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Li Ta
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Li Ta was a Red Army officer since the late 1920’s, participated in the Long March and was chief-of-staif of the 129th Division throughout the Sino-Japanese War and the civil war with the Nationalists in the late forties. He spent the early years of the PRC in the southwest, and after a brief tour of duty in Korea, he was a vice-minister of National Defense from 1954 to 1959.
Education
Li Ta (not to be confused with a Party founder of the same name) was trained at the Red Army Academy in the Soviet Union during the late twenties or early thirties. He is said to have been a Party member and a veteran of the Red Army from the latter part of 1927, when he was with Mao Tse-tung’s forces in the Chingkang Mountains on the Hunan-Kiangsi border. Little is known of his work over the next few years, but he made the Long March from 1934 to 1936 as a stall officer with the Sixth Red Army Corps and later the Second Front Army (see under Jen Pi-shih and Ho Lung).
Career
When war with Japan broke out in mid-1937, Li became chief-of-staff of the 129th Division, one of the three divisions in the Communists Eighth Route Army. The wartime record of the 129th Division is reviewed in the biography of its commander, Liu Po-ch'eng, a man with whom Li was associated for many years. Li continued as a staff officer throughout the war, and in the immediate postwar period (1945-46) he was concurrently commander of the T’ai-hang Military District in southeast Shansi. Over the next two years Liu Po-ch’eng’s forces moved to the east and then southward into central China. Accordingly, the 129th Division was first redesignated the Shansi-Hopeh-Shantung-Honan PLA and then the Central Plains Liberation Army, in both units Li Ta continued as Lius chief-of-stail. In the spring of 1949 Li participated in the capture of Nanking with Liu Po-ch’eng’s forces, which were by now known as the Second Field Army. After a brief pause in the spring and summer of 1949, the Second Field Army pushed into southwest China, which it captured by the end of the year.
In its conquest of the southwest, the Second Field Army had been assisted by armies led by Ho Lung, which had moved into the area from northwest China. The military hierarchy for the southwest was established in early 1950. Liu Po-ch’eng continued to command the Second Field Army, which operated under the jurisdiction of the Southwest Military Region commanded by Ho Lung. Ch’en Keng, Chou Shih-ti, both seasoned Red Army officers, and Li Та were appointed deputy commanders under Ho, an assignment that Li continued to hold for most of the next four years. Concurrently, he served as chief-of-staff of the Second Field Army. Like most of the key military officers in the area, when the Communists established their organization for civil rule in July 1950 the Southwest Military and Administrative Committee Li was appointed as a member. He retained his membership when the Committee was reorganized and redesignated the Southwest Administrative Committee in February 1953.
Li remained in Chungking, the headquarters for Communist civil and military authority in the southwest, during the early 1950’s, although on occasion he was reported in Peking. In mid-1953, just as the Korean War was drawing to a close, Li replaced Yang Te-chih as chief-of-staff of the “Chinese People’s Volunteers.” However, he remained in Korea for less than a year and by the following spring had resumed his post as deputy commander of the Southwest Military Region in Chungking. Li remained there through the summer of 1954, but in October, a month after the First NPC had established the constitutional government, he was transferred to Peking to become a vice-minister under P’eng Te-huai in the newly established Ministry of National Defense. In September 1955 Li was among the recipients of the newly created military orders and personal ranks. He was made a colonel general (a three-star rank) and was given the Orders of August First, Independence and Freedom, and Liberation, awards for military service from the birth of the Red Army in 1927 to the final conquest of the main land in 1950.
For a brief time in the first half of 1958 Li served under Hsiao K’o as a deputy director of the PLA’s General Training Department. Probably as a result of this assignment he soon became a top administrator of the PRC’s quite extensive program to promote military-related athletic activities (e.g., marksmanship). In April of that year he headed a special committee to prepare for a sports meet in East Germany, which brought together athletes from the armed forces of the various Communist nations. Then, immediately after Ts’ai Shu-fan was killed in an air crash in October 1958, Li succeeded him as chairman of the National Defense Sports Association, a post he still holds. A year later (September 1959) he received a collateral assignment in the national government when he was appointed a vice-chairman under Ho Lung of the Physical Culture and Sports Commission. As a consequence he relinquished his post as a vice-minister of National Defense. From 1960 to 1964 Li represented the Sports Association or the Commission abroad on four occasions. The first of these trips took him to Czechoslovakia in June 1960 for an athletic meet. In July-August 1961 he was in the USSR at the invitation of the Soviet Voluntary Sports Society for the Promotion of the Army, Navy and Air Force, and while in Moscow he also attended Soviet Army Day celebrations. In November-December 1963 Li was in Albania as a guest of an association similar to the one in the Soviet Union, and in October 1964 he led a sports delegation to North Vietnam.
Li has been a member of the NPC since 1959. He served in the Second NPC (1959-1964) as a deputy from the Tibet Military Region. He has had no known direct connection with Tibetan affairs, although it should be noted that Tibet was conquered in 1950-51 by troops under the jurisdiction of the Southwest Military Region in which Li was then a senior officer. However, when the Third NPC held its initial session in December 1964-January 1965, Li attended as a deputy from his native Shensi. He has also been a member of the central government’s National Defense Council since April 1959. On numerous occasions he has served as a host for visiting dignitaries. In 1957, for example, he escorted the East German Defense Minister on a tour of Chinese military installations, and in 1960 and again in 1961 he accompanied U.K. Field Marshal Montgomery on the latter’s visits to China.
Politics
Li’s work on behalf of defense-related athletics is illustrated in still other ways. He is almost al-ways present for the many sports events sponsored by the Chinese armed forces, and since February 1964 he has been a vice-chairman of the All-China Athletic Federation. In 1963 Li was named to the Preparatory Committee for Participation in the Games of the New Emerging Forces, better known as “GANEFO,” and when the Chinese established a permanent organization to take part in GANEFO in August 1964, Li was named to its national committee. The GANEFO scheme had been sponsored by Indonesian President Sukarno as a means of circum-venting the International Olympics Committee (IOC), and because the Chinese had been excluded from the IOC, they were willing participants in GANEFO until Sukarno’s political fall in 1965. In August 1964 Li attended a meeting that decided to establish the Chinese People’s Aviation Sports Federation, and three months later he presided over the Amateur Gliding Conference. He wrote an article for the journal Hsin t’i-yu (New sports), which stressed the Maoist dictum that sports competition and physical fitness were useful in developing a “revolutionary spirit” and a willingness to “struggle.” Li’s article was reprinted in the 1962 edition of the authoritative Jen-min shou-ts’e (People’s handbook).
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Born
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Nationality
China -
Ethnicity
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Political Party
Chinese Communist Party
Career
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1937
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1950
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1958
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1959