Background
Dong Biwu was born in Huangan County, Hebei, in 1886. His family was regarded as “landless gentry” because his father was a degree-holder in the late Qing period.
Dong Biwu was born in Huangan County, Hebei, in 1886. His family was regarded as “landless gentry” because his father was a degree-holder in the late Qing period.
Dong also studied the Confucian classics,earning the Xiucai degree when he was fifteen, following which he pursued a modern education, initially at a middle school in Wuchang. He began a teaching career in 1911, but switched to what would be a life-long revolutionary career when he enlisted in the revolutionary army at the outset of the revolution. In 1911, he joined the Tongmenghui, but fled to Japan two years later when Yuan Shikai suppressed the revolutionary organization. While studying law in Tokyo in 1914, he joined Sun Yat-sen's newly organized Zhonghua geming dang (Chinese Revolutionary Party).
The next year, 1915, Dong returned to Hubei at Sun Yat-sen's request. He undertook secret work in the Chinese military, which resulted in his arrest and incarceration for several months. Upon his release in 1916, Dong returned to Japan in order to complete his studies. Back in China, for a time in 1917-1918, he performed propaganda work in western Hubei. But in the spring of 1919 he went to Shanghai where he began studying Marxism. He was converted to Marxism later that year or in early 1920.
Dong returned to Wuhan and opened a middle school, which, along with a bookstore founded by his friend Yun Taiying became a gathering place for left-oriented intellectuals. He founded a Communist group in Hubei, and in July 1921 found himself one of two delegates from Hubei to attend the First Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Shanghai, thus becoming one of its founding members. Dong returned to Hubei and continued to develop party organizations, although he is said to have spent a year in Sichuan working on tactics within the military. During the period of cooperation with the Nationalists,Dong served in a GMD branch in Hubei. In 1924, he went to Jinchai county with two colleagues to initiate a peasant movement, apparently the first such effort in this area. In early 1925, he traveled both in the northwest and northeast of China looking for recruits. In January 1926, he attended the Second Guomindang (GMD) Congress in Guangzhou and was elected an alternate member of the Central Executive Committee. Dong, along with other colleagues, succeeded in persuading Tang Shengji, who was in Hunan at the time, to side with the revolutionaries just before the Northern Expedition was launched. Dong claims to have helped in the capture of Wuhan by the Northern Expeditionary forces. He remained in Wuhan during the turbulent period of CCP-GMD cooperation until mid-1927, narrowly escaping after the termination of the alliance. He made his way to the French Concession in Shanghai and then again to Japan where he stayed for eight months. From Japan he traveled to Moscow, arriving there in September 1928. Here he attended either Sun Yat-sen University or the University of the Toilers of the East or the Comintern-run Lenin School (the latter is recorded in his own account as given to Nym Wales). He completed his studies in Russia in 1931 and returned to China the following year.
During the period of the Agrarian Revolutionary War Dong Biwu served as president of the Party school, secretary of the Party Affairs Commission, member of the Soviet Republic’s Central Executive Committee,president of the Supreme Court, and vice-chairman of the Workers and Peasants5 Procuratorial Committee in the Jiangxi Central Revolutionary Base. He participated in the Long March from Jiangxi to Shaanxi in 1934-1935. In Shaanxi he continued as president of the Party School and served as acting chairman of the Shaanxi-Gansu-Ningxia Border Regional Government. Dong helped Zhou Enlai in negotiations with Jiang Jieshi and his captors during the Xi’an Incident of December 1936. Beginning in September 1937 Dong again went to Xi'an to work as a liaison officer with the GMD during the Second United Front. This assignment consumed much of the following decade and he moved as circumstances demanded to Hankou,Chongqing,and Nanjing. After Zhou Enlai returned to Yan'an in June 1943, Dong represented the Communists in Chongqing for most of the rest of the war against Japan. In March 1945, Dong was appointed by the Nationalists as the only Communist on the ten-member delegation sent by China to establish the UN organization in San Francisco. Afterward, Dong toured the United States for several months, returning to China in December 1945. He served as Zhou Enlai’s top assistant in negotiating with the GMD during General George C. Marshall’s mission to China in 1946-1947. After the Marshall mission failed,Dong returned to Yan’an just as it was about to fall into Nationalist hands in the resumed civil war.
Before the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was established in 1949, Dong also served as a member of the secretariat of the party’s North China Bureau, director of the North China Commission of Finance and Economy, and chairman of the North China People's Government.
After the PRC was established, Dong served as director of the Central Commission of Finance and Economy, vice-premier of the Administration Council of the Central People's Government, director of the Committee of Political and Legal Affairs, president of the Supreme People's Court, vice-chairman of the Second National Committee of the Chinese People s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), secretary of the Party's Control Commission, vice-chairman and acting chairman of the PRC itself, and vice-chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC). In the early 1950s the super-active Dong attended numerous public
functions and produced a steady flow of reports for various government organs and national conferences. He traveled abroad again only in 1954 and 1958, respectively leading delegations to Sofia on both occasions, but also visiting Prague and East Berlin on the second trip.
Dong appears to have played an important role in Mao's purge of Gao Gang and Rao Shushi in 1954-1955. He was named chairman of the new Central Control Commission that was established in 1955 in order to prevent a recurrence, it was said, of a Gao—Rao Party plot. He was elected a member of the Party's Central Committee at the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth national Party congresses. He had been a member of the Politburo from the Sixth Plenary Session of the Sixth Central Committee and was elected to the Politburo's Standing Committee at the First Session of the Tenth Central Committee in August 1973.
Dong died on April 2, 1975 at the age of ninety. Marshall Ye Jianying gave the eulogy at the memorial ceremony held in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on April 7. His ashes were interred at Babaoshan Cemetery. He was survived by his third (or fourth) wife, He Lianji, and three children.
Dong was a member of Politburo of the Communist Party of China from 1945 to 1975. He was elected one of nine members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo at 10th Congress of the Communist Party in 1973.