Education
Sung attended a primary school in Li-ling hsien in Hunan (c. 1920-21 ), and in the mid-twenties he attended the Whampoa Military Academy, which was opened in Canton by the KMT in 1924. Like many of the Whampoa cadets, he later joined the National Revolutionary Army and probably participated in the Northern Expedition. Still later, he deserted the Nationalists and joined the Communists, serving as chief-of-staff of the 20th Red Army in south Kiangsi. This unit gained a measure of fame when, in late 1930, one of its key officers revolted and imprisoned the army's commander. Known as the Fu-fien Incident, this revolt was directed against the leadership of Mao Tse-tung (see under P'eng Te-huai). However, Sung's role in the incident (if any), is not known. In 1933 Sung attended the Red Army Academy in the Juichin area of Kiangsi, and afterwards he became a regimental chief-of-staff. After making the Long March in 1934-35, he was assigned to Hsu Hai-tung’s 15th Army Corps.
Career
When war broke out in mid-1937, Sung was assigned to Ho Lung’s 120th Division, which moved into north Shansi. A year later, Sung and Teng Hua, his political commissar, led a detachment said to number “several thousand” men into seven rural hsien in east Hopeh about midway between Peking and the Gulf of Pohai. There, on July 9, 1938, they set off a series of raids on Japanese garrisons and their logistic network, which had the support of the local peasantry and Communist organizers who had been in the area before the Sung-Teng detachment arrived. Communist accounts describe this in the cumbersome but graphic phrase the “East Hopeh, seven-hsien, 20,000-man Great Uprising. Their guerrilla raids soon extended to 17 hsien, but by October the Japanese had wiped out the main force of the Sung-Teng unit.
After suffering this severe defeat, Sung was barely able to hold together a small band of guerrillas. However, the situation improved somewhat in the first part of 1939 when the important Communist commander Hsiao K’o arrived in east Hopeh to assist Sung and Teng. They quickly decided that a major military campaign against the powerful Japanese forces was a hopeless venture, and thus the decision was made to concentrate on political work. For most of the war years Hsiao K'o was based in a mountainous area just west of Peking, but Sung remained to the east of the city where the Communists established a quasi-govern mental body known as the East Hopeh Administrative District. This and other nearby pockets of Communist activity were known collectively as the Hopeh-Jehol-Liaoning base, which in turn was subordinate to the Shansi-Chahar-Hopeh Border Region under Nieh Jung-chen. Sung's area of operation was of marginal value to the Communists during the war against Japan, but during the ensuing civil war with the Nationalists it was especially useful as one of the major gateways to Manchuria.
Sung remained in east Hopeh throughout the war, except for a period in about 1942 when he was sent back to Yenan to take part in the political campaign being conducted in the Party School (see under Teng Fa). In the immediate postwar period, Sung collaborated with Hsiao K’o in moving his guerrilla units northward into Jehol province, and they were thus in a position to assist Lin Piao, who was then in the process of moving tens of thousands of troops from north China into Manchuria. In January 1946 the Nationalists and Communists signed a cease-fire agreement, and to implement this an Executive Headquarters was established in Peking (see under Yeh Chien-ying). Sung was assigned to the headquarters as director of operations for the Communist side. He remained with the headquarters until early 1947 when negotiations broke down; by that time the civil war was in full swing. Sung returned to the battlefield, this time to command the Po-hai Military District. The Po-hai area, adjacent to the Gulf of Pohai, consisted of a small section of southeast Hopeh and a rather large section of northwest Shantung. For administrative purposes, it was subordinate to the Communists’ East China PLA under Ch'en I.
In 1948 Sung was commander of the 28th Army of the 10th Army Group and in the next year he became commander of the Ninth Army Group. Both units were subordinate to the East China PLA, which was redesignated the Third Field Army during the winter of 1948-49. From November 1948 to the early days of 1949, Sung took part in the critically important Huai-Hai Campaign, one of the last major battles fought by the Communists north of the Yangtze. After this notable success, the Communists moved southward, and when the Third Field Army captured Shanghai in May 1949, Sung was placed in command of the Shanghai-Woosung Garrison. After they consolidated their rule in the latter part of 1949, the East China Military and Administrative Committee (ECMAC) was established (January 1950). Sung was named to membership on the ECMAC and nominally retained this post until it was reorganized in December 1952. However, when the Chinese People’s Volunteers (CPV) entered the Korean War in October 1950, Sung was in command of one of the major elements of the CPV to have engaged U.S. Marine units near the coast in northeast Korea. He apparently remained in Korea throughout the war, because he was not reported in China again until February 1954 when he attended a PLA rally in Nanking, the news release was worded in such a way as to suggest that he headed one of the important infantry schools there. He was specifically identified as president of the Higher Infantry Academy by September 1954, and when a group of former Japanese military officers visited China in 1956, they again identified Sung as president. Also in September 1954, when the National Defense Council was created, Sung was named as a member. He was reappointed in April 1959 and January 1965.
Further military honors fell to Sung in 1955 when personal military ranks and awards were created. He was given the rank of colonel-general (equivalent to a three-star general in the U.S. Army) and received one or more of the top national military honors (although the specific award or awards were not mentioned). When the Eighth National CCP Congress met in Peking in September 1956, Sung was elected an alternate member of the Central Committee. In April 1958 he was identified as vice-president of the Naval Academy, but there has been no subsequent mention of this post.
Politics
Since 1958 Sung seems to have been stationed in Peking where the press has identified him at a number of official functions, especially those celebrating important military holidays or honoring visiting military delegations. In July 1962 he led a military delegation to Baghdad to celebrate the fourth anniversary of the founding of the Republic of Iraq. While there, Sung had interviews with top military leaders and the premier. Other than his alternate membership on the CCP Central Committee and his membership on the National Defense Council, Sung holds no top positions in the Party or the government, but his continuing presence in Peking suggests some high-level staff job in the PLA headquarters.
