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Lai Jo-yii
Edit ProfileEducation
He was educated locally.
Career
Lai Jo-yii began his career as a Party official in north China where he worked from the late twenties until 1952, when he became secretary-general of the All-China Federation of Labor. From then until his death in 1958 he led the PRC trade union movement. Lai was born on January 1, 1910, in Wu-t’ai hsien in eastern Shansi, the hsien where the sacred Buddhist Wu-t’ai Mountain is located and also the head-quarters during the Sino-Japanese War of the Communists’ Shansi-Chahar-Hopeh (Chin-Ch’a- Chi) base. Communist military leader Hsu FIsiang-ch’ien, with whom Lai was associated, was also a native of Wu-t’ai. In 1929, when Lai was 19, he joined the CCP and began his revolutionary activities as an underground operative. He was arrested in Peking in 1930, and after his release in 1932 he continued his revolutionary work, presumably in north China.
According to Lai’s obituary and a memorial address by Li Hsueh-feng, the two major sources for Lai’s career before 1949, he spent most of the years of the Sino-Japanese War and the civil war that followed in his native Shansi. After the war began in mid-1937, he served in the T’ai-hang mountain area, a district that was a major sub-division of the Communists’ Shansi-Hopeh Military Region, where Liu Po-ch’eng and Teng Hsiao-p’ing’s 129th Division (of the Eighth Route Army) was stationed. In 1941, following the expansion of the Communist bases, the Shansi-Hopeh base was enlarged into the Shansi-Hopeh-Shantung-Honan (Chin-Chi-Lu-Yii) Border Region (see under Yang Hsiu- feng). Lai was assigned to Party organizations in the T’ai-hang area, located in eastern Shansi and western Hopeh, serving successively as a hsien Party secretary, as a local (ti-wei) Party committee secretary, and finally as director of the T’ai-hang’s Organization Department. In Li Hsueh-feng’s memorial address, Lai was praised for the excellence of his work in strengthening Party bases behind Japanese lines during the years from 1940 to 1943. During a portion of this time he was said to have worked directly under Teng Hsiao-p’ing, then the 129th Division’s Political Commissar and now the Party Central Committee’s General Secretary. Lai remained in the T’ai-hang area during the civil war against the Nationalists, rising to the post of secretary of the T’ai-hang Party Committee.
Lai was with the forces led by Hsu Hsiang-chien that captured Taiyuan, the Shansi capital, in late April 1949. The Communists immediately established the Taiyuan Military Control Commission under the chairmanship of Hsu, with Lai, Lo Jui-ch’ing, and Hu Yao-pang as his deputies. Hsu, Lo, and Hu were soon reassigned elsewhere, but Lai remained in Shansi until late 1951. Before the end of 1949 he was holding three additional positions of importance: deputy political commissar of the Shansi Military District, secretary of the Taiyuan Party Committee, and deputy secretary of the Shansi Provincial Party Committee «In the meantime, however, he went to Peking in September as a representative from the “North China Liberated Area” to the first session of the CPPCC, the organization that brought the new central government into existence on October 1, 1949. While the CPPCC was in session, Lai served on the ad hoc committee charged with the task of preparing public statements on the work of the CPPCC.
He remained on the NCAC, chaired by Liu Lan- t’ao, until it was reorganized in February 1953. More important, however, was Lai’s transfer to Peking over the winter of 1951-52, relin-quishing the Shansi governorship to P’ei Li-sheng in December 1951. Lai’s first national assignment came in December 1951 when he was appointed a member of the Central Austerity Examination Committee, an appointment probably made on the basis of the experience he had gained as chairman of the Shansi Finance and Economics Committee. Headed by Po I-po, one of the top economic specialists of the PRC, the Examination Committee was given the task of implementing the nationwide drive to uncover such abuses as graft, corruption, and waste. From February 1952 to 1954 Lai was also a member of the CPPCC’s Study Committee, established to promote the dissemination of the' works of Marx, Engels, and Mao Tse-tung.
In the spring of 1952 Lai assumed an important post with the All-China Federation of Labor (ACFL), and until his death six years later he led the Federation, one of the most important of the many “mass” organizations. Lai’s initial post in the ACFL was as secretary-general, replacing Hsu Chih-chen who, unlike Lai, had had a long career in the labor movement. Lai’s appointment to the ACFL may have resulted from the serious “errors” of leadership that were “exposed” during a meeting of the Federation’s Party Committee in December 1951. At first glance it appeared that the “errors” were attributable to Hsu Chih-chen, but Hsu’s later career suggests that another person was involved most probably Li Li-san, the former dc facto head of the CCP and a labor leader from the early twenties. When Lai assumed the Federation secretary-generalship in 1952, he was theoretically outranked by Chairman Ch’en Yun and vice-chairmen Liu Ning-i, Li Li-san, and Chu Hsuch-fan. However, Ch’en was then fully occupied at the policy level in Party and PRC Government affairs, Liu was heavily engaged in liaison work with the World Federation of Trade Unions (and therefore often abroad), Li was probably in political difficulties, and Chu Hsueh-fan was (and remains) mainly a figurehead, retaining his post as a demonstration of the Party’s willingness to cooperate with non-Communists.
Lai’s last major activity, quite fittingly, was in connection with the Eighth All-China Congress of Trade Unions in December 1957. He completely dominated the proceedings of the congress, just as he had at the 1953 meetings. He delivered the keynote address and at the close of the meetings was re-elected to all his positions within the Federation. Lai last appeared in public in February 1958 at a session of the NPC. Three months later he died of liver cancer (May 20). He was given the full honors normally accorded to a leader of his stature; his funeral committee was headed by Liu Shao-ch’i, the dean of the Chinese Communist labor movement (in the Maoist version of history), and at a memorial service on May 23, veteran north China Party leader Li Hsueh-feng delivered a eiilogy.
During Lai’s six-year period of leadership of the Trade Union Federation, membership had climbed from 10 million in 1952 to over 16 million in late 1957, an expansion that approximately coincided with the First Five-Year Plan (1953-1957). His death, of course, necessitated a reshuffling of the ACFTU leadership. At a special meeting of the Federation in August 1958, Liu Ning-i succeeded to the ACFTU chairmanship.
Politics
Returning to Shansi in the fall of 1949, Lai became one of the most active and important Parly officials there through 1951, although he was politically outranked by Ch’eng Tzu-hua, who was the provincial Party secretary, the governor, and the commander and political commissar of the Shansi Military District (as well as an alternate member of the Party Central Committee from 1945). However, by mid-1950 Ch’eng was mainly occupied with responsibilities in Peking, and it is probable that Lai was regarded as the senior leader in the province. In April 1950 he became a member of the Shansi Provincial People’s Government Council (serving under Governor Ch’eng Tzu-hua), and four months later he was named as chairman of the government’s Finance and Economics Committee. In February 1951 Lai succeeded Ch’eng as the provincial governor, and at approximately this same time he also became the ranking secretary of the Shansi Party Committee.
In the mid-fifties Lai was particularly active. He presided over most of the ACFTU meetings and usually participated in national conferences where trade union interests were involved, as in May 1956 when he addressed a national confeience of outstanding workers” on the need to fulfill the First Five-Year Plan ahead of schedule. He also spoke before the annual sessions of the NPC and presented reports before the State Council on trade union work. In addition, Lai was a frequent contributor to the press, including the JMJP, the Kung-jen jih-pao (Workers’ daily, the organ of the ACFTU), and Hsueh-hsi (Study). For the last-mentioned publication, then the most important CCP journal, Lai wrote an article on leadership in the trade unions for the second issue of 1958 (January 18).
At the Party’s Eighth National Congress in September 1956, Lai delivered the major report on trade union work and at the close of the meetings was elected to membership on the Party Central Committee. Then 46 years old, he was one of the youngest men elected to full’ membership. His election was also notable in that he was one of only 33 men elected a Central Committee member who had been neither a full nor an alternate member of the Seventh Central Committee elected in 1945. Two of Lai’s colleagues in the ACFTU, Liu Ning-i and Liu Ch’ang-sheng, also became full Central Committee members at this time. In contrast to the two Liu's, both of whom have been extremely active in the international activities of the Trade Union Federation, Lai’s contributions were mainly in domestic affairs. He did, however, make two trips abroad on behalf of the Federa-tion, in both cases to the Soviet Union. In May 1954 he led a delegation to Moscow to attend the 11th All-Soviet Trade Union Congress (remaining there until August), and in July 1957 he led a group to a meeting of the World Federation of Trade Unions.
Membership
In December 1951 Lai was named to membership on the newly established North China Administrative Committee (NCAC), the governmental organ responsible for the provinces of Hopeh, Chahar, Shansi, Pingyuan, and Suiyuan. Earlier in 1953 Lai had been named to two other posts under the administration of the central government. In January he became a member of a committee to “thoroughly implement” the Marriage Law, which had been promulgated in 1950, and in the next month he was named as a member of the Central Election Committee. Chaired by Liu Shao-ch’i, the Election Committee was responsible for the conduct of nationwide elections to the forthcoming NPC. When the elections were held in 1954, Lai was named as a deputy from Honan, and at the close of the session of the First NPC in September 1954, he was appointed as a member of the NPC Standing Committee. At each of the five annual sessions of the First NPC (1954-1958) Lai served as a member of the Congress Presidium (steering committee).
In December 1954 he attended the meetings of the CPPCC as a representative of the Trade Union Federation and was elected to the Second National Committee a post he held until his death in 1958. Because the ACF plays a major role in the education of workers (see under Li Chieh-po), Lai was a logical nominee for membership on two special organizations formed in 1956 to advance literacy in China. In February of that year a committee to popularize standard spoken Chinese (p’u- tung-huo) was created, and in the next month the National Association for the Elimination of Illiteracy was established. Lai served as a member of both organizations until his death. Similarly, he was named to chair a special committee established in July 1956 to “disseminate scientific and technical knowledge” among workers and employees. In this connection, it appears that Lai took a special interest in the application of technology to Chinese industry. He was cited for his efforts in these endeavors in Li Hsueh- feng s memorial address and also by labor leader Liu Tzu-chiu in a brief article in the JMJP of May 23, 1958,
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Born
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Died
1958 (aged 47) -
Nationality
China -
Ethnicity
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Political Party
Chinese Communist Party