Background
Li Shih-ying, a native of Honan, was a specialist in security work.
Li Shih-ying, a native of Honan, was a specialist in security work.
He may have had some security training in Vladivostok in the mid-1930’s. During the Sino-Japanese War he was active in the Communist-held areas of Shantung. Presumably, this was after 1939 when elements of the 115th Division of the Eighth Route Army went to Shantung to establish a guerrilla base there. Little is known about his career until 1948, when he was identified as the director of the Public Security Department in Tsinan, the Shantung capital.
As Communist forces pushed into Shanghai in the late spring of 1949, Li accompanied them, thus temporarily giving up his work in Shantung. After the fall of Shanghai, the Communists immediately formed a Military Control Commission as well as the Municipal People’s Government. Under both organizations Li was named to head the Public Security Department, which, given the Communist view of Shanghai as a stronghold of business and a target for socialization, stands as a testimony to his stature within Party circles. During Li’s stay in Shanghai regional governments were formed, with the eastern coastal provinces placed under the jurisdiction of the East China Military and Administrative Committee (ECMAC), and with its formal establishment in January 1950, Li was named as a member. In the following month he was also appointed as director of the ECMAC Public Security Department. Not long afterward, he gave up his posts in the Shanghai public security network, probably because of the much heavier responsibilities of security work for the ECMAC. Perhaps because of the secrecy involved in this work, little was heard of Li over the next year and a half, although in March and November 1951 he delivered reports in Shanghai on bandit activities and the ’’suppression of counterrevolutionaries” in East China.
In November 1951 Li was transferred back to Shantung. At this time he was demoted to deputy director of the ECMAC Public Security Department (being replaced by Hsu Chien-kuo), the demotion probably resulted from the need to have the public security chief present at the ECMAC headquarters in Shanghai. With his transfer he assumed three important posts in the Shantung Government: director, Public Security Department, November 1951-c. 1955; chairman, Political and Legal Affairs Committee, October 1952-1954, vice-governor, December 1953- March 1955. Within the ECMAC he was appointed in September 1952 as a member of the Political and Legal Affairs Committee, which was chaired by Chang Ting-ch’eng. And, when the ECMAC was reorganized into the East China Administrative Committee in December 1952, he was named as a member of the newly organized Committee.
In the meantime, like many other regional and provincial officials, Li held posts directly subordinate to the national government in Peking. When the central government was formed in the fall of 1949, he was named a member of the Supreme People’s Procuratorate (with powers broadly akin to the U.S. Attorney General’s Office) under Chief Procurator Lo Jung-huan, later to become a Politburo member. He held this post until the governmental reorganization in September 1954.
Little was heard of Li after his transfer from Shanghai to Shantung in November 1951. He served, however, in February 1954 as a deputy leader of a “comfort” delegation, a group sent to entertain and inspect PLA troops stationed in East China. And in early 1955 he was reported as a deputy secretary of the Shantung Party Committee, his first known Party post. Then, after almost four years in Shantung, Li was transferred to Peking where he resumed work in the Supreme People’s Procuratorate. Formerly only a member of the Procuratorate (1949- 1954), Li was now appointed (August 1955) as a deputy procurator-general under Chang Ting- ch’eng, his former superior in east China. Thirteen months later, on the day following the Eighth Party Congress, the first plenum of the newly elected Party Central Committee elected Li a member of the Party Central Control Commission under Politburo member Tung Pi-wu. The Control Commission has duties involving discipline and inspection similar to those of the governmental Procuratorate, and it is thus logical that Li should hold these broadly parallel posts. In about 1961 a Standing Committee was created in the Control Commission, and Li was named as one of the alternate members. However, after the 10th Party Plenum in September 1962, the Control Commission was reorganized, Li remained as a Commission member but was removed as a Standing Committee alternate. The reason for his removal is almost certainly because Standing Committee members, who actually manage the Commission, reside in Peking, and by 1962 Li had been transferred to Kiangsu.
Li was suddenly transferred in 1962 from Peking back to east China, this time to Kiangsu where in April he was identified as a secretary of the Kiangsu Party Committee headed by Chiang Wei-ch’ing, an alternate member of the CCP Central Committee. At about the same time he became a provincial vice-governor under Kiangsu Governor Hui Yu-yu. As a consequence of his transfer, Li was removed as a deputy procurator-general, although his name was deleted from the 1961 Jen-min sliou-ts’e (People’s handbook), he was not officially removed until September 1962.
After his arrival in Kiangsu, Li was elected for the first time to the national legislature. At the first session of the Third Kiangsu Provincial People’s Congress (September 1964) he was elected one of Kiangsu’s deputies to the Third NPC, which opened in Peking in December 1964. At the same session of the Kiangsu Congress, Li gave the keynote report on the work of the provincial government and at the close of the session was re-elected a vice-governor.
Since 1958 Li has been involved in activities outside the field of security work. In June 1958 he was among a group of political and legal experts invited to lecture at the Peking University Law Department. In August of that year he was elected a member of the national council of the Political Science and Law Association of China, the mass organization in the legal field. More important, he was elected a secretary of the small secretariat that runs the association on a day-to-day basis. The organization was then headed by Tung Pi-wu (Li’s superior on the Control Commission) and Wu Te-feng, another public security expert. Until his transfer to Kiangsu in 1962, Li occasionally appeared in this capacity at social functions given for visiting foreign jurists and legal experts. In October 1964 the Political Science and Law Association held a congress and elected new officials; Li was dropped as a secretary (once again because of his 1962 transfer out of Peking), but he was re-elected to the national council.
