Background
Virtually nothing is known of Sun’s early life, but some information was revealed in the charges brought against him in 1958.
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Sun Tso-pin
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He was a Communist Party member by 1934 and once belonged to the Lung-tung District Party Committee and to the East Kansu Local Party Committee. During the Sino-Japanese War, Lung-tung was one of the districts into which the Communist Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia Border Region was divided, an area straddling southern Ninghsia and eastern Kansu. No dates were given for Sun’s activities in Lung-tung but presumably these were carried on in wartimes. In any event, by the latter half of 1949 he had become one of the leading Party officials in Kansu, where he was to remain for the next four years.
Career
The Communists established their political instruments of power in Kansu following their capture of Lanchow, the capital, in August 1949. Sun became a deputy secretary in the Kansu Party apparatus under ranking Secretary Chang Te-sheng, a veteran of the northwest Party organization from the early thirties. Sun also held two posts within the provincial government structure, established in Lanchow on January 8, 1950. He served as a member of the Kansu Provincial People's Government from January 1950 and two months later was named as chairman of this government’s People’s Supervision Committee. He also held related posts under the multi-provincial Party and government organs for Northwest China; in 1953-54 he was deputy director of the United Front Work Department of the Northwest Party Bureau (a department headed by minority nationalities specialist Wang Feng). During these same two years he was also a vicechairman (again serving under Wang Feng) of the Nationalities Affairs Commission of the Northwest Administrative Committee, a government committee (like the Party bureau) having jurisdiction over Kansu, Ninghsia, Shensi, Tsinghai, and Sinkiang. These two posts are related because a major task of the United Front Department is to gain cooperation from the various national minority groups. The problems of united front work are particularly pertinent in the northwest where so many non-Han Chinese live. Sun’s specialization in national minority matters was already evident by 1950 when he wrote an article on minority affairs in Kansu for the Kansu jih- pao (Kansu daily) of January 10, 1950, an article reprinted in the Hsin-hua yueh-pao (New China monthly) of February 15, 1950.
Although Sun was politically overshadowed in Kansu by Party leaders Chang Te-sheng and Wang Shih-t’ai, he was reported with some regularity in the early 1950’s. For example, he was a vice-chairman of the preparatory committee established to mark the opening of the T’ien-shui-Lanchow Railway in August 1952, the important line that provided access by rail to Sian in the east and Chengtu in the southwest. In the following month he was identified as the man in charge of “political study work” in all Kansu Party organizations, and in December 1953 Sun was named as the responsible person of the Northwest Party Bureau for the implementation of Party policies involving minority nationalities.
In early 1954, Sun was transferred from Kansu to neighboring Tsinghai, where he served in the provincial Party Committee briefly under Chang Chung-liang and then (from August 1954) under Kao Feng. Four years later, when charges were brought against Sun, it was asserted that he resisted this reassignment to Tsinghai, declaring it to be insignificant. It was further alleged that he was dissatisfied when he was not named as the Party first secretary a suggestion that he may have had some friction with Chang Chung-liang and Kao Feng, his two superiors in the Tsinghai Party organization. At first Sun was given the position as second secretary in the Tsinghai Party committee, but by mid-1956 his post was redesignated as secretary (although he continued to be subordinate to ranking Secretary Kao Feng). In 1954 he received his first national post when he was elected as a deputy from Tsinghai to the First NPC. He attended the first session of the First NPC in Peking in September 1954 and then presented a report about the NPC meetings before a session of the Kansu Provincial Congress in December 1954. At this same time, he was elected as the Tsinghai governor, replacing Chang Chung-liang.
The 1958 disclosures made note of the fact that Sun had spent a year studying in Peking at the Higher Party School, which, as the name suggests, is the leading Communist Party School for higher level leaders and cadres. The exact year that Sun attended the Higher Party School was not mentioned, but it was probably in the last half of 1955 and the first part of 1956, during which time he did not appear in Tsinghai.
Politics
In his capacity as either the Tsinghai governor or as a provincial Party secretary, Sun Tso-pin was frequently in the news in the mid-1956’s. Most frequently, he was reported in Tsinghai attending meetings of advanced workers,making inspection tours, or delivering reports before provincial governmental or Party organizations. He also returned to Peking annually for the sessions of the NPC. In July 1957, Sun spoke before the fourth session of the First NPC; the title of his speech may be freely translated 4tIf There Were No Communist Party There Would Be No Unity of Nationalities.” Ironically, half a year later Sun was charged with a host of offenses, one of which was sabotaging Party leadership by advocating “local nationalism” (the standard Communist term to describe separatist tendencies leading toward greater local autonomy). Refining these charges, it was claimed that Sun had proposed the “doctrine of Kansu for the Kansu people,” a strong suggestion that Sun is himself a native of that province. The broad catalogue of charges against Sun can only be briefly mentioned. During his tenure in Tsinghai he allegedly: opposed expenditures for the exploitation of the mineral-rich Tsaidam Basin, favoring the use of these funds for the development of pastoral areas, directed personnel work for the Tsinghai Party Committee but neglected this work and displayed attitudes toward work and leisure which were declared to be those of a “bureaucrat of the Kuomintang type.”
Of particular interest is the charge that as long ago as 1934 Sun had claimed that there is a “Communist Party of the white areas” and a “Communist Party of the Soviet areas. Strikingly similar charges had been leveled against Kao Kang in 1955. The “white areas” referred to the Party organizations and personnel working in areas controlled by the Kuomintang or the Japanese. Such claims, of course, were viewed by the Party leaders to be divisive and therefore harmful. Sun was further accused of leading a corrupt life, of aiding and harboring anti-Communists, and opposing the crackdown on counterrevolutionaries. Finally, he was charged with being anti-Party, anti-socialist, and anti- people. He was stripped of all his posts in Tsinghai (and the NPC) and expelled from the CCP. Expulsion from the Party can be taken as the ultimate punishment in contemporary Communist China. In this connection, it is noteworthy that Sun was mentioned again at the Second Session of the Eighth Party Congress in May 1958, just a few weeks after his expulsion from the Party ranks. Those mentioned were all declared to be rightists," but with an important distinction: approximately half the group was described as “comrades,” with no mention made of the loss of Party membership. Several such men (e.g. P’an Fu-sheng and Ku Ta-ts’un) have subsequently been reinstated to posts of moderate importance. The “rightists” of the second category on the other hand, were not given the appellation “comrade” and apparently have been precluded from any further work in the Chinese Communist movement. Apart from Sun, the other man of considerable stature who lost his Party membership at this time was Sha Wenhan, the purged former Chekiang governor.
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Born
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Nationality
China -
Ethnicity
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Political Party
Chinese Communist Party
Career
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1949
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1950
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January, 1950
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1954