Background
Ma, who has been known by the names Ma Ju-chou and Ma Chi-min, was bom in the same year and place that Liu Lan-fao was born.
- Photos
- Works
- Photos
- Works
Ma Ming-fang
Edit Profile
A veteran Party leader from the northwest, Ma Ming-fang is one of the few Communist leaders of the present generation who has seen little military service in the Red armies. His early career, spent mainly in the northwest, was interrupted from 1942 to 1946 by imprisonment in Sinkiang. After serving as one of the top CCP leaders in the northwest during the early years of the PRC.
Education
He studied at a normal school in nearby Sui-te and may also have studied at Yii-lin Normal School, an institute attended by such Party stalwarts as Kao Kang, Liu Chih-tan, and Pen Tzu- li, all contemporaries in age. (A discussion of the modernizing influences in northern Shensi, and especially Yii-lin, during the twenties is contained in the biography of Chia T’o-fu, another important Communist from Shensi.) In 1925, when Ma was 21, he joined the CCP and began to participate in revolutionary activities, possibly in association with Kao Kang and, after about 1928, with Liu Chih-tan. Ma worked in the Party's North Shensi Special Committee after it was established by Kao and Liu in 1928. The Special Committee was first led by Liu Chih-tan, but about 1931 Ma assumed the secretaryship and retained it until 1938. On one occasion in 1932, when the Special Committee was meeting in Chia-hsien (about 25 miles northeast of Mi- chih), Ma and a colleague named Ma Wen-jui narrowly avoided arrest by the authorities, who had been informed of the meeting through the “treachery of a renegade” from the CCP.
Career
In January 1935, when the First North Shensi Soviet Congress was held in An-ting hsien, the Shensi-Kansu Provisional Soviet Government was set up. Ma became its chairman and concurrently head of the Propaganda Department of its Northwest Work Committee. During the year he was involved in a dispute that led to the arrest of Liu Chih-tan and Kao Kang (see under Liu Chih-tan). However, Ma was on hand with other senior local leaders to greet Mao Tse-tung when he arrived in north Shensi in October 1935 at the end of the Long March. During the midthirties Ma was also chairman of the North Shensi Soviet Government and secretary of the CCP Shensi Party Committee.
In 1937, by which time the Communist position in the northwest was fairly well consolidated, the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia (Shen-Kan-Ning) Border Region Government was established. Ma was named to head the Civil Affairs Department, but in the following year he was sent to the Soviet Union for medical treatment and further study. (While there he is reported to have used the name Malov.) In 1939 he returned to China from the USSR, traveling via Sinkiang, then under the control of the semiindependent warlord Sheng Shih-ts’ai. At this time a number of prominent Communists were in Tihua (Urumchi), some returning from and others en route to the Soviet Union. According to a Communist account, Sheng would neither permit them to proceed to Yenan nor to the Soviet Union.
Ma’s whereabouts for the next two to three years are not clear. He apparently made his way back to the Soviet Union, for a Communist account describes his second arrival in Sinkiang from the USSR in January 1941. In the next year, following the rupture of relations between the Communists at Yenan and Sheng Shih-ts’ai in Sinkiang (see under Ch’en T’an-ch’iu), Ma was imprisoned in Urumchi. Unlike some of his fellow Communist prisoners who were executed (e.g” Ch’en T’an-cfi’iu and Mao Tse-min), Ma survived the four-year imprisonment and was finally released in mid-1946. According to a Communist newspaper of that time, he was one of 129 Party members who had been in prison to return from Sinkiang. In the meantime, before and during his years of imprisonment, Ma was given new appointments in the Shen-Kan-Ning Government and the CCP. Presumably in anticipation of his return from Sinkiang to Yenan, he was named in 1941 as a deputy from his native Mi-chih to the second Border Region Assembly, and when the Assembly met in November he was appointed a member of the Shen-Kan- Ning Border Region Government (the cabinet). Far more important, however, was the election of Ma as an alternate member (and Ch’en T’an- ch’iu as a full member) of the Party Central Committee at the Seventh Party Congress held in Yenan from April to June 1945. The Communists at Yenan were apparently completely out of contact with their jailed comrades in Sinkiang when the Seventh Congress met although Ma lived to serve on the Seventh Central Committee, Ch’en T’an-ch’iu had been executed by Sheng Shih-tsi almost two years before. The distinction of having been placed on the Seventh Central Committee while in prison is also shared by LiaoCh’eng-chih.
Ma’s activities in the northwest are not well documented in the postwar years. By 1948, however, he had become the deputy secretary of the Party Northwest Bureau, serving under Secretary Hsi Chung-hsun. Ma continued to hold the subordinate post until the winter of 1952-53 when Hsi transferred to Peking, after which Ma became the senior Party official in the northwest. (At various times in the period from 1948 to 1954，Ma was known as deputy secretary, second secretary, and third secretary but in effect he was Hsi's senior deputy until early 1953 and the head of the Bureau thereafter.) In 1949 Ma also became president of the Northwest People’s Revolutionary University, but it is not known how long he held this post.
As described above, Ma was the Shensi governor from 1949 to 1952. It is probable, though not fully documented, that he was the senior Party secretary in Shensi for this same period. (He was listed by the American Consulate General [Hong Kong] as the probable secretary in late 1951 and mid-1952.7) In any event, he was succeeded by P’an Tzu-li in this post in the latter half of 1952. Particularly after he became a vice-chairman of the NWMAC in October 1952 (at the same time as the transfer of Hsi Chung-hsun to Peking), Ma’s duties seemed to have been principally concerned with the work of the NWMAC and NWAC. He gave most of the important reports before these bodies, as in December 1953 when he spoke before the NWAC on the work completed in 1953 and the tasks ahead for 1954.
Following the abolition of the regional administrations in 1954, Ma was transferred to Peking. There, as a deputy from his native Shensi, he attended the first session of the First NPC held in September 1954, and since that time has been one of the more important leaders in the PRC legislative branch. At the close of the NPC session he was elected a member of the NPC Standing Committee as well as chairman of the NPC Credentials Committee. He served in a similar capacity during the term of the Second NPC (1959-1964). More important, however, not long after the initial NPC session closed, he was identified (early 1955) as a deputy secretary-general of the Party Central Committee, a post that made him directly subordinate to Secretary-General Teng Hsiao-p'ing. Ma retained this post until the Party Center underwent a reorganization at the close of the Eighth Party Congress in September 1956. To manage the affairs of the Congress, three ad hoc bodies were established: a presidium (steering committee), secretariat, and credentials committee. Ma and only six others (Liu Lan-t’ao, T’an Cheng, T’an Chen-lin, Li Hsueh-feng, Lin Feng, and Sung Jen-chung) served on all three bodies. At the close of the Congress he was promoted from alternate to full membership on the Central Committee. Furthermore, when the new Central Committee held its first plenum (the day after the Congress closed), he was elected as a member of the Party Central Control Commission, in charge of internal Party discipline and inspection. Before the next two years had passed, he was to receive other posts in key Party Center organs. By late 1956 he was identified as a deputy director of the Organization Department (although he has not since been identified), and by June 1958 he was director of the apparently newly established Finance and Trade Department. Thus, with this impressive array of posts (none of which receive much publicity in the Party press), Ma could be regarded as one of the CCP's top organization men by the mid-fifties.
Politics
Ma was in Peking in September 1949 to take part in the establishment of the central government at the first session of the CPPCC. Attending as a representative of the “Northwest Liberated Areas,” he served on the presidium (steering committee) of the first session as well as the ad hoc committee to draft the Organic Law of the CPPCC, one of the most important documents adopted at that time. When the session closed in late September, he was named to membership on the CPPCC's First National Committee, holding this post until December 1954 when the Second CPPCC was formed. In October 1949 Ma was appointed to the Executive Board of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association (holding the post to December 1954), after which he returned to the northwest to resume his duties. For the next five years he worked in Shensi, where from December 1949 to November 1952 he was the governor (being replaced by Chou Shou-shan). Ma was concurrently named in March 1950 to head the Shensi Finance and Economics Committee, a post he probably held until he relinquished the governorship in late 1952. In January 1950 the Communists inaugurated the regional government for the northwest; known as the Northwest Military and Administrative Committee (NW- MAC) and headquartered in Sian, it had jurisdiction over Shensi, Kansu, Ninghsia, Tsinghai, and Sinkiang provinces. Ma was a member of the NWMAC and in October 1952 was promoted to a vice-chairmanship. He continued as a vicechairman when the NWMAC was reorganized into the Northwest Administrative Committee (NWAC) in January 1953, holding this position until the regional governments were abolished in the latter half of 1954. P’eng Te-huai was the chairman of both the NWMAC and the NWAC, but because he spent most of the early years in Korea as head of the Chinese army there, the de facto chairmanship fell to Hsi Chung-hsun, a vice-chairman of the NWMAC-NWAC. Then, with Hsi's departure for Peking in the winter of 1952-53, Ma became, in effect, the acting chairman. Under both the NWMAC and the NWAC, he was also a member of the Finance and Economics Committee.
Although Ma's public appearances have been infrequent, the nature of his activities in the late fifties and early sixties suggested that he was playing an important role, particularly in connection with finance and trade. He frequently traveled in the provinces, as in June 1958 when he spoke before a finance and trade conference in Kwangtung, which stressed the need to improve management techniques. Similarly, he spoke at a symposium on industry and commerce in rural areas held in Harbin in August 1959. Ma also appeared at a number of conferences in Peking, as in May 1960 when he attended the National Demonstration Conference of Finance and Trade Departments; speaking before the 5,000-odd technical innovators,he emphasized the urgency of improvements in agrotech nical techniques. In the same month he wrote an article on trade and finance for the Party's top journal, Hung-ch'i (Red flag, issue of May 16, 1960). His last appearance in Peking in his capacity as director of the Party's Finance and Trade Department was in October 1960. Not long afterwards he was transferred to Manchuria (see below). Although Ma has been principally occupied with domestic problems since the PRC was established, he did make one trip abroad in March 1958 when he accompanied alternate Politburo member Ulanfu to Ulan Bator for the 13th Congress of the Mongolian People’s Revolutionary (Communist) Party.
-
Born
-
Nationality
China -
Ethnicity
-
Political Party
Chinese Communist Party
Career
-
1935
-
1941
-
1948 - 1954
-
1954