He comes from I-chang hsien, a coal-producing region in southeast Hunan. I-chang was an area in which the Communists early found supporters, Chu Te’s small military force retreated into southern Hunan after its defeat near Swatow in the fall of 1927, and in January 1928 he established a short-lived local soviet at I-chang.
A middle school graduate, Li took part in the establishment of a “peasant self-defense corps” in 1925 in areas nearby his native hsien. Then, when Chu Te was in this region during the winter of 1927-28, Li and a colleague led & contingent of the self-defense corps to join Chu’s troops at Ch’en-hsien, not far north of I-chang. Not long after this, Chu’s units were merged with those led by Mao Tse-tung to form the Fourth Red Army, based at Chingkangshan on the Hunan-Kiangsi border.
By 1930, when Li was presumably already a CCP member, he was serving as a political commissar in P’eng Te-huai’s Third Army Corps in Kiangsi. In 1932 he was an officer in the Political Department of the First Front Army, formed from Chu Te’s First Army Corps and P’eng Te-huai’s Third Army Corps following a reorganization of Red Army forces in mid-1930. The First Front Army was led by Chu and P’eng and in these years did most of its fighting in the Kiangsi-Fukien border area. Li was given a logistics assignment in 1933, probably in the same army, and then made the Long March from Kiangsi to Shensi in 1934-35.
In north Shensi Li studied in 1936 at the Red Army Academy. In December 1936 he was among the group that accompanied Chou En-lai to Sian to negotiate the release of Chiang Kai- shek, who had been captured by the forces of Manchurian warlord Chang Hsueh-liang. The latter had sent his private plane to Pao-an, then Chou’s headquarters, to bring the Communists to Sian. Among this group were such leading Communists as Ch’in Pang-hsien, Yeh Chien-ying, and Li K’o-nung. In 1937-38 Li served successively as director of the Sian and then the Hankow Office of the Communists’ Eighth Route Army. Then, after the fall of Hankow to the Japanese in October 1938, he accompanied Yeh Chien-ying to Hunan to work in a KMT-sponsored guerrilla training class in Heng-shan, located about 100 miles south of Changsha, the Hunan capital.
Li returned to the Communist capital at Yenan sometime during the Sino-Japanese War, serving as head of the Third Office of the Central Intelligence Department, then as chief of the Second Bureau of the Army’s General Staff, and finally as director of the Operations Department. From 1941 to 1946 he was a deputy to the Second Assembly of the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia (Shen-Kan-Ning) Border Region, serving as a representative of “those working for the Border Region Government.” He attended both the first and second sessions of the Second Assembly, held in November 1941 and December 1944, respectively.
In the postwar period Li is reported to have served on Lin Piao’s staff in the Northeast Democratic Allied Army, the force that conquered Manchuria by the winter of 1948-49. He was in Peking after the surrender of that city in January 1949, and in April of that year was identified as a spokesman for the PLA Headquarters. In June he participated in the meetings of the Preparatory Committee for the first session of the CPPCC, which was to bring the PRC Government into existence on October 1, 1949. Li was not an official member of the Committee but rather served as a substitute for Ch’en I pending the latter’s arrival from east China where his troops were locked in battle. When the First Session of the CPPCC met in September 1949, Li attended as a representative of the PLA Headquarters, and since that time he seems to have been principally occupied with military staff work. Immediately after the central government was established, he was identified as director of the Operations Department of the People’s Revolutionary Military Council (PRMC), the highest military organ in the government, chaired by Mao Tse-tung. It is not known how long Li retained the Operations post, but another man was holding this position by early 1953. From 1949 to 1954 Li also served in the PRMCs National Defense Research Council; the PRMC and its subordinate bodies were abolished in 1954.
Li has made extremely few public appearances in the years since the establishment of the PRC in 1949, and when he does appear it is usually in connection with the PLA. From June 1950 to at least 1951 he was a deputy director of the Central Flood Prevention Headquarters, he was presumably given this assignment because of the important role of the PLA in flood prevention work. In September-October 1950 he participated in a large conference of “fighting heroes” from the PLA, and in October-Novem- ber 1951 he took part in the Third Session of the CPPCC’s First National Committee, attending as a representative of the PRMC. He made a few more appearances of minor importance between 1952 and 1954 and then in 1954 was elected as a deputy from his native Hunan to the First NPC. However, he was not re-elected to the Second NPC, which opened in 1959. In September 1955, when national military awards were made for the first time, Li was given the three top honors, the Orders of August First, Independence and Freedom, and Liberation’ covering military service from 1927 to 1950. Although military ranks were also first created in 1955, Li was not identified until mid-1963 by his present rank, colonel-general, the equivalent of a three-star general in the U.S. Army.
At the Party’s Eighth National Congress in September 1956, Li was elected an alternate member of the Central Committee. He was not again mentioned in the press until February 1962 when he served on the funeral committee for Li K’o-nung, a colleague since at least 1936. Li T’ao received another assignment in the military establishment at the close of the initial session of the Third NPC in January 1965 when he was named to membership on the National Defense Council, an organization with very limited power and authority, but one with considerable prestige.
