Background
Chaoding Ji was born on October 9, 1903 in Fenyang, Shanxi, China.
Ji Gongquan and his family, early 20th century. Ji Qing (l), Chaoli (c), Chaozhu (r).
冀朝鼎
Chaoding Ji was born on October 9, 1903 in Fenyang, Shanxi, China.
Chaoding Ji studied law and diplomacy at Tsinghua University, graduating in 1924.
He is said to have been influenced by the May Fourth Movement (1919), he was an active student and a regular participant in debating and public speaking societies. His sense of nationalism at this time is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that he won first prize in the English oratorical contest with a speech entitled “Save Mongolia.” In the year of his graduation he went to the United States where he continued his study of law at the University of Chicago (1928).
While in Chicago Chaoding Ji became associated with various left-wing organizations, most notably the Anti-Imperialist League. He had joined the Communist Party of China in 1927 and was among the first Chinese students in the United States to do so. In that same year he left for Europe where he attended the first and second congresses of the Anti-Imperialist League.
Chaoding Ji also spent about a year in Moscow where he was an interpreter for the Chinese who had fled to Moscow at the time of the CCP- KMT split in 1927. He took part in the work of the Communist Party of China delegation to the Sixth Comintern Congress in Moscow in mid-1928, and he worked with the Chinese Communist delegation that was affiliated with the Red Trade Union International (Profintern).
Chaoding Ji returned to the United States in 1929 and for the next 12 years lived principally in New York City where he was active in leftist circles and was a frequent contributor (often using a pseudonym) of articles on China. Chaoding Ji had enrolled at Columbia University and in 1936 he received his doctorate in economics. His highly regarded though controversial doctoral dissertation won Columbia’s Seligman economic prize and was published in England in 1936 under the title Key Economic Areas in Chinese History.
During his many years in the United States Chaoding Ji was perhaps best known in connection with the Institute for Pacific Relations. In 1936 he was a member of the Chinese delegation led by the distinguished scholar Hu Shih to an IPR conference held in Yosemite, California, and from 1937 to 1940 he was a member of the IPR Research Staff in New York.
Sometime in the thirties Chaoding Ji came to know Frank Coe and Solomon Adler, both of whom were U.S. Treasury Department officials and both of whom ultimately were to work for the PRC after the Communists took power in 1949. Chaoding Ji was able to put these contacts to good use for the CCP. His contacts with Coe and Adler won him a job as a secretary to K. P. Chen (Ch’en Kuang-fu).
After some 17 years abroad, Chaoding Ji finally returned to China in 1941 where for the next few years he held important economic posts with the Nationalist Government in Chungking. In 1944 he had become administrative director of the Economic Research Department in the Central Bank of China of which H. H. K’ung was governor. He worked at this post first in Chungking and then, after the war ended, in Shanghai.
Even by mid-1948, when the Nationalists were on the brink of defeat, Chaoding Ji was able to serve as an adviser to the Nationalist delegation to the third session of the United Nations’ Economic Council on Asia and the Far East (ECAFE) in Octacamund, India (June), and again at the fourth session in Lapstone, Australia (December). Upon his return to China he immediately went to Peking, which was within days of being surrendered to the Communists by KMT General Fu Tso-i. When it fell on the last day of January 1949 and Chaoding Ji formally joined the Communist regime, he was quickly given a variety of tasks befitting his broad background in economics and international banking, he became economic adviser to the People’s Bank and director of its Research Department, as well as manager of the People’s Insurance Company. Then, following the surrender of Shanghai in May, he temporarily served as assistant general manager of the Shanghai Branch of the Bank of China.
Chaoding Ji had received a number of new posts, which, for the most part, reflected his deep involvement in international affairs. From the spring of 1950 to at least mid-1952 he was a deputy manager of the Bank of China, and from 1952 to an uncertain date he was a deputy director of the Finance Ministry’s International Economic Affairs Bureau. In the spring of 1952 he was also identified as a "senior expert" in the Academy of Sciences, presumably in connection with one of the Academy’s institutes engaged in economic research. From November 1956 to at least 1960 he was an Executive Committee member of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce, an organization that includes among its members China’s most experienced banking, economic, business, and industrial figures. Chaoding Ji also served from May 1954 to his death as a Standing Committee member of the Chinese People’s Association for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, and from December 1954 until he died as a member of the CPPCC’s Second and Third National Committees, serving here as a representative of "people’s organizations for peaceful and friendly relations with foreign countries."
From his trip to Moscow in 1952 until his death 11 years later, Chaoding Ji spent a great deal of time abroad 33 missions took him to 20 different nations throughout the world. Most frequently he traveled as a top CCPIT official leading trade negotiation delegations, attending international trade fairs and economic seminars, or supervising Chinese exhibitions that displayed the economic growth of "New China." It is a noteworthy reflection of the aims of the CCPIT that the above-mentioned trips took Chaoding Ji to seven nations that did not recognize Peking. When he was not abroad he spent much of his time in Peking conferring with visiting trade groups and on several occasions signed joint statements and agreements related to trade and financial matters.
Chaoding Ji was extremely active until the last days of his life, on August 2, 1963, just one week before he died, he welcomed a delegation of Colombian parliamentarians in Peking.
Chaoding Ji was married three times and is probably the only important Chinese Communist to have had an American wife.
Harriet Levine became Chi’s first wife in Paris in 1927, and she is the mother of two sons, both American citizens. Harriet and Chi was in Shanghai in 1947, but she separated from her husband and returned to the United States where she continues to reside, as do the sons, Emile and Carl.
Chi’s second wife was Lu Yu-chen, a Stanford graduate who also studied at Sun Yat-sen (Chung-shan) University in Moscow. Nothing is known of Lu Yu-chen’s activities in the post-1949 period.
Although the details of his third marriage are not known, at the time of his death it was revealed that his widow was Lo Ching-i.