Background
Rao Shushi was born in Linchuan County, Jiangxi, in 1901.
Rao Shushi was born in Linchuan County, Jiangxi, in 1901.
Rao Shushi graduated from the Nanchang First Provincial School, where his father taught. Rao joined the Socialist Youth League (YL) in 1924, and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1925.
He was active in the May 30th movement and organized workers in Shanghai. In the spring of 1927, he operated under Chen Yun and Zhou Enlai in organizing the workers' uprising that facilitated the entry of Jiang Jieshi's army into Shanghai.
In 1928 he served as secretary of the YL in Zhejiang, and the following year he became secretary of the league in Manchuria. In 1930 he was arrested by the GMD authorities and released the following year. He was a leading Communist labor organizer in Shanghai during 1932-1933. In 1935 he lived in Moscow for a time as the representative of the All-China General Labor Union to the Red Labor International. In 1936 he worked on the staff of a Chinese-language newspaper in New York and was assigned to work under Liu Shaoqi in the Communist political mobilization programs in North China.
After the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War (1937—1945), Rao worked in Yan-an. In 1940 he served as deputy secretary of the CCP southeast bureau. In March 1941, he worked under Liu Shaoqi and became deputy secretary of the CCP Central China Bureau and director of its propaganda department. Soon he also was appointed as director of the political department of the New Fourth Army.
After the New Fourth Army Incident of January 1941, Rao became deputy commissar of the New Fourth Army. In the spring of 1942, he succeeded Liu as secretary of the Central China Bureau and acting political commissar of the army. Since the New Fourth Army performed well behind the Japanese lines from 1943-1945, Rao was rewarded for his wartime service. At the Seventh CCP Congress in 1945, he became a Central Committee (CC) member. In August 1945, he served as political commissar of the New Fourth Army.
After the end of the war, the Marshall Mission was mediated between the CCP and the Guomindang. A truce agreement was signed by the Communists and the Nationalists in January 1946. An executive headquarters for the implementation of the agreement was established at Beiping. Ye Jianying served as the Communist representative to the headquarters, and Rao was assigned to Ye's staff as political adviser. Before they returned to Yan-an after the outbreak of the large-scale CCP-GMD civil war in mid-1946, Rao once served as the Communist representative to the advance section of the executive headquarters in Changchun. In January 1947, he became political commissar to the CCP East China Military Region. He was one of the first Communist leaders to enter Shanghai after its capture in May 1949.
After the establishment of the People’s Republic，Rao became a member of the government council and the military council. He also served as first secretary of the CCP East China Bureau, chairman of the East China Military and Administrative Committee, political commissar of the East China Military Region, and secretary of the CCP Shanghai municipal committee.
In October 1952, Rao and Liu Shaoqi attended the Soviet Communist Party's Nineteenth Congress in Moscow. At the end of the year, Rao resigned from most of his posts in East China and went to Beijing, where he became a member of the State Planning Commission, led by Gao Gang. In the spring of 1953, Rao was appointed as director of the CCP Central Organization Department.
Rao's promising political career came to a sudden halt in the Gao Gang-Rao Shushi Affair of 1953-1954. At the Fourth Plenum of the Seventh CCP Central Committee in February 1954, Rao was accused of being the co-conspirator to split the Party and usurp state leadership. Gao committed suicide. Rao refused to confess to alleged anti-Party crimes. He was expelled from the CCP in March 1955. He passed away in March 1975. What exactly he did for the two decades before his death is unclear.
