Background
Lo came from I-liang near Kunming in Yunnan province. His family were said to have been of peasant stock.
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Lo Ping-hui
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Lo Ping-hui was an important Red military leader from the early 1930,s until his death in 1946. He had had considerable military experience when he became a Communist in 1929, but his reputation rests upon his exploits in some of the military operations that are now ranked among the landmarks of the Chinese Communist Movement.
Education
He had little formal education and received most of his military training from practical experience. In 1915, when he was 18, Lo ran away from home to join the garrison force at nearby Kunming, which was part of the army of Yunnan’s military governor, Tang Chi-yao.
Career
At this time Tang's army supported the provincial separatist movement in Yunnan, and the army offered ample opportunity for advancement to Lo. He soon began attending daily lectures on military affairs. He did so well that he came to T’ang’s attention and was put on his headquarters staff. Lo held responsible positions in t’ang’s army for the next several years. Then, when Tang had to escape Yunnan after being defeated by other local militarists, Lo accompanied him to Hong Kong as his purchasing agent. In Hong Kong he lived in T’ang’s household for eight months (1920) until he began to tire of a life of luxury.
In 1921 he returned home by way of Indochina only to find that his previous connections with Tang Chi-yao made him unpopular with Tang's rival warlords, they had Lo arrested and imprisoned. Released after two weeks through the aid of former military colleagues, he made his way via Kweichow into Kwangsi where he joined the army of Chu P'i-te, a military supporter of Sun Yat-sen. By this time Lo had made something of a reputation as a talented young officer, and he was able to win Chu's confidence as quickly as he had earlier won T'ang's. Chu first entrusted Lo with a special mission to Kwangtung to gather intelligence on provincial military leaders whom he suspected of supporting southern military leader Ch’en Chiung-ming, then opposing Sun Yat-sen. When he had completed this mission, Lo rejoined Chu in Canton and was allied with him during the 1922 campaigns fought against Ch’en Chiung-ming in Kwangtung. Advancing from the rank of captain in the Canton arsenal guards to acting battalion commander, Lo was next sent north with the arsenal guards to engage forces allied to Wu P'ei-fu and opposed to Sun Yat-sen. Lo became a full battalion commander in 1926 at the start of the Northern Expedition. Between July 1926 and August 1927 his battalion fought from Kwangtung to Hunan and from there to Kiangsi as part of Chu P'i-te's Third Nationalist Army. By mid-1927 Lo was stationed near Nanchang, the Kiangsi capital. It was during the Northern Expedition that he began to use the revolutionary alias Lo Ping-hui. It was probably also at this time that he joined the KMT. He was involved in some intensive fighting during the northern military campaign, was twice wounded, and managed to reach Nan-chang with only 80 survivors from his original unit of about 400.
When the Nanchang Uprising took place on August 1, 1927, Communist-led troops that took over the city disarmed the Chu P'ei-te troops, with which Lo was serving. Lo had already met Communist leader Chu Te, but when Chu asked him to join the CCP at the time of the uprising, he refused, he said, partly because at the time he did not have any good friends who were Communists. Hence, when the Communists were forced to flee from the city (August 5, 1927), Lo remained with Chu f’ei-te’s army. Later he was sent into Fukien and Kiangsi as a “bandit suppression” commander. As head of a “peace preservation corps” in the river port city of Chi-an (Kian) in 1929, he first fought against Chu Te’s army, which was operating in the Kiangsi countryside near Chi-an. But as peace preservation corps commander, Lo's sympathies had come to be with the workers and peasants, so he finally joined the CCP in July 1929 after he had received several invitations from members of the Kiangsi Provincial Party Committee.
From 1930 to 1934 Lo's troops were almost continually engaged in action against encircling Nationalist armies conducting the five Annihilation Campaigns to eliminate the Communists from central-south China. (In 1930 Lo’s 12th Army was absorbed into Chu Tc's First Army Corps.) After surviving the first three campaigns, Lo's army was sent on a mission to decoy the Nationalists in central Kiangsi to the north in hopes of breaking the blockade that was beginning to menace the Communists. In fighting near Lo-an in central Kiangsi in 1931, he was successful for a time. His army participated in another drive for Nanchang in 1933 when the forces of Chu Te, K’ung Ho-ch’ung, and Fang Chih-min attempted to take the city. Then, when the Communists were finally driven off, they called a military conference to review their campaign and to plan their next moves. At this conference, which occurred in the spring of 1933, it was decided to create two new army corps, the Ninth and the Seventh. Lo was put in charge of the former, which apparently absorbed his former 22nd Army troops into the new unit. Ts’ai Shu-fan was political commissar of the Ninth Army Corps. In the interim, Lo had been elected to the Central Executive Committee (CEC) of the Chinese Soviet Republic, established in November 1931 at the All-China Congress of Soviets held in Juichin in southeast Kiangsi. He was re-elected at the second congress held in January-February 1934. During the summer of 1934, at the height of the NationalivSt campaigns against the Communists, Lo was sent on a mission to Fukien, apparently with the intent of decoying Nationalist troops from the Communist capital in Kiangsi. Thus, in July 1934 he started from Kuei-hua (Ming-chu) in western Fukien and marched in a northeasterly direction to the Min River, and then traveled down river to Shui-k’ou. From there Lo's force covered the coastal area of northeast Fukien from the vicinity of Fu-ting to Licn-chiang just above Foochow, occupying briefly the towns of Hsia-p’u, Fu-an, Ning-te, Lo-yuan, and Lien-chiang. The maneuver forced the Nationalists to come to the defense of Foochow and meanwhile the Communists plundered the countryside for supplies. While thus engaged, Lo dispatched a part of his army north to join Fang Chih-min, who had at the same time been sent on a similar decoying expedition from northeast Kiangsi (see under Fang Chih-min). When this unit reached Fang’s 10th Army, it formed part of the so-called “Resist Japan Vanguards,” with which Fang fought until he was captured by the Nationalists in early 1935. Lo himself, however, found it necessary before long to pull back into Kiangsi, and when his troops suffered heavy losses at Kuang-ch’ang in east Kiangsi north of Juichin, he was again forced to withdraw.
Lo embarked upon the Long March in the fall of 1934 as commander of the Ninth Army Corps with Ho Ch’ang-kung as his political commissar. When Mao’s army reached west Szechwan in mid-1935 and rendezvoused with the Fourth Front Army of Chang Kuo-t’ao, Lo was with Mao. But after the two leaders had separated, with Mao going north to Shensi while Chang turned west into the then Sikang province, Lo’s Ninth Corps went with Chang and spent the winter of 1935-36 at his headquarters in the Tibetan-peopled area near Kan-tzu. Ho Ch’ang-kung，Lo’s political commissar, also made this move. In the spring of 1936 Chang's army was joined by the Second Front Army, commanded by Ho Lung and Jen Pi-shih, and Lo made the next lap of the march north to rejoin Mao with Ho's army. By December 1936 he had arrived at Huan-hsien in eastern Kansu. Lo's Ninth Army Corps was subordinate to Chang Kuo-fao's army, which did not follow Ho Lung from Kansu to Shensi but remained in Kansu by order of Chang. After crossing the Yellow River at Ching-yuan they met with disaster in the Kansu corridor at the hands of generals Hu Tsung-nan and Ma Pu- fang and had to flee into the Ch'i-lien Mountains of Tsinghai. Only some 500 soldiers from the Ninth Corps survived and these were brought to north Shensi in the spring of 1937 (see under Ting Tai-yuan and Wang Shu-sheng). However, it is very doubtful that Lo accompanied his Ninth Army Corps on the Kansu-Tsinghai Expedition, because at some point in the year he was known to have had his headquarters in the small town of Yii-wang-pao in southern Ninghsia. Lo was in north China in mid-1937 when the American authoress Nym Wales interviewed him. The information she obtained from him, in addition to a semi-official Communist biography of Lo, provides most of the data for his early career.
When the Sino-Japanese War broke out in July 1937, Lo became director of the Wuhan office of the Communist Eighth Route Army. In the following year he joined the New Fourth Army as deputy commander of the Army First Detachment headed by Ch'in I. This was the army the Communists put into operation in east-central China early in 1938. It was commanded by Yeh T’ing and drew together the scattered Communist guerrilla forces that had been operating in central and east China since before the outbreak of the war. By April 1938 Yeh had organized four detachments of New Fourth Army troops, and the first three detachments soon moved south of the Yangtze into the southern portions of Kiangsu and Anhwei provinces. The detachments occupied an area extending from Tan-yang in southwest Kiangsu to Fan-ch’ang southwest of the river port city of Wu-hu in Anhwei, in territory bounded by the Yangtze stretching south toward the Chekiang border to She-hsien.fl By 1940 Yeh's headquarters were only some 50 miles south of Wu-hu, near the county seat of Ching-hsien. In this territory Lo was deputy commander of the Second Detachment, which made its headquarters in early 1939 at Chin-t'an, south Kiangsu.
Politics
After joining the Party, Lo remained for a time in Chi-an, but in the latter part of 1929 he defected with a small number of troops. Then, after making contact with Red Army troops south of Chi-an in early 1930, he was made commander of the Second Column in Huang Kung-lueh's Third Army. He campaigned in Kiangsi during the early months of 1930 with troops led by Chu Te, Feng Te-huai, and Huang, after which he was transferred to west Fukien where, in July 1930, he was placed in command of the 12th Red Army. A few years later, about 1933, he was commander of the 22nd Red Army. In the meantime, however, while still heading the 12th Red Army, the major Red Army units in the Kiangsi-Fukien area were ordered to move north into central china by the impetuous young Party leader Li Li-san, whose influence was then paramount at the CCP headquarters and who planned a major military campaign to take over the Yangtze industrial cities. Lo was a member of the force led by Chu Te and Mao Tse-tung which began an assault on Nanchang in August 1930 as part of this strategy. At the same time that the Chu-Mao army was attacking Nanchang in Kiangsi, P’eng Te-huai was making an attack upon Changsha, the Hunan capital. Both attacks failed in short order. Then the retreating Communist armies met to reconnoiter and prepare for a second attack to be made jointly upon Changsha. This opened on September 1 and was as unsuccessful as the first. After the second Changsha defeat, Lo accompanied Chu Te's troops eastward into Kiangsi. They attacked and entered Chi-an on October 5, 1930, to establish a short-lived Communist government there. The attack on Chi-an was spearheaded by Lo’s 12th Red Army, Lo receiving cooperation from some of his former colleagues with whom he had worked a year earlier in the peace preservation corps.
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Born
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Died
1946 (aged 49) -
Nationality
China -
Ethnicity
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Political Party
Chinese Communist Party
Career
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1931
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1934