red Flag), the organ of the Party Central Committee.
Kao’s stature was such by 1956 that he attended the historic Eighth Party Congress and spoke on the execution of the Party’s policies toward the national minorities in Tsinghai. During the next two years he was reported rather frequently in the press, often in connection with the 1957-58 Rectification Campaign. Part of this campaign involved the performance of manual labor as a means of getting “closer to the masses,” and Kao was among the first to participate. In May 1957 he was named to head the Tsinghai “rectification movement leadership team.” Kao attended the second session of the Eighth Party Congress (May 1958) and immediately afterward joined Mao Tse-tung and other top leaders in performing manual labor at the Ming Tombs Reservoir north of Peking. It was not long after that the New China News Agency (July 1, 1958) reported that Kao had contributed an article entitled “Liberate Your Thinking to Build Up Tsinghai” for the leading organ of the Tsinghai Party Committee, a local counterpart of Hung-ch’i (Red Flag), the organ of the Party Central Committee.
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Born
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Nationality
China -
Ethnicity
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Political Party
Chinese Communist Party