Shih Liang

Background

Shih was bom in Ch’ang-chou (Wu-chin), an important Yangtze River port city in Kiangsu midway between Shanghai and Nanking.

Education

She attended a girls school in her home town and then graduated from the Shanghai Law College in the mid-twenties. Shih joined the KMT and during the Northern Expedition of 1926-27 she headed the Personnel Training Section under the Revolutionary Army’s General Political Department.

Career

She held several minor posts with the KMT in the late twenties in Kiangsu, but by the end of the decade she was practicing law in Shanghai. After the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931, she became increasingly involved in political affairs in Shanghai, particularly those related to efforts to strengthen Chinese abilities to resist the steady encroachments of the Japanese. In these endeavors she came to be closely associated with prominent ifigures in Shanghai, a group that included journalist Tsou Tao-fen, banker Chang Nai-ch’i, and fellow lawyer Shen Chiin-ju.

With war against Japan on the horizon, Shih and her colleagues became increasingly critical of the KMT government’s policies. In particular, they objected to the KMT policy of first annihilating the domestic threat of Communism before strengthening China’s military forces to withstand Japanese incursions into China. Finally, in 1936, Shih and others organized the National Salvation Association, first in Shanghai and then on a nationwide basis. In cooperation with student organizations, they constantly agitated for immediate resistance to the Japanese, the cessation of the war against the Communists, and for the release of political prisoners. The KMT struck back in November 1936 by arresting in Shanghai seven NSA leaders: Shih, the above- mentioned Shen Chiin-ju, Chang Nai-ch'i, and Tsou T’ao-fen, as well as editor Li Kung-p'u, the lawyer Sha Ch’ien-li and professor Wang Tsao-shih. The imprisonment in Soochow (Su- chou) of Shih and her six colleagues became an immediate cause celebre under the name of the uSeven Gentlemen" incident.

Both Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Tse-tung have written about the Salvation Association and its influential members Chiang viewing them as knaves and dupes of the Communists, Mao as useful allies. Chiang, in fact, assigns to the association an important role in the events leading to the dramatic Sian Incident of December 1936, when he was kidnapped by dissident KMT Generals Chang Hsueh-liang and Yang Hu-ch’eng. In Chiang's account he asserts that Chang and Yang had shielded Communists and “front organizations” and as a result the Third Party (see under Chi Fang) and the Salvation Association had openly engaged in propaganda. Unless timely measures were taken, he wrote, “the situation could lead to a rebellion. Thereupon, I went to Sian in the hope that my presence would constitute a stabilizing factor.’’ Mao, in turn, was quick to capitalize on the nationwide sympathy engendered by the arrest of the “Seven Gentlemen,” which took place only three weeks before the Sian Incident. Although Mao conceded that Chiang did not sign any specific agreement to gain his release from Sian, he claimed (in a statement of December 28, 1936) that Chiang tacitly agreed to a six-point program, one of which was to release the patriotic leaders in ShanghaiM (i.e., Shih and her colleagues).

All of the "Seven Gentlemen were released soon after war with Japan began in July 1937 and all were to have careers intimately linked to causes espoused by the CCP and five of them were to work for the Communists after they conquered the mainland in 1949. Li Kung-p'u was assassinated in 1946, and two years earlier, when Tsou Tao-fen died, he was posthumously admitted to the CCP. After 1949 Wang Tsao-shih worked in the PRC as an education official in east China, and Chang Nai-ch'i held a number of important posts in the PRC central government, but both were purged during the 1957-58 “rectification” campaign. Ironically, Chang was replaced as head of the Food Ministry by one of his fellow Seven Gentlemen, Sha Ch'en-li. Until his death in 1963, Shen Chiin-ju held important posts, including the presidency of the Communists’ Supreme Court from 1949 to 1954 and Sha Ch’ien-li has served from the inauguration of the Communist government as a cabinet official of considerable importance.

Shih spent the Sino-Japanese War years in Chungking working, like many Chinese of the political left, with both the KMT and the CCP. She headed a liaison committee of the Women’s Advisory Committee under the KMT-sponsored New Life Movement Association in which Mme. Chiang Kai-shek was a prominent leader. She was also associated with Mme. Chiang's sister, Mme. Sun Yat-sen, in women's work, and toward the end of the war was among the organizers of the leftist-oriented China Womens Association (Fu- nil lien-i hui), which was placed under the AllChina Federation of Democratic Women (see below) when the Communists took power in 1949. Continuing her political work, Shih took part in forming the China Democratic League (CDL) in 1944. In 1946 Shih returned to Shanghai, remaining there after the CDL was outlawed by the KMT government in the fall of 1947. She quickly advanced in the League hierarchy, becoming a Standing Committee member in 1948 and, after the Communists look power, she rose to a vice-chairmanship in 1953. Shih is the only woman vice-chairman of the CDL, which is generally regarded as one of the most important of the eight “democratic” political parties in China.

Any doubts concerning Shih’s political future were dispelled in December 1948 when she was elected to alternate membership on the Board of Directors of the World Federation of Democratic Women (WFDW), a Communist front then dominated by the Soviet Union. In May 1949 she led a Chinese delegation to the Congress of the Women’s Union of France on behalf of the All-China Federation of Democratic Women (ACFDW), a member of the WFDW. Shih was not then a national office holder in the ACFDW, but she was added to its Executive Committee in 1950 and has been a vice-chairman since April 1953. As the Communists set about establishing the “mass” organizations and the central government in mid-1949 Shih was among the most active participants, first in Shanghai and then in Peking. In Shanghai she headed the Democratic League’s Provisional Work Committee for east China and was a member of the Preparatory Committee for the Shanghai branch of the Women's Federation. Then she transferred to Peking where, as a lawyer, she helped draft new laws under the jurisdiction of the CPPCC Preparatory Committee, established in June 1949 under Mao Tse-tung. In the same month she became a vice-chairman of the New Legal Research Society’s Preparatory Committee. In July she was a keynote speaker at a large conference of social scientists, many of them non-Communists in the same month she was named to Preparatory Committee membership on the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association (SSFA), and when the association was established in October, she was named to the Executive Board, a post she still retains.

Already in possession of numerous positions within and outside the government, Shih was to receive still others in the early years of the PRC. She was elected to the National Committee of the China Peace Committee in October 1949 and advanced to the Standing Committee in mid- 1958. On behalf of this organization she accompanied Mme. Sun Yat-sen to Vienna in December 1952 to attend the Communist-dominated World Peace Congress. In November 1951 she became a member of a child-care organization headed by Mme. Sun known as the Chinese People's Committee in Defense of Children, and in the next month she was appointed to the central government's Austerity Examination Committee, established to investigate the state of the nation’s economy. She has also served on the Board of the Political Science and Law Association of China since its inauguration in April 1953, and during that same year she also became a vice-chairman of a special committee to “thoroughly implement” the PRC’s Marriage Law, which fiad been promulgated in 1950. She also served under Politburo member P'eng Chen from at least July 1954 until November 1956 as a vice-president of the Central Political and Legal Cadres' Academy.

Politics

Representing the Democratic League, Shih attended the initial session in September 1949 of the CPPCC, the organization that brought the new government into existence. She was elected to the CPPCC's First National Committee and has continued to represent the Democratic League on the Second, Third, and Fourth National Committees, which first met in 1954, 1959, and 1964, respectively, moreover, Shih has had a seat on the CPPCCs Standing Committee since 1953. When the central government was formed in October 1949, Shih was appointed to head the Ministry of Justice, a portfolio she held for nearly a decade. Her legal background also won her seats on the central government’s two major legal bodies, the ministry-level Law Commission and the Political and Legal Affairs Committee, the latter being one of the four major committees under the Government Administration Council (the cabinet), Shih lost her seat in these two organizations when they were dissolved in 1954. With the exception of leading women Communists TsTai Ch'ang and Teng Ying-ch'ao and other prominent women like Mmes. Sun Yat-sen and Liao Chung-k'ai (Ho Hsiang-ning), few women emerged with so many significant posts as Shih Liang in the early days of the PRC. However, it must be noted that the CCP was anxious to present a facade of national unity and to enlist the support of women, consequently, there is little doubt that Shih's actual authority in the councils of government was considerably less than her positions would at first glance suggest.

Membership

Shih has been a deputy from her native Kiang- su since the inauguration of the First NPC in September 1954, and when the Second NPC came into existence in April 1959, she was advanced to membership on the Standing Committee, the body in charge of NPC affairs between the annual sessions of the full congress. During the life of the Second NPC (1959-1964) she was a member of the permanent NPC Bills Committee, continuing in this post when the Third NPC opened in December 1964. When the Second NPC opened in April 1959, a number of personnel and organizational changes were made in the central government, among them the abolition of Shih's Ministry of Justice, whose functions were placed under the Supreme Peopled Court. To judge from the rather large number of reports Shih had made before central government bodies and to national conferences dealing with legal questions, she was among the most active women members of the government throughout the 1950’s.

Since losing her ministerial portfolio, however, Shih seems to have devoted most of her time to the Women's Federation, the China Democratic League, and to legal argumentation in support of the PRC in its disputes with foreign countries. In regard to the last-mentioned activity, for example, she wrote an article for the July 13, 1964, issue of the Peking Ta-kung pao denouncing the imprisonment of PRC officials (ostensibly members of a trade delegation and journalists) who had been imprisoned by Brazilian authorities on espionage charges.

Connections

Shih was married to a Shanghai lawyer named Lu Chao-hua, but they were separated prior to the Communist conquest of the city in 1949. She has since remarried, and when former French Premier Edgar Faure visited China in 1956 he described Shih as “very beautiful and very chic” noting that she t4spoke only Chinese but was accompanied by a polyglot husband.’’ Faure’s flattering comments stand in contrast to the wry remark of force' political leader Carsun Chang (Chang Chiin-mai) that Miss Shih was the “Communist Portia.”

Spouse:

Lu Chao-hua