Background
Li was born near Changsha, the Hunan capital, in 1899.
Li was born near Changsha, the Hunan capital, in 1899.
He and his three brothers were reared in a family in which the father was a teacher in a boys’ school. American authoress Nym Wales has written that Li was among those Chinese Communists who had been “produced by the old Confucian scholars . . . whose aristocratic families were bankrupt.” He studied in a normal school in Changsha in the mid-teens during the same years that Mao Tse-tung, Li Wei-han, and Ts’ai Ho-sen (his future brother-in-law) were there. As a member of the important Hsin-min hsueh-hui (New people’s study society; see under Li’s wife, Ts’ai Ch’ang), whose original members in Hunan produced a large number of leading Communists, Li was enlisted in the “work-and-study” program to go to France. In preparation, he and a number of others, including Liu Shao-ch’i, went to Peking in 1918, and from there to Paoting to take a French language course.
Then in 1919 he left for France, going to the Collège de Montargis south of Paris where Ts’ai Ho-sen headed the branch of the Hsin-min hsueh-hui. However, in the five-odd years that Li was in France it appears that he, like most of the worker-students, was more deeply involved in earning a living and in political affairs than in formal study. In the summer of 1920 a split occurred within the ranks of the Hsin-min hsueh-hui members in France. One group, headed by Ts’ai Ho-sen, led the more radical elements in establishing the Young China Communist Party and a Socialist Youth League in 1921-1922. The latter was, in fact, reorganized from the Kung-hsueh hu-chu she (Work-and-study cooperative society), whose membership included Li, Li Wei-han, Ts’ai Ch’ang, and Hsiang Ching-yii (Ts’ai Ho-sen’s wife). Thus, by 1922 Li was a member of what proved to be the equivalent of the French branch of the CCP, formed in China the previous year, and in this sense he can be described as one of the founding members of the CCP. Edgar Snow, in accordance with interviews he recorded in 1936 in Kansu, has written that in 1921 Li joined the French Communist Party, but there is little to suggest that he was active in it.
Snow has also written that Li and a fellow student, Nieh Jung-chen, were tutored in both French and Marxism by the same teacher and that in 1923 he spent some time with Nieh in Berlin. Apparently, the visit was brief, because he married Ts’ai Ch’ang in 1923 in France, and in the next year he and Chou En-lai both became members of the KMT Executive Committee in France. Membership at this time in both the KMT and the CCP was a common thing among Communists. Sometime in 1924 Li left for Moscow where he spent half a year studying at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East, returning to China by late 1924 or early 1925. Going to Canton, then the revolutionary center of China, he quickly took up important posts in the KMT. He is said to have been an instructor in the Whampoa Military Academy’s Political Department where Chou En-lai was a key official. Li Jui, Mao Tse-tung’s biographer, has written that Li Fu-ch’un headed a KMT political training class (cheng-chih chiang- hsi pan), at which Mao lectured on at least one occasion on the “peasant question.” Li Jui also claimed that the most of the graduates of this class later took part in the Northern Expedition as political workers.
In 1926 Li became director of the Political Department of T’an Yen-k’ai’s Second Army, a force consisting of Hunanese troops and one of the major units of the National Revolutionary Army. In this capacity Li made the Northern Expedition, which began in mid-1926. In broad terms, the Northern Expeditionary forces followed three northward routes: one of these took the coastal route to Shanghai, another marched due north from Canton to Wuhan (the army which included the troops led by the important Communist Yeh T’ing). A third route was taken by the Second Army, which went through Nanchang and then marched through Anhwei before arriving in Nanking in March 1927. The Sixth Army, in which Lin Po-ch’ii headed the Political Department, also took the route leading to Nanking. Within a few weeks of the arrival of the Second Army in Nanking, Chiang Kai-shek staged his anti-Communist coup; like many of the surviving Communists working in KMT armies in Shanghai or Nanking, Li fled to Hupeh where the CCP was still maintaining its uneasy alliance with the “Left” KMT in Wuhan, the Hupeh capital. He reportedly continued to work as a political officer in the Wuhan armies, but then all relations with the “Left" KMT were broken when the Communists engineered the Nanchang Uprising on August 1, 1927. One source suggests that Li may have been scheduled for some role in this famous revolt, but from other evidence it appears that he remained in Hupeh. In any case, within a few weeks after the Nanchang Uprising Li was in north Hupeh where, it appears, he was making preparations in one of the areas in which the Communists were planning to stage peasant uprisings. However, these did not materialize in north Hupeh, and Li soon made his way to Shanghai where for most of the next four years he worked in the Party underground. According to Edgar Snow’s 1936 interview with Li, he was forced to flee to Hong Kong in 1931, but then he returned to Shanghai.
In 1932, presumably because of the ever increasing suppression of the Communists by the KMT, Li went to Kiangsi where the rural base established by Mao Tse-tung and Chu Te had grown to sizable proportions. In Kiangsi Li served in the Red Army’s Political Department and by the fall of 1933 he was secretary of the CCP Kiangsi Provincial Committee. In December 1933 he was elected to Executive Committee membership in the Kiangsi Provincial Soviet (see under Tseng Shan and Ch’en Cheng-jen), one of the member soviets of the Chinese Soviet Republic established in Juichin in November 1931. When the Second Congress of the Republic was held in January-February 1934, Li and his wife were elected as members of the Republic’s Central Executive Committee, the governing body of the Juichin government until the Long March began in the fall of 1934.
In January 1934, just prior to the above-mentioned Juichin Congress, Li was elected to membership on the Party’s Sixth Central Committee, of interest is the fact that Li’s wife had been elected to the Central Committee nearly six years earlier. Li made the Long March as a political officer in Mao Tse-tung’s First Front Army. After the completion of the March Li worked in the Yii-wang area (then in Kansu, but now in Ninghsia) where Edgar Snow interviewed him in the late summer of 1936. Snow identified him at the time as “chairman of the Central Committee of the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia Communist party,” and a year later Snow’s wife (Nym Wales) described him as “acting Chairman of the Kansu Provincial Soviet.” Perhaps more important was his role in the Party headquarters, which was at Pao-an in northern Shensi until the end of 1936 and thereafter at Yu-nan. There Li reportedly headed the Central Committee’s Organization Department from 1935 until he relinquished the post to Ch’in Pang-hsien in 1937. From then to at least 1948 Li served as a deputy to Ch’in, Liu Shao-ch’i, Ch’en Yun, and P’eng Chen.
The Communists’ governmental organization in Manchuria from 1946 to 1949 was known as the Northeast Administrative Committee (NEAC), and then from 1949 as the Northeast People’s Government (NEPG). From 1948 Li was vice-chairman of the Finance and Economics Committee where he was subordinate to Chairman Ch’en Yun, with whom he had worked so closely in past years and when the NEAC was reorganized in August 1949 he became a NEPG vice-chairman under Kao Kang. Kao and Li were the senior Communists in Manchuria when the central government was established in Peking, by which time most of the other key leaders in Manchuria had been transferred to the capital. When the new government was formed in October Li was named to membership on the Finance and Economics Committee (FEC), the most important economic body in the early years of the PRC.
In March 1956 Li became a vice-chairman of the newly established Scientific Planning Commission under the State Council, but he relinquished the post for 4 months later when the commission was reorganized. At the Party’s Eighth Congress in September 1956 Li was one of the featured speakers, his address dealing with the strengthening of state planning work. When the meetings closed he was elected to membership on the Eighth Central Committee, and, on the following day, when the new committee held its first plenum, he was elected for the first time to the Politburo. A year and a half later, at the Fifth Plenum (May 1958), he was added as a new member of the Party’s Central Secretariat, the organ responsible for implementing Politburo policies. While the Plenum was in session, Li was once again in Moscow, this time as the ranking deputy to Ch’en Yun, who had gone there to attend (as an observer) a meeting of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, the economic arm of the Warsaw Pact nations. Both Ch’en and Li were received by Khrushchev during this visit, and Ch’en attended a one-day session of the Warsaw Pact, a meeting that Li may also have attended.
By the early 1940’s Li moved into financial and economic work, a field in which he seems to have been without experience, but one in which he has sinced worked. From 1940 to about the end of the war he again served under Ch’en Yun as deputy director of the Party’s Finance and Economics Department, and as part of this work he was in charge of a major campaign in the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia area to boost production in the fact of an economic blockade enforced by the Nationalists, which worked severe hardships on the Communists’ main base. The necessities of the situation required that virtually all organizations take part in productive enterprises, and thus it is probable that Li was in constant contact with Party leaders, heads of cooperatives, and even with elements of the Red Army (see under Wang Chen) who were called upon to increase food and material supplies needed to sustain the military forces and the local population. Like most important leaders in Yenan during the war, Li contributed articles from time to time to the journals and newspapers published in Communist-held areas or to the few journals that were allowed to publish in the Nationalist capital.
In August 1952 Li left Peking for Moscow on what proved to be one of the most important missions ever undertaken hy a PRC leader and one that was to keep him abroad for nine months. The group was led by Chou En-lai and included such key figures as Ch’en Yun, PLA deputy chief-of-staff Su Yu, Air Force chief Liu Ya-lou, and Minister of Heavy Industry Wang Ho-shou (who had replaced Li in this post just prior to the delegation’s departure). Over the next month this team of specialists negotiated the return to China of the Chinese Changchun Railway and an extension for the joint use of the naval facilities at Port Arthur. Chou and the rest of the group returned to Peking, but Li Fu-ch’un remained in Moscow and a few weeks later, in October, he was a member of Liu Shao-chi’s delegation to the 19th CPSU Congress. Li remained in Moscow after this delegation re-turned home, and then in March 1953 he was a member of Chou En-lai’s delegation to Stalin’s funeral, two months later Li went to Prague from Moscow for the eighth anniversary of the end of World War II. In the interim, Foreign Trade Minister Yeh Chi-chuang had arrived in Moscow, and together with Li Fu-ch’un he negotiated and signed on March 21, 1953, a trade protocol for 1953, a protocol to the February 1950 agreement on credits to the PRC, and an agreement for Soviet assistance to China for the construction of new power stations. As already indicated, Li remained in Moscow for several weeks after the signing of these agreements, but the importance of his delayed departure did not become public knowledge until four months after his return to Peking (May) when, speaking before a meeting of the Central People’s Government Council on September 16, he revealed that the Soviets had agreed to assist the Chinese in the construction and renovation of 141 large-scale projects, most of them related to heavy industry. It was revealed in the Chinese press at this time that the 141 projects were to be in addition to the 50 already under construction with Soviet assistance.
With the assumption of the Planning Commission chairmanship in 1954, Li moved into the number two spot in the PRC’s economic hierarchy, ranking behind Politburo member Ch’en Yun. Although a precise delineation cannot be made between their functions in the mid-fifties, it appears that Ch’en worked principally at policy levels, whereas Li (although obviously involved in policy decisions) was primarily responsible for the day-to-day functioning of the economy through his chairmanship of the State Planning Commission.
Since the mid-fifties Li has taken part in talks with visiting delegations, particularly economic groups from Communist nations. He has, in addition, participated on occasion in negotiations with visiting Communist delegations, especially in the early sixties when the Sino-Soviet ideological dispute sharply intensified. In this connection, Li led a delegation to Hanoi in August-September 1960 for the 15th anniversary of the North Vietnamese government and to attend the Third Congress of the Vietnamese Workers’ (Communist) Party. But principally his role has been in the domestic economic field, and there have been few occasions (particularly since he eclipsed Ch’en Yun) that he has not been a featured speaker at one of the innumerable economic conferences held in China. Li rose to new heights during the early stages of the “great proletarian cultural revolution” launched in 1966. In the fall of that year he was identified as a member of the Politburo’s Standing Committee, the most powerful single organization in China, a position to which he was probably elected at the Party’s 11th Plenum in August 1966.
During the first decade of the PRC, Li’s prime responsibilities had been within the CCP and government, but he also belonged to two “mass” organizations. From 1949 to 1954 he was a member of the Executive Board of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association, and from 1953 to 1957 he was an Executive Committee member of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). He was not re-elected to the new ACFTU Executive Committee when the Federation held its Seventh Congress in December 1957, but he did make a major address to the Congress that summarized the state of the economy as the First Five-Year Plan drew to a close.
