Background
Luo Fu was Zhang Wentian's pen name. It was taken from the Chinese transliteration of two syllables of his adopted Russian name. Zhang Wen-tian was bom in Nanhui (now Chuansha, Shanghai), Jiangsu province into a rich peasant family.
Luo Fu was Zhang Wentian's pen name. It was taken from the Chinese transliteration of two syllables of his adopted Russian name. Zhang Wen-tian was bom in Nanhui (now Chuansha, Shanghai), Jiangsu province into a rich peasant family.
In 1919, under the influence of Zuo Shunsheng, Zhang Wentian joined the Young China Association. In 1920, Zhang Wentian went with Shen Zemin to Japan to study for a year. When he returned to China, Zuo Shun-sheng found him work in the Zhonghua Bookshop, where he met the Marxist theorist Li Da.
In 1922, he sailed for the United States and worked for a local Chinese newspaper, Datong Duily, in San Francisco while continuing his self-directed study using the library of the University of California at Berkeley. He returned to China in early 1924 and taught in Sichuan. He also edited the weekly Nanhottg, which was banned after publishing six issues.
Before he joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Zhang Wentian was a prolific writer. His publications include plays, poems, essays, translations of, and commentaries on modern Western authors. His most acclaimed works were the novel Journey (Liitu 1924) and a three-act play Dream of Youth (Qingchun de meng, 1924).
Zhang Wentian’s literary career ended after he joined the CCP in May 1925. In October, he was among approximately 100 young Chinese Communists, including Wang Ming and Jiang Jingguo (Chiang Ching-kuo), sent by the CCP to study in the Sun Yat-sen University in the Soviet Union. In 1928, he took up further studies at Red Professors’ College in Moscow.
In January 1931, Zhang Wentian left his Russian wife and one-year-old son and returned to Shanghai with Yang Shangkun. They failed to contact the Party until February and missed the Fourth Plenum of the Sixth Central Committee, which was held on January 7, and chaired by the Comintern representative Pavel Mif. Qu Qiubai and Li Lisan were removed from the Politburo. Wang Ming entered the Politburo and took control of the Party. Russian-trained Communists were quickly appointed to key positions in the Party. Zhang Wentian became head of the organization department of the Central Committee and later took over the positions of minister of propaganda and the editor-in-chief of Red Flag and Struggle. After Wang Ming left for Russia in October, he was nominated by the Comintern to join the CCP Central Committee Provisional Politburo in Shanghai headed by Bo Gu.
Although Zhang was known as one of the Twenty-Eight Bolsheviks, he did not always agree with Wang Ming and the Comintern policies. His article “On Closed-Doorism on the Literature and Art Front” (1932, under the pen name Getew) is a criticism of policies of Bo Gu and Wang Ming. On October 27, 1932, Zhang Wentian also openly criticized the Provisional Politburo in a meeting.
The Provisional Politburo in Shanghai was forced to move to Ruijin in 1933. In the following year, Zhang was elected central secretary in the Fifth Plenum of the Sixth Central Committee. However, he was reluctant to support Bo Gu,s campaign against “Luo Ming’s opportunism” and opposed the removal of Deng Xiaoping and other experienced cadres from their posts. He was then excluded from the Party decision-making body and became the chairman of the People’s Committee of the Chinese Soviet Republic. In Ruijin, Zhang met Mao Zedong and was impressed by Mao.
The Chinese Red Army, under the leadership of Bo Gu and Li De (Otto Braun), was defeated by the Guomindang (GMD) and the CCP had to abandon the Central Soviet Region in 1934. The military catastrophe intensified the political conflicts between the Military Council led by the u military troike”(Bo Gu, Li De,and Zhou Enlai) and the so-called “Central Triad” (Mao Zedong, Zhang Wentian, and Wang Jiaxiang). Between January 7,8 1935, an enlarged session of the Politburo of the Central Committee was convened in Zunyi to remove Bo Gu and Li De from leadership. Zhang Wentian replaced Bo Gu as the head of the Party and Mao Zedong secured his leading position in the Red Army. In 1935, Zhang Wentian supported Mao's anti-Japanese national United Front at the uWayaobao Conference,w and further supported Mao at the “Luochuan Conference" in his stand against Wang fling’s “capitulationism” in 1937. In 1936, he was appointed president of the Marx-Lenin Academy.
Although Zhang Wentian supported Mao, he gradually lost influence in the Party after the Yan'an Rectification Movement between 1942 and 1944 because of his past association with Bo Gu and the Comintern. From then on, and especially after 1949, he was appointed to less senior Party and government positions. Between 1945 and 1949, he worked under Chen Yun and Gao Gang in the northeastern region. In 1950, he was the chief delegate from the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the UN, and in the following year succeeded as the Chinese ambassador to the USSR. In 1955, he was appointed vice-minister of Foreign Affairs.
Zhang Wentian was reelected to the Central Committee and the Politburo in 1959. In the same year, he was stripped of all Party and government positions after criticizing Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” policies in the CCP's Lushan Conference. He was accused of supporting Peng Dehuai's anti-Party “military club.” In 1960, he worked as a special researcher in the Institute of Economic Research. He was further persecuted during the Cultural Revolution and died of a heart attack in 1979. Zhang Wentian was posthumously rehabilitated in 1979.