Lo Jui-ch’ing,one of the earliest members of the Red Army, was a top staff and political officer during the Sino-Japanese War and the civil war against the Nationalists in the late forties. He was elected an alternate member of the Party Central Committee in 1945 and a full member in 1956. He is best known for his role as minister of Public Security during the first decade of the PRC.
Background
Lo was reportedly born into a landlord family. Japanese sources assert that he came from Liang-shan (Liang-p’ing) in east Szechwan, but it is more likely that he comes from Nan-ch’ung, formerly known as Shunking (Shun-chMng), an important regional center in the Chia-ling river basin in central Szechwan.
Education
He received some vocational training in a Nan-ch'ung school run by Chang Lan, the well-known head of the China Democratic League until his death in 1955. He then went to Canton where he was enrolled in the fifth class of the Whampoa Military Academy. The fifth class matriculated from February to November 1926, but because the Northern Expedition began in mid-1926, many of the cadets left the classrooms for the battlefronts and then returned to a more normal training program at the northern branch of the academy in Wuhan after the Northern Expeditionary Forces captured that city in the fall of 1926. It appears that Lo followed this pattern. Like a large number of his fellow cadets, he also joined the CCP at approximately this time.
Career
Lo took part in the Communist uprising at Nanchang on August 1, 1927 (see under Yeh T’ing),an event in which many ex-Whampoa students participated. However, his role at Nanchang must have been minor, because there is no record of the nature of his activities. After the failure at Nanchang, the Communists moved south to Kwangtung, and after sustaining further defeats, many of them made their way to the Hunan-Kiangsi border base at Chingkangshan. In any case, Lo was at Chingkangshan in 1928, serving there in the Fourth Red Army, led by Chu Te and Mao Tse-tung. Lo remained with the Chu-Mao forces, which underwent a major reorganization in mid-1930 in west Fukien. At that time the First Army Corps was established, composed of the Third, Fourth, 12th, and 21st Red Armies. Lo was assigned to the Fourth Red Army, led by Lin Piao and Lo Jung-huan, serving as political commissar of the 11th Division. In this capacity he took part in the brief but savage Second Annihilation Campaign waged by the Nationalists against the Red Army in east- central Kiangsi during the last two weeks of May 1931.
In the spring of 1932 Lo was severely wounded in a battle against Nationalist troops. There are unconfirmed reports that he then went to the Soviet Union where in the next two years he received training in security and intelligence work. In any event he was back in the Kiangsi area in 1934 when he was elected a member of the Chinese Soviet Republic’s Central Executive Committee at the Second All-China Congress of Soviets (January-February). In the same year he became director of the Political Security Bureau for Lin Piao’s First Army Corps; in this post he was probably subordinate to Teng Fa, the over-all security chief for the Communists.
Lo made the Long March, which brought the Communists from Kiangsi to Shensi. Little is known about the part he took in the long trek, but to judge from an article by a Long March participant it appears that Lo was a relatively important staff officer in the First Front Army, which included Mao, Lin Piao, and Nieh Jung- chen. When the march was completed in the autumn of 1935, Lo became Political Department director of the First Column of a unit known as the Shensi-Kansu Detachment, which was under Lin Piao’s First Army Corps. He was a graduate in 1936 of the Red Army Military Academy, which the Communists reopened in north Shensi several months after the marchers arrived there. The school was moved to Yenan in early 1937 and renamed the Anti-Japanese Military and Political Academy (Kung-ta). Lo was assigned to the school, initially serving as dean of studies (chiao-yii chang). He later became vice-president (by 1938) under President Lin Piao, as well as political commissar. He was the acting head of the academy after Lin Piao led units of the Eighth Route Army into Shansi in the early stages of the Sino-Japanese War, which began in mid-1937. Lo wrote a brief but useful description of KJang-ta for the 48th issue of the Communist journal Chieh-fang (Liberation), published on August 8, 1938. Not long afterwards, in 1939, a Communist publishing house brought out a book-length work by Lo entitled K'ang-Jih chiin-tui chung te cheng-chih kung-tso (Political work in the anti-Japanese military forces), Lo’s preface was written at K’ang-ta ani was dated November 10, 1938. This has been described in a bibliography dealing with Chinese Communist military affairs as “probably the most comprehensive work on political organization and indoctrination in the Communist forces.”
Lo’s wartime record is not well documented. From 1939 to the end of the war in 1945 he seems to have divided his time between Yenan and the front line headquarters of the Communists' Eighth Route Army in the T'ai-hang Mountains in Shansi province. In regard to his work in Shansi, he reportedly served from 1940 to 1945 as director of the Field Hcadquarters, Political Department under the over-all direction of the Eighth Route Army, and during approximately these same years he was also a member of the CCP’s North China Bureau. According to a Communist account dealing with the middle war years, Lo worked closely with Eighth Route Army Deputy-Commander P’eng Te-huai and Deputy Chief-of-Staff Tso Ch'iian. When the latter was killed in southeast Shansi in June 1942, Lo presided over the memorial services. He was back in Yenan in the late summer of 1944, and he may have remained there until the Party held its Seventh Congress in Yenan (April- June 1945), when he was elected an alternate member of the Central Committee. In 1946 he became deputy political commissar of the Shansi-Chahar-Hopeh Military Region where he served for a brief time under Nieh Jung-chen, the region's commander and political commissar.
Under the new national administration Lo was given several top appointments, the most important being the portfolio for the Public Security Ministry. In addition, he became a member of: Chou En-lai's Government Administration Council (GAC; the cabinet), the GAC's Political and Legal Affairs Committee the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, and the People’s Revolutionary Military Council (PRMC). Moreover, under the PRMC he also served as a member of the National Defense Research Council. In brief, during the formative years of the PRC, Lo was one of the leading Communist officials in the fields of security, law enforcement, and the interpretation of legal matters. Although specific documentation is lacking, he probably worked directly under Politburo member P’eng Chen. Lo continued to hold all these posts until they were abolished in 1954-excepting only the Ministry of Public Security where he remained as the minister until the fall of 1959.
Lo’s tasks in the early years of the PRC were not concerned solely with the central government. In the fall of 1949 he was also named to membership on the Peking Municipal People’s Government Council as well as director of the Peking Public Security Bureau, he held the former position until February 1955 but it is not known how long he retained the municipal security post. In addition, he was chief procurator for the Peking city government from November 1951 to the mid-1950’s. Like many key CCP personnel, Lo held a seat on the Executive Board of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association from 1949 until 1954 when it was among the most active of the mass organizations. From its establishment under the presidency of P'eng Chen in July 1951 to at least mid-1954, Lo was also a member of the Administrative Committee of the Central Political and Legal Cadres Academy.
One of Lo’s earliest assignments for the new government was to preside over the First National Public Security Work Conference in October-November 1949. Because the conference was attended by virtually every important security official at the national and provincial level, it is plausible to assume that it laid the groundwork for the nationwide security network a task that was doubtless given high priority at this eary stage of Communist control. Over the next decade Lo was almost always the featured speaker at similar conferences, and it was usually he who made the official reports on security work before government bodies. Lo’s numerous reports, as well as his articles in the Communist press, normally referred to security matters in terms of “suppressing counterrevolutionaries,” and punishment was usually described in terms of “reform through labor.” It also fell to Lo to announce executions carried out by the PRC, writing for the October 11, 1951, issue of the JMJP, for example, he candidly admitted that persons had been executed "in orderjto appease the rightful indignation of the people.” He was particularly prominent in the early fifties during the three- and five-anti movements-nationwide campaigns directed against both CCP members and businessmen for “crimes” regarded as inimical to the interests of the PRC (e.g., graft).
As chief administrator of nationwide security programs, Lo normally acted in the name of the Public Security Ministry. He received a closely related post by 1950 when he was identified as commander of the PLA's Public Security Forces, and by 1953 he was identified as the political commissar. He held both posts until 1959 or possibly later, after which Hsieh Fu-chih replaced him. In November 1952 he was promoted from membership to a vice-chairmanship on the GAC's Political and Legal Affairs Committee, and four months later he accompanied Chou En-lai to Moscow to attend Stalin's funeral. Immediately before this trip he served as a member (January-February 1953) of a special committee to draft the national election law. As a result of the elections, Lo was selected as a deputy from Hopeh to the First NPC, which convened in September 1954 to inaugurate the PRC constitutional government.
Politics
From early 1946 to early 1947, holding the simulated rank of lieutenant general, Lo served under Yeh Chien-ying, who headed the Communist delegation at the Peking Executive Headquarters. There, under the auspices of the Marshall Mission, negotiations were conducted for a year in an attempt to arbitrate CCP-KMT differences and to prevent the outbreak of civil war, which had in fact already erupted by the time the Executive Headquarters was formally disbanded in early 1947. During this period Lo was chief-of-staff of the Communist group attached to the Executive Headquarters, the top post under Yeh Chien-ying. When the negotiations completely collapsed in early 1947, Lo went back to his work in the Shansi-Chahar-Hopeh Military Region where the North China PLA under Nieh Jung-chen was in charge of operations.
As a top political officer in north China, Lo took an active part in a series of campaigns, mainly in Hopeh, from the fall of 1947 to January 1949. During this period he was associated with PLA commanders Yang Ch'eng-wu, Yang Te-chih, and Keng Piao. Lo was then director of the Political Department of the North China PLA and political commissar of the 19th Army Group. The operations in which he participated were carried out in coordination with Lin Piao, who was moving his troops from Manchuria into north China by late 1948, these campaigns culminated in the capture of Tientsin and Peking in January 1949. Soon after this Lo was transferred to become deputy political commissar in the army that Hsu Hsiang-ch’ien was moving toward Taiyuan, the Shansi capital. Yen Hsi-shan, the famed Shansi warlord, fled Taiyuan in March 1949, and in the following month it was captured by the Communists. Hsu was immediately placed in charge of the Taiyuan Military Control Commission, and Lo was made vice-chairman.
Lo’s term of office in Taiyuan was of brief duration, because a few weeks after the fall of that city he was transferred to Peking where, in a short time, he was to assume important assignments in the national government. First, however, in June 1949 he was named to the Preparatory Committee of the China New Legal Research Society, and in the same month (representing P'eng Te-huai who was still fighting in the northwest) he served on a special committee that was charged with drafting the Common Program, the document that served as the equivalent of a constitution in the formative years of the PRC. This committee assignment was given to Lo by the CPPCC Preparatory Committee, headed by Mao Tse-tung. The work of the Preparatory Committee was completed by September 1949 when the CPPCC held its inaugural session to form the national government. Representing the First Field Army, Lo attended the session and served on the ad hoc committee that prepared the final draft of the Common Program, which was formally adopted at this time.
Membership
Lo’s long military-political career was given recognition at the Party's Eighth National Congress in September 1956 when he was promoted from alternate to full membership on the Central Committee, and during the Congress he addressed the delegates on the subject of public security. Lo continued to be the dominant Communist official in matters of security throughout the middle and late fifties, but beginning with the initial session of the Second NPC in April 1959 (which Lo attended as a deputy-from his native Szechwan), he began to play a more significant role in the national government and, soon afterwards, in the PLA. At the close of the 1959 NPC session he was appointed one of the four new State Council vice-premiers and was reappointed a member of the National Defense Council, as well as minister of Public Security. Then, in September 1959, following the political downfall of National Defense Minister P'eng Te-huai and PLA Chief-of-Staff Huang K'o-ch'eng, Lo was appointed the ranking vice-minister of Defense under the new Defense minister, Lin Piao. In addition, he replaced Huang as chief-of-staff. Because of these new key assignments, he turned over the directorship of both the Public Security Ministry and the State Council’s First Staff Office (now known as the Political and Legal Affairs Office) to Hsieh Fu-chih. Considering all the critical personnel changes made in the power elite in 1959, few if any Communist officials rose in stature as quickly as Lo and within a little more than a year (1961), he was also identified as a member and secretary-general of the most powerful military organ the Party Central Committee's Military Affairs Committee. Equally if not more important, at the CCP's 10th Plenum in September 1962, Lo was added as a new member of the Party’s Central Secretariat, the organ responsible for carrying out Politburo policies. In effect, Lo replaced the two military representatives on the Secretariat: former Chief-of-Staff Huang Ku-ch'eng and National Defense Vice-Minister Tan Cheng.