Background
Little is known about his background.
- Photos
- Works
- Photos
- Works
Lei Jen-min
Edit Profile
also known as
Lei Renmin
Education
1928 - Beiping University, majored in Economics
1934 - Waseda University, Master in Economics
Career
However, under the impact of the May 30th Movement (1925) and the Northern Expedition, which began in mid-1926, the province was increasingly opened up to the political activities of both the KMT and the CCP. Lei was apparently influenced by these events, because in 1928, while still in his teens, he joined a CCP cell at the Kuo-min Normal School. Other prominent present-day Communists who attended the school include Po I-po and Jung Tzu-ho. After graduation about 1930, Lei went to the Peking-Tientsin area where he engaged in Party activities for two years. He returned to Shansi in 1932 and, because of his political work among the students in Taiyuan, he was imprisoned by the Yen Hsi-shan government.
After ostensibly renouncing Communism, Lei was released from prison in 1935. In the following year, Yen Hsi-shan, who was increasingly apprehensive about Japanese incursions into north China, created the so-called Sacrifice League and in 1937 a paramilitary organization is known as the Dare-to-Die Corps. Both organizations were heavily infiltrated with Communists and other leftist elements. About the time war broke out in 1937, Lei was a brigade commander in Yen Hsi- shan’s Shansi Army, but by 1939 he was commanding the Fourth Column of the Dare-to-Die Corps in northwest Shansi near the Shensi border. Lei’s column was subordinate to the “New Shansi Army.” which, though nominally under Yen’s control, was cooperating with Communist units in waging guerrilla warfare against the Japanese. In the last days of 1939, under a set of complex circumstances described in the biography of P’eng Shao-hui, Lei took his men over to the Communist side. He presumably remained for the balance of the war in northwest Shansi, where the principal Communist unit was the 358th Brigade under P’eng Shao-hui’s command.
Under the terms of the truce worked out in early 1946 by U.S. Envoy George C. Marshall, special field teams were assigned to various cities to keep the peace between opposing Communist and Nationalist military forces. With the simulated rank of colonel, Lei was assigned for a brief period in 1946 to the truce field team at Anyang, a city in northern Honan, astride the important Peking-Hankow (Pinghan) Railway. When the truce arrangements broke down completely over the winter of 1946-47, Lei was ordered back to his native Shansi. Little is known of his activities in the latter stages of the civil war aside from the fact that in 1948 he was serving as a deputy commander of a military sub-district in northwestern Shansi, a command headed by Wang Shang-Jung, a veteran Communist military commander.
In August 1948 the Communists established the North China People’s Government (NCPG) to govern those portions of north China then under their control. When the NCPG was staffed in the following month, Lei was named as a deputy director of the Civil Affairs Department. In February 1949 the NCPG moved from Shih-chia-Chuang to Peking, and from that date until October 1949 when the Communists established their central government and absorbed the NCPG, the NCPG was an approximation of a central government. In December 1949, just two months after the inauguration of the central government, Lei was named to head the Staff Office of the Ministry of Internal Affairs as well as the Cadres Office in the same ministry. He held these two posts until September 1951 when he became a vice-minister in the Ministry of Trade, then responsible for both foreign trade and domestic commerce. It soon became evident that Lei’s responsibilities involved foreign trade. The first concrete evidence of his new responsibility occurred in April 1952 when he was named as a member of the delegation sent by the PRC to the “International Economic Conference” in Moscow (see under Nan Han-ch’en), one of Peking s first major efforts to break out of the trade embargo imposed upon the Communist bloc by the Western allies as a result of the Korean War. Immediately upon the return of the delegation from Moscow, the Chinese formed the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade (May 1952). Lei, named as a member of the Council, had by 1954 been promoted to a vice-chairmanship (and since that date has served on occasion as the acting chairman in the absence of Chairman Nan Han-ch’en). This council in subsequent years has been the principal channel for the PRC to conduct trade negotiations with nations with which it does not have formal diplomatic relations.
Politics
In August 1952 the Ministry of Trade was divided into the ministries of Commerce and Foreign Trade. Logically, Lei was assigned as a vice-minister to the latter ministry; as of the mid- 1960’s he shares the distinction with Li Ch'iang of being the only men to have served continuously as vice-ministers in this important ministry. In addition, Lei has served from time to time as the acting minister in place of Minister Yeh Chi-chuang. In the 13-ycar period between 1952 and 1965, he has been extremely active as one of China’s top international trade negotiators. In general, he has tended to deal more with the non-bloc nations than with the Communist bloc; he is known to have negotiated and signed trade agreements on at least 24 occasions with non-Communist countries in Europe, Africa, and Asia, as opposed to only five such agreements with Communist countries. Such negotiations have taken Lei abroad on several occasions, some of these trips being quite noteworthy. From April to July 1954 he was an adviser to Premier Chou En-lai at the Geneva Conference, which brought about a peace settlement in Indochina. While in Geneva Lei held a press conference for the large number of foreign corresepondents attending this important conference; the press conference placed great stress upon the “bright prospect” for increased trade with “new China.”
From March to May 1955 Lei was in Japan leading a trade delegation, and while there he signed a trade agreement with the Japanese. Though delegations to and from Japan became commonplace in the ensuing years, as of 1955 extremely few Chinese groups had been in Tokyo. In September 1958, during a visit to Tunisia, he signed the first Sino-Tunisian trade agreement—an agreement signed five years prior to the establishment of diplomatic ties between the two nations. From Tunis he proceeded to Morocco, another nation then lacking formal diplomatic ties with Peking. Not only did Lei negotiate a trade agreement, but before he left Rabat the Moroccans had agreed to the estab-lishment of formal diplomatic relations. Several years later he was involved in similar negotiations when he accompanied Liao Ch’eng-chih to Italy, ostensibly at the invitation of the Italian Peace Committee. However, in his capacity as a vice-chairman of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, Lei negotiated an agreement whereby “non-official” commercial representative bureaus of each country were to be established in each other’s country. (The bureaus were in fact opened in 1965 in Rome and Peking.)
Membership
Unlike the majority of Chinese leaders Lei has not had to devote much time to relatively periph-eral activities (such as “peace” or “friendship” organizations) . Even his few extracurricular duties have been rather closely related to his main function as a foreign trade specialist. For example, from 1953 to 1956 he was a member of the Executive Committee of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce; from July 1955 to the present he has served on the Board of Directors of the Chinese People’s Institute of Foreign Affairs; and since March 1957 he has been a member of the State Council’s Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission. In short, Lei has apparently been categorized as a specialist and allowed to devote his time almost exclusively to his main activity, foreign trade.
-
Born
-
Nationality
China -
Ethnicity
-
Political Party
Chinese Communist Party