Shao was born in 1899 in I-yang hsien, about 100 miles east of Nanchang, the Kiangsi capital. His long-time colleague Fang Chih-min was bom in the same year and the same hsien. Shao is said to have come from a declining petty bourgeois family.
From 1916 to 1918 he studied at the I-yang Higher Primary School, and it was there that he became a close friend of Fang. Both young men took part in student demonstrations against the Japanese in 1918, a period when Chinese students were keenly sensitive to Japan’s mounting incursions on Chinese sovereignty. Nothing is known of his whereabouts or activities for the next few years, but then in 1923 he went to Peking where he enrolled in Peking Normal University. In 1925 he joined the Communist Youth League and then the CCP. It is probable, though undocumented, that Shao was one of the many young men enlisted into the Communist movement by Li Ta-chao, then the leading CCP figure in north China. Like many Communists during this period of cooperation with the KMT, Shao was also a member of the KMT in the midtwenties. During his student days he was successively chairman of the university's Stadents' Union and secretary of the CCP branch within this organization.
In March 1926 Shao was among the participants in the demonstrations staged by Peking students, Communists, and left-wing KMT members to protest the “Taku Ultimatum” presented to the Chinese by the signatory powers of the Boxer Protocol (most notably the Japanese). The ultimatum demanded the immediate removal (within 48 hours) of Chinese artillery installations from Taku, the port city for Tientsin. In the subsequent protest demonstrations, a number of the demonstrators were killed and Li Ta-chao was wounded and barely escaped capture by the soldiers. Shao was forced to leave school for his part in the demonstrations, and like many Communists then in Peking, he left the city for fear of being arrested.
Returning to Kiangsi, Shao taught school for a brief time at the First Normal School in Nan- chang. The province was then in a state of great turmoil resulting from the advance of Chiang Kai-shek's Northern Expeditionary forces, which captured Nanchang in November 1926. Before the year ended Shao was back in his native I-yang where he worked in the peasant movement, presumably for both the KMT and the CCP, both parties were then eagerly wooing the peasantry in an attempt to hasten the success of the Northern Expedition. Sometime toward the end of 1926 Shao became a member of the Standing Committee of the KMT Kiangsi branch, as well as the secretary-general. The first half of 1927 was a period of considerable tension in Kiangsi as the CCP and the KMT jockeyed for power, a contest for authority further complicated by an intra-KMT struggle in which the Communists actively supported the left-wing KMT against the right-wing faction. In early April, the leftwing faction temporarily gained the upper hand and was thus able to reorganize the KMT Kiangsi branch as well as the provincial government. As a result of this turn of events, Shao was immediately appointed as a special inspector (fe-pfai yuan) of the provincial peasant association. He immediately proceeded to Hsien-fcng hsien (adjacent to his native I-yang hsien) where he deposed the local officials who were hostile to the CCP and the left-KMT. He replaced them with two CCP members native to the hsien, Tsou Hsiu-feng became head of the new government organization in Hsien-feng, and Wu Hsien-min became the Public Security Bureau chief. Shao was given still another post within the KMT when he was made a member of the provincial Supervisory Committee at a conference in April of the KMT Kiangsi branch. However, Shao and his colleagues Fang Chih-min and Huang Tao were able to exercise their authority on behalf of the left- KMT and the CCP for only a few weeks, because by the late spring and early summer of 1927 Chiang Kai-shek's right-wing faction was rapidly moving toward control of the province. The final blow to the Communists took place in June and July when the steadily deteriorating alliance between the CCP and the left-KMT finally collapsed.
For a short time just prior to the KMT-CCP split in the middle of 1927, Shao was the secretary for both the CCP Committee in Fou-liang hsien in northeast Kiangsi and the committee for the city of Ching-te-chen, situated in the hsien. In the period after the Nanchang Uprising on August 1，the Communists turned to the countryside where they made concerted efforts to organize peasant rebellions and to establish armed forces to combat the Nationalists. By the fall of 1927 Shao had gone from Ching-te-chen to Heng-feng hsien. In November, in neighboring I-yang hsien, he attended a conference convened by Fang Chih-min which brought together CCP members from I-yang, Hsien-feng, and three other nearby hsien in northeast Kiangsi. They resolved to foment armed uprisings in the countryside and elected a small work committee, of which Fang Chih-min was the secretary and Shao one of the members. It was to be the highest Party authority until a more formal structure could be worked out. At this time or soon afterwards, Shao became secretary of the Heng-feng CCP Committee and political commissar of the guerrilla units within the hsien. Several years later, when Mao Tse-tung described the early history of the CCP movement to journalist Edgar Snow, he singled out Fang and Shao as the two key figures in the development of the Communist base in northeast Kiangsi.
Shao’s obituary is again the source for posts he held after May 1933. He was chairman of the Fukien-Kiangsi Soviet, commander of the Fu- kien-Kiangsi Military Region, and a little later he was secretary of the Fukien-Kiangsi Provincial Party Committee. Very little is known about this soviet, which was situated directly south of the Fukien-Chekiang-Kiangsi Soviet. Nonetheless, when the Second All-China Congress of Soviets was held in January-February 1934, Shao's two- province soviet sent a separate delegation, two members of which, Ku Tso-lin and Chu Wei- yuan, were elected to the Second CEC. Shao was also elected to CEC membership, and at this juncture or soon thereafter, he was transferred to Juichin, the capital of the Chinese Soviet Republic. When the main elements of the Red Army left the area on the Long March in October 1934, Shao accompanied them. During the march he was chief-of-staff and director of the Political Department of the Second Column. His obituary also lists him as director of the Local Work Department (ti-fang kung-tso pu) during the long trek, but the nature of this assignment is not clear.
After arriving in Shensi Shao was assigned to educational work. In 1937 he was director of the Educational Department of the North Shensi Public School (Shen-pei Kung-hsueh), one of the most important training institutes in the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia Border Region. He was still connected with the school in the spring of 1938 when, for the May 6 issue of Chieh-fang (Liberation), he wrote an article entitled Experience and Lessons in the National Defense Education Program in the North Shensi Academy（Public School). In the same year, he was transferred to the Shansi-Chahar-Hopeh (Chin- Che-Chi) Border Region (see under Sung Shao- wen), which was then headquartered in the Wu-fai Mountain area in northeast Shansi. From that time until the end of the war he was a member of the Chin-Che-Chi Border Region Government Council and vice-president of the second branch of the Anti-Japanese Military and Political Academy (K’ang-ta). In the latter part of 1944 he returned to Yenan to attend the Central Party School. He apparently remained in Ycnan through the spring, because he was one of the delegates to the Seventh National CCP Congress, held from April to June 1945.
After 1949 Shao’s activities centered in Kiangsi where he was the governor and an important official in the provincial Party Committee. He was made a vice-chairman of the Kiangsi branch of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association in 1952, he was re-elected to this post in July 1959, but the Association was not particularly active after the split between China and the Soviet Union. In the fall of 1953 Shao made his only known trip abroad, going to North Korea as a deputy chief of a comfort, and inspection delegation led by Ho Lung. By May 1955 Shao was identified as the second secretary of the Kiangsi Party Committee, the designation was changed to secretary in late 1956, but in both cases he was subordinate to First Secretary Yang Shang-k'ei. Shao's subordination to Yang is rather unusual in view of the fact that Shao was elected an alternate member of the CCP Central Committee at the Eighth Party Congress in September 1956. Yang, however, is not a member of the Central Committee.
Shao became president of the Kiangsi branch of the Academy of Sciences when it was established in July 1958. That same month he assumed another post in the science field, becoming chairman of the Kiangsi Provincial Government’s Science and Technical Work Committee. In 1961 the Party re-created the regional CCP bureaus in accordance with a decision taken at the Central Committee’s Ninth Plenum in January 1961. When the regional bureaus had existed, in the period from 1949 to 1954-55, Kiangsi had come under the jurisdiction of the Central-South Bureau. However, as constituted after 1961, Kiangsi was placed under the East China Bureau, whiefi was headed by K’o Ch’ing-shih. Shao was serving as a member of this Bureau at the time of his death.
In the early part of 1928 Fang, Shao, and Huang Tao merged their aimed bands into the I-yang-Heng-feng Guerrilla District. By the middle of the year the Communists found themselves compressed into a small area in I-yang hsien. At an emergency meeting convened to decide upon a future course of action, Shao was placed in command of the guerrilla units. A good indication of the smallness of the guerrilla forces is provided by Miao Min, the biographer of Fang Chih-min. Writing about the last months of 1928, Miao described Shao’s efforts to increase the size of the guerrilla units by winning over defectors from nearby KMT units. He was able to get 70 defectors who, by bringing their weapons with them, doubled the number of weapons available to the Red units.
In December 1929 the first congress of workers, peasants, and soldiers was held, and this resulted in the formation of the Hsin-chiang Soviet Government (so named after the Hsin-chiang River, which traverses I-yang hsien). Fang Chih- min was elected the chairman, and its 33-member executive committee included Shao and Huang Tao. The development of the Communist base in northeast Kiangsi, which evolved into the Fukien-Chekiang-Kiangsi Soviet area in the early 1930’s is described in detail in the biography of Fang Chih-min. Although exact dates are not given, Shao's obituary reveals that in the period prior to May 1933 he held the following posts: chairman of the Fukien-Chekiang-Kiangsi Soviet, commander of the Fukien-Chekiang-Kiangsi Military Region, and political commissar and secretary of the Frontline Committee of the 10th Red Army. Shao apparently held the first-named post for only a brief time, because for most of the period between 1930 and 1934 it was held by Fang Chih-min. Similarly, Fang became acting political commissar of the 10th Red Army in March 1935 and by the next year he was the political commissar.
As a senior provincial leader, Shao was a frequent contributor to the press. For the Nanchang Yueh-chin (Leap forward), which began publication on July 1, 1958, as a provincial version of Hung-ch'i (Red flag), he wrote an article on industry in Kiangsi. In 1960 he wrote three articles for the national press, two dealing with the economic development of the mountainous regions of Kiangsi and one on his early experiences in the 1 Oth Red Army. These were written for the JMJP of February 17 and December 25, and for the English-language monthly China Reconstructs (November 1960).
Throughout the fifties and early sixties, Shao continued to be one of the most active Kiangsi officials. Just two months before his death he was named to a preparatory committee for the Second National Sports Meet, and a month later he was appointed to a committee given the task of preparing for a provincial congress of industrial and communications workers. Shao died in Nanchang on March 24, 1965, at the age of 65. The funeral committee appointed at that time was chaired by Politburo member K'o Ch'ing-shih and included such notables as Chou En-lai, Teng Hsiao-p’ing, and P’eng Chen.
In November 1931, when the First All-China Congress of Soviets was held in Juichin, southeast Kiangsi, Shao was elected a member of the Central Executive Committee (CEC) of the Chinese Soviet Republic established by the congress. Mao Tse-tung was chairman of the CEC. At the same time Shao was one of 15 men named to membership on the Central Revolutionary Military Council. This important organ was chaired by Chu Te, and Wang Chia-hsiang and P’eng Te-huai served as the vice-chairmen. The composition of the council suggests an effort to give representation to the various Communist military bases, some of which were quite distant from Juichin. For example, Hsu Hsiang-ch’ien, the top military figure in the Oyiiwan Soviet, was a council member. Significantly, Shao was the only Communist leader selected from the Fukien-Chekiang-Kiangsi Soviet.
