Li’s exact birthplace is unknown, he may have been born in Ch’ien-chiang where the Li family originated or in the town of Ching-shan where his parents later moved. He grew up in an intellectual revolutionary environment; his older brother Li Shu-ch’eng was a T’ung-meng hui member who took part in the overthrow of the Manchu Dynasty and became a secretary to Sun Yat-sen in 1912.
Probably influenced by his brother who had studied in Japan, Li also went there about 1913 to finish his secondary schooling. During his six years in Japan Li studied in the engineering department of Tokyo Imperial University, but more important for his later career, he became acquainted with Marxian ideas. He returned to China in 1919, the year of the opening of the May Fourth Movement, which made such an impact on the young intellectuals of Li’s generation.
He went to Shanghai where he shared a large house in the French Concession with a number of relatives. Because the family had means, Li was not pressed to find work and was able to devote himself to the translation of Marxist literature and the exchange of ideas with other young students also interested in Marxism. Being fluent in Japanese he was able to translate radical Japanese works. He also served as an editor in the important Commercial Press in Shanghai. Among his particular friends were Li Ta, Ch’en Tu-hsiu, Shao Li-tzu, and Tai Chi-t’ao, the last two soon to leave the Marxists and become important members of the KMT. The group frequently met in secret at Tai’s residence in Shanghai where they made plans to organize a Communist party in China. Ch’en Tu-hsiu, who was one of the prime movers, introduced the group to Comintern representative Gregory Voitinsky when the latter visited Shanghai in early 1920. It was through the efforts of Voitinsky Ch’en, Li, and their friends that a small nucleus of a communist party came into being in Shanghai in May 1920. A year later this nucleus, plus small cells of Marxists from other cities, founded the CCP.
As part of a program to develop other cells in China, Li went to Wuhan in the latter part of 1920 to discuss the matter with Tung Pi-wu and Ch’en T’an-ch’iu. Returning to Shanghai he and a colleague established a “committee of the workers’ movement” in January 1921, which distributed large quantities of socialist literature. In the meantime, Li had taken part in the publication of Shanghai weekly entitled Lao-tung chieh (The world of labor), probably as the chief editor. The views he expressed in this and other publications illustrated his preference for a legalistic approach to Marxism, an approach that would be rejected when the Party was founded in Shanghai in July 1921.
At the Party’s Seventh National Congress, held in Yenan from April to June 1945, Li was elected, probably in absentia, a member of the CCP Central Committee. Not long afterwards, when the Japanese surrendered in August 1945, Chu Te, commander of the Communist armies, sent a series of instructions to the commander-in-chief of the Japanese armies in China. Among these was an order to send “your representative” in Wuhan to General Li’s headquarters in the Ta- pieh Mountain region to arrange for the surrender of Japanese troops in Hupeh and Honan." Predictably, this order was not obeyed, because the Japanese surrendered to representatives of Chiang Kai-shek’s national government. In the immediate postwar period, as the Communists and Nationalists jockeyed for strategic positions, a series of skirmishes took place in many parts of China. Li’s forces were badly mauled by the Nationalists in October 1945, and this was noted by Mao Tse-tung a few days later in a bitterly worded statement." Li’s men were forced to retreat to the mountainous regions of north-central Hupeh. The difficulties for the Communists abated considerably in early 1946 following the signing of the cease-fire agreement worked out between the Communists and Nationalists by U.S. Special Envoy George C. Marshall. However, in June 1946, Li’s men were again under heavy attack; known by this time as the Central Plains Liberation Army (commanding the Central Plains Liberated Area), they shifted eastward across the Peking-Hankow Railway and settled around the town of Hsuan-hua-tien, not far north of Li’s native Huang-an hsien. But continuing KMT assaults were so severe that Li was ordered to evacuate most of his troops westward where, over the next few months, he established bases in south Shensi, southwest Honan, and northwest Hupeh. Some of his troops remained in central and eastern Hupeh to conduct guerrilla warfare, and others moved northeast to Anhwei to join other units of the New Fourth Army.
Li was back in the Oyiiwan region by mid-1947, and over the course of the next year and a half his troops played a significant role in the conquest of the area. Many of his battles were fought in coordination with Liu Po-ch’eng’s troops, which, in the period from 1947 to 1949, made a number of thrusts into the Central Plains region. By 1948 Li was serving under Liu as a deputy commander of the Central Plains PLA, which was redesignated the Second Field Army during the winter of 1948-49. By the spring of 1949 the Second Field Army was preparing to assault the major Yangtze River cities in cooperation with Lin Piao’s Fourth Field Army. The Wuhan area fell to the Communists in April-May 1949, Liu Po-ch’eng’s army soon moved into the southwest, but Lin Piao’s men remained in Wuhan, and thus in 1949 Li served for a time as a deputy commander of Lin’s Fourth Field Army.
With the Communist conquest of Hupeh, Li quickly emerged as the dominant official there. In May 1949 he became the first Communist governor, as well as commander and political commissar of the Hupeh Military District. At this same time, or soon thereafter, he also became the ranking secretary of the CCP Hupeh Committee. He relinquished the post of commander to Wang Shu-sheng in 1950, but he retained the other three until 1954. Li was also a member of the Central Plains Provisional People’s Government, which was established in March 1949 (see under Teng Tzu-hui), this temporary, multi-provincial government organ was abolished in February 1950, when it was replaced, in effect, by the larger Central-South Military and Administrative Committee (CSMAC), which had jurisdiction over Honan, Hupeh, Hunan, Kiangsi, Kwang-tung, and Kwangsi provinces. Li was a member of the CSMAC, which was headquartered in Wuhan under Lin Piao’s chairmanship, and from March 1950 he was also a member of the CSMAC’s Land Reform Committee. Six months later, in September, Li was appointed chairman of the Hupeh government’s Finance and Economics Committee.
In October 1952 Li was promoted from member to vice-chairman (one of several) of the CSMAC, a post to which he was reappointed in January 1953 when the CSMAC was reorganized into the Central-South Administrative Committee (CSAC). In May he relinquished his post on the regional Land Reform Committee, but at the same time he succeeded Lin Piao as chairman of the CSAC’s Finance and Economics Committee. Not long before this, in March 1953, Li was identified as third deputy secretary of the Party s Central-South Bureau. These posts, taken together with those already mentioned, suggest that until his transfer to Peking in mid-1954, Li was among the half-dozen top leaders in central-south China. He was clearly outranked by Lin Piao and Lo Jung-huan, but Lin was ill for much of this period and'Lo spent most of his time in Peking. Other central-south China regional leaders of approximately equal stature to Li included Teng Tzu-hui, Yeh Chien-ying, T’an Cheng, Chang Yun-i, T’ao Chu, and Li Hsueh-feng, but none of these six had reached the Politburo in 1956, the year Li Hsien-nien was elected.
Like most top regional leaders, Li held nominal posts in the “mass” organizations, serving as chairman of the Hupeh chapter of the China Peace Committee from 1950 and as a vice-chairman of the central-south China branch of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association from the same year. He relinquished these, and his numerous other posts, in June 1954 when he was transferred to Peking. Li replaced Teng Hsiao-p’ing as minister of Finance, and he also became a vice-chairman under Ch’en Yun of the Government Administration Council’s Finance and Economics Committee. A short time later Li was elected a deputy from Hupeh to the First NPC which, at its first session in September 1954, inaugurated the constitutional government and partially re-organized the central government. Li was reappointed minister of Finance, and he was also appointed a vice-premier of the State Council and a member of the National Defense Council, the successor organ to the People’s Revolutionary Military Council to which he had previously belonged. In the following month he became director of the newly established Fifth Staff Office under Chou En-lai’s State Council. This office was charged with coordinating the work of the various State Council ministries and bureaus involved in financial and trade affairs. An employee in the ministry of Finance throughout most of the 1950’s has stated that Li was seldom present at the ministry, but rather spent most of his time at the more important Fifth Staff Office. Li continues to head this important body which, since September 1959, has been known as the Finance and Trade Staff Office. Three years later, in October 1962, he was given further responsibilities in the economic sector when he was appointed as an additional vice-chairman ef the State Planning Commission, which is engaged in long-range planning.
Li’s participation in the Peking-Hankow Railway labor movement seems to have been his last important association with the CCP. At sometime in the early twenties he left or was expelled from the Party. He did, however, continue his interest in politics and also taught economics at a university in Wuhan. He participated in the left-KMT government established in Wuhan in late 1926, becoming minister of Education in the Hupeh Provincial Government at about this time. Li remained in Wuhan after the mid-1927 break between the CCP and the KMT, and toward the end of the year he and his friend Tung Pi-wu went into hiding in the Japanese concession. The KMT generals in charge of Wuhan sent a unit to surround the concession. Tung managed to escape, but Li was captured and immediately executed (December 17), allegedly in connection with the Communists’ attempt to capture Canton (the “Canton Commune”). This would seem to contradict the generally accepted supposition that Li had given up his CCP membership in the early twenties. It is possible, of course, that he had rejoined the Party as suggested in Tung Pi-wu’s interview with Nym Wales a decade later.”
Li’s Ma-k'o-szu tzu-pen ju-men (How to study Marx’s Das Kapital) was a popular reference for some of the early Marxist study groups. He also wrote for a number of the literary publications of the May Fourth period, which were oriented toward Marxism. These writings are amply referenced in Chow Tse-tsung’s Research Guide to the May Fourth Movement (1963). Li was concerned with theoretical Marxism but his intellectual approach to the subject has been scorned by the surviving leadership of the CCP. At the First Congress he voiced his objections to an active organizational program before further study had been undertaken, and he felt that anyone accepting Marxist principles should be admitted to the Party without having to take part as an activist. In the words of one writer, Li made the “remarkable suggestion that delegates be sent to Germany and Russia to examine the relative merits of the German and Russian revolutions. In this he was supported by Ch’en Kung-po and others.” This view, however, was rejected. Li’s position has been called “Menshevist legalism” by the important CCP leader Ch’en Yun. This derogatory term appeared in Ch’en’s essay “How to be a Communist Party Member,” which belongs to the official handbook of essays propagating the thought of Mao Tse-tung and which was used during the ideological movement launched in 1942.
Military leader Hsu Hsiang-ch’ien had been working in the Oyiiwan area from about the same time as Li, and then in 1931 the political leadership of the base was strengthened by the arrival of such top Communist leaders as Chang Kuo-t’ao, Shen Tse-min, and Ch’en Ch’ang-hao. In this same year the Party and government organs were reorganized, and in November the various military units were combined into the Fourth Front Army under Hsu Hsiang-ch’ien’s command. By approximately that time Li was secretary of the Party Committee in Huang-an hsien, chairman of the small “soviet government” in the same hsien, and commander of the Huang-an Detachment. The Nationalist government, apprehensive of the growing strength of the Oyiiwan base, conducted a series of strong attacks against the Communists. The Red Army was able to withstand the first of these, but a campaign begun in mid-1932 led to the evacuation of most of the units in the fall of 1932. (Information on the Communists who remained behind in Oyiiwan is contained in the biography of Hsu Hai-tung.)
In late 1932 and early 1933 the Fourth Front Army moved in a generally westward direction and, after fighting a number of engagements with Nationalist forces, settled down in northern Szechwan. There they established the T’ung- Nan-Pa Soviet (see under Wang Hung-k’un) and reorganized their military forces. At approximately this time Li was made political commissar of the 30th Army, one of the five armies under the Fourth Front Army. Chang Kuo-t’ao, Hsu Hsiang-ch’ien, and their men remained in this area for nearly two years. Then, in the early summer of 1935, the Chang-Hsu forces met the Long Marchers led by Mao and Chu Te in west Szechwan, The conflict that developed between Mao and Chang Kuo-t’ao at this time is described in Chang’s biography. In brief, the two leaders separated and went toward different destinations, each taking under his command some of his own units and some from his opponent.
In addition to directing his guerrilla bands, Li was also fighting in cooperation with KMT armies in the early war years. However, KMT-CCP relations rapidly worsened, particularly in the 1939-40 period, which was marked by an ever increasing number of “incidents” between Communist and KMT troops. Mao Tse-tung took note of these in a directive of May 1940, which praised Li for having “repulsed” KMT attacks in central and eastern Hupeh.'3 These episodes reached a grand climax at the time of the New Fourth Army Incident of January 1941 (see under Yeh T’ing), when important elements of the New Fourth Army (but not Li’s) were badly-mauled by the Nationalists. The Communists immediately reorganized their forces, at which time Li’s troops were designated the Fifth Division. Li became the commander and political commissar, positions he held throughout the war.
In the meantime, like most major regional and provincial leaders, Li was given an assignment in the national government when it was established in October 1949. From then until the reorganization of the central government in 1954, he was a member of the People’s Revolutionary Military Council.
Li is married to Lin Chia-mei, a minor official in the Public Health Ministry in the mid-1950’s, and an employee in her husband’s Finance and Trade Staff Office since 1958. Li has at least one son who, in 1965, was studying English in Peking at the Number Two Foreign Languages Institute.
