Background
Nothing is known about her background.
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Shui Meng-ch'i
Edit ProfileEducation
She was educated locally.
Career
By 1932 Shuai was director of the Women’s Department of the Kiangsu Party Committee, then an underground organization under constant KMT surveillance. In July 1932 various left-wing groups from Kiangsu held a “masses representatives’ conference” in Shanghai, which was broken up by the Nationalist Government. Not long afterwards Shuai was arrested and imprisoned until the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937. According to several Communist accounts, Shuai was tortured by the Nationalists while in prison, but nothing could break her “revolutionary will-power.” Her experiences in prison are described in a pamphlet written by Li Po-chao (the wife of Party leader Yang Shang-un.). Entitled Nii Kung-Wan-tang yuan (A Woman of the Party), it was published in Peking in 1950.
No further details of her career are available until the spring of 1949 when she was active in the affairs of tfie mass women’s organization the All-China Federation of Democratic Women (ACFDW). Attending the Federation’s founding congress in March-April 1949, she was made a member of both the Executive and Standing Committees and was also appointed director of the ACFDW Organization Department. The latter position gave her considerable influence over administrative and organizational matters of the Federation during its formative years. She held all the above posts until the Federation met for its second congress in April 1953. Although she was a member of the 1953 Congress Presidium (steering committee), she was re-elected only to membership on the Federation's Executive Committee. At the third national ACFDW Congress (September 1957), Shuai was re-elected to the Executive Committee, and she retains this post with the National Women's Federation, as the ACFDW was renamed at that time.
From the Eighth Party Congress in September 1956 Shuai began a new phase in her career. At this time she was one of the very few women to serve on the Congress Presidium (steering committee). The role she played from the time the Congress opened indicated that she had been chosen for Party executive work, because she was one of the executive chairmen of two of the daily Congress sessions and was then elected an alternate member of the CCP Central Committee. She was one of only eight women members of the new Central Committee, four serving as full members, and four as alternates. In the latter group Shuai received the largest number of votes among the female alternates. The day after the Congress closed, the First Plenum of the Eighth Congress elected a 17-member Central Control Commission headed by Party veteran Tung Pi-wu. Shuai and Ch'en Ying, a full Central Committee member, were the only women elected to the Control Commission. In about 1961 the Commission was slightly reorganized and a Standing Committee of nine persons was formed, with Shuai as one of the members. In the interim she was identified in June 1957 as a deputy director of the Party Organization Department, the only woman of this rank in this important Party organ. As of 1965 she was the ranking deputy director in terms of seniority.
Politics
In addition to her work with the women’s movement, Shuai has held various posts in the national government. She was a delegate from the ACFDW to the First CPPCC in September 1949, and attended the third session of the First CPPC (October-November 1951). From 1949 to 1954 she was a member of the People's Supervision Committee of the Government Administrative Council (the cabinet). And she was made a member of the Central Austerity Examination Committee, an ad hoc committee formed in December 1951 and staffed by high-ranking members of the elite. Since the inauguration of the constitutional government in September 1954 Shuai has represented Hunan in the NPC, serving on the First (1954-1959) and Second (1959 NPC’s and then being re-elected to the Third NPC, which held its first session in December 1964-January 1965. At the close of this session she was elected to the NPC Standing Committee, the organ charged with managing the affairs of the NPC when full congress is not in session. In May 1956 Shuai led a six-member delegation to North Vietnam to attend the Second Congress of the Vietnam Women's Federation.
Membership
In recent years Shuai has been a member of the Presidium of the fifth session of the First NPC (1958) and of the first session of the Third NPC (1964-1965). She continues to hold all her Party posts, and though her name does not appear frequently in the press, this is probably because of the nature of her work in the Party's disciplinary and organizational branches, work seldom mentioned in the press. Shuai is clearly one of the most senior of the Communist women leaders.
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Born
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Nationality
China -
Ethnicity
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Political Party
Chinese Communist Party