Li was born in Feng-shun hsien, about 50 miles northwest of Swatow in Kwangtung province. Her parents were coolies who w'orked as hod carriers for house builders. One of 12 children (10 sons and two girls), Li was adopted in infancy by a family that lived in the East River area of Kwangtung near Hai-lu-feng, later to become famous as an important early Communist soviet (see under P’eng P’ai).
She was educated locally.
In April 1927, as a local repercussion of the fighting between the KMT and the CCP, a peasant uprising took place in the East River (Tung-chiang) area, allegedly in opposition to oppressive landlords. Li took part in the revolt as head of the propaganda team, and her brother-in-law, who led the uprising, was executed by KMT troops. Four members of her adopted family were killed in early revolutionary struggles, including her husband who fell in battle in 1930. Following the abortive 1927 uprising in the East River District, about 140 of the insurgent peasants fled the area to join the forces of Ku Ta-ts’un, one of the most important of the early Kwangtung CCP guerrilla leaders. In Li’s autobiographical account, she states that she remained with Ku’s troops for over a year; they fought, redistributed the land, and “made propaganda,” mainly in eastern Kwangtung near the Fukien border. Li also helped to organize coolies and workers and in 1928 was engaged in political work for Ku’s forces. In the following year, still under Ku’s jurisdiction, Li was in charge of women’s work in the small city of Ta- p’u, Kwangtung, about 80 miles north of Swatow.
The areas where Li had been working in Kwangtung were quite close to sections of western Fukien that were under partial Communist control and where the Fukien Soviet had been established under the leadership of Chang Ting-ch’eng, Teng Tzu-hui, and T’an Chen-lin. Li was sent there by the Party in 1930 to work in a branch of the Communist government. In 1933 she was sent to the central Soviet capital in Juichin, Kiangsi, where at the Second All-China Congress of Soviets, held in January-February 1934, she was elected a member of the Central Executive Committee, the governing body of the Chinese Soviet Republic. She remained in Juichin until the Long March began in the fall of 1934.
Li apparently remained in east China throughout the civil war with the Nationalists in the late forties. In February 1949, the First East China Women’s Conference (held at an undisclosed location) elected her as a delegate to the First National Women’s Congress, convened in Peking in March-April. At this meeting she was elected to the Executive Committee of the All China Federation of Democratic Women (ACFDW), a post she held until the convocation of the next congress in April 1953. As a delegate of the East China Liberated Areas, Li also attended the first session of the CPPCC (September 1949), at which time the new national government was inaugurated. After the CPPCC sessions, Li returned to her native Kwangtung where she assumed several new positions, the first of which was as secretary of the Women’s Work Committee of the Party’s South China Sub-bureau (responsible for both Kwangtung and Kwangsi provinces), a post she probably retained until the Sub-bureau was dissolved in mid-1955. She also became, in December 1949, a member of the South China Branch of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association (SSFA), then one of the most active of the “people’s” organizations. Three years later (November 1952) she became a member of the Kwangtung Branch of the SSFA.
Li was working in central Kwangtung in mid- 1954 when she chaired a special committee established to discuss the draft national constitution. Soon after, she was named as a deputy from this area to the Kwangtung Provincial People’s Congress (KPPC), and when the Congress held its first meeting in August 1954, she was elected to the First NPC, her first national post. She was subsequently re-elected to the Second NPC (1959-1964), as well as to the Third NPC, which opened in December 1964. At the next session of the KPPC (February
1955), she was elected to the Kwangtung Provincial People’s Council, the executive arm of the Kwangtung Government. Li presumably continues to hold her seat on both the KPPC and the Government Council; at most of the numerous sessions of the KPPC held since 1954 she has served on the ad hoc presidium (steering committee).
In the wake of the Kao Kang purge, the national Party authorities decided to replace the former national and provincial Discipline Inspection Committees with more powerful Control Commissions. The Kwangtung Control Commission was set up in September 1955, serving initially as a deputy secretary, Li has been the senior secretary since at least August 1957, a position she continues to hold. As a consequence of this assignment, she was a logical candidate for membership on the national CCP Central Control Commission following the decision taken at the Party Central Committee 10th Plenum (September Î962) to expand and strengthen the Control Commission. Within the Kwangtung Party structure Li was also a deputy secretary by 1956 and a secretary by 1960, positions that placed her directly under T’ao Chu, the senior Kwangtung secretary from 1955 to 1965 and one of the most powerful men in the entire central-south China region.
At the Party’s historic Eighth National Congress, held in Peking in September 1956, Li was elected an alternate member of the Party Central Committee. Although she had then been a Party member for nearly three decades, her importance seemed considerably less than many persons who failed to be elected to the powerful Central Committee. Her election, therefore, may have been largely a gesture, signifying the CCP elite’s willingness to include women within the top ranks of the Party. Nonetheless, only eight women were elected to the Centrol Committee four as full members and four as alternates.
When Nym Wales interviewed Li in mid- 1937, the latter was said to be “Chief of the Soviet Women’s Department,” a post presumably subordinate to the Party Central Committee. Li said that she was then married to Teng Chun- hsiung (whose antecedents are otherwise unknown) and had a 12-year old child. Nym Wales has described Li as among the Party elite who were self-educated and who received training at the “Chinese Red Academy,” training she may have received at Juichin prior to the Long March or in north Shensi where the Red Army Academy was re-created at the end of the March. Li’s activities during the Sino-Japanese War are not documented, but by the end of the war she was the secretary of the Party Committee in Ch’ang-t’ing hsien in Fukien, an area that in the early thirties had come under the control of the Chinese Soviet Republic, whose capital was at Juichin, Kiangsi.
From 1949 to 1954 the PRC had large government organizations with jurisdiction over the six regions of China. The organization that governed Kwangtung (as well as Hupeh, Hunan, Honan, Kiangsi, and Kwangsi) was known as the Central-South Military and Administrative Committee (CSMAC). When the CSMAC was inaugurated in February 1950, Li was named as a member, holding this post until the Committee was reorganized into the Central-South Administrative Committee in early 1953. She was also a member (from March 1950 to May 1953) of the Land Reform Committee, one of the most important of the CSMAC’s subordinate organs and one headed by important Party leader Li Hsueh-feng. Paralleling this position at the regional level, Li was appointed in November 1950 as a vice-chairman of the Kwangtung
Provincial Land Reform Committee. Li’s participation on the land reform committees, the organs largely responsible for the land reform “movements” of the early fifties, was probably made on the basis of her experiences in the countryside as a youth. Other positions held by Li in the early fifties included the chairmanship of the Preparatory Committee of the Kwangtung Democratic Women’s Federation (by April 1951—?) and membership on the joint Kwangtung Province-Canton Municipal Opium and Narcotics Suppression Committee (May 1952-?). In the latter post she served under the chairmanship of her former superior from the twenties, Ku Ta-ts’un. But Li’s most important tasks in the early fifties were probably her Party assignments in both central and eastern Kwangtung; in the period from 1950 to 1956 she served as first and second secretaries for the Party’s East Kwangtung District Committee as well as its counterpart for central Kwangtung.
At the age of 17 Li was married to a son of her adopted family (petty merchants w'ho also owned about half an acre of land). The husband liked her, but Li stated that she “did not love him because he was ten years older than I.” When a peasant uprising occurred in the mid-twenties, Li was chosen to engage in “revolutionary work.” She explained that the “revolutionary slogans then demanded equality of men and women and individual choice in marriage instead of the old family contract, and this was the main slogan which attracted me.” Li’s husband joined the CCP in 1926 and Li joined herself in the following year.
