Li Te-ch'iian

Background

Little is known about her background.

Education

Li went to Peking for education, graduating from the Bridgeman Girls’ Middle School and a women’s college that later became part of Yenching University. After completing her schooling, Miss Li taught at the Bridgeman School, worked as a pastor’s assistant in a Congregational church in Peking, and worked in the Peking YWCA.

Career

Working closely with Feng in his various endeavors, Li was a first-hand witness to the stormy and chaotic events that characterized Feng’s life in north and northwest China in the twenties and early thirties. Li made her first trip abroad at age 30 when she accompanied her husband on his trip to Mongolia and the Soviet Union from March to September 1926. It may have been at this time that she first acquired some knowledge of Russian; writing about 30 years later, former French Premier Edgar Faure noted (on the basis of his 1956 trip to Peking) that she spoke both English and Russian.

From the latter part of 1935 the Fengs lived in Nanking, the Nationalist capital, and then spent the war years in Chungking when the capital was transferred there after the fall of Nanking to the Japanese in 1937. During these years Li was engaged in a variety of quasipolitical and charitable activities, working for the National Women’s Association for War Relief, and serving as president of both the Chinese Women’s Association and the Chinese Women’s Christian Temperance Union and as a board member of the National Refugee Children’s Association and of the Sino-Soviet Cultural Association. The last-named organization had a strong leftist orientation (see under Ch’ien Chiin-jui) and was a forerunner of the Sino- Soviet Friendship Association established by the Communists in 1949.

In April 1946 Li was elected a delegate to the KMT National Assembly, but she did not attend any sessions, possibly because by this time she and her husband were preparing to go abroad again. Highly dissatisfied with the course of political events in China, Feng Yii-hsiang wanted to leave the country, and to do so he asked the Nationalist Government to send him to the United States to investigate irrigation and water conservancy facilities. The request was granted and in September 1946 the Fengs sailed from Shanghai. They lived for a brief time in Berkeley, California, toured conservation sites, and then settled in New York City where they remained until mid-1948. At this time relations between Feng and his wife were reported to have been so strained that Mme. Feng was considering a divorce. In the United States Feng quickly became an active spokesman for anti-Chiang Kai-shek sentiment, urging the U.S. Government to maintain a strict neutrality between the Communists and the Nationalists, a position with which his wife presumably agreed.

After spending nearly two years in the United States, the Fengs sailed from New York in July 1948 on a Russian ship. In early September, just before docking at a Black Sea port, Feng died in a fire aboard the ship; this gave rise to rumors of foul play, but Feng’s biographer, James E. Sheridan, believes it was simply an accident. Li proceeded to Manchuria and then arrived in Peking in February 1949, the month after the city was surrendered to the Communists. Even before her arrival in Peking it was evident that she had already decided to throw in her lot with the Communists, for in December 1948 she had been elected a member of the Communist-dominated Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) at a meeting in Budapest (although it is not clear if she attended). Moreover, in January 1949 she had been made a vice-chairman of the Preparatory Committee of the All-China Federation of Democratic Women (ACFDW), an affiliate of the WIDF, and when the first national women’s congress was held that spring, she was elected an ACFDW vice-chairman, a post she still retains.

At the same time that the new government was formed, several “mass” organizations were established. Li was named to two of the most active of these, the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association (SSFA) and the China Peace Committee. In the SSFA she was named to the First Executive Board, rising to a vice-chairmanship in December 1954, a post she still holds. Moreover, from 1949 to 1954 she was also one of the SSFA deputy secretaries-general and a deputy director of the Liaison Department. In the Peace Committee she has served since 1949 as a National Committee member (and as a Standing Committee member from 1958 to 1965). In 1950, as conditions on the mainland became more stabilized, steps were taken to reorganize a number of relief and social welfare organizations into a single organization. Li took an active part in these endeavors and in April 1950 was made a vice-chairman of the Chinese People’s Relief Administration (see under Wu Yun-fu), a post she still retains. In the late summer of the same year the Chinese Red Cross Society was reorganized, with Li assuming the presidency, a position to which she was to devote much time until she was replaced in 1965.

In the early years of the PRC Li assumed still other posts in the government and “mass” organizations. Toward the end of 1951 she was named to the central government’s ad hoc Central Austerity Committee to examine the state of the nation’s economy, and a few days later she was appointed to membership on the North China Administrative Committee, retaining this post until the regional governments were dissolved in 1954. From 1952 to 1956 she was a vice-chairman of the All-China Athletic Association, and from 1952 to 1954 she served on the national government’s Labor Employment Committee, which was established to deal with chronic unemployment problems. Li was also named to the Board of Directors of the Chinese People s Association for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries upon its formation in May 1954, a post she may still hold.

Interspersed with her already numerous administrative responsibilities and her foreign travels, Li was fully occupied in the late fifties and early sixties with still other duties. She has served since 1954 as a deputy from her native Hopeh in the NPC, and from its establishment in February 1956 she was a vice-chairman of the Asian (later Afro-Asian) Solidarity Committee of China; Li was dropped from her vicechairmanship in June 1965, but she remains a member. From 1956 to 1958 she was a member of the State Council’s Scientific Planning Commission and she has served for a number of years on the editorial board of the English- language monthly China Reconstructs. Presumably in recognition of her advancing years (she was 70 in 1966), Li’s active official life began to taper off in the early sixties, as suggested by the fact that she made her last trip abroad in 1962 after having been abroad at least once each year since 1946 (excepting only 1961). Finally, in January 1965, she was replaced in the Public Health Ministry by Ch’ien Hsin-chung, and three months later Ch’ien also replaced her as president of the Red Cross Society (although Li remains a member of the Society’s Standing Committee). She continues to make public appearances, but most of them are of a ceremonial nature. Among the foremost accomplishments of the PRC are the elimination of some of the major diseases that have plagued China for centuries and the establishment of a nationwide public health network reaching into virtually every village. As the Public Health minister for more than 15 years, Li Te-ch’uan would seem to deserve some of the credit for these accomplishments. The Public Health Ministry was not devoid of political struggles during Li’s term of office, particularly in regard to the controversy of traditional Chinese versus Western medicine. It appears, however, that the politically more important Hsu Yun-pei, a former vice-minister, served as the chief spokesman for Chinese medicine in this battle. Regarding another important and sensitive issue birth control Li reportedly expressed Chinese eagerness to cooperate with the Family Planning Federation of Japan to a Japanese family planning expert when he visited Peking in 1964.” At the end of 1958 it was announced that Li had been admitted to the CCP together with a number of prominent intellectuals (e.g., Li Szu-kuang). However, this action by the Party can probably be regarded more as a reward for long service than as an indication that Li Te-ch’iian and the others had advanced to a new level of political importance.

Politics

In June 1949 Li attended the meetings chaired by Mao Tse-tung of the Preparatory Committee for the CPPCC, and when the CPPCC held its first session in September to bring the new central government into existence, she attended as a delegate of the Kuomintang Revolutionary Committee (KMTRC), one of the “democratic” political parties that ostensibly shares political power with the CCP. Li has continued to hold a seat in the CPPCC since her election to the First National Committee in 1949, but since 1954 she has represented “social relief and welfare organizations” (rather than the KMTRC). She was elevated to the CPPCC Standing Committee in 1953 and to a vice-chairmanship in early 1965. When the assignments in the new government were made in October 1949, Li became a member (until 1954) of the Culture and Education Committee under the Government Administration Council (the cabinet). But her most important assignment was to head the Ministry of Public Health, a post she was to hold for over 15 years. Although not a medical doctor by training, Li brought to the ministry much experience in charity and relief work. Moreover, unlike many non-Communists who have held nominal posts in the cabinet, it appears that Li was given genuine powers within the ministry. She was, at any rate, extremely active in the first decade of the PRC, as evidenced by the many reports on public health she presented before governmental bodies, by the tours she made throughout the nation, and by the fact that she was sent abroad on several occasions (see below) to attend meetings related to public health. It should also be noted that the Public Health Ministry had particularly burdensome responsibilities as a consequence of years of warfare, with the resulting deterioration of public health facilities. For example, one of the first measures taken by the new government was the formation (October 1949) of a Central Epidemic Prevention Committee, a body to which Li was appointed as a member. Writing of Miss Li at this time, the Indian ambassador in Peking commented that she was a “picture of quiet efficiency” and “obviously full of energy and competence.”

One of the most outstanding features of Li’s career has been the frequency with which she has traveled abroad on behalf of the PRC or one of the “mass” organizations to which she is affiliated. Forty-two separate trips abroad have taken her to 24 nations; she had visited every country in the Communist bloc except North Vietnam, seven in West Europe, three in Asia, one in the Middle East, and Canada. Her trips can be divided into four principal categories: Red Cross work, public health, women’s liaison, and the “peace” movement. Traveling either to meetings of the International Red Cross (IRC) or paying visits at the invitation of Red Cross chapters in other nations, Li was in the following nations: Monaco, 1950; Switzerland, 1951 (twice), 1953; Canada, 1952; Norway, 1954; Japan, 1954, 1957; England, 1955; India, 1957 and the Soviet Union, 1959. Among these trips the most notable was that to Toronto in July- August 1952 when she led the Chinese Red Cross delegation to the 18th International Conference of the IRC, thus becoming one of the extremely small number of PRC officials to have visited North America since 1949. Li’s efforts at the Toronto meetings were devoted primarily to opposing Chinese Nationalist participation in the IRC and to castigating the United States for its alleged use of “germ warfare” in the Korean War. Her foreign travels on behalf of the Public Health Ministry have taken her to India (1953), the Soviet Union (1954), the Mongolian People’s Republic (1960), and Cuba (1962), in addition to a five-nation tour in 1958 of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Bulgaria, and Albania. The purpose of most of these trips was to inspect public health facilities.

Connections

In February 1924 she married the powerful north China warlord Feng Yii-hsiang, widely known as the “Christian General” and a man 14 years her senior.

Spouse:

Feng Yii-hsiang