Background
Po comes from the town of Ting-hsiang, about 50 miles northeast of Taiyuan, the Shansi capital.
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Po I-po
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Po I-po was active in the Shansi branch of the CCP from the late 1920Js and during the war years he was a key official in the Shansi-Hopeh-Shantung-Honan Border Region government. He was first elected to the Party Central Committee in 1945, and 11 years later he was promoted to alternate membership on the Politburo. In the years after 1949 Po quickly emerged as one of the PRC's top financial and economic specialists.
Education
He attended the Kuo-min Normal School in Taiyuan and while there joined a Communist cell (about 1927). Among his schoolmates who also became Communists were Lei Jen-min and Jung Tzu-ho. Prior to this period Shansi had been virtually the private domain of warlord-governor Yen Hsi-shan, but with the rising tide of nationalism and particularly the launching of the Northern Expedition in mid-1926, the province witnessed in the middle and late twenties an increasing amount of political activity by both the KMT and the CCP. Po and his fellow students, probably working in cooperation with the important Communist and labor leader, P'eng Chen, came to dominate the Taiyuan labor movement in the period prior to the KMT- CCP split in mid-1927 and the ensuing struggle between the “Left” and “Right” factions of the KMT.
Graduating from the normal school about 1930, Po went to Peking with some of his classmates, including Lei Jen-min. Po reputedly attended Peking University, but he apparently did not graduate. When the Japanese moved into Manchuria in 1931, he immediately became involved in anti-Japanese demonstrations. Arrested in 1932 for incitement to riot,he was imprisoned in Peking until 19362 when he was released after ostensibly renouncing Communism.
Career
Although only in his late twenties, Po played a rather important role in the dramatic events of north China during the next two years as Japanese encroachments grew increasingly blatant and war finally erupted in mid-1937. Many of these events turned on the actions of Yen Hsi-shan, who was growing increasingly apprehensive about the Japanese. During the year 1936 it appears that Po shuttled back and forth between the Communist headquarters in north Shensi and Yen's capital at Taiyuan, Shansi. By the middle of 1936 Yen was already holding talks with important Communist officials who were attempting to induce him to join in a “united front” against the Japanese (see under P'eng Hsueh-feng). Receptive to such overtures, Governor Yen established the League for National Salvation through Sacrifice (Hsi-sheng chiu-kuo t'ung-meng-hui), better known as the Sacrifice League, in September 1936 (on the fifth anniversary of the Mukden Incident).
In the late war years Po commanded a division under the military region and concurrently served as commander of the T'ai-yueh Military Subdistrict, which covered the western sector of the larger military region. It is evident that his work gained the approval of the higher echelons of the CCP, because when the Party held its Seventh National Congress in Yenan from April to June 1945 he was elected a full member of the Central Committee. The overwhelming majority of the 44 members were Long March veterans who had held high Party posts from the 1920’s and thus Po's election was all the more noteworthy.
By early 1946 Po was a deputy political commissar of the Chin-Chi-Lu-Yii Region, and he was still a vice-chairman of the Border Region government. His two superiors continued to be Liu Po-ch'eng and Teng Hsiao-plng, but judging from the available evidence Liu and Teng were primarily concerned with military operations, whereas Po seems to have concentrated on civil affairs. From its modest beginnings in 1937, the region had grown to huge proportions. Official Communist figures for 1944 claimed a population of 25 million in a region of more than 100,000 square miles (about the size of Italy). Po and his colleagues were in control of most of the area bounded on the west by the rail line running south from Taiyuan to Lin-fen, on the south by the Yellow River and the Lunghai Railway, and on the north and east by the long shaped rail line from Taiyuan to Hsu-chou (Kiangsu). In terms of logistics, the Communist military units were within striking distance of every north-south and two of the most important east-west rail lines in north China.
In 1948, following the merger of the Chin-Ch'a-Chi and the Chin-Chi-Lu-Yu Border Regions, the North China Military Region was created, Nieh Jung-chen was made the commander and Po the political commissar. Broadly paralleling the military region, the Communists established the North China People's Government (NCPG) in August 1948 to govern those portions of Hopeh, Shansi, Suiyuan, Chahar, and Pingyuan provinces under their control. Po attended the congress that inaugurated the NCPG and delivered a report on the administrative policies of the Party's North China Bureau (of which he was the secretary). He was made first vice-chairman of the NCPG and vice-chairman of its Finance and Economics Committee, serving in both instances directly under Tung Pi-wu. These positions occupied most of Po’s time until the PRC was created (October 1949) and the NCPG was absorbed into its central administration, at which time he entered the national government.
From June 1949 he served as a CCP representative on the Preparatory Committee of the CPPCC, however, when the CPPCC convened in September 1949, Po attended as a representative of the North China Liberated Area. He served on the presidium (steering committee) for the September session and also spoke on North China affairs. When the central government was formally inaugurated in October, Po received several high-level appointments. He was made a member of the singularly important Central People's Government Council (CPGC), an organization that had legislative, executive, and judicial responsibilities and which, in 34 meetings between 1949 and 1954, passed on virtually all the vital national legislation adopted in these first critical years of the PRC. It consisted of a chairman (Mao Tse-tung), six vice-chairmen, and 56 Council members. He was also named to membership on the Government Administration Council (GAC; the cabinet), and, under the GAC, as a vice-chairman of the Finance and Economics Committee, the important committee charged with the task of coordinating the work of the ministries concerned with finance, industry, trade, food, railways, communications, water conservancy, agriculture, forestry, and labor, as well as the People’s Bank of China. The other important post that Po was given in October 1949 was as minister of Finance, a position he held until September 1953 when he was replaced by his wartime colleague Teng Hsiao-p’ing.
In mid-December 1949 Po was appointed political commissar of the Suiyuan Military District. Fu Tso-i, the KMT general who had surrendered Peking in January 1949, was the commander. However, even though Suiyuan fell under the jurisdiction of the Party's North China Bureau which Po headed, there is little indication that he was active in the Suiyuan military post. In fact, he was fully engaged in Peking in the years after 1949 working in the national bureaucracy and concurrently directing the North China Party Bureau until it was abolished in August 1954. In the “mass” organizations, Po was a member of the First Executive Board of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association (1949-1954), and, more important, he was a key figure in the establishment of the All-China Federation of Cooperatives (ACFC). The task of the federation is to promote agricultural and handicraft production to ensure the flow of commodities between the urban and rural areas. When the ACFC was established in 1950, Po was named chairman. However, Ch’eng Tzu-hua assumed the acting chairmanship in 1953 and thereafter Po, who had numerous other major responsibilities, played no active part in the federation.
At a March 3, 1950, GAC meeting, Po was made chairman of the National Organization Committee, which was established then under the GAC. The committee, although temporary in nature, was given broad powers to conduct a nationwide inventory on supplies and personnel. The GAC announcement that accompanied the formation of this body made it clear that the central government intended to crack down on falsified reports it had been receiving about available supplies and taxes, in addition to what they termed “padded” personnel rosters. (It should be noted that the Ministry of Personnel was not established until September 1950 under An Tzu-wen.
At the end of 1951 Po was made chairman of a special “austerity examination committee.” During the course of the next year the committee investigated and brought charges against a number of Party and state employees accused of corruption, waste, and burcaucraticism (the “three-anti” campaign) and against the bourgeois elements accused of bribery, tax evasion, fraud, theft of government property, and theft of state economic secrets (the “five-anti” campaign). Po spoke on these campaigns before the GAC on January 14 and May 30, 1952, and he summarized the results in an article in the JMJP of October 1, 1952.
Po received two important posts, both related to the economic field in which he had been working for so many years. He was named director of the State Council's newly established Third Staff Office, which was charged with coordinating the work of the various commissions and ministries engaged in heavy industry and construction work. One of the commissions under the Third Staff Office, the State Construction Commission, was also placed under Po’s direction. He gave up the latter post in May 1956 to Wang Ho-shou, another economic specialist. However, when he relinquished the post to Wang, he assumed the chairmanship of the State Economic Commission. This body directs annual economic planning, in contrast to the State Planning Commission, which is charged with the task of preparing the five-year plans. Po also served for a fairly short time (March 1956-May 1957) on the Scientific Planning Commission as a vice-chairman under Vice-premier Ch'en I, but he relinquished the position when the Scientific Commission was reorganized.
Politics
In the early part of the war the Communists and Yen Hsi-shan persisted in their uneasy alliance, bound together for the most part by their desire to resist the Japanese. This fiction was nicely maintained in 1938 when U.S. military observer Evans Carlson visited Liu Po-ch'eng's headquarters in the T'i-hang Mountains in 1938. Po told Carlson about his activities with the Dare-to-Die Corps and about those on behalf of Yen Hsi-shan's government, but he did not mention his work with the CCP. However, the fiction was destroyed in late 1939 when Po and his Dare-to-Die colleagues in other parts of Shansi became involved in a complex dispute with Yen Hsi-shan (see under P'ing Shao-hui). The upshot of this situation was that the Dare-to-Die columns denounced their allegiance to Yen and openly joined the Eighth Route Army. The separation was given further organizational expression a year and a half later when, in July 1941 the Shansi-Hopeh-Shantung-Honan (Chin-Chi-Lu-Yu) Border Region Government was formally established. Yang Hsiu-feng, a former Peking professor, was the chairman of the government; Po and his longtime colleague Jung Tzu-ho became the two vice-chairmen.
Po was in Yenan in the spring of 1946, but he was back at his base in late 1946 when American Communist journalist Anna Louise Strong saw him at the Military Region's headquarters, then located in a village near Han-tan, a city in south Hopeh on the Peking-Hankow Railway. Her interview with Po, and a subsequent one in 1947 with journalist Jack Belden, provide two of the rather few detailed sketches of a military-political headquarters and a top Communist leader at work. Po, whom Miss Strong found to be a “large, efficient-looking man,” told her that some 600 people “comprise the top leadership” for the ucivil government, the army headquarters, and the voluntary associations, such as trade unions, peasants’ union women’s and youth associations, the cooperatives, and the Communist Party.” Po continued: “When any general problem comes up, such as land reform or the defense of the area, we hold a meeting of all top-flight leaders of army, government, and voluntary associations. Each system assumes its share of the work and carries it out all over the area. All our forces of army, government and voluntary associations can be brought into play at once from here. Po claimed there were 200 men in the military headquarters, unot counting sentries and orderlies. We include here our Operations, Intelligence, Departments of Discipline and Education, military administration and personnel and signal corps. We do not include here our rear services,i.e. supplies, transport, medical department, weapons and ammunition. These departments need not even be in the same county. They are placed according to convenience and we reach them by messengers, telephone or radio.” The telephone network, according to Po, consisted of 10,000 miles of line and 1,000 phones. He also emphasized the mobility of the military headquarters, asserting that the entire headquarters' equipment could be packed in half an hour and transported on two mules and the backs of a few men.
Po’s service to the Party has been strongly oriented toward domestic problems. However, on at least two occasions he has been directly involved with international economic affairs. In May 1960 he spent about three weeks in Poland as head of a delegation invited there by the Polish United Workers' (Communist) Party. Though the Communist press mentioned that economic cooperation was a major subject of discussion, no known agreement of any kind was signed. In January 1961, he led the negotiations with Vietnamese officials in Peking regarding a Chinese loan to Vietnam and a protocol on technical aid and the supply of equipment, both of which Po signed on January 31, 1961.
Throughout the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, Po continued to play a key role in the economy. Unlike such key economic specialists as Ch’en Yun, he apparently did not run into political difficulties during the Great Leap Forward or its aftermath. Throughout those economically difficult years Po was a regular participant in scores of conferences which dealt with one or another phase of economic development. Po’s writings in the Great Leap Forward suggest that he favored relatively conservative economic policies. One Western observer noted that in an important article by Po in early 1961 he outlined future economic tasks which were, in effect, a “complete reversal of the Great Leap Forward approach to local initiative,” that is, central economic planning was to be restored in place of reliance on such planning at the commune level. Po continued to be a major economic and political figure until mid-1966 when, during the early phase of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, he was denounced and, presumably, stripped of his numerous posts.
Membership
In November 1952 Po was appointed a member of the newly established State Planning Commission. This had been formed on the eve of the inauguration of the First Five-Year Plan (January 1953), Po continued to serve on the commission until the constitutional government was set up in the fall of 1954. In preparation for this, the PRC established in early 1953 a committee to draft the constitution. This was chaired by Mao Tse-tung, and Po was one of its members.
Connections
Po is known to have been married (as of 1964) to Hu Ming, whose antecedents are unknown.
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Born
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Nationality
China -
Ethnicity
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Political Party
Chinese Communist Party
Education
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1927
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1930