Kao Kang

Background

Kao was born in Heng-shan, just south of the Great Wall in northern Shensi, into a small land¬lord family.

Education

He studied at the Yii-lin Middle School not far from Heng-shan. He was a student there during approximately the same years as Liu Chih-tan (1921-1924), a man whose career was closely linked with Kao’s in the twenties and thirties. The Yü-lin school was strongly influenced in the early twenties by several Communist instructors, the most prominent of whom was Wei Yeh-ch’ou, an early Communist and protégé of Li Ta-chao. In 1926 Kao joined the CCP, one year after his friend Liu Chih-tan. In the fall of that year warlord Feng Yü-hsiang, who was then cooperating with both the Nationalists and the Communists, established the Chung-shan Military and Political Academy at Sian to train poltical workers for his armed forces. Liu Chih-tan and Teng Hsiao- p’ing were among the many Communist instructors, and Kao and Hsi Chung-hsun, another important Shensi Communist, were students.

Career

In mid-1927 Feng broke with the Communists and proceeded to suppress the Communist move-ment throughout the province. In the spring of the next year Liu led an insurrection in Wei-nan and Hua-yin hsien to the east of Sian. It is unlikely that Kao participated in this endeavor, but in any event, after the revolt was suppressed, Liu and Kao were together in the Pao-an hsien area of northwest Shensi where Liu was an official in the CCP’s North Shensi Special Committee. According to Communist accounts, Committee Secretary Yang Kuo-tung was resisting all attempts to foster armed peasant uprisings. As a consequence, Liu Chih-tan overthrew the Yang leadership with the assistance of Kao Kang and others. Little is known of Kao’s activities during the next few years, but by 1931 he was a leader of the Communists’ 26th Red Army, which was operating on the Shensi-Kansu border. Over the next few years Kao remained one of the key military and political officers in the Red guerrilla units as the Communists attempted to establish a viable, peasant-based movement in Shensi. These developments are briefly summarized in the biography of Liu Chih-tan and are comprehensively covered in Mark Selden’s “The Guerrilla Movement in Northwest China,” The China Quarterly (nos. 28-29, October-Decem- ber 1966 and January-March 1967).

In mid-1927 Feng broke with the Communists and proceeded to suppress the Communist move-ment throughout the province. In the spring of the next year Liu led an insurrection in Wei-nan and Hua-yin hsien to the east of Sian. It is unlikely that Kao participated in this endeavor, but in any event, after the revolt was suppressed, Liu and Kao were together in the Pao-an hsien area of northwest Shensi where Liu was an official in the CCP’s North Shensi Special Committee. According to Communist accounts, Committee Secretary Yang Kuo-tung was resisting all attempts to foster armed peasant uprisings. As a consequence, Liu Chih-tan overthrew the Yang leadership with the assistance of Kao Kang and others. Little is known of Kao’s activities during the next few years, but by 1931 he was a leader of the Communists’ 26th Red Army, which was operating on the Shensi-Kansu border. Over the next few years Kao remained one of the key military and political officers in the Red guerrilla units as the Communists attempted to establish a viable, peasant-based movement in Shensi. These developments are briefly summarized in the biography of Liu Chih-tan and are comprehensively covered in Mark Selden’s “The Guerrilla Movement in Northwest China,” The China Quarterly (nos. 28-29, October-Decem- ber 1966 and January-March 1967).

When the Party held its Seventh National Congress from April to June 1945, Kao served on the 15-member Congress presidium and was one of the speakers. He was elected a member of the Party Central Committee the only one of the Shensi Soviet leaders to gain this distinction (although Hsi Chung-hsun and Ma Ming-fang were elected alternates). According to some sources, Kao was also elected a Politburo member at this time, but it seems more likely that he did not rise to this post until 1952. He remained in Yenan until the fall of 1945, after which he was sent to Manchuria at about the same time that the Party dispatched such prominent military and political leaders as Ch’en Yun, P’eng Chen, Lin Piao, Li Fu-ch’un, and Lin Feng. By 1946 and until 1947 he commanded the Communists’ Kirin-Heilungkiang Military Region. In 1947 Kao was elevated to become deputy commander and deputy political commissar of the Northeast Military Region, serving in these posts under Lin Piao, the commander.

Kao’s rise to great prominence in Manchuria coincided with the conquest of this critical region over the winter of 1948-49 and the departure from the area of virtually ail other top leaders, who went south with Lin Piao’s military forces or transferred to Peking to assume political posts. Li Fu-ch’un and Chang Wen-t’ien remained for a brief time, but then they too left to assume new duties elsewhere. Only Central Committee member Lin Feng remained, serving in positions subordinate to Kao. In the first half of 1949 Kao became secretary of the Party’s Northeast Bureau, and commander and political commissar of the Northeast Military Region. Then, when the Northeast People’s Government was established in August 1949, he became its chairman. Of the six regional areas of China, only Kao Kang held all four of these key posts not even such prominent leaders as Lin Piao in central-south China or P’eng Te-huai in the northwest were vested with such broad powers.

Immediately after the central government was established on October 1, 1949, Kao was made a member of the central government’s People’s Revolutionary Military Council (PRMC), and two years later (November 1951) he was elevated to a vice-chairmanship. Still another position he received in October 1949 was membership on the Executive Board of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association, one of the most active “mass” organizations in the early years of the PRC. Kao concurrently served from 1949 as the chairman of the Association’s Northeast branch. After participating in these preliminary steps to organize the central government, Kao returned to Mukden, the capital of the Manchurian administration, where he spent most of the next three years. During these years Kao completely dominated the political scene in Manchuria. It was a rare occasion when he was not the keynote speaker at the innumerable conferences held by the Northeast Bureau or the Northeast People’s Government on subjects ranging from land reform to industrial management to afforestation. Many of his speeches were published in the JMJP and the Tung-pei jih-pao (Northeast daily), the Party organ for Manchuria. A number of these were also re-printed in the authoritative government gazette Hsin-hua yueh-pao (New China monthly) or the English-language journal People’s China. Several of Kao’s more important reports are conveniently assembled in Current Background, no. 163 (March 5, 1952).

In November 1952, in anticipation of the First Five-Year Plan, which began in 1953, the State Planning Commission was established. Kao was brought to Peking to become its first chairman. The significance of the Commission was underscored by the fact that it was placed directly subordinate to the Central People’s Government Council, that is, on a par with Chou En-lai’s Government Administration Council (the cabinet). Kao, by now definitely identified as a Politburo member, retained his positions in Manchuria, and in January 1953, when the Northeast People’s Government was reorganized and redesignated the Northeast Administrative Committee, he was again named as chairman. In fact, however, he spent virtually all his time in Peking after the early part of 1953. By March he was described as one of Mao’s “close comrades-in-arms,” an accolade accorded only to the select few. He made his last major report in September 1953 at the 26th meeting of the CPGC, stressing the need to concentrate resources on the development of heavy industry. He continued to appear in public until January 20, 1954, when he attended a meeting to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Lenin’s death. Only two weeks later he was attacked (though not by name) at a Party Plenum and within a year he had died by his own hand.

Politics

In the early months of 1936 Kao participated in a military thrust into Shansi, which the Communists mounted in an effort to dramatize their demands for action against the Japanese and to get food, supplies, and recruits for the badly depleted Red armies. Liu Chih-tan was killed during this operation, and thus Kao Kang emerged as the most significant of the “local” Shensi Communist leaders. When war with Japan broke out in mid-1937, a number of key Communist military and political leaders moved eastward to engage the Japanese, but Kao remained in the Yenan area of Shensi where he quickly became a key figure. He served throughout the war years in a quasi-military post as commander of the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia (Shen-Kan-Ning) Border Region’s Peace Preservation Corps, but his primary duties were in connection with the Party apparatus and the Shen-Kan-Ning Border Region Government. Within the Parly structure he was secretary of the CCP Committee for the Shen-Kan-Ning Border Region from 1938 to 1940, and then from 1940 to the end of the war he was secretary of the Party’s Northwest Bureau. The Shen-Kan-Ning Government had been established in 1937, but its initial meeting was not held until the convocation of the First Assembly in January-February 1939. At this time Kao was elected Assembly chairman, and in November 1941 he was re-elected chairman of the Second Assembly, retaining this post until his departure for Manchuria in 1945. It appears that within the Border Region Government Kao was second only in importance to Lin Po-ch’ii, the chief executive officer, until the cheng-feng (rectification) movement began in 1942. After that time Kao probably surpassed Lin in importance as the Communists paid less attention to the united front and began to stress the necessity of the “mass line to implement their programs.

Kao was a frequent contributor to the Party press during the war years and he also spoke at Party-sponsored meetings on numerous occasions. Many of these articles and speeches are cited in Chiin-tu Hsiieh’s bibliography of Communist materials for the years 1937-1949. In terms of Communist historiography, the most important of Kao’s talks was delivered in November 1942 at a meeting of Party cadres in the Shen-Kan-Ning Border Region. Entitled “An Examination of Questions Concerning Party History in the Border Region,” it describes the history of the Shensi guerrilla movement prior to the arrival of Mao Tse-tung in 1935. Earlier in 1942, at the outset of the famous cheng-feng movement, Mao Tse-tung spoke of Kao in the most flattering terms. “The ‘outside’ cadres,” according to Mao, “must certainly be somewhat inferior to the local cadres in their detailed knowledge of the (local) conditions and theii relations with the masses. Take my case as an example. I came to northern Shensi five or six years ago, yet I cannot compare with comrades like Kao Kang in my knowledge of conditions here or in my relations with people of this region.” Mao concluded that “No matter what progress I make in investigation and research, I shall always be somewhat inferior to the northern Shensi cadres.” Predictably, after Kao’s purge in the 1950’s these lines were altered; the key passage involving Kao now reads: “Although I have been in northern Shensi five or six years, I am far behind the local comrades in understanding local conditions.”

Huang attended the Party’s Eighth National Congress in Peking in September 1956. He presented a written report to the Congress on the “reform” of the Tientsin “capitalists,” and at the close of the sessions was elected as an alternate member of the CCP Central Committee. Until the Second Session of the English National Congress in May 1958, Huang was very active in Tientsin. Then, immediately after the Congress he was suddenly transferred to Liaoning, the important industrial province of southern Manchuria, where in June of 1958 he became the Party first secretary, replacing Huang Ou-tung, who was made the second secretary. Since moving to Manchuria Huang Huo-ch’ing has assumed several other responsible positions; in November 1959 he replaced Huang Ou-tung as the chairman of the Liaoning Committee of the CPPCC, and by February 1960 he was identified as the political commissar of the Liaoning Military District. One year later, in February 1961, he was identified with the PLA rank of lieutenant-general when he attended a meeting at PLA headquarters in Peking to celebrate the 43rd anniversary of the founding of the Soviet Army.

Connections

Little is known of the personal life of Huang aside from the fact that he is married to Ma Hsin, whose antecedents are unknown.

Spouse:

Ma Hsin