Background
Nothing is known about his background.
Nothing is known about his background.
He was educated locally.
Lo participated in the Canton Uprising in December 1927 (see under Chang T’ai-lei), and he is credited witli having set up a “fighting unit” of workers to assist the regular Communist Shanghai. Until the fall of 1930 Li Li-san had been the de facto head of the Party, but it is not known if Lo was tainted with the stigma of having followed the famed “Li Li-san line.”
In addition to his post with the Party Secretariat, Lo was also appointed in 1930 as secretary of the Party Corps (Tang fang) of the Communist-led underground All-China Federation of Labor. Hsiang Ying had chaired the Labor Federation since its secretly held Fifth Congress in late 1929, but in the latter part of 1930 this position was assumed by Lo Chang-lung. During the last few months of 1930 and the early part of 1931, the CCP was rent by extremely serious factional struggles. The three major factions were led by Li Li-san, labor leader Lo Chang- lung and his colleagues, and the Russian-returned student group led by Ch’in Pang-hsien and Ch’en Shao-yii (who had strong backing from Comintern representative Pavel Mif). At the Party's Fourth Plenum in January 1931, the Russian-returned group emerged the victor. This new leadership element apparently looked with favor upon Lo Teng-hsien, because after the Plenum he was named to succeed Lo Chang-lung as chairman of the Labor Federation.
Lo's leadership of the Labor Federation was short-lived, because after the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in September 1931, he was assigned there as the representative of the Party Center and as secretary of the CCP’s Manchurian Provincial Committee (Man-chou sheng-wei). Using the alias Ta Ping, he traveled from Harbin, the headquarters of the CCP Committee, to various parts of Manchuria in an effort to coordinate the Party's activities with local resistance leaders and to assist in the formation of new guerrilla units. K’ang Sheng’s biography of Lo asserts that he worked among the coal miners at Fushun and that he “laid the foundation” for the ultimate establishment of the First Army. The First Army was one of six armies set up in 1933-34 by Chinese and Korean Communists in Manchuria. (The details are discussed in the biography of Chou Pao-chung who, like Lo, was sent by the CCP to Manchuria in 1931.)
The Manchurian assignment was clearly one of the Party’s most dangerous, and in fact Lo narrowly escaped arrest on a number of occasions. Therefore, fearing for his safety, the Party Center ordered him back to Shanghai in December 1932. In the meantime, in November 1931 Lo had been elected in absentia to membership on the Central Executive Committee of the Chinese Soviet Republic. The Republic had been established at the First All-China Congress of Soviets in Juichin, Kiangsi, the headquarters of the armed forces led by Chu Te and Mao Tse- tung. Upon his return to Shanghai at the end of 1932, Lo was made secretary of the Shanghai Executive Bureau (chih-hsing chii) of the AllChina Federation of Labor, which, in effect, was one of the various posts that collectively made up the Party underground in Shanghai. In early 1933 he was attempting to organize a strike on the rail line from Hangchow, Chekiang, to Nanchang, Kiangsi, in order to disrupt Nationalist supply lines during one of their major Annihilation Campaigns against the Central Soviet in Kiangsi. During the course of this work he was arrested by the International Settlement police in Shanghai on March 28, 1933. Three days later he, Liao Ch’eng-chih, and Ch’en Keng were tried and convicted in the settlement. Despite an appeal to the authorities by Mme. Sun Yat-sen, all three were turned over to the Nationalist authorities. Ch’en Keng escaped from prison and Liao was released, but Lo was executed in Nanking in July. Lo's colleague Teng Chung-hsia was also arrested and executed at approximately the same time.