Li I-mang

Background

Born in October 1904 in Chia-ting (now Lo-shan hsien), Szechwan.

Education

Li was trained as an economist. He changed his name from Li Min-chih to Li I-mang in 1927. Li was in Shanghai in the early twenties, where he was associated with the Creation Society (see under Kuo Mo-jo), one of the many literary organizations established in the wake of the May Fourth Movement (1919). He studied at the radical Shanghai University, which though nominally headed by KMT member Yii Yu-jen, was dominated by such important Communists as Ch’ii Ch’iu-pai, Teng Chung-hsia, and Yun Tai-ying. The school existed from 1923 until June 1925, when it was closed down by the authorities in the aftermath of the May 30th demonstrations.

Career

In the spring of 1926 Li went to Canton, then the revolutionary center of China. When the Northern Expedition was launched by Chiang Kai-shek in inid-1926, Li participated as an official in the Propaganda Section, which was subordinate to the National Revolutionary Army’s Political Department. During this period he worked directly under fellow Szechwanese Kuo Mo-jo, a senior official in the Political Department. He remained with Kuo as the latter’s assistant in Nanchang when the Revolutionary Army captured the city. But after Chiang Kai-shek began to expel Communists and leftists from his army in early 1927, Kuo and Li fled to Shanghai and then to Wuhan, the head-quarters of the left-KMT which opposed Chiang. Kuo and Li were in Kiukiang (Chiu-chiang) at the time of the Communists’ Nanchang Uprising on August 1 (see under Yeh T’ing). They went to Nanchang but were forced to leave almost immediately when the Communists were driven from the city. Still working under Kuo, Li took part in the march led by Yeh T’ing and Ho Lung from Nanchang to Swatow, but after their defeat there he made his way to Shanghai.

Like most Communists in Shanghai after the 1927 split with the KMT, Li was under constant threat of arrest, which probably accounts for the fact that he changed his name to Li I-mang. Apart from his work in clandestine activities for the CCP, he also published a translation of Marx s The Poverty of Philosophy under the name of Tu Chu-chiin. The work was published in Shanghai in 1929 and re-issued in the same city in 1946. In 1930 a research society in Shanghai brought out his translation of the first volume of Marx’s selected works. By 1933 Li had gone to the Communist-held areas in Kiangsi, where Chu Tc and Mao Tse- tung had their headquarters. In that year he was serving in the Chu-Mao First Front Army as head of the Political Department’s Staff Office.

At the Second All-China Congress of Soviets, held in Juichin in January-February 1934, Li was elected an alternate member of the Central Executive Committee, the governing body of the Chinese Soviet Republic. Later that year he embarked on the Long March, arriving in Shensi in the fall of 1935. He engaged in Party activities there until 1938, when he was assigned to the newly activated New Fourth Army, which operated in the lower reaches of the Yangtze Valley throughout the Sino-Japanese War.

Li s work with the New Fourth Army was largely confined to political and administrative duties. When he first joined it in 1938 he worked m the Political Department, and by 1941 he was secretary-general of the Army headquarters. In addition to its military and political responsibilities, the New Fourth Army also sponsored a wide variety of “people’s” (or “mass”) organizations. Apart from his duties with the Army headquarters, Li was also a vice-president in 1941 of the “Resist-the-Enemy Dramatic Society.” (Many popular organizations during the war had “anti-Japanese” or “resist-the-enemy” prefixes in an attempt by the CCP to arouse support by this appeal to nationalism.) By 1943 Li was working in the Huai-hai area, which was under the control of Huang K’o-ch’eng’s Third Division. With its rich agricultural resources, the Huai-hai district was a focal point of Japanese attention. In early 1944 they established a Model Peace Zone” there, making part of the area into a new province called Huai-hai. It consisted of 21 hsien taken from Kiangsu, Anhwei, and Shantung. But the Japanese were never successful in this endeavor, in part because of the Communists’ ability to infiltrate the area. Late in 1944 New Fourth Army units penetrated deep into the area around Tung-hsien, Kiangsu, recruiting many inhabitants into their forces! By 1945 most of the rural areas in Huai-hai were controlled by the Communists. From 1943 to an uncertain date Li was director of the Huai-hai Administrative (government) Office, and from the same year to about 1947 he was also chairman of the Kiangsu-Anhwei Border Region Government.

Following the conquest of Manchuria and much of north China in 1948-49, Li was assigned to Port Arthur-Dairen, then under joint Chinese-Soviet control. By the spring of 1949 he was the first vice-chairman of the Port Arthur-Dairen District Administrative Committee, the governmental organ in charge of these important twin cities. In 1950 he was also reported to be the president of Dairen University. Over the winter of 1949-50, and again in mid-1950, the newly established PRC government attempted to have its representatives accepted by the United Nations. Foreign affairs specialist Chang Wen-t’ien was designated chief delegate to the U.N. Security Council, with Li appointed as his deputy as well as a delegate to the General Assembly. These attempts failed, of course, and by early 1951 Li was in Peking where he embarked on a new, although related, career as a leading spokesman in Communist-sponsored international “peace” organizations.

In the meantime, Li had received new assignments in China. In 1954 he was elected a deputy from his native Szechwan to the First NPC (1954-1959). He was not, however, re-elected to the Second NPC (1959-1964), presumably because of a new overseas appointment (see below). More closely related to his work abroad was his appointment in March 1955 to the Board of Directors of the Chinese People’s Association for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries; he probably retained his seat on the Board in April 1959 when the Association was reorganized, but complete information is not available. In mid-1955 the Chinese set up a special committee to gain entry into the (non-Communist) International Parliamentary Union (IPU). Li was named to the delegation to attend the 44th conference of the IPU in Helsinki and led the advance group there. However, when the Chinese delegation was refused admission, Li returned to China where he was assigned the task of writing Peking’s official denunciation of the IPU for failing to admit the PRC.

Politics

Li’s first assignment took him to East Berlin in February 1951 for a session of the World Peace Council (WPC). In April of the same year he led a group bound for a meeting of the British-Chinese Friendship Association, however, upon reaching Prague the group turned back following a refusal by the British to grant visas. From .September to December 1951 Li was a deputy leader of one of the first major cultural delegations sent abroad by the PRC. The visit of this group to India and Burma was described by Li in the May 1, 1952, issue of the English-language journal People's China. In mid-1952 he was again in Europe to attend another WPC meeting in East Berlin. At this time Li was elected to the WPC Executive Committee and the Secretariat; for the next four years he devoted most of his time to WPC affairs and for a portion of this period was stationed in Vienna, then the WPC headquarters.

In addition to those WPC sessions already mentioned, between 1952 and 1956 he attended WPC- sponsored meetings in the following places and times: Vienna (December 1952, November 1953, November 1954, January 1955), Budapest (January 1953, June 1953), Stockholm (June 1953, June 1954, November 1954, April 1956), East Germany (July 1952, July 1953, May 1954), and Helsinki (June 1955). These meetings were uniformly devoted to campaigns directed against the United States (such as the alleged use of “germ warfare” in the Korean War). Apart from the activities directly sponsored by the WPC, Li was also a participant in delegations to other countries, as in July 1952 when he was a member of a cultural delegation to Bulgaria, and in January 1953 when he attended a congress of the Czech Peace Defenders in Prague. In April 1953 he was in Paris for a memorial meeting for the late president of the French National Peace Committee, and in May 1953 he attended the leftist “American Continental Cultural Conference” in Santiago, Chile. (As of that date Li was one of the very few Chinese Communists who had been in Latin America.) He was also a participant in one of Peking’s first major efforts in the Afro-Asian world, namely the Asian Countries’ Conference in New Delhi in April 1955, a conference intended to influence the tone of the more famous Afro-Asian (“Bandung”) Conference held later that month in Indonesia. Subsequently, a series of “Afro-Asian Solidarity Conferences” were held (the first of them in Cairo in late 1957 see under Yang Shuo), although Li himself did not participate in these.

From 1958 to 1963 Li was Peking’s ambassador to Burma. Replacing Yao Chung-ming, Li presented his credentials in Rangoon on April 30, 1958. During his tenure in Rangoon, the Burmese gradually shifted their political alignment toward more intimate relations with the PRC, a shift for which Li presumably must be given some credit. Two important agreements between Burma and China were signed in these years: the Treaty of Friendship and Mutual Non-aggression and the Sino-Burmese Boundary Agreement. Li accompanied Prime Minister Ne Win to Peking in January 1960 for the formal signing of the former. At this same time a preliminary agreement covering the boundary question was also signed, under the terms of which a joint Sino-Burmese committee was formed to work out the details (see under Yao Chung-ming, the chairman of the Chinese side of the joint committee). Li was back in Peking again in October 1960 when Prime Minister U Nu signed the boundary treaty. Over the turn of the year 1960-61 the Chinese sent a 400- member delegation to Burma, one of the largest ever sent abroad by the Chinese. Led by Chou En-lai, the Chinese group went to Burma to participate in the celebrations marking the 13th anniversary of Burmese independence and to exchange the instruments of ratification foi the boundary treaty. For his part in fostering Sino- Burmese relations, Li was given the Burmese governments' “heroic honor” medal at this time. He was again back in China in the fall of 1961 when both U Nu and Ne Win were on a state visit to China.

Connections

Li is married to Wang I, who in the late fifties was secretary-general of the China-Poland Friendship Association. Since 1964 she has been a deputy director of the Second Department (in charge of Asian affairs) of the Commission for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries.

Spouse:

Wang I