Li Li-san

Background

Li was born in Li-ling hsien, Hunan. The rural hsien is located in eastern Hunan, south of Changsha.

Education

Between 1911 and 1914 Li attended middle schools in Li-ling as well as the Ch’ang-chiin Middle School in Changsha. When in 1917 Mao Tse-tung was organizing his study group for young Hunanese intellectuals, the Hsin-min hsueh-hui (New people’s study society), he advertised in a Changsha paper for interested young students. He received “three and a half” replies, the half reply coming from a “non-committal youth named Li Li-san”, he listened to all Mao had to say but then went away and their “friendship never developed,” The story may be apocryphal, because when Mao related it to Edgar Snow in 1936 he was openly opposed to Li Li-san, who had been banished to Moscow six years earlier. However, it suggests a way in which Li may have become associated with the Hunanese student group organized by Mao and Ts’ai Ho-sen, which played a major role in preparing students to go to France on the work- and-study program (see under Ts'ai).

Career

In August 1918 Li joined one of the classes organized in Peking for students preparing to study in France, and in the following year he left China with a number of others. In France he was employed in a metal-working factory and attended the Collège de Montargis, south of Paris, where Ts’ai Ho-sen established his Changsha study group. Li also studied at St. Charmond, a suburb of St. Etienne near Lyons, where he helped organize a socialist study group with Chao Shih-yen. While in France Li worked closely with Ts’ai Ho-sen, Chou En-lai, and the two sons of Ch’en Tu-hsiu, the first CCP general secretary (see under Ch’en Yen-nien). In 1921 a university was established at Lyons for Chinese students in France, and thinking they would be admitted, Li, Ts ao Но-sen, Ch’en I, and others went to Lyons to enter the school. However, when they were refused admission, they occupied the school buildings by force on September 21. The French police immediately ejected them, and after being jailed for a few weeks Li and the others were deported.

Returning to China in late 1921, Li was immediately assigned as a labor organizer at the An-yuan coal mines on the Hunan-Kiangsi border east of Changsha. The mines supplied most of the fuel lor the famous Han-yeh-p’ing iron and steel works in the Wuhan area. Working under the auspices of the Labor Secretariat (the forerunner of the All-China Federation of Labor, see under Teng Chung-hsia), Li established an evening school for miners in January 1922. He selected a number of the more able students to organize units within the various sections of the mines. Then in May 1922, they established the An-yuan Mine and Railroad Workers’ Club (a euphemism for a labor union), with Li as the director. He was also associated in these organizational endeavours with Mao Tse-tung, who was working in nearby Changsha as chairman of the Hunan branch of the Labor Secretariat. The workers organization had grown strong enough by September 1922 to enable Li Li-san and Liu Shao-ch’i to lead a successful strike (regarding wages, working conditions, etc.).

Li was one of the first representatives from the ACFL to attend Profintern meetings in Moscow. There is conflicting information, but apparently he attended such meetings in Moscow in late 1925 or early 1926. Within the ACFL he was advanced to a vice-chairmanship at the Third Labor Congress, which was held in Canton in May 1926 when the important Party leader Su Chao-cheng became the chairman. At this same time Li assumed the directorship of the Federation’s Organization Department, and he lectured on the workers’ movement at the Peasant Movement Training Institute (see under P’eng P’ai) during its sixth class (May-October 1926) when Mao Tse-tung was the principal. In mid-1926, at approximately the time when the Northern Expedition was launched, Li was sent to Hupeh to carry on his labor activities. With Liu Shao-ch’i and others he was among the participants in late 1926 in demonstrations held to protest the existence of the British concession in Hankow, a section of Wuhan where the left-KMT had just established its seat of government. The protests were successful and in early 1927 the British relinquished their control of the concession to the KMT government, with which the Communists were still cooperating. In May 1927 the Prof intern-sponsored Pan Pacific Trade Union Congress was held in Hankow, a permanent Secretariat of the Pan-Pacific Trade Union was created with Li as a member. A month later, in June, he gave the keynote speech before the Fourth All-China Labor Congress (also held in Hankow) and was elected ACFL secretary-general. (It is worth noting that Maoist historians have neglected Li’s major role in the Communist-led labor movement of the early and middle twenties, often in favor of Liu Shao-ch’i who, though certainly a key labor agitator and organizer, was clearly less important than Li at that time.)

Concurrently with his rise in the labor movement, Li was rapidly advancing in the CCP hierarchy. He was elected to the Politburo at the Fifth CCP Congress, held in Wuhan in April-May 1927. The stormy meeting witnessed considerable dissension between those who supported Party General Secretary Ch’en Tu-hsiu (with his Comintern backing) and those who opposed Ch’en’s attempt to continue cooperation with the KMT (see under Ch’ii Ch'iu-pai and Ch’en Tu-hsiu). After the July 1927 split between the Communists and the left-wing KMT government in Wuhan, Li made his way to Chiu-chiang (Kiukiang), arriving July 19 with Teng Chung- hsia. Li was one of the principal organizers of the Communist-led Nanchang Uprising on August 1 (see under Yeh T’ing). Together with Communist military leader Ch’en Keng, Li was given the task of arresting “counterrevolutionaries” and dealing with the Provincial Bank of Kiangsi once the rebels had taken the city. Moreover, when the city fell on August 1, he was named to the 25-member Revolutionary Committee and headed its Political Security Office. However, he was not able to exercise his authority for long, because the Communists were driven from Nanchang only five days after it fell into their hands.

Returning to Shanghai in late 1928, Li sought to strengthen Party organizational work, especially in the urban labor field. He made little progress, however, in contrast to the growing successes of the various Red Army units in 1929 and early 1930. By April 1930 the Party claimed some 50,000 armed troops scattered in the rural hinterlands of central-south China, which were moving into regions from which they could seriously threaten the important industrial complex at Wuhan and the provincial capitals of Hunan and Kiangsi. A vital component of the Red forces was the First Army Corps led by Chu Te and Mao Tse-tung. This was concentrated along the Kiangsi-Fukien border with about 20,000 troops, of which 9,000 were armed. Peng Te-huai’s units protected the important Hunan-Hupeh-Kiangsi base with some 10,000 troops, of which perhaps 7,000 were armed. There were also Ho Lung’s 6,000 men on the Hunan-Hupeh border. In all, about 14 separate detachments claimed control of all or parts of 150 hsien in central-south China. At the same time the CCP organization, variously estimated at 65,000 to 120,000 members, listed only about 2,000 who could in any sense be considered “proletarian.”

After nearly 15 years of what amounted to exile, Li returned to China in the closing days of World War II, entering Manchuria with Soviet forces. Using the alias Li Min-jan, he initially took up residence in Harbin and served as an adviser and political commissar under Lin Piao. In the late spring of 1946 he traveled to Yenan where, in a meeting that must have been laden with irony, he met Mao Tse-tung for the first time since the late twenties. Li remained in Yenan only briefly, returning via Nanking and Peking to Harbin in June. Back in Manchuria he served for a short time as a CCP representative to the Changchun Advance Headquarters, which had been set up under the terms of the Cease-Fire Agreement worked out by U.S. General George C. Marshall in early 1946. At about this same time he was also in charge of negotiations regarding the distribution of UNRRA supplies in Manchuria. (For a discussion of UNRRA activities in China, sec under Wu Yun-fu.)

In June 1949 the Communists established a committee to prepare for the convocation of the CPPCC, the organization that was to bring the new Communist government into existence. Representing the ACFL, Li served on this committee, which was chaired by Mao Tse-tung, and when the CPPCC held its first session in September he was named to the ad hoc Credentials Committee. Then, when the PRC Government was formed in October 1949, Li received four key assignments. The first was membership on the Central People’s Government Council (CPGC). Chaired by Mao, the CPGC had six vice-chairmen and 56 members, endowed with broad executive, legislative, and judicial powers, the CPGC passed on virtually all important matters of state from 1949 until it went out of existence in 1954. Second, Li was made one of the 15 members of Chou En-Iai’s Government Administration Council (GAC), the equivalent of the cabinet. Third, he was given the portfolio for the Ministry of Labor, and finally he was made a member of the GAC’s Finance and Economics Committee, a highly important body headed by Ch’en Yun, Peking’s lop economic specialist during the first decade of the PRC. Concurrently, Li served with two of the more important “mass” organizations, the Sino- Soviet Friendship Association (SSFA) and the China Peace Committee. He was an SSFA Executive Board member from 1949 to 1954 and a Standing Committee member of the Peace Committee from 1950 to 1958, but in neither instance was he particularly active.

Politics

In June 1923 the CCP held its Third Congress in Canton. It is not certain whether Li attended, but he is known to have opposed the decision adopted then to cooperate with the KMT (which is discussed in the biographies of Ch'en Tu-hsiu and Li Ta-chao). He particularly opposed a policy he felt would place the labor unions under KMT jurisdiction. In 1924 Li went to Shanghai, where he quickly rose in prominence as a Party and labor leader. He gained his greatest fame in the labor movement during the mid-twenties in connection with the events surrounding the May 30th Movement (1925). Shortly before this date, in the early days of the month, the Second All-China Labor Congress was held in Canton. It decided to establish the All-China Federation of Labor (with Li as a member of its Executive Committee), to affiliate with the Russian-based Red International of Trade Unions (the Profintern), and to step up the already quickening pace of labor activities throughout China. Then, in the middle of the month a Chinese laborer was killed during a strike in Shanghai. This led to a series of protests, culminating in a large demonstration on May 30 Several demonstrators were killed by the British-officered police, thereby ushering in a nationwide series of strikes and protests that dwarfed all previous anti-foreign demonstrations. The Communists were quick to capitalize on the situation and on the next day established the Shanghai General Labor Union under purely Communist leadership. The new union, established largely through the efforts of Li Li-san, Ts’ai Ho-sen, and Ch’Li Ch’iu-pai, played a major role in a series of strikes over the ensuing weeks and months. Li became chairman of the Shanghai Union, which claimed a membership of over 200,000 within three weeks of its inauguration. According to one writer, who described Li as the Party’s “best public speaker,” he “gained more stature” in the May 30th Movement than “any of its other leaders, and henceforth acted in party councils as chief spokesman for the workers. In fact, it was through the . . . Movement, and thanks to Li Li-san’s energy” that the CCP acquired its first real taste of leading a workers’ struggle.”

In December 1930, coinciding with the Fu-t’ien Incident, Li was in Moscow where he was being interrogated by Comintern officials, most notably Dimitri Manuilsky, a key member of the Comintern Presidium, and Otto Kuusinen, the chief of the Comintern’s Far Eastern Bureau. In essence, Li was on trial and confessed to the basic charges brought against him, admitting that he had" exaggerated the Party’s strength and the revolutionary situation existing in China in 1930. Though he admitted that these errors of judgment had led him into a policy of putchism, he also charged that the Comintern “did not understand conditions in China” and that “comrades in Moscow did not trust the comrades doing practical work in China.”

Manuilsky gave Li credit for coming to Moscow to meet the Comintern. (Ch’en Tu-hsiu, when offered a similar opportunity, had refused.) But he was not willing to accept Li’s easy confession without some measure of atonement. He wanted Li to “understand the substance of his mistakes” and thought that he should not return at once to China; therefore, regarding Li’s punishment, “We want him to attend the Bolshevik school here.” Li’s stay in Russia was to last 15 years. In his first years he is reported to have attended the Lenin School (run by the Comintern’s International Relations Section) and to have been associated with the Profintern. One source states that he was imprisoned from 1936 to 1938 as a Trotskyite, but this cannot be confirmed. Prior to 1936 he had headed the Eastern Section of the Foreign Languages Publishing House, and from 1938 to 1945 he was director of a translating department for the same publishing house. According to Chang Kuo-t’ao, Li held only very insignificant positions and had a difficult time in his years in Moscow. Li’s difficulties were mentioned again in his speech before the Eighth Party Congress in 1956 (see below), he picturesquely described the seven years he worked directly under Ch'en Shao-yii, the Chinese representative to the Comintern, as being like years “endured by an unwelcome daughter-in-law under the rule of overbearing ’in-laws.” Moreover, in keeping with the spirit of his 1956 speech, he chided himself for his irresolute spirit and his failure to defend the Party’s interests against Ch’en’s “mistaken views and acts.”

Connections

Li has been married three times. One of his wives, Moscow-trained Li Han-fu, was allegedly killed by the KMT. Another wife, Wang Hsiu- chen, was reportedly arrested by the KMT in 1932. During his long stay in Moscow Li married a Russian woman to whom he is still wed. By one of his earlier marriages he had a son (born about 1930), and by his present marriage he has two daughters, one born about 1938 and the other about 1944. In 1959 the older girl, reared in the Soviet Union, was in the Foreign Students’ Department of Peking University where she was taking a two-year course to learn Chinese.

Spouse:

Li Han-fu

Spouse:

Wang Hsiu-chen