Background
Nothing is known about his background.
Nothing is known about his background.
He is a graduate of the College of Commerce in Shanghai.
He worked for a number of years in insurance and trading companies and by 1946 was the shipping department manager in a large export firm in Shanghai. By the next year Lu was general manager of the China National Trade Company, a concern that imported American medicines and exported Chinese drugs and pharmaceuticals. In the postwar period he was also reported to have managed Communist-sponsored foreign trade and insurance companies in Hong Kong. Presumably he was a CCP member by this time, but in any event Lu had joined the Communist government in Shanghai after the fall of that city in May 1949, becoming by the latter part of the year a deputy director of the East China Finance and Economics Committee, an interim body established in September under Ch’en I’s East China Military Region. To administer the coastal provinces, the Communists established in early 1950 the East China Military and Administrative Committee (ECMAC), and in February Lu was appointed to membership on the EC^IAC’s Finance and Economics Committee and as deputy director of its Trade Department. He served in the latter post until September 1951 and continued to sit on the Finance and Economics Committee under Chairman Tseng Shan until September 1952, but by this date he had already been transferred to Peking.
In September 1953 Lu was made director of the Foreign Trade Ministry’s Third Bureau, responsible for trade with the West. He quickly won promotions in the ministry, advancing to assistant-minister in June 1955 and to viceminister in October 1956, a position he still retains. In the meantime, he had made two further trips abroad, visiting Japan from March to May 1955 as a deputy leader of a trade delegation and leading another such group to Ulan Bator, where he remained from March to August 1956, finally signing an agreement providing for Chinese economic and technical aid to Mongolia. Over the ensuing years Lu's record of foreign travels has been as impressive as that of any foreign trade oflicial in the PRC. On two occasions he journeyed to Communist nations, the first of these from January to March 1958 when he signed trade agreements in Yugoslavia and Albania. The second trip took him in July- August 1960 to Cuba where he signed long-term trade and payments and scientific-technical agreements.
These trips to Communist areas, however, have been the exceptions in Lu’s work which has been almost entirely concerned with nonCommunist nations. Perhaps his two most significant trips abroad took place in 1961 and 1964, in both cases to Africa where he signed trade agreements or conferred with officials about future trade prospects, in addition to representing the PRC at various official functions. The first of these trips was a four-month tour from January to May 1961 that took Lu to the United Arab Republic, Mali, Guinea, Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Morocco. He devoted himself to trade relations in each nation, excepting Sierra Leone, which he visited as the official PRC representative to independence ceremonies. This trip was one of the first made by a Chinese Communist official to Black Africa. He was again in Africa on a seven-nation tour, described as a government goodwill mission, lasting from July to September 1964. Once more he spent most of his time talking with economic administrators on his visits to Mali, the Congo (Brazzaville), Niger, Nigeria, Dahomey, Cameroun, and the Central African Republic. While in Brazzaville, he represented the PRC at celebrations marking both the first anniversary of the “August Revolution” and the Congolese national day. Lu has been on the African continent on two other occasions, the first from October to December 1958 when he negotiated a trade and payments agreement in Cairo (in addition to a side trip in December 1958-January 1959 to Iraq where he signed a similar agreement). His other visit to Africa occurred in December 1964 when he spent three weeks in Kenya working out the details of an economic and technical cooperation protocol, in addition to attending the first anniversary celebrations of the republic. In brief, few Chinese officials have spent as much time in Africa as Lu.
Summarizing the record, in the 1952-1964 period, Lu has visited 27 nations (some of them twice), all but six of them non-Communist countries. The emphasis on his dealings with the nonCommunist world becomes all the more strikingly apparent from a review of the negotiations he has conducted in Peking. In the same 19521964 period, he signed one or more agreements or protocols with representatives from 13 countries, each of them non-Communist. He has also participated in trade negotiations on numerous other occasions in which some other Chinese official was the signatory, and in the overwhelming majority of cases these talks were held with officials from non-Communist countries. Peking’s massive importations of food grains that began in the early sixties, mainly from Australia and Canada, have never been publicly acknowledged in the Chinese Communist press, presumably because it would embarrass the PRC to admit reliance upon foreign sources. As a logical result of his extensive knowledge of Western trading practices and potentials, Lu has been one of the key Chinese participants in these negotiations.
Lu was transferred from Shanghai to Peking by early 1952, and in April of that year journeyed to Moscow to participate in the First International Economic Conference (see under Nan Han-ch’en, the Chinese delegation leader). The main purpose of the conference was to break through the trade embargo imposed on the Communist bloc by the Western powers as a consequence of the Korean War. The Chinese delegation concluded a number of preliminary agreements in Moscow with business and industrial circles from several non-Communist nations, and to exploit these agreements Lu was sent to East Berlin where in June he signed trade contracts with English firms in his capacity as manager of the China National Import and Export Corporation, a position he held from 1950 to about 1954. In the meantime, in May 1952, Lu was named to membership on the China Committee for the Promotion of International Trade (CCPIT), established in hopes of further exploiting the trade contacts made at the Moscow meetings. In practice, the CCPIT has been an unofficial arm of the Foreign Trade Ministry and is used principally to trade with nations not having diplomatic relations with Peking. Four years later, in April 1956, Lu was made a member of the CCPITs Foreign Trade Arbitration Committee, set up to secure “speedy and equitable settlements” of disputes that might arise.
He has been a Central Committee member since April 1955 of the China Democratic National Construction Association (ostensibly a non-Communist political party), and in December 1956 he was elected to the Standing Committee of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce. Membership in such organizations could be regarded as a nominal assignment in the case of many PRC officials, but as both organizations consist largely of leading business and commercial figures, Lu's association with these men is doubtless beneficial to his work in the promotion of foreign trade.
Lu is regarded by Western business and government officials who have dealt with him as a man of considerable intelligence, and one completely in control of the facts. He is said to be aided in his work by an affable personality and a casual manner, and he gives the impression of being fully entrusted by his superiors to make firm decisions and commitments in the name of the PRC. Lu’s career since 1949 suggests that his talents as a highly trained specialist are appreciated by higher authorities. Unlike many other PRC officials he has devoted virtually no time to extracurricular activities (e.g., engaging in ideological campaigns).