Background
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Sha Ch’ien-li
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Sha Ch’ien-li, a non-Communist, has held many important administrative posts in the central government since the establishment of the PRC in 1949, having served as minister or viceminister in five ministries: Trade, Commerce, Local Industry, Light Industry, and Food. Sha was born in Soochow (Su-chou), an important city in Kiangsu on the Grand Canal to the west of Shanghai, and was educated at the Shanghai Law College, after which he practiced law
Education
Sha's wartime activities are not well documented, but he is known to have spent these years in west China, and toward the end of the war in 1945 he became a member of the China Democratic League (CDL), a loosely-knit political party whose membership included many National Salvation Association leaders.
Career
From 1945 to 1947 Sha was back in Shanghai where he practiced law and continued his work for the CDL, but then he fled to Hong Kong after the League was banned by the KMT in October 1947. In the following year he went to Communist-held areas in Manchuria, and from there to Peking in late February 1949, just a few weeks after the city had fallen to the Communists. Although already in his mid-forties, Sha was elected a vice-chairman of the All-China Federation of Democratic Youth in May 1949; he retained this post until mid-1953, but there is little indication that he was active in this assignment.
When Shanghai fell to the Communists in May 1949, Sha was sent there, serving as a member of the Shanghai Preparatory Committee of the Youth Federation and as deputy secretary-general of the Shanghai government. But the Shanghai assignments were of brief duration and by the end of the summer he was back in Peking where he has since worked. Prior to the establishment of the central government in October, Sha received two appointments in the political-legal field, being named in June to membership on the China New Legal Research Society's Preparatory Committee, as well as to membership on the Standing Committee of the New Political Science Research Association, which was formed in September. Later that month he attended the inaugural session of the CPPCC as a delegate of the National Salvation Association, which, for purposes of representation in the CPPCC, was regarded as a political party. At the close of the CPPCC, the organization that brought the new government into existence, Sha was elected to the CPPCC’s First National Committee, holding his seat until the Second CPPCC was formed in late 1954.
Sha is one of the very few non-Communists who has continuously held important cabinet posts since the establishment of the PRC in October 1949, the first of which was a viceministership in the Ministry of Trade, responsible for both domestic commerce and foreign trade. He has worked primarily in the domestic sector, his most notable venture in the foreign trade field occurring from November 1951 to April 1952 when he led a delegation to Moscow, which negotiated the Si no-Soviet trade protocol for the year 1952. Also in the foreign field, he has been a board member since early 1950 of the Bank of China, the institution responsible for the PRCs foreign banking. In domestic commerce he received two collateral assignments in 1950-51, the first of these in July 1950 when he was appointed to membership on the provisional Board of Supervisors of the AllChina Federation of Cooperations (ACFC), serving under Board Director Yeh Chi-chuang, who was also his superior in the Ministry of Trade. Sha remained an ACFC supervisor until mid-1954.
Sha’s second assignment in connection with domestic commerce was with the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce (AC-FIC). The decision to organize China's industrialists and business leaders, most of them nonCommunists, had been made at the third session of the CPPCC in Octobcr-November 1951. A special office was immediately established, with Sha as its secretary-general, to prepare for the convocation of a national conference of businessmen. The national meeting, originally scheduled for March 1952, was delayed, however, because of the ufive-antr, movement, a nationwide campaign directed largely at practices that the CCP authorities regarded as inimical to the interests of the state. Finally, after having been castigated by the Party press for several months, the nation business leaders met in June 1952 to form themselves into a national organization. Sha reported on the work of his special office and, at the close of the proceedings, was elected secretary-general of the ACFIC Preparatory Committee. A year and a half lalcr, in the fall of 1953, the ACFIC was established on a permanent basis, with Sha continuing to serve as the secretary-general. He retained his secretary-generalship until the next ACFIC congress in December 1956 and since that date has been a vice-chairman. Sha was clearly among the most important non-Communists involved in the early organizational period of the Federation, although it is equally evident that he was subordinate to Hsu Ti-hsin, the CCP's leading specialist in the control of the Chinese industrial and business community.
Less than two months after the PRC had been established in October 1949, Sha's National Salvation Association was abolished its tasks, in the eyes of the CCP, having been accomplished with the formation of a Communist government. Most of the Association leaders were transferred, in effect, to one of the other “democratic” political parties. Sha, who had been a China Democratic League member from about 1945, was elevated to Central Committee membership in the League in December 1949, the same month that the Salvation Association was abolished. He continues to serve on the Democratic League’s Central Committee, and from 1949 to about the mid-fifties he also headed the League’s Industry and Commerce Committee. Since April 1955 he has also been a Central Committee member in another democratic” political party, the China Democratic National Construction Association (CDNCA), whose membership closely parallels that of the Federation of Industry and Commerce, in which Sha has been so active. In February 1960 he advanced to Standing Committee membership in the CDNCA, another post he still retains.
Politics
Like many government officials in the early years of the PRC, Sha was called upon to lend his name to “mass” organizations, which were being established in rapid succession in 1949. From 1949 to 1950 he was National Committee member of the China Peace Committee, and from 1949 to 1954 he served on the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association’s Executive Board， but such assignments were clearly peripheral to his more important tasks in domestic commerce. For example, he received a more pertinent assignment in July 1952 when he was appointed to membership on the central government’s Labor Employment Committee, established to deal with the chronic problems of unemployment. In the following month, reflecting the growing complexities of the central bureaucracy, the Ministry of Trade was divided into the ministries of Foreign Trade and Commerce. Sha was assigned to the latter, where he served under Commerce Minister Tseng Shan and continued in the post until the constitutional government was inaugurated at the first session of the First NPC in September 1954.
At the close of the NPC meetings he received his first ministerial portfolio when he was named to head the newly established Ministry of Local Industry. Sha had attended the NPC as a deputy from his native Kiangsu, and he has subsequently served in the Second NPC (19541959), as well as the Third NPC, which opened in December 1964. In May 1956 when Sha’s Ministry of Local Industry was abolished, he was transferred to the Ministry of Light Industry, where he replaced Chia T'o-fu as the minister. Less than two years later, in February 1958, Sha was once more transferred, this time to the Ministry of Food, where he replaced Chang Nai-ch’i, a non-Communist industrialist and banker who had been one of the chief victims of the 1957-58 “rectification” campaign. Sha’s succeeding Chang in the Food Ministry was particularly ironic both had been among the seven Salvation Association leaders imprisoned together two decades previously.
Apart from his 1951-52 trip to Moscow, Sha has been abroad on two other occasions. In November 1952 he led a “people’s delegation” to North Korea and in May 1955 he accompanied Politburo member P'eng Te-huai to East Berlin to attend the celebrations marking the 10th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany. Unlike many of his colleagues in the nonCommunist political parties, Sha has apparently not been the object of CCP-directed criticisms in the many ideological campaigns staged since 1949. It is noteworthy, for example, that 10 of the 24 ministries and commissions in 1949 were headed by non-Communists, whereas in the mid-1960’s only nine of the 46 ministers were non-Communists Sha among them. Thus, as of January 1965 (when all cabinet members were appointed or reappointed), only Sha and the following eight men shared the distinction of being non-Communist heads of ministries: Hsu Te-heng, Aquatic Products, Li Szu-kuang, Geology, Li Chu-ch'en, Light Industry, Chang Hsi- jo, Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, Liu Wen-hui, Forestry, Fu Tso-i, Water Conservancy and Electric Power, Chiang Kuang-nai, Textile Industry and, Chu Hsueh-fan, Posts and Tele-communications.
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Born
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Nationality
China -
Ethnicity
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Political Party
Chinese Communist Party