Background
Gao Gang was born on October 25, 1905 in Shaanxi, China.
高岗
Gao Gang was born on October 25, 1905 in Shaanxi, China.
Gao Gang was of peasant background with a low level of education: he is said to have not been very literate.
Gao Gang joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1926. In 1928 he and his mentor Liu Zhidan were assigned by the Party to spread propaganda and to infiltrate Nationalist units in Shaanxi and Gansu. In 1932 Gao Gang served as a political commissar in the Twenty-Sixth Red Army in the region. By the spring of 1935, a Shaanxi-Gansu soviet regime had been established, and Gao Gang had become political commissar of the General Front Command.
In the summer of 1935, Gao Gang was appointed as director of the political department of the Fifteenth Army Group. Soon after the arrival of some CCP Central Committee members in Shaanxi, a power struggle erupted. Liu Zhidan and Gao Gang, the top local leaders, were imprisoned and charged with deviation from the Party line. In late 1935 after they reached Shaanxi, Mao Zedong and the central leadership ordered Liu’s and Gao’s release. Mao and his exhausted survivors of the Long March needed Gao Gang local support, and he was then made political commissar of the army group.
After Liu’s death in combat in April 1936, Gao Gang emerged as the leading Shaanxi Communist when he became secretary of the North Shaanxi Provincial Committee. During the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945), he was secretary of the Party Committee for the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region and of the CCP Northwest Bureau.
By the end of the Chinese Civil War (1945-1949), Gao Gang had served as secretary of the CCP Northeast Bureau, chairman of the Northeast Peopled Government, and political commissar of the Northeast Military Region.
After the establishment of the People’s Republic, Mao rewarded Gao Gang with the vice-chairmanship of the Central People’s Government while allowing him to maintain control over northeast China. He was the only regional leader to be granted such a joint honor and privilege. But soon his close relationship with the Soviet Union, whose influence in the northeast was strong, aroused suspicion within the CCP's top leadership in Beijing. Indeed, even before the Peopled Republic was founded, Gao Gang visited the Soviet Union and concluded economic agreements. In the early 1950s, he was also the chief advocate of Soviet-style industrial development in China. Ultimately, some central leaders, including Mao, charged that Gao Gang attempted to create an "independent kingdom" for himself in the northeast by maneuvering between Beijing and the Soviet Union. In order to undermine Gao’s growing power, Mao in November 1952 transferred him to Beijing to take the new post of chairman of the State Planning Commission. In 1953 Gao was accused of engaging in activities aimed at splitting up the Party and usurping state leadership, and plotting to replace Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai. Rao Shushi, a regional leader in east China, was charged to be the co-conspirator. At the Fourth Plenum of the Seventh CCP Central Committee in February 1954, the "Gao Gang-Rao Shushi Antiparty Clique" fell from power. Gao Gang denied the accusations and killed himself as a form of protest in August 1954. He was posthumously expelled from the CCP in March 1955.
Among his colleagues inside the CCP, Gao Gang gained a reputation as having great confidence and ambition, and of being a notorious womanizer.