Background
Nothing is known about his background.
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Lo Ming
Edit ProfileEducation
He was educated locally.
Career
Lo later headed the Fukien Party Committee and was the focal point in a protracted intra-Party dispute regarding the appropriate strategy to resist the efforts by the KMT armies to wipe out the Communist base on the Kiangsi-Fukien border in the early thirties. In late 1930 Chiang Kai-shek's armies launched the First Annihilation Campaign to destroy the Communists. In the four successive campaigns, the Communists were initially able to hold off Chiang’s armies, but steady inroads were made in Kiangsi and Fukien during the Fourth Campaign begun in mid-1932. In the meantime, at the CCP’s Fourth Plenum in January 1931, a new group of leaders had taken control of the Party. These men, the so-called Russian-returned students (or 28 Bolsheviks) were headed by Ch’en Shao-yii, Ch’in Pang-hsien, and Chang Wen-fien, and they were strongly influenced by their Comintern mentors.
The new leaders were well versed in Party theory, but had little experience in building Communist bases. Asserting that the Nationalists were on the verge of collapse, they wanted to intensify the revolutionary struggle in China. They advocated engaging the enemy in positional warfare, trying to capture cities, and clearly defining class status. These policies became known as the “forward and offensive line.” After the Comintern’s 12th Executive Committee Plenum in September 1932, at which Communists throughout the world were urged to step up the revolutionary pace, the retumed-student leadership advocated a broad-scale political and economic mobilization, as well as an expansion of the Red Army.
Lo himself was removed as head of the Fukien Party Committee in February 1933 when the attacks against him began. But the campaign against his alleged followers continued for many months and, according to the returned-student leadership, the suppression of the Lo Ming policies enabled the Communists to repulse the Nationalists’ Fourth Annihilation Campaign in 1933. Most accounts stress that those criticized were close to Mao Tse-tung, but few versions have emphasized that the critics included many leaders who were not members of the returned student leadership. For example, both Chou En-lai and Jen Pi-shih wrote blistering attacks against the Lo Ming group. The men who were censured during the campaign included such notables as T’an Chen-lin, Ch’en T’an-ch’iu, Teng Tzu-hui, Teng Hsiao-p'ing, Hsiao Ching-kuang, and Mao's younger brother, Mao Tse-fan. It should be noted, however, that with the exception of Mao Tse-t’an (who was killed in 1935 by the Nationalists) all these men went on to have highly significant careers in later years.
Politics
Lo Ming, the acting secretary of the Fukien Party Committee in 1933, became the symbol of this conflict between the reality of Nationalist attacks and the policies of the returned-student leadership to thwart them. According to the accusations made about him when the campaign against the Lo Ming, was begun in February 1933, Lo felt that the peasants were too war-weary and apathetic to be aroused to a successful fight against the Nationalists. Instead, he favored moderating the revolutionary effort and using guerrilla tactics until the Communist position could be strengthened. To demonstrate Lo's “incorrect” viewpoint, Ch’in Pang-hsien quoted Lo as saying: “I don’t think we can thoroughly change the mood of the masses even if wc ask our best leader Chairman Mao or Chairman Hsiang Ying (of the Military Council), Comrade Chou En-lai, Comrade Jen Pi-shih, or go to the Soviet Union to ask Comrade Stalin or bring Lenin back to life and ask them all to . . . address the masses three days and nights to step up political propaganda. Chang Wen-fien dated Lo's mistakes from the Fourth Plenum of 1931, criticizing him for separating military mobilization from political mobilization, for divorcing the Party from the masses, and for insisting on the use of guerrilla warfare.
Accoding to a February 15, 1933, decision of the Party’s Central Bureau, Lo’s policies were “opportunistic,” and they were supported by a group of his associates who were “filled with pessimism and despair, inclined toward retreat and escape, isolated from the masses. Those who were not directly threatened by the Nationalists tended to minimize the seriousness of the attacks, resulting in complacency and pacifism. Those directly threatened had panicked, resulting in despair and defeatism. The peasants in general considered the “forward and offensive” policy to be the Red Army’s problem, not theirs. The campaign against the “Lo Ming line” was designed to counter these attitudes.
With the Nationalists' successful Fifth Annihilation Campaign, which resulted in the Communists' abandonment of their base and the subsequent Long March (October 1934), the controversy was set aside. Based on the available record, the Lo Ming dispute lay dormant for over a decade. Then, on the eve of the CCP Seventh National Congress, the Party adopted the famous “Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party (April 1945). This resolution, the definitive Maoist interpretation of Party history, charged that the returned students had incorrectly espoused the “third Left line” and had “wrongly opposed” the Lo Ming line. The annotators of Mao's Selected Works further argued that Lo had been “attacked by the ‘Leftists’ because he held that as the Party was confronted with a rather difficult situation in Shanghang, Yungting and other outlying parts of western Fukien, its policy there should be different from that in the stable base areas. The "Leftists' wrongly and exaggeratedly represented his views as a line of opportunist-liquidationist flight and retreat, due to pessimism and despair about the revolution and, organizationally, waged the so-called struggle against the Lo Ming line.
In response to the difficulties in Fukien, an interim Party committee, which included Liu Hsiao among its members, was established to take over Lo Ming's responsibilities. Nothing further, however, is known of Lo Ming himself.
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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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1930 - 1933