Li K’o-nung

Background

Li was born in Ch’ao-hsien on the eastern shore of Lake Ch’ao in Anhwei province but spent his youth in Wu-hu, a major Yangtze River port some 40 miles to the southeast of Ch’ao-hsien.

Education

He attended primary and middle schools in Wu-hu together with Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un (Ah Ying), a prominent Communist literary figure, who in 1962 wrote a commemorative article on Li’s career. At the middle school, whose principals included early KMT leader Chao Po-hsien and revolutionary poet Su Man-ju (a colleague of Ch’en Tu-hsiu), Li was said to have learned of China’s revolutionary heritage. It is also claimed that he was engaged in “progressive activities” during the May Fourth Movement, which began in 1919 partially in opposition to the Chinese government’s humiliating policy toward Japan.

Career

Li was a reader of journals associated with the May Fourth Movement, including Hsin ch’ing-nien (New youth), New Tide (Hsin ch’ao), and Mao Tse-tung’s Hunan journal, the Hsiang-chiang p’ing-lun (Hsiang River review). It may also be presumed that Li read the publications in Wu-hu, which were begun in the early twenties to propagate the spirit of the May Fourth Movement. He also became acquainted with prominent writers of the period, such as Chiang Kuang-tz’u (also known as Chiang Hsia-seng and Chiang Kuang-ch’ih), a left-wing writer who contributed to" the Hsin Ch’ing-nien. Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un has written that K’o Ch’ing-shih, a CCP member by 1922 and later a Politburo member, was a frequent visitor to Li’s home.

Following the May 30th Movement of 1925 (which instigated a series of demonstrations and strikes throughout China), Li, his former schoolmate Ch’ien Hsing-ts’un, and others established the Min-sheng Middle School in Wuhu, a school that spread revolutionary ideas and served as a training ground for future revolutionists. In 1926 Li joined the CCP and thereafter his home was used as a rendezvous point for revolutionists. The school was soon closed by the KMT authorities, after which he helped organize CCP- sponsored uprisings in the Anhwei countryside.

Li remained in Anhwei until after the spring of 1927 when Chiang Kai-shek turned on the Communists in a series of coups (most notably in Shanghai) that cost the CCP thousands of lives. According to Li’s son’s account, his father barely escaped arrest by the authorities, after which the Party sent him to Shanghai where he went into training in the CCP intelligence apparatus then being established under Chou En-lai and Ku Shun-chang. From 1928 to 1931 Li is credited with having played a major role in Communist intelligence, “safeguarding the central leading organs” (i.e., the CCP head-quarters), and penetrating the “most dangerous places.” According to a non-Communist account, Li was even able to penetrate the Nationalist intelligence apparatus. Among his colleagues in the underground were K’ang Sheng, Ch’en Keng, and K’o Ch’ing-shih, later to become Party Central Committee members.

After arriving in Shensi in late 1935, Li became head of the Party Central Committee’s Liaison Bureau (Lien-lo chii), an organization that probably had intelligence functions. When Edgar Snow visited Shensi several months later he described Li as chief of the “communications department of the Foreign Office.” It seems certain that this department and the Liaison Bureau were in some way related if in fact they were not one and the same. When Chiang Kai-shek was kidnapped in December 1936 by dissident Nationalist generals Yang Hu-Ch’eng and Chang Hsueh-liang (the “Sian Incident”; see under Chou En-lai), the Communists sent a group of top men to negotiate with Chiang in hopes of reaching a temporary united front to fight the constantly threatening Japanese. The delegation sent to Sian was headed by Chou En-lai, and included Yeh Chien-ying. Li was present as secretary-general of the delegation, and it appears that security chief Teng Fa was also involved behind the scenes. The Sian talks were a prelude to further negotiations (which included Chou and Li) held in Hankow in 1937, where the Nationalist government had retreated following the invasion of China by Japan in mid-1937. Out of these talks came a series of agreements to cooperate in the common effort against the Japanese, agreements that included KMT recognition of the Communist Eighth Route Army and the establishment of Eighth Route Army liaison offices in Nationalist-held areas.

One of the repercussions of the New Fourth Army Incident of January 1941 was the closure of the liaison office in Kweilin. As a consequence, Li was reassigned to Yenan where he assumed important new jobs. He first became secretary-general of the Eighth Route Army Headquarters and later served as secretary-general of the Party’s Yangtze Bureau. The latter assignment presumably took him away from Yenan occasionally to work with Chou En-lai and Tung Pi-wu in Chungking. But Li’s most important wartime post was probably with the Party’s Social Affairs Department (She-hui pu), the Communist euphemism for an intelligence bureau. During the latter part of the war he was the deputy director of the Social Affairs Department, a post that probably placed him under K’ang Shcng, one of the Communists’ top intelligence operatives. He advanced to the directorship of the department by about 1946, the same year in which he became secretary-general of the Communist delegation to the Peking Executive Headquarters, established in early 1946 pursuant to the Cease-Fire Agreement negotiated between the Communists and the KMT by U.S. General George C, Marshall. Li’s intelligence background was presumably a major factor in his selection for this assignment, among other things, the Executive Headquarters served the Communists as a repository of information about the Nationalists’ forces, as well as a useful listening post regarding American attitudes toward the civil war.

By mid-1949 Li was in Peking serving on a preparatory committee for the China New Legal Research Society, but nothing further is known of his work in this connection. In September 1949, as a representative of the CCP, he attended the first session of the CPPCC, at which time the PRC was inaugurated. When the new government was staffed in October, Li was named as a vice-minister of Foreign Affairs, serving under Chou En-lai, his colleague from the late twenties. It can be presumed that within the ministry Li had major responsibilities involving security and intelligence work. His most notable public work in the ministry occurred in the spring and summer of 1954, when he accompanied Chou En-lai to Geneva for the famous conference that brought a temporary halt to the fighting in Indochina. When the conference was briefly adjourned in June, Chou left for visits to India and Burma. During this time Li was left in charge of the delegation, and when the conference closed in July he returned home separately, visiting the Czech foreign minister in Prague on behalf of Chou and also stopping over briefly in Moscow.

Like so many of the elite, Li was named in October 1949 to the Executive Board of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association, a post he held until 1954. Relatively little was recorded about his career in the early fifties, but Lo Jui-ch’ing’s funeral oration provides useful clues about his work. Lo noted that after 1949 Li was a department director within both the Party’s Central Committee and the Central Committee’s Military Affairs Committee. Given Li’s back-ground and the natural reluctance of the Chinese to discuss publicly security work, it is probable that both posts were related to intelligence and security work. This seems to be confirmed in part by Lo’s further comment that in the post- 1949 period Li had performed outstanding work in “safeguarding socialist construction.” According to his obituary, he was still serving as a department director under the Central Committee at the time of his death. It would seem that the department in question was the Social Affairs Department, the one that Li had headed since about 1946 (as described above). However, when appointed to the Foreign Ministry in 1949 he was described as the “former” director, possibly as a security precaution. In any event, according to an authoritative source, the Social Affairs Department was not mentioned in the Chinese press after 1950.

In 1954 Li was named as a deputy from his native Anhwei to the First NPC (1954-1959); he was re-elected to the Second NPC (which opened in April 1959) and was holding this post at the time of death in 1962.

Politics

In 1931 the Communist position in Shanghai was seriously compromised by the treachery of Ku Shun-chang. Li was presumably among those compromised by Ku’s action; in any event, he was sent to the Kiangsi Soviet district that same year. In Kiangsi Li continued to specialize in intelligence work, including cryptography. In November 1931, at the First All-China Congress of Soviets, which established the Chinese Soviet Republic, the National Political Security Bureau (Kuo-chia cheng-chih pao-wei chii) was set up under the direction of Teng Fa. Li, who probably ranked second only to Teng in the intelligence- security network in Kiangsi, became director of the Security Bureau’s Administrative Department (Chih-hsing pu). It is not known how long Li retained this post, but it is clear that he remained in the intelligence field. By no later than the fall of 1933 he was identified in Chien-ning hsien (west Fukien) serving as head of the Political Security Bureau under the First Front Army. Chou En-lai was then the political commissar of the First Front Army. Not long after this, when the Soviet Republic convened its Second Congress (January-February 1934), Li was elected an alternate member of the Republic’s Central Executive Committee. In October 1934 Li set out on the Long March with the First Front Army (led by Chu Te and Mao Tse-tung), presumably taking his orders from Teng Fa, who continued to be the over-all security chief.

In the period between the outbreak of war and the New Fourth Army Incident of early 1941 (see under Yeh T’ing, the New Fourth Army commander), Li was a major figure in liaison activities between the Nationalists and the Communists. In 1937 he was director of the Eighth Route Army’s Offices in Shanghai and Nanking (which were evacuated before the on- rushing Japanese in November and December 1937, respectively). In the summer of 1937, while working in Shanghai, Li was also in contact with the CCP’s Shanghai Committee, then working “semi-secretly.” Aside from his liaison and (presumably) intelligence activities, Li was also given the task of gaining the release by the Nationalist Government of CCP “political prisoners.”

After the fall of Nanking, Li was assigned to Kweilin (in Kwangsi) where from 1938 he headed the Office of both the Eighth Route and the New Fourth Armies, the latter force having been activated and officially recognized by the KMT in early 1938. In the early years of the war Kweilin became a major center for Communist and Communist-front organizations, particularly after the fall of Canton and Wuhan in October 1938. In addition to Li’s liaison office, Kweilin was the locale of the Chiu-wang jih-pao (Salvation daily), the Kuo-chi hsin-wen she (International news agency), and the Kweilin office of the Hsin-hua jih-pao (New China daily), the important Communist newspaper published in Chungking. In the words of a Communist writer, Kweilin was “a center of communications for our Party with east and south China and even with Hong Kong and places overseas, and a frontline command post for directing revolutionary cultural work and united front work in southwest China. Comrade Li K'o-nung was commander-in-chief of this center.”

Connections

Li was married by the early twenties to a woman named Chao Ying, who died just 13 months before her husband. He had at least three sons; one of them (Li Ning) is known to have survived him. After Li went to Kiangsi in 1931 he was completely separated from his family, and during this period his wife earned a living as a primary school teacher in Wuhu, Anhwei. Chao was reunited with her husband in the late thirties and was with him both in Kweilin and (after 1941) in Yenan. One or more of his sons (including Li Ning) are known to have gone to Yenan in 1938 to study.

Spouse:

Chao Ying