Jen Pi-shih was one of the major political figures during the first three decades of the Chinese Communist Movement. Trained in the Soviet Union, he returned to China to become one of the most important leaders of the Youth League in its formative years.
Background
Jen was born on April 30, 1904, in Hsiang-yin hsien, which is near Tung-t’ing Lake in northern Hunan and not far from Changsha, the provincial capital. Communist sources describe his family as impoverished teachers, but other sources refer to them as rich peasants. The information about Jen’s cousin (see below), suggests that his family was reasonably well-to-do.
Education
After attending elementary school, Jen entered the First Middle School in Changsha. Mao Tse-tung had studied there briefly a few years earlier, before attending the better known Hunan Provincial Normal School. Among Jen’s middle school classmates was Hsiao Ching-kuang, who later became a top Red Army commander. Jen was in Changsha when the May Fourth Movement erupted in 1919, and like many other students there he was influenced by the new and revolutionary ideas which the movement spread. Graduating in 1920, he and Hsiao went to Shanghai where they studied Russian at a foreign language school headed by Yang Ming-chai. Jen and Hsiao also joined the Socialist Youth League, which was founded in Shanghai in August 1920. Comintern representative Gregory Voitinsky was instrumental in the establishment of the foreign language school and the Youth League, both of which were designed to unearth young talent for further training in the Soviet Union.
Thus, during the winter of 1920-21 Hsiao and Jen left for Moscow, traveling via Vladivostok, which was still occupied by the Japanese. The two young men enrolled in the Communist University of the Toilers of the East, which was established in the spring of 1921, and both of them studied there until 1924 together with several hundred other Asian students. In early 1922, when Jen was just 18, he joined the CCP in Moscow. Aside from his friend Hsiao Ching-kuang, other young Communists then in the Soviet capital included Liu Shao-ch’i and Lo I-nung.
Career
Returning to Shanghai in 1924, Jen joined the staff of Shanghai University where he taught Russian. This school, the training ground for a number of young Communists, had on its staff such top Communists as Ch’ii Ch’iu-pai, Teng Chung-hsia, and Chang T’ai-lei. The university was closed for its radical activities in June 1925, but by that time Jen was more deeply involved in the affairs of the Communist Youth League (as the Socialist Youth League was now known). In January 1925, at the League’s Third Congress in Shanghai, Jen had been elected a member of the Central Committee, and from the same year to 1927 he served as director of the League’s Organization Department. In 1926, in the absence of Chang T’ai-lei, Jen was acting secretary of the League, and when the youth organization met for its Fourth Congress in May 1927, he was elected secretary, continuing in this post until mid-1928 when he was succeeded by Kuan Hsiang-ying.
In connection with Jen’s senior posts in the Youth League, it should be noted that the League was then an organization which in some respects rivaled the authority of the Communist Party. As one writer has noted, the League “often took a tack somewhat to the left” of the Party, “its youthful spirit disposing it to take Party programs too literally. It could afford such deviations because it managed to retain some autonomy until the late 1920’s.” There is considerable documentation from the twenties to indicate rather serious differences between the two organizations; however, none of these materials specifically links Jen with such differences, and, in fact, Party scribes writing after Jen’s death claim that he led the way in 1927 in opposing tendencies within the Youth League to pursue radical policies described as “vanguardism” (hsien-feng chu-i).
In May 1933 the Party sent Jen to be secretary of the Hunan-Kiangsi Border Region Committee and political commissar of the Military Region. The military unit there, commanded by Hsiao K’o, was known as the Sixth Army; it operated in and around the area which several years earlier had formed part of Mao Tse-tung’s famous Chingkangshan base. In addition, the Hunan-Kiangsi base maintained close connections with the Hunan-Kiangsi-Hupeh base to the north. When the Nationalists began their Fifth Annihilation Campaign in the fall of 1933, the Sixth Army was driven northward from its base, because of rather severe losses in personnel, the army was reorganized and redesignated the 17th Division. (By the next year it had increased in strength and was then designated the Sixth Army Corps.) Not long after the Nationalist 1933 campaign began, Jen left the fighting front and returned to Juichin. According to an eyewitness account, this took place in January 1934, and because this date coincides with the convocation of the Second All-China Congress of Soviets, it is presumed that he went to Juichin to attend these meetings (as well, perhaps, as the Party’s Fifth Plenum, which was also held at that time in Juichin). In any event, he was again elected a member of the Chinese Soviet Republic’s Central Executive Committee.
Jen was back in the Hunan-Kiangsi border region by the summer of 1934, and in August of that year orders were received to retreat westward across Hunan to join Ho Lung’s Second Army Corps. Even if it was not realized at the time, this move, in effect, was the beginning of the Long March for the Sixth Army Corps. The normal command structure for Red Army units in that period consisted of the commander and the political commissar. In the case of the Sixth Army Corps, however, in July 1934 (just before the retreat) Jen was appointed chairman of the Corps’ Political Committee, and Hsiao K’o and Wang Chen continued to be the commander and political commissar, respectively. By October 1934 the Sixth Corps had moved to northeast Kweichow where they met Ho Lung’s Second Army Corps. After spending the winter there, the combined force, now called the Second Front Army, moved to Ho’s former base in west Hunan (April 1935) and then expanded into an area on the borders of Szechwan, Hunan, Hupeh, and Kweichow provinces. They proceeded to establish a base area named for the four provinces (see under Ho Lung). The formation of the Second Front Army brought about a new command structure; Ho Lung was the commander, Jen was the political commissar, and Kuan Hsiang-ying, who had been Ho’s chief political officer, was the deputy political commissar. In addition, and probably more important, Jen was also secretary of the Party Sub-bureau for the Hunan-Hupeh-Szechwan-Kweichow base.
In the immediate postwar period, as the Communist armies began to engage the Nationalists in the civil war, Jen remained with Mao in Yenan. But they were forced to evacuate their capital to the Nationalists in March 1947. Presumably with a view to possible emergency situations, the Secretariat was divided into two groups. Mao, Chou En-lai, and Jen remained in the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia Border Region, and a “working committee” of the Secretariat headed byr Liu Shao-ch’i and Chu Te moved into the Shansi-Chahar-Hopeh area to set up a headquarters in P’ing-shan hsien, not far from Shih-chia-chuang in west Hopeh. They were joined there by Mao and his group 14 months later, in May 1948. In the interim, Jen devoted himself principally to basic policy questions which were arising as the Communist armies conquered more and more territory. (From Wang Shou- tao’s account, it appears that Jen was then head of the Party’s Research Office.) Among the more pressing problems was the need to formulate policies to handle agrarian questions, and still other policies were required to deal with industrial and business interests in the large cities which the Communist armies were beginning to capture. On the land question, in particular, Communist policies fluctuated rather quickly from “radical” to “conservative” from the end of 1946 to the early part of 1948. Like several top leaders, Jen’s positions underwent quite notable changes; in the latter part of 1947 he called for “radical” actions by the “masses,” but by the turn of the year 1947-48 he was among those articulating a new, more “conservative” policy both in terms of the landed elements in the rural areas and of the business interests in the cities." It is noteworthy that Mao Tse-tung frequently addressed himself to these questions in a series of speeches and directives from the end of 1947 to the spring of 1948.
Politics
The crisis situation reached a climax on August 1, 1927, when the Communists staged their famed uprising at Nanchang (see under Yeh T’ing). At this juncture the Party leadership was turned over to Ch’ii Ch’iu-pai who convened the so-called Emergency Conference on August 7 (probably in Hankow). Jen reportedly attended this meeting, but little is known about his work or whereabouts for the next year. As noted above, Jen relinquished the direction of the Youth League in mid-1928, and at that time he was transferred to the Party Center (and presumably worked in the Party underground in Shanghai). Soon afterwards, he was sent to work in the underground in Anhwei where, in Nan-ling hsien (south of Wu-hu in southeast Anhwei) he was arrested. After his release in March of 1929 he became a member of the Standing Committee of the Kiangsu Provincial Party Committee, then headed by Lo Teng-hsien. Still operating in the underground, Jen was again arrested in September 1929 and imprisoned in Shanghai for two months. In the meantime, while Jen had been in the underground, the Party was forced to hold its Sixth Congress (June-July 1928) in Moscow.
He was re-elected in absentia to the Central Committee, and in the following year, after being released from prison a second time (November 1929), he was sent to Wuhan where he became a member of the Yangtze Bureau and secretary of both the Wuhan Municipal Committee and the Hupeh Provincial Committee. Jen remained there for about a year, and was thus in the central Yangtze Valley in mid-1930 when the Li Li-san leadership made its bold but abortive eiforts to capture and hold key cities in that area (see under Li Li-san and P’eng Te-huai). Jen was back in Shanghai by about the end of 1930, and Wang Shou-tao has written that he attended a “secret training class” there at which Jen lectured on Party organizational methods.” Well entrenched in the inner-Party circles by 1930, Jen weathered the political storm which finally deposed Li Li-san by the end of the year, and he was again re-elected to the Central Committee at the Fourth Plenum in January 1931 when a new group of leaders took control of the Party. It was a sign of Jen’s accommodation to the new leaders, the Russian-returned students (see under Ch’en Shao-yii), that he was also elected a member of the Politburo. A week later the Central Bureau for the Soviet Areas (Su-ch’ii chung-yang chii) was established, and among its nine members were Mao, Chu Te, Chou En-lai, Jen, and Hsiang Ying, the secretary. Apparently the Bureau’s major assignment was the supervision of Party activity in the guerrilla bases where the Communists had been working for a few years to build up peasant armies and establish viable Party organizations. In March 1931, as head of the Bureau’s Organization Department, Jen proceeded to Juichin, Kiangsi, where he worked in Party organizational affairs for most of the next two years, excepting only a period in 1932 when he was in T’ing-chou (Ch’ang-t’ing) in west Fukien. At the First All China Congress of Soviets, which met in Juichin in November 1931 and established the Chinese Soviet Republic, Jen was among those elected a member of the Republic’s leading political body, the Central Executive Committee.
Membership
Only a few days before Jen had become the top Youth League official, he was elected a member of the Party Central Committee at the Fifth CCP Congress (Wuhan, April-May 1927). Then only 23 years old, Jen was probably the youngest Central Committee member (and perhaps the youngest person to achieve this rank in the history of the Communist movement). The Fifth Congress was convened at a time of mounting crises for the Communists, the “Right” KMT under Chiang Kai-shek had all but shattered the CCP apparatus in Shanghai, and the “Left” KMT in Wuhan was growing restive in its relations with the Communists.
Personality
Physical Characteristics:
Jen’s health had been failing since the end of 1947, and it took a turn for the worse in 1949. When the PRC was inaugurated in October, he was the only top Party leader who did not receive a post in the new government. He went to Moscow in early 1950 for medical treatment and returned home in the summer. Jen made one of his rare public appearances on October 18, 1950, but nine days later, on October 27, he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Peking. His death and funeral were given wide coverage in the press, and he was described in that particular phrase reserved for the select few: “a close comrade-in-arms of Mao Tse-tung.”
Connections
Jen’s wife, Ch’en Tsung-ying, was with him in Shanghai in the mid-twenties, as well as on the Long March a decade later. She has been a member of the Executive Committee of the Na¬tional Women’s Federation since 1957. They apparently had five children, four of whom were identified in mid-1951 (their given names being Yuan-chih, Yuan-cheng, Yuan-fang, and Yuan¬yuan), but nothing further is known about them.