Background
Sung was born in 1904 in Liu-yang, about 50 miles east of Changsha, the Hunan provincial capital.
politician first secretary Army political officer
Sung was born in 1904 in Liu-yang, about 50 miles east of Changsha, the Hunan provincial capital.
In the mid-1920’s he went to Canton, then the revolutionary center of China, and enrolled at the newly opened Whampoa Military Academy, whose president was Chiang Kai-shek. Edgar Snow has described Sung as a “former Kuomintang officer and although the dates are not available, it would appear to have been in the period between his graduation from Whampoa and 1928, the year he joined the Communist Party.
He apparently soon went to the Kiangsi-Fukien area controlled by the Communists, because by 1930 he was a regimental political commissar in forces led by Lin Piao. In the next year he advanced to the post of a division political commissar in the Fifth Army Corps. This corps was established under the command of Tung Chen-fang and Chao Po-sheng in December 1931 after these two officers led a revolt in the Nationalists' 26th Route Army and joined the Communists. Sung later studied at the Red Army Academy, which opened in 1933 just outside Juichin, the capital of the Communist Chinese Soviet Republic. Then, during the Long March (1934-35), Sung and Ch'en Keng were political commissar and commander of the Red Cadres' Regiment, which consisted of cadets from Red Army military institutes in Kiangsi. This regiment was responsible for “protecting the leaders and organizations” of the Party Central Committee, including Mao Tse-tung.
In January 1936, soon after the first group of marchers reached north Shensi, Sung became political commissar of the 28th Red Army, he was with this force when it was ordered to cross the Yellow River into west Shansi in early 1936. This campaign is described in the biography of Liu Chih-tan, the 28th Army commander. When Liu was mortally wounded in the Shansi operation, Sung assumed command of the 28th Army (presumably also continuing as its political commissar). The Communists reorganized their armies after the start of the Sino-Japanese War in mid-1937 and Sung’s forces became part of Liu Po-ch'eng's 129th Division, one of three divisions making up the newly created Eighth Route Army. Sung was made director of the division’s Political Department, serving directly under Political Commissar Tcng Hsiao-p’ing. Sung remained with Liu’s forces for nearly two decades.
In August 1938 Sung also became vice-chairman of the South Hopeh Administrative Office, the political organization paralleling the Military District. Offices like this provided the governmental machinery for a Communist base and were distinct in function from the military command and from the Party organ established in every guerrilla area. However, the principal governmental personnel were often the same men who conducted the base's military and Party affairs. The chairman of the South Hopeh Administrative Office was Yang Hsiu-feng, a former professor who joined the resistance at the outbreak of the war. Yang was not then a Party member, and Sung was thus the important Party official in his administration. Sometime in 1939 Sung replaced Yang as chairman in South Hopeh. In July 1941, when the Communists created the Shansi-Hopeh-Shantung-Honan (Chin-Chi-Lu-Yli) Border Region Government, the South Hopeh Administrative Office became part of it. Yang became the Border Government chairman, and Sung was made a member of the Chin-Chi-Lu-Yu Government Council.
From the end of the war with Japan in 1945 until 1954, Sung continued to serve with Liu Po- ch’eng’s army. This army’s advance from south Shansi into central and central-south China, and then into the southwest late in 1949 where it captured Yunnan province is described in Liu Po-ch’eng’s biography. During 1945-46 Sung was commander of the Hopeh-Shantung-Honan Military Region, as well as the South Hopeh Military District, in which he had served since 1938. In 1947 he was also political commissar of the South Hopeh Military District and of the Second Column of Liu’s forces. By 1949 Sung had become political commissar of the Fourth Army Corps in Liu's army, which was now called the Second Field Army. He also served as vicechairman of the Nanking Military Control Commission from April to November 1949.
After Kunming, the Yunnan capital, was captured in February 1950, Sung was given key posts at the regional, provincial, and municipal levels. In the next month he became chairman of the Kunming Military Control Commission, and by this time he was also a deputy political commissar of the Southwest Military Region and director of the Second Field Army's Political Department. In July he was appointed a member of the overall regional government for the southwest, the Southwest Military and Administrative Committee (SWMAC), and shortly thereafter he was made a member of the Yunnan Provincial Peopled Government Council and chairman of its Finance and Economics Committee. From 1951 Sung was also the ranking Party secretary in Yunnan. He was promoted to a vice-chairmanship of the SWMAC in August 1952 and he retained this post when the SWMAC was reorganized into the Southwest Administrative Committee in February 1953. Finally, by mid-1952 he was also first deputy secretary of the CCP Southwest Bureau, ranking third after Secretary Ho Lung and Second Secretary Liu Po-ch'eng. Because Ho was frequently in Peking and Liu was seldom in the southwest after 1951, much of the responsibility fell to Sung. Similarly, after 1952 Teng Hsiao-p’ing, the regional political commissar, spent most of his time in Peking, and thus from then until 1954 Sung was probably the key political officer in the area.
Since 1955 Sung's stature among the Communist elite has been steadily rising. When personal military ranks and decorations were first awarded in 1955 he was made a colonel-general (equivalent to a U.S. Army lieutenant-general) and was awarded the three top military awards. These decorations, the Orders of August First, Independence and Freedom, and Liberation, were given for military service from 1927 to 1950. He also assumed an important PLA staff post in 1955 as deputy director of the General Cadres Department under Lo Jung-huan. It is uncertain how long Sung held this post; he may have been dropped from the department around December 1956 when Hsiao Hua replaced Lo as the director.
In addition to his military posts, Sung was also identified in 1955 as a deputy secretary-general of the CCP Central Committee. In this capacity he worked under his long-time colleague, Secretary-General Teng Hsiao-p'ing, until the post was abolished when the Party Center was reorganized in September 1956 at the Eighth Party Congress. Sung took an active part in the Congress, serving as a member of its Presidium and Credentials Committee and as a secretary of its Secretariat. He also delivered a speech entitled “Experience in Collective Leadership.” When the Congress elected the new Central Committee, Sung was promoted from alternate to full membership.
In November 1956 Sung received his first key appointment in the national government as minister of the Third Ministry of Machine Building, a ministry re-established after having been abolished the previous May. In February 1958 the ministry was renamed the Second Ministry of Machine Building, and the Third Ministry was again abolished. Sung continued to hold the portfolio in the new Second Ministry until September 1960.
In May 1957 he was named to the State Council’s Scientific Planning Commission. First established in March 1956, it was absorbed by the Scientific and Technological Commission in November 1958 at which time Sung was dropped. In 1958 he was elected a Yunnan delegate to the Second NPC, which opened in April 1959. During the term of the Second Congress (19591964) he was transferred from Peking to Liaoning, and when re-elected to the Third NPC (opening December 1964) it was as a Liaoning deputy.
In addition to his political work Sung was also active on the military front. In 1942 he organized and directed for a time a “dare-to-die” column of guerrillas in south Hopeh. Units of the so-called Dare-to-Die Corps were the military arm of the Sacrifice League, the leading mass patriotic association of the Shansi resistance, which had been organized in 1936 with Governor Yen Hsi-shan as its titular head. In the early war years, the League's membership grew quite large and many of its members later joined the CCP.G
Sung apparently left south Hopeh at least temporarily in 1943 when he went to Yenan to study at the Central Party School. At that time the Party was in the midst of conducting an intensive indoctrination movement known as the cheng-feng (rectification) campaign. Begun in 1942, it consisted of training in Communist doctrine with special emphasis on Mao Tse-tung's works and principles. Sung presumably took part in it during his stay in Yenan. Later, when the Party met in Yenan for its Seventh National Congress (April-June 1945), Sung was elected an alternate member of the CCP Central Committee.
In 1961 Sung left Peking for Manchuria. In January of that year the regional CCP bureaus were re-established, and in March Sung was identified as first secretary of the Northeast Bureau, which is headquartered in Shenyang (Mukden), the Liaoning capital. Since his arrival in Shenyang Sung has been quite active, attending a number of functions in his capacity as the top Party leader in Manchuria. In June 1963 he was on hand to welcome Korean President Choi Yong Kun to Shenyang when the latter arrived with Premier Chou En-lai for a visit to Manchuria. In October of that year Sung was in North Korea where he was identified among a group of Northeast CCP Bureau officials received by Kim II Sung, chairman of the Korean Workers' (Communist) Party. Sung was presumably the leader of the Chinese delegation, but the purpose of the visit was not mentioned.