Li Pao-hua was born in Lo-t’ing hsien, about 100 miles east of Tientsin in Hopeh province near the Gulf of Chihli (Po Hai). There are reports from non-Communist sources that he is the son of Li Ta-chao, one of the Party founders, but these cannot be confirmed. Li Ta-chao married in his teens and was known to have had two sons, and if Li Pao-hua were his son he would have been born when the father was only 19.
Li Pao-hua was known by his revolutionary alias, Chao Chen-sheng, until the late 1940’s, he was using this name in 1945 when elected an alternate member of the Party Central Committee.
For Li to have reached the level of the Party Central Committee by 1945, it is evident that he must have been a CCP leader of considerable significance at least by the time of the Sino- Japanese War. However, very little is known about his early career. He joined the CCP in 1928, when he was 20, just one year after Li Ta-chao was executed by the gendarmes of Manchurian warlord Chang Tso-lin. In war times Li Pao-hua is said to have been a member of the Party Committee for the Shansi-Chahar- Hopeh (Chin-Ch’a-Chi) Border Region (see under Sung Shao-wen), formed in early 1938. The Chin-Ch’a-Chi area, one of the most important regions controlled by the Communists during the war, had among its leaders such important persons as Nieh Jung-chen and Huang Ching. Like many of the Chin-Ch’a-Chi leaders, Li was also active in the Party’s North China Bureau and at some time during the latter stages of the war reportedly headed the Bureau’s Organization Department.
As noted above, he was elected an alternate member of the Party Central Committee at the Seventh Party Congress held in Yenan from April to June 1945. At that time the Central Committee was a relatively small body, consisting of only 44 full and 33 alternate members. During the civil war with the Nationalists in the late 1940’s Li evidently remained in north China. Following the surrender of Peking to the Communists in January 1949, he became a deputy secretary of the municipal Party Committee, then headed by P’eng Chen, another veteran north China operative and a man with whom Li may well have been associated for a number of years.
Li participated in the formation of the PRC Government when it was established at the first session of the CPPCC in September 1949. He attended the CPPCC meetings as a representative of the Peking-Tientsin municipalities and served on the ad hoc committee that drafted the organic laws of the CPPCC, the major legislative body of the new government until it was superceded by the NPC in 1954. In October, when the major assignments to the government were made, Li was named a vice-minister of the Ministry of Water Conservancy (at which time he relinquished his Peking CCP post). He remained in this ministry for the next 13 years (the ministry becoming known as the Ministry of Water Conservancy and Electric Power in February 1958 when it absorbed the Ministry of Electric Power Industry). During his long term of office Li Pao-hua was probably the most important figure in the ministry, particularly because Minister Fu Tso-i, the KMT general who peacefully surrendered Peking, does not belong to the Party. Moreover, until Central Committee alternate Liu Lan-po joined the ministry in 1958, Li was the only official there of Central Committee rank. Li’s primacy within the government body was given furthei confirmation both in 1957, when he was identified as secretary of the ministry’s Party Committee, and in 1958, when he served briefly as the acting minister. While serving as a vice-minister of Water Conservancy, Li was often a participant in the many PRC conferences dealing with the pressing problems of water conservancy and flood prevention. Similarly, he was called upon from time to time to deliver reports on these subjects, as he did on August 29, 1956, before a session of the NPC Standing Committee.
Unlike most senior Party leaders who frequently held several concurrent posts in the early years of the PRC, Li apparently centered his activities almost exclusively around the work of the Water Conservancy Ministry. The one exception and probably a rather minor one was his selection for membership on the Executive Board of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association (SSFA) in 1950. He retained this post until the second national conference of the SSFA in December 1954 (which he attended as a representative of the CCP), but since then he has had no further association with this organization.
When the Second National Committee of the CPPCC was formed in December 1954, Li was named to the National Committee (as a representative of the CCP), as well as to the Standing Committee that manages the affairs of the CPPCC when the National Committee is not in session. He was reappointed to both posts under the Third CPPCC when it was established in April 1959. However, probably because of his transfer to east China in 1961 (see below), he was not named to the Fourth CPPCC, which first met at the end of 1964. Li’s work for the CCP was given recognition when, at the Eighth Party Congress in September 1956, he was promoted to full membership on the CCP Central Committee. Li made his only known trip abroad in May 1960, accompanying economic planner Po I-po to Poland for a three-week visit, made at the invitation of the Polish United Workers (Communist) Party to discuss economic cooperation between the two nations.
