Education
He was educated locally.
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Sun Ta-kuang
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Although Sun Ta-kuang has risen to the cabinet level in Communist China, he was virtually unknown when the regime was formed in the fall of 1949. At that time he was serving as head of the Northeast General Bureau of Navigation. On January 2, 1951 in Harbin, Sun signed an agreement with the Soviet Union on construction and navigation along the Amur, Ussuri, and other rivers and lakes on the Manchurian-Soviet Far Eastern boundary.
Career
In August 1951 he was appointed as president of the Northeast Marine Navigation College, a position he held officially until June 1954, but one which in fact he must have relinquished by mid-1953 when he was reported in Peking serving as director of the Planning Department of the Ministry of Communications. From this rather modest beginning with the ministry he rose in little over a decade to become the minister. In January 1955 he was appointed as assistant minister, in July 1958 as vice-minister, and in July 1964 as minister.
Sun made his first trip abroad for the PRC in May-June 1955, when he led a delegation to Schevenigen in the Netherlands, where he attended the International Congress of Experts on Coastlighting, one of the relatively few nonpolitical international events in which the Chinese Communists had participated as of that time. Two years later, like so many of his Communist colleagues, Sun became involved in the “rectification” campaign. At a meeting of his ministry on July 8, 1957, Sun “exposed” his minister, Chang Po-chiin， a non-CCP member and one of the leading targets of the “rectification” movement. Early in 1958, Chang was removed from his post as a “rightist.”
Since 1961 Sun has devoted considerable time and effort to the China-Albania Joint Stock Shipping Company, formed under the terms of an agreement he signed in Peking in December 1961 with a visiting Albanian vice-minister of Communications. This was in obvious response to the worsening Tirana-Moscow and Peking-Moscow relations in that it provided Albania, shorn of its allies in Europe, with an additional link abroad for purposes of trade and receiving aid from China. Not long after signing the agreement, Sun journeyed to Tirana where, from April 23 to May 7, 1962 the first meeting of the “administrative council” of the stock company was held to discuss management and related problems, on May 7 Sun signed the protocol to the meeting. He then flew to Cairo where he spent two weeks on a “friendly” visit to the United Arab Republic. The second meeting of the shipping company was held in April-May 1963 in Peking. Sun took part in the negotiations and once again signed the protocol to the meetings (May 2).
As noted above, Sun became minister of Communications in July 1964, replacing Party Central Committee member Wang Shou-tao, who was transferred to south China. In his new capacity, Sun signed an agreement on maritime transportation with the Congo (Brazzaville) in Peking on October 2, 1964. At this juncture, Peking was making a determined effort to bring about closer relations with the Congo, as was well illustrated by the fact that PRC Chairman Liu Shao-ch'i signed a treaty of friendship with the visiting president of the Congo on the same day that Sun signed the maritime agreement.
In late 1964 Sun was elected from Anhwei to the Third NPC, at its first session in December 1964-January 1965, he was named to the National Defense Council (and reappointed as minister of Communications). Although this military advisory body is not of great importance, it provides the only clue that Sun may have been a military figure of some prominence prior to 1949. An alternative interpretation is that a decision was made to bring more technical specialists into the organization, a role to which Sun would be well suited.
Politics
In January 1959, Sun was added as an additional member of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, an organization devoted essentially to the promotion of trade with countries not having diplomatic relations with Peking. Later in the same month the Council created the Maritime Arbitration Commission as a subordinate organization. Sun was named as the chairman, a position he still retains, but one about which virtually nothing is ever reported. A little over a year later, in February 1960, the State Council created a special Committee for Receiving and Resettling Returned Overseas Chinese. This had been formed to accommodate a large number of Chinese who returned to mainland China from Indonesia, partly because of restrictions placed by the Indonesian government on Chinese merchants. Because of the large number of repatriates (about 100,000), this resettlement presented major logistical problems, and it was presumably for this reason that Sun, a specialist in logistics, was named as a member of the special committee.
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Born
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Nationality
China -
Ethnicity
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Political Party
Chinese Communist Party