P’an Tzu-li

Background

Little is known about his background.

Education

P’an comes from Shensi, and in the early 1920's attended a middle school in the north Shensi town of Yii-lin. About the time that the CCP was organized (1921), a group of young teachers went to Yii-lin from Peking University where they had been students of Li Ta-chao, one of the Party founders. It was in part through their influence that an interest in Marxism was brought to the YU-lin Middle School (see under Liu Chih-tan). Liu Chih-tan, Kao Kang, and Ma Ming-fang were among Pan's classmates in the early twenties. By the mid-twenties P'an had become a member of the CCP. In the fall of 1925 Liu Chih-tan, the most important of the early Shensi Communists, went to Canton where he studied at the Whampoa Military Academy. It appears that P’an also went to Whampoa about that time (because a decade later, during the Long March, he was identified as a former Whampoa student.) Liu took part in the Northern Expedition (1926-27) and then returned to Shensi. On the other hand, seems to have remained in central-south China. He set out on the Long March in the fall of 1934 with the forces led by Chu Te and Mao Tse-tung. However, after mid-1935, when the Communists had reached the Szechwan-Sikang borderlands en route to north Shensi, P'an became a propaganda worker in the General Political Department of the Fourth Front Army commanded by Chang Kuo-fao and Hsu Hsiang-ch’ien which separated from Mao and did not rejoin him in Shensi until the latter part of 1936 (see under Chang Kuo-t’ao).

Career

After the Communists consolidated their position in the northwest they established the Shensi- Kansu-Ninghsia Border Region Government in 1937 with Yenan as the capital. Lin Po-ch,ii was the Border Region chairman; P’an served under him as secretary-general of the government, but in 1938 he was succeeded by Wu Hsiu-ch’Uan. Nothing further is known of P’an’s wartime activities but it seems likely that he was a political officer in the Communists’ Shansi-Chahar-Hopeh (Chin-Ch’a-Chi) base. In any case, by March 1946 he was a deputy director of the Chin-Ch'a-Chi Military Region's Political Department and two years later he was in charge of the Propaganda Department in the Northern Sub-bureau of the CCP's North China Bureau. In the latter part of 1949, as the civil war was drawing to a close, P’an was an army corps political commissar in P’eng Te-huai’s First Field Army, which was then fighting against the Nationalists in northwest China.

In September 1949 the Communists captured Yinchuan, the capital of Ninghsia province. Before the year ended P'an had assumed the three key provincial posts, becoming the ranking secretary of the Ninghsia CCP Committee, political commissar of the Ninghsia Military District, and the provincial governor. Within the Ninghsia government he concurrently served from August 1950 to 1951 as chairman of the Finance and Economics Committee. In the early PRC years most key provincial leaders were concurrently assigned to the multi-provincial regional governments, and thus P'an was a member of the Northwest Military and Administrative Committee from 1950 to 1954 (known from 1953 until its abolition in 1954 as the Northwest Administrative Committee).

In about November 1951 P’an relinquished his posts in Ninghsia, and by the spring of 1952 had returned to his native Shensi. He spent the next two years there performing many of the same tasks he had performed in Ninghsia. From about May 1952 until September 1954 he served as the ranking secretary of the Shensi Party Committee, succeeding his old Yii-lin schoolmate, Ma Ming-fang. He was also a provincial vice-governor under Governor P’ei Li-sheng. During these same years he was identified in two other posts: by August 1952 he was director of the Political Department of the Northwest Military Region, and in April 1953 he became chairman of the newly established provincial election committee, which was responsible for running the elections to the First NPC (1954-1959). P'an himself was elected one of the provincial deputies, but he could not have been very active in the Congress, because in the same month that the NPC held its first session (September 1954) he was transferred to the foreign service.

The Chinese Red Cross delegation was led by Minister of Public Health Li Te-ch'an and P'an headed another delegation representing the PRC Government. He disrupted the proceedings by walking out on November 5 after accusing the United States of trying to engineer a “two-China’s plot.” In June 1958 P’an was one of eight Chinese ambassadors called home during the crisis in Lebanon and Jordan when American and British troops were rushed to the Middle East. He was again in Peking in March 1960 accompanying Nepalese Premier Koirala on a visit to the Chinese capital. Koirala signed the Sino-Nepalese Boundary Agreement and another one that called for a grant of 100,000,000 Indian rupees from China. P’an returned to India the next month and was on hand for the visit of Premier Chou En-lai, who was in New Delhi to discuss a border agreement. Chou also visited Nepal and signed a treaty of friendship in April 1960. P'an presumably accompanied Chou to Nepal, but soon afterwards, in July 1960, Chang Shih-chieh was appointed to Katmandu as China’s first resident ambassador in Nepal, while P’an continued as ambassador to India.

P’an moved from one scene of international crisis to another. He arrived in Moscow on December 10, 1962, and presented his credentials five days later. The Sino-Soviet dispute was worsening even as P'an was being accredited. In the first two weeks of December, at congresses of the Italian and Czech Communist Parties, the Chinese position had been vigorously attacked (see under Wu Hsiu-ch'uan). Italian and Czech support for the Soviet view was commented upon in a Pravda article of December 9, officially revealing the Sino-Sovict conflict to the Russian public for the first time. After his arrival in Moscow P'an's activities received relatively little attention in the Chinese press particularly in contrast to the 1950's when Chinese diplomats in Moscow were constantly in the news. Most of P’an’s activity, in fact seemed to center around the Si no-Soviet dispute. He served, for example, as a member of the important CCP delegation, led by Teng Hsiao-p’ing, which unsuccessfully attempted to settle differences in a round of negotiations in Moscow in July 1963.

In 1964 P’an was elected a deputy from Kansu to the Third NPC, a somewhat unusual assignment for a person stationed abroad. As already noted, he had been a Shensi deputy to the First NPC, but he did not serve in the Second Congress (1959-1964).

Politics

P’an’s first diplomatic assignment was as the ambassador to North Korea. He has remained in the foreign service, and after serving in three important posts he ranks among Peking’s leading diplomats. He presented his credentials in Pyongyang in January 1955. His brief tour there was relatively uneventful, perhaps owing to the fact that the Chinese diplomatic mission in Korea tended to be overshadowed by the presence of the large number of Chinese troops still there from the Korean War. One of the few times his name appeared in the press was in August 1955 when he was a member of Chu Te,s delegation to the celebrations marking the 10th anniversary of the North Korean government.

After only 13 months in Korea, P’an was replaced in February 1956 by Ch’iao Hsiao-kuang. In the next month P’an was named to succeed Yuan Chung-hsien (deceased) as ambassador to India and Nepal. The six years he spent in India were critical ones in the history of Sino- Indian relations; it was during his tour that growing tensions erupted into border warfare along the Sino-Indian frontier. P’an presented his credentials in New Delhi to President Prasad on April 17, 1956. That same month he joined Ulanfu’s delegation to the coronation of King Mahendra of Nepal, and while in Katmandu he presented his credentials as ambassador. The following September P^n was elected in absentia by the Eighth Party Congress to alternate membership on the Central Committee.

P’an resided in India while holding the two ambassadorial posts, but he went on a number of official visits to Nepal and also returned home on several occasions. In September 1956 he negotiated and signed in Katmandu the Sino- Nepalese Agreement on Friendship, Trade, and Communications between the Tibetan Region of China and Nepal. The agreement replaced one which had been in effect between Nepal and Tibet for a century. Later that month he accompanied Nepalese Prime Minister Prasad Acharya on a state visit to China. While in Peking P'an probably took part in the negotiations for the Sino-Nepalese Agreement on Economic Aid (signed October 7) and in the meeting which led to the Sino-Nepalese Exchange of Notes on Questions of Foreign Exchange. Back in New Delhi, on May 25, 1957, he signed the Sino- Indian Exchange of Notes on the Extension of the 1954 Trade Agreement and the Sino-Indian Exchange of Notes on the Promotion of Relations of the State Trade Companies for the Two Countries.

Connections

P'an is married to Yao Shu-hsien, whose antecedents are unknown. They have a son born in 1958.

Spouse:

Yao Shu-hsien