Background
Li was born in Yung-chi, in southwest Shansi near the Yellow River.
Li was born in Yung-chi, in southwest Shansi near the Yellow River.
Nothing is known of his early career, but by the winter of 1937-38 he was one of the top leaders in Party organizational work in southeast Shansi. Little is known of Li’s wartime record, but judging from his participation in a memorial service (1965) for Chang Yu-ch’ing, a leading north China official and one-time secretary of the Shansi CCP Committee until his death in 1942, it appears that Li remained in the Shansi area throughout the war.
It is also probable that he was affiliated with the Shansi-Hopeh-Shantung-Honan (Chin-Chi-Lu-Yii) Border Region (see under Yang Hsiu-feng and Liu Po-ch’eng), because in March 1946 Li was a member of the presidium for a session of the Chin-Chi-Lu-Yu Assembly. In the next month Li was identified as secretary of the T’ai-hang CCP Committee. T’ai-hang was one of the major sub-divisions of the Chin-Chi-Lu-Yu Border Region, and its eastern border roughly paralleled the important rail line from Shih-chia-chuang in Hopeh to Hsin-hsiang in north Honan. In the late forties, during the civil war against the Nationalists, the armies led by Liu Po-ch’eng moved from the Chin-Chi-Lu-Yu area to central China, and in 1948 Li was serving as a member of the Party’s Central China Bureau. In the following year he was head of the bureau’s Organizational Department, he was identified in this capacity in March 1949 when, in the wake of the southward-advancing Communist armies, the Communists formed the Central Plains Provisional People’s Government, whose capital was at Kai- feng in north Honan. Li was named to the government council when it was established in March 1949, serving under important Party leader Teng Tzu-hui, a man with whom he would be directly associated for the next five years. It was also in 1949 that he was the political commissar for the Honan Military District. Apparently this army post was one of his few formal associations with the Communist military forces, a fact which tends to set him apart from the top Chinese Communist leaders, the vast majority of whom have had extensive military backgrounds.
In accordance with the steady southward progress of the PLA in 1949, the Central China Bureau of the Party was redesignated as the Central-South Bureau, Li retained his post as head of the Organization Department and held it until mid-1952. Along with the change of the Party title, the governmental apparatus underwent changes, the capital of the Central Plains Provisional Government was shifted southward from Kaifeng to Wuhan in June 1949. Then, on February 5, 1950, the Central Plains Government was dissolved in favor of the Central-South Military and Administrative Committee (CSMAC), which had jurisdiction over Honan, Hupeh, Hunan, Kiangsi, Kwangtung, and Kwangsi.
During the period from 1950 to 1954, Li was one of the most important officials in the CSMAC (known after January 1953 as the Central-South Administrative Committee). In addition to membership on the CSMAC, he was also named in March 1950 to head one of the most important subordinate organs, the Land Reform Committee. It was not long afterward (June 1950) that the national land Reform Law was adopted by the central government, following explanatory remarks by top Party leader Liu Shao-ch’i at a session of the CPPCC. From that point on, the program was put into high gear. As the senior official dealing with this topic in central-south China, Li was called upon to give a major address on the subject before the second plenary meeting of the CSMAC in September 1950. Among other things, Li warned against tendencies to carry out the “reform” too quickly. Some idea of the magnitude of the program can be gained from the December 1950 Communist claim that land reform during the winter of 1950 and the spring of 1951 would encompass 247 hsien in central-south China, which had an agrarian population of over 63,000,000.
It was at the meeting to discuss the Sung Ying case that Li was first identified as second deputy secretary of the Central-South Party Bureau, the Party organ having parallel responsibilities with the governmental CSMAC over Honan, Hupeh, Hunan, Kiangsi, Kwangtung, and Kwangsi. This post placed Li in the fourth-ranking position in the bureau, below Secretary Lin Piao, Second Secretary Teng Tzu-hui, and First Deputy Secretary T’an Cheng. Along with this post, Li received a promotion to a vice-chairmanship of the CSMAC in October 1952 (retaining the position following the reorganization of the CSMAC into the Central-South Administrative Committee in January 1953). A month later (November 1952), he was named to chair a CSMAC committee to eliminate illiteracy, paralleling a national committee formed at the same time. It was also at this time (October-December 1952) that Li first traveled abroad, serving as a deputy leader to military veteran Ho Lung, who led a delegation to North Korea to inspect and “comfort” the large Chinese army sta-tioned there (known as the “Chinese People’s Volunteers"). In May 1953 Li relinquished the chairmanship of both the Land Reform Committee and the Political and Legal Affairs Committee, but he remained as a vice-chairman of the CSMAC and as second deputy secretary of the regional Party Bureau until both were abolished in 1954.
In 1954 Li was transferred to Peking. His initial post in the national government was as a deputy from Honan to the First NPC (1954-1959), the organization that brought the constitutional government into existence at its first session in September 1954. Since that date, Li has been among the key leaders of the PRC’s principal legislative body, serving on the NPC Standing Committee for the duration of the First and Second NPC’s (1954-1964), after which he was promoted to a vice-chairmanship when the Third NPC closed its first session in January 1965. Li served as a deputy from Honan to the First and Second NPC’s but was transferred to the Hopeh constituency for the Third NPC. During the First NPC (1954-1959), Li was especially active in congressional affairs, serving as a member of the presidium (steering committee) for the second through the fifth sessions (1955-1958), as well as chairman of the adhoc Motions Examination Committee for these same sessions. However, probably because of his other duties (see below), he has been less active in the affairs of the NPC since the Second Congress opened in 1959.
Li received a very significant new appointment by June 1963 when he was identified as the first secretary of the North China Party Bureau. It may be that he held the post from the time of the Ninth Party Plenum in January 1961 when the decision was taken to re-create the six regional bureaus to “act for the Central Committee in strengthening leadership over the Party committees in the . . . provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions.” This post places Li on the same level as such important regional leaders as Politburo member Li Ching-ch’iian (of the Southwest Bureau) and Central Committee member T’ao Chu (of the Central-South Bureau).
Li’s position within the CSMAC was notably enhanced in December 1951 when he was named to chair still another of its key subordinate organs, the Political and Legal Affairs Committee. Shortly thereafter, a major bureaucratic scandal in the Central-South area was exposed. It was known as the Sung Ying case (see under Chang P’ing-hua) and involved serious mismanagement in a hospital in Wuhan, a situation that led to a false arrest, theft, and serious breaches of Party discipline. Among the significant Party officials demoted was Wu Te-feng, then the Wuhan mayor, who later made an impressive comeback. Although Li was not the most important Party personality involved in the final settlement of this case (playing a lesser role than such top men as Teng Tzu-hui), he did address a meeting called to discuss the Sung Ying (February 1952), at which time he called for stern punishment of the guilty.
Even more important than his work in the NPC was his assignment for the first time to a position directly subordinate to the Party Central Committee. In 1955 he was identified simply as a “leading member of one of the departments of the Central Committee.” This position was clarified by September 1956 when he was identified as the head of the Party’s Industrial and Communications Work Department, a post which apparently gave him a powerful voice in the decisions taken by those organizations in China related to industry and communications. By mid-1957 the communications portion of the department was separated from Li’s jurisdiction, but he continued to head the “Industrial Work Department” until at least late 1958,
Li made a significant stride in his career at the historic Eighth National Party Congress held in September 1956. He served as a member of the Congress Presidium (steering committee) and was one of the featured speakers. His very important speech dealt with a problem that had troubled Chinese management from the inauguration of the First Five-Year Plan in 1953. Using the Soviet model, the Chinese had employed the single-director” system of industrial management, which, in Li’s words, had “wrongly emphasized that the man responsible for the management of the enterprise had full authority, that the duties of the Party organization were only to guarantee production and give general supervision, and that the director or manager did not need to carry out the resolutions of the Party organization regarding the management of production if he disagreed with them.” As one writer put it, the “single-director” system had produced “little despots” and had brought about a situation (anathema to the CCP) in which the factory director had become the “most powerful individual in the enterprise, far overshadowing the Party secretary.” Li informed the delegates to the Congress that the Central Committee had already decided to replace the “single-director” system with one in which the factory managers would assume the responsibility of the enterprises but he made it completely clear that such responsibilities would be “under the leadership of the Party committee.”
At the close of the Eighth Congress, Li was elected a full member of the. Party Central Com-mittee, one of the 33 elected to full membership who had been neither a full nor an alternate member of the Seventh Central Committee elected in 1945. Even more important is the fact that on the day following the Congress (at the First Plenum of the new Central Committee) Li was named as a secretary of the Central Secretariat, the powerful organ of the Party, which is headed by Teng Hsiao-p’ing and charged with the task of carrying out the policies of the Politburo. At the time Li was named to the Secretariat, there were only seven full members and three alternates.
The pattern of Li’s career suggests close ties with such top Party organizational leaders as Liu Shao-ch’i and P’eng Chen. It is probable that he was associated with both of them in north China from as early as the late 1930’s, and he has definitely worked closely with them in the fifties and sixties in connection with both the NPC and the Party. When these personal ties are considered in the light of his important political positions (head of the North China Party Bureau, member of the Party Secretariat, and a vice-chairman of the NPC Standing Committee), it is apparent that Li belongs to that small group of men who rank just below the members of the Party Politburo.