Nieh Jung-chen

Background

Nieh is from a landlord family in Chiang-ching, Szechwan, a small Yangtze River port about 25 miles southwest of Chungking.

Education

He graduated from a middle school in Chungking, and while there he participated in the May Fourth Movement (1919). Toward the end of that year he left for France to take part in the work-and-study program (see under Ts'ai Ho-sen). Of the 1,600-odd students who took advantage of this scheme in the 1919-20 period, Szechwan was second only to Hunan in the number of participants. Fellow Szechwanese included Ch'en I and Teng Hsiao-p’ing.

Like many of his student colleagues, Nieh arrived in France with unformed political ideas, aside from the broad notion that he must work for the independence and modernization of China. Also like many of them, he had been influenced by Ch’en Tu-hsiu and his famous journal Hsin chying-nien (New youth). But unlike many of the worker-students who spent more time in political activities than in educational pursuits, Nieh concentrated on work and study. His student life consisted of a year or so in Grenoble and Paris, and about two years in Charleroi in Belgium where he studied chemical or electrical engineering at the Universite de Travail under the financial sponsorship of the Belgian Socialist Party. During this period he held jobs with the Schneider-Creusot arms factories, the Renault auto works, and the Thomson Electric Company. He was also moving toward an allegiance to Marxism. Nieh began reading Marxian literature, and he and Li Fu-ch’un another of the worker-students, were reportedly taught both French and Marxism by the same teacher. As a result of his new commitment, Nieh joined the Youth League in 1922 and the CCP in 1923. Edgar Snow reports that Nieh and Li spent some time in Germany in 1923, and while there Nieh helped to organize students. Snow writes that Nieh spoke German, French, and some English, and, because of his period of study in the Soviet Union (see below), he presumably has some knowledge of Russian.

Nieh was among the many students in France who went to Moscow in 1924. There he studied at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East for six months, and at the Red Army Academy for a year. Returning home in the fall of 1925, Nieh went directly to Canton, then the revolutionary center of China. He went to work under Chou En-lai in the Military Committee of the CCP Kwangtung Regional Committee, and at the same time he was a political instructor for the fourth and fifth classes (beginning, respectively, in October 1925 and February 1926) at Whampoa Military Academy, as well as secretary-general of the academy's Political Department.

Career

Immediately after the outbreak of the Sino- Japanese War in July 1937 the Communists reorganized their units and established the Eighth Route Army. It had three divisions, one of which, the 115th, was commanded by Lin Piao. Nieh was made deputy commander and political commissar. In September Lin and Nieh led their division into northeast Shansi where, in cooperation with Nationalist units, they won a much heralded battle against the Japanese at P’ing-hsing. After this victory Lin took most of the division south to aid in the defense of Taiyuan, but Nieh was ordered in late October to move to the Wu- t’ai Mountain area south of the P’ing-hsing Pass, where he was to set up the Communists' first guerrilla base behind enemy lines. His small force of one regiment, one cavalry battalion, and portions of two companies, totaled only 2,000 men. Soon afterwards, on November 7, the Shansi-Chahar-Hopeh (Chin-Ch'a-Chi) Military Region was established, with Nieh as the commander and political commissar. Not long after these events, Lin Piao returned to Yenan, and for most of the remaining war years Nieh was acting commander of the 115th Division. As the top Communist official in the Wu-t’ai area, one of Nieh’s first acts was to make contact with local provincial officials, most notably Wu-fai hsien magistrate Sung Shao-wen and also with Lti Cheng-ts’ao, a military leader across the border in Hopeh who had previously served in the Nationalist Army.

Nieh, one of the first of the top Communists to enter Peking, was immediately made commander of the Peking-Tientsin Garrison, a post he held until 1955. He continued to take part in the affairs of the North China Peopled Government, attending meetings held in February and April 1949. More important, however, he was one of the key Communist negotiators in meetings held with KMT delegations sent to Peking to discuss peace terms. The first of these KMT missions, ostensibly an unofficial group, arrived in Peking on February 14 and held talks with Nieh, Lin Piao, and other top military leaders, and a week later went to Shih-chia-chuang for talks with Mao and Chou En-Lai. This round of negotiations failed, but then on April 1 an official group led by the veteran KMT leader Chang Chih-chung arrived for further talks. The Communist delegation, led by Chou En-lai, consisted of Lin Po- ch'ii, Lin Piao, Yeh Chien-ying, Li Wei-han, and Nieh. They presented the KMT delegation with terms tantamount to surrender, and when these were rejected the civil war continued.

In June 1949 the Communists established a special committee chaired by Mao Tse-tung to prepare for the convocation in September of the CPPCC, the body which brought the PRC into existence on October 1. Nieh was made a member of this preparatory committee, but a few weeks later P’eng Te-huai’s First Field Army ran into unexpected opposition from KMT General Hu Tsung-nan and his allied armies in the area west of Sian, the Shensi capital. Nieh was called upon to lead two armies to reinforce P’eng. After this brief and successful campaign, Nieh returned to Peking where on September 8 he replaced Yeh Chien-ying as both mayor of Peking and chairman of the Peking Military Control Commission. Nieh thus had the distinction of being mayor of the city which three weeks later would become the capital of the PRC.

In March 1950 Nieh was made vice-chairman of an ad hoc committee which was given broad powers to regulate, on a nationwide basis, the allocation of vital supplies and personnel (see under Po I-po, the chairman). More important, however, was his role as acting chief-of-staff. In this capacity, it was Nieh who gave one of the first “signals” that the Chinese intended to intervene in the Korean War, which had begun in June 1950. In late September, by which time the United Nations' forces were moving rapidly toward the Yalu River, Nieh informed Indian Ambassador K. M. Panikkar that China did not intend to vissit back with folded hands as the Americans advanced to the Chinese border. Nieh continued: We know what we are in for . . . The Americans can bomb us, they can destroy our industries, but they cannot defeat us on land.” China could, he claimed, survive atomic attacks: “After China lives on the farms.” Within a month of this conversation with the Indian diplomat, PLA units known as the Chinese People’s Volunteers had entered the Korean War.

In February 1951, not long after China had gone into the Korean conflict, Nieh relinquished his post of mayor of Peking to P'eng Chen. However, he retained a seat on the Peking Municipal People's Government Council until early 1955. In February 1952 he led China’s delegation to Ulan Bator to attend the funeral of Mongolia's top leader, Marshal Khorloin Choibalsan. In June 1954 Nieh was promoted from membership to a vice-chairmanship of the People’s Revolutionary Military Council, but he lost this post in September 1954 when, at the inaugural session of the First NPC, the council was abolished. Nieh attended the First NPC as a deputy from the North China Military Region and he was appointed a member of the NPC Standing Committee, as well as a vice-chairman of the newly established National Defense Council. At approximately this time the Chinese were in the process of initiating steps to “professionalize” the PLA. In this connection, Nieh and Defense Minister P’eng Te- huai gave explanatory speeches before a meeting of the NPC Standing Committee in February 1955 on the new conscription law, which was finally adopted in July 1955. Another step was taken in September 1955 when personal military ranks were created and decorations awarded to PLA veterans. Nieh was made one of the 10 marshals, the highest rank, and he was also awarded the three top decorations the Orders of August First, Independence and Freedom, and Liberation.

In the meantime, Nieh had been re-elected a member of the CCP Central Committee at the Eighth National Party Congress in September 1956. Soon afterwards, in mid-November, he was made a vice-premier of the State Council, and because of this assignment in the executive branch (as it was officially explained), he was removed as a member of the NPC Standing Committee in July 1957. This appointment to a high State Council post coincided with a partial reorientation of Nieh’s career after three decades of devoting himself mainly to military affairs, he was about to become Peking's leading figure in the field of science and technology. One of the first suggestions of this change occurred in December 1956 when Nieh presided over a meeting of the State Council’s Scientific Planning Commission. The commission had been created in March 1956, immediately after the decision had been made to adopt a 12-year plan for scientific development. Originally headed by Ch'en I, the commission chairmanship was assumed by Nieh in May 1957 when it was reorganized and considerably expanded in size. It underwent another reorganization in November 1958 when it was combined with the State Technological Commission and redesignated the Scientific and Technological Commission. It should also be noted that the establishment of the commission and the 12-year plan coincided with a dramatic rise in funds budgeted for science (from approximately $15 million in 1955 to nearly US$100 million in 1956). One authority has written that the commission is responsible for organising scientific institutions and undertakings, collating and co-ordinating plans for scientific research in each area, integrating plans and activities in science with national plans and programmes, supervising the execution of all plans, controlling the use of research funds, establishing working standards and pay scales for scientists, developing training programmes, organising international exchanges and communications among scientists and promoting the recruitment of Chinese scientists abroad.

Politics

Under the new Communist order of battle, Nieh was made the chief political officer (tang tai-piao) in Yeh Ming 11th Army. After a few days the Communists were driven from Nanchang. Moving south to Kwangtung, they captured Swatow in late September, but once again they were quickly routed. After this serious defeat Yeh and Nieh made their way to the nearby Hai-lu-feng Soviet (see under P5eng P'ai), and from there they took a ship to Hong Kong. In early December Yeh and Nieh went to Canton to participate in the Communist-led uprising there (see under Chang Tai-lei), but this was just as unsuccessful as the debacles at Nanchang and Swatow.

Official Communist biographies of Nieh are silent about the next three years of his career. However, according to what Edgar Snow and Nym Wales learned from their interviews with top Communist leaders in 1936-37, Nieh fled from Canton to Hong Kong where he remained until 1930, and from Hong Kong he went to north China where he was engaged in Party organizational work in Peking, Tientsin, and the mines around the city of T’ang-shan. In 1931 he went to Shanghai where he worked for the Party Central Committee’s “military advisory committee.” In the same year he went to Kiangsi where Mao Tse-tung and Chu Te had been building a major revolutionary base. Nieh was assigned to the Red Army Headquarters as a deputy director of the General Political Department. However, he was not in this post for long, because by no later than January 1932 he had joined Lin Piao to become political commissar of Lin’s First Army Corps, one of the major components of the Chu-Mao First Front Army. For the next two and a half years Nieh remained with Lin for most of the time, although on the eve of the Long March he was serving as political commissar with Ch’en I’s troops in the vicinity of Hsing-kuo hsien in central-south Kiangsi.

Nieh participated in the first congress of the Chin-Ch’a-Chi Border Region Government in January 1943. Then, in the late summer of that year, he was ordered to lead some of his troops to the Shansi-Shensi border, and by the early fall of 1943 Nieh was in Yenan, reportedly to attend “important conferences.” At approximately this time Lo Jung-huan took over as acting commander of the 115th Division, and Nieh stayed in Yenan for the remainder of the war. At the Party's Seventh National Congress, held in Yenan from April to June 1945, Nieh was one of the speakers, and at the close of the meetings he was elected a member of the Party Central Committee. Nieh was back at his base in the closing days of the war when he and other top commanders in north China were ordered to move north toward Inner Mongolia and Manchuria. Within a few days after the end of the war Nieh's troops were in the Kalgan region (then the capital of Cha-har), and it was approximately at this time that the border region capital and military headquarters were moved to that city. Kalgan proved to be of considerable importance to the Communists, because it was through this general area that Lin Piao was able to move tens of thousands of troops from north China into Manchuria.

In the fall of 1947 Nieh took five columns southward in a 10-wcek campaign which culminated in the capture of Shih-chia-chuang in mid-November. This city was of particular strategic importance because it controlled rail traffic running south from Peking, as well as the rail lines connecting west Hopeh and Shansi. The fall of Shih-chia-chuang led to the merger of Nieh’s Chin-Ch-Chi area with the Shansi-Hopeh-Shan-tung-Honan (Chin-Chi-Lu-Yii) Border Region to the south. In May 1948, as a result of this merger, the Communists established the North China Military Region. Nieh was named commander of the region, as well as of the Communist armies which operated in the area. At this same time the CCP organizations for the two border regions were amalgamated into the North China Bureau, Nieh was appointed second secretary under First Secretary Po I-po (then a top political figure in the Chin-Chi-Lu-YU Border Region). The next major step taken by the Communists to formalize their rule in north China took place in August 1948 at a congress to which Nieh delivered a report on the North China Military Region. He was elected a member of the newly created North China People’s Government, which was headed by Party veteran Tung Pi-wu. The government by this time controlled a population of about 50 million in some 280 hsien covering most of Hopeh and Shansi, and parts of Suiyuan, Chahar, Jehol, Honan, and Shantung provinces.

Membership

Nieh attended the inaugural session of the CPPCC in September 1949 as a representative of the PLA Headquarters, and during the meetings he served on the ad hoc committee which drafted the Organic Law of the CPPCC, one of the major documents adopted at that time. With the formation of the central government, he became a member of the Central People’s Government Council, the singularly important body (chaired by Mao) which was vested with broad executive, legislative, and judicial functions and which from 1949 to 1954 passed on virtually all vital matters of state. He was also made a member of the People's Revolutionary Military Council and, subordinate to the council, he was made deputy chief- of-staff. However, because of the continuing absence of Chicf-of-Staff Hsu Hsiang-ch'ien, Nieh served for most of the 1949-1954 period as acting chief-of-staff. During this same period he was also a member of the Executive Board of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association. In addition to these national and municipal positions, Nieh continued to be a top figure in the north China apparatus, he retained his post as second secretary of the North China Party Bureau until it was abolished in 1954 (although Chou Jung-hsin temporarily replaced him in 1950-51), and from the end of 1951 to 1954 he was also a member of the North China Administrative Committee.

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• Nieh made a strong impression on a number of Westerners who met him during the war and postwar years in north China. United States military observer Evans Carlson, who had extensive conversations with Nieh, characterized him as thebrains and driving forces behind the Chin-Ch'a- Chi Border Region government and journalist Haldore Hanson provided a vivid sketch of Nieh on the basis of his interviews in 1938.In 1944 an American diplomat who met Nieh in Yenan described him as a man of commanding presence, evident vigor and determination,28 and a few years later United States Military Attache Robert B. Rigg wrote that Nieh was an “exponent of mobility,” who had built a reputation on “sudden attack and elusiveness.’’ Rigg also reported that the Japanese had been sufficiently impressed with his skills to make a study of Nieh's guerrilla tactics. American journalist Harrison Forman, who visited Communist-held areas in 1944, also stressed and described in some detail Nieh’s adroit use of guerrilla tactics.

Connections

Nieh is married to Chang Jui-hua, whom Edgar Snow met in 1936 in Kansu. She had just “slipped into the Soviet districts” from KMT-held areas and had not seen her husband for five years. Evans Carlson met her two years later and reported that she had recently graduated from a military or political training school in Yenan and was on her way to the Wu-fai base where she expected to work. In 1938 the Niehs had two children.

Spouse:

Chang Jui-hua