Background
Born into a peasant family, Ku came from the small town of An-liu in the rural interior of Kwangtung, a region where the Communists have long been active.
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Ku Ta-ts’un
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A local guerrilla leader in Kwangtung for some 20 years, Ku Ta-ts’un was an alternate member of the Party Central Committee from 1945 until his death 21 years later. He was one of the major victims of the 1957-58 “Rectification” campaigns against “rightists,” and although he later re-emerged, his last years were spent under a political cloud.
Education
Located in Wu-hua hsien, An-liu lies some 50 miles north of Lu-feng, a coastal city in eastern Kwangtung, which was one of the two centers where in 1922 the early Communist leader P’eng P’ai started to organize the peasants. Several years later P’eng was instrumental in establishing the Hailufeng (Hai-lu-feng) Soviet situated in Hai-feng and Lu-feng hsien, the earliest though short-lived of the CCP rural soviet governments.
Ku apparently received little or no formal education and made his living as a farmer. Then in 1924, when he was about 27 years old, he joined the CCP, possibly as a result of contacts with the peasant associations that P’eng P’ai and his followers were organizing in the early and mid-twenties. Ku himself is known to have been among the organizers of a peasant association in his native Wu-hua hsien in 1924.
Career
According to Ku’s obituary, he was a “war area propagandist” for the National Revolutionary Army (NRA), this might indicate that he participated in the Northern Expedition, which began in mid-1926, but given Ku’s working locale in east Kwangtung, it seems more likely that this refers to one of the two so-called “Eastern Expeditions” of 1925, in which the NRA carried out punitive expeditions against Kwangtung leader Ch’en Chiung-ming. Ku subsequently served as the secretary of a CCP hsien committee and, in the words of his obituary, as the secretary of the “Seven-hsien Combined CCP Committee,” presumably in reference to seven hsien in Ku’s native East River area. In 1927 Ku became a member of the Standing Committee of the East River Special Committee, which was the secret CCP organ that actually controlled the affairs of the Hailufeng Soviet when it came into existence in the fall of 1927. He also served at approximately this same time as “military director” of the East River Soviet Government and was probably in contact with the important Communist military units that passed back and forth through the Hailufeng district following the Communist military disasters in 1927 at Nanchang, Swatow, and Canton (see under Chu Te and Yeh T’ing). Further details on Ku’s political and military activities at this time are found in the biography of Miss Li Chien-chen, one of his subordinates.
Following the destruction of the Hailufeng Soviet, Ku organized his remnant guerrilla units into the 11th Army, a fighting force that by 1930 had some 5,000 men and 3,500 and was nominally under the command of the Chu-Mao armies in Kiangsi. Ku was the commander of the 11th Army and concurrently served as its acting political commissar. His guerrilla units operated in the Kwangtung-Fukien border area where he reportedly maintained contact with the West Fukien Soviet, which included such prominent Communists as Chang Yun-i and T’an Chen-lin.
Sometime toward the end of the war Ku went to the Communist headquarters in Yenan and was among the speakers at the Party’s Seventh National Congress, held from April to June 1945. Although no specific dates are indicated, according to Ku’s obituary he once served (presumably at the end of the war) as director of the “First Section” of the Central Committee’s Party School. As the war was drawing to a close in the summer of 1945, the Party sent a number of high-level military commanders and Party leaders to Manchuria, among them Lin Piao, Ch’en Yun, P’eng Chen, and Kao Kang. Ku probably accompanied these men, because subsequently, in the late forties, he was a Standing Committee member of the Party’s West Manchurian Committee, a deputy director of the Northeast Bureau’s Organization Department (then headed by P’eng Chen), and a deputy director of the Communications Department of the Northeast Administrative Committee, a governmental organization headed by Lin Feng, which existed from 1946 to 1949.
Ku was in Peking in September 1949 to attend the first meeting of the CPPCC, the organization that brought the central government into existence. Attending as a delegate of the South China PLA, while the sessions were in progress he served on the ad hoc committee to draft the Organic Law of the CPPCC, one of the basic documents adopted at this time. Immediately after the meetings, he proceeded to his native Kwangtung, where he was appointed a vice-governor, serving then under fellow Kwang- tungese Yeh Chien-ying. Soon afterward (January 1950), he was appointed as director of the important Civil Affairs Department, holding this post in the Kwangtung Government until about 1954. Under the chairmanship of Lin Piao, the Communists established the Central-South Military and Administrative Committee (CSMAC) in February 1950 to govern the provinces of Kwangtung, Kwangsi, Kiangsi, Honan, Hunan, and Hupeh. Ku was appointed as a CSMAC member and continued as such when the CSMAC was reorganized into the Central- South Administrative Committee in January 1953, retaining this post until the latter committee was dissolved in 1954 with the advent of the constitutional government.
Ku was elected from Kwangtung as a deputy to the First NPC in 1954, and when the NPC held its initial session in September to bring the constitutional government into existence, he was elected to the NPC Standing Committee. Not long after, in February 1955, Ku was elected to a vice-chairmanship on the Kwangtung Committee of the CPPCC, and by mid-1955 he was identified as a deputy secretary of the Kwangtung CCP Committee, by November 1956 Ku had advanced to a secretaryship on the Kwangtung Party Committee, but he was still subordinate to First Secretary T’ao Chu. On the eve of the Party’s Eighth National Congress in September 1956 there were over 60 full and alternate members of the Central Committee who had been elected at the 1945 Congress. In retrospect, it is apparent that Ku’s political troubles had already begun by the time of the Eighth Congress, for even though the size of the Central Committee was tripled, he was one of only four alternates not promoted to full membership. Of the foursome, Tseng Ching-ping was dropped altogether, and Wan I, Chang Tsung-hsun, and Ku were only re-elected as alternates. Ku’s political difficulties were confirmed in a dramatic fashion in May 1958 at the Second Session of the Eighth Party Congress when a number of “rightists,” the victims of the 1957-58 “Rectification” campaign, were denounced. These “rightists” fell into two groups; men like Chekiang Governor Sha Wen-han were accused of “crimes” and were summarily expelled from the CCP, but a second group, for example, Central Committee alternates Ku and Feng Pai-chii, were merely “exposed” and were treated more leniently in that they were allowed to retain their seats on the Central Committee.
However, after cataloging these and numerous other charges, Ou Meng-chueh took note of Ku and Feng’s 30-year-long revolutionary history and the Maoist principle of “curing the disease to save the man” and stated that the Party had decided that the two men could retain their Party membership as well as part of their duties but that they would be relieved “of their more important posts.” In view of the seriousness of the charges, Ku’s eclipse did not last longless than a year later, in February 1959, he was elected a vice-chairman of the Kwangtung Committee of the CPPCC. He continued to hold this post until November 1961 when he was removed, but at the same time he was reinstated to his previous and more important post as a Kwangtung vice-governor. In general, after 1958 Ku appeared in public rather infrequently, although he was elected a Kwangtung deputy to the Third NPC, and when the initial session of the Third NPC closed in January 1965 he was elected to the permanent NPC Standing Committee. At the end of 1965 he resigned his Kwangtung vice-governorship for reasons of health, but he was still an alternate member of the Party Central Committee and a member of the NPC Standing Committee on November 4, 1966, when he died of illness in Canton at the age of 69. In his official obituary, Ku’s long Party career was reviewed in some detail, but no mention was made of his alleged anti-Party activities of the 1950’s.
Politics
In November 1931 Ku attended the First All China Congress of Soviets at Juichin, which established the Chinese Soviet Republic. He was elected to membership on the Soviet govern-ment’s Central Executive Committee (CEC) and a little over two years later, at the Second Congress (January-February 1934), he was re-elected to the CEC. When the main Red armies led by Chu Te and Mao Tse-tung set out on the Long March in the fall of 1934, Ku was among those who remained behind to conduct guerrilla warfare. For the next few years he led guerrilla units against the Nationalists and continued to do so when the Japanese war broke out in mid-1937. He seems to have operated mainly in the Ch’ao-chou and Mei-hsien areas of the Kwangtung East River district, somewhat to the north and east of Hailufeng on the coast. It is stated in Ku’s obituary that he was at one time the commander- in-chief of the Red Army guerrilla forces in the East River District. In various secondary sources Ku has been credited with commanding the East River Column (Tung-chiang tsung-tui), but no mention is made of him in a highly authoritative Party history of wartime “liberated areas” (nor is this mentioned in Ku’s obituary). In any event, Tseng Sheng was the East River Column commander by at least 1943 and probably earlier.
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Born
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Died
1966 (aged 69) -
Nationality
China -
Ethnicity
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Political Party
Chinese Communist Party
Career
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1927
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1930
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1945
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1946 - 1949
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March, 1955