Background
Tan’s background is unquestionably that of a true proletarian. He speaks of his family having “neither land nor property” and of his father as being a “low-grade employee of a mine near Yu-hsien.
Tan’s background is unquestionably that of a true proletarian. He speaks of his family having “neither land nor property” and of his father as being a “low-grade employee of a mine near Yu-hsien.
In 1913, when the father lost his job, the sons among his eight children had to be sent to work. The eldest boy, then 16, went into a shop making joss-sticks. Another son (older than Chen-lin) went into a bean factory and two more sons were adopted into other families. Tan seems to have been the student in the family (he speaks of having had three years in a private school) and he was sent to work in a bookstore dealing in old books. He was 12 when he entered the store in the fall of 1913. He states that he spent two years there, the work was hard and his only achievement was learning to master the abacus. He returned home when his employer died and the shop was closed and was sent to work in another bookstore in the town of Ch'a-ling, some 15 miles from his native Yu-hsien (Ch'a-ling bordered the Chingkangshan base). In his years in Ch’a-ling, T’an learned to print with wood blocks and to bind hooks, trades that were to occupy and support him until he became an active Communist.
While working in the Ch'a-ling book store he began to read. He mentions among his favorite books the San-kuo-chih yen-i (The Romance of the Three Kingdoms) and the Shui-hu-chuan (Water Margin), the colorful tales of past dynasties that had long been read by Chinese schoolboys and upon which Mao also grew up. T’an commented also on his reading of a biography of Hung Hsiu-ch'an, the leader of the Taiping Rebellion. After four years as an unpaid apprentice in book stores, T'an was able to earn a pittance and then to increase this small sum by meager amounts each year until, after about 10 years the bookstore in Ch’a-ling also closed. This was in about 1925 when T’an was 23, and he returned to Yu-hsien to work as a book binder. In the Yu-hsien store in which he worked, he became friends with Yii Lei, a graduate of the Hunan First Normal School (the alma mater of Mao Tse-tung). Yii is described as a responsible member” of the CCP. It was through Yii that Tan first learned about Communism and first heard of the Communist Revolution in Russia. In 1926, after many discussions with Yii, T'an joined the CCP.
In September 1927 T’an participated in the Autumn Harvest Uprisings in Hunan, the peasant insurrections that were directed there by Mao Tse-tung. When they ended in defeat, Mao led a small band of his followers south through western Kiangsi to Chingkangshan where he made his headquarters. Chingkangshan was taken by the Communists in October, and nearby Ch’a-ling in November of 1927. T’an remained with Mao’s forces at Chingkangshan through the difficult winter of 1927-28, and Chu Te joined them in the spring of 1928. Although he had only belonged to the Communist Party for two years, T’an must have soon worked his way up to a responsible position with Mao's local Party group. By 1928 he was already taking part in the inner-Party struggle between Mao’s group at the Chingkangshan base and the provincial Party Committee, which presumably took orders from the Party Central Committee, then under the leadership of C'ii Ch'iu-pai. The Hunan Committee first sent an emissary to see Mao in March 1928 when Mao was at Ning-kang on the northwestern border of the mountain base. This Party representative found Mao “leaning to the right” and saw to it that the Front Committee for the border area which Mao headed was abolished. In May Mao's group counterattacked, holding a congress of Party representatives from the Hunan-Kiangsi border region at Mao-p’ing in Ning-kang hsien, they elected the First Special Committee of the border area. This committee had 23 members, Mao was its secretary. It was not long after the May meeting that an even more serious dispute occurred between Mao and the Hunan Provincial Party Committee over the military strategies to be followed at Chingkangshan. As the feud developed, Yang K'i-ming from the Hunan Committee came to Chingkangshan (July) to replace Mao as the secretary of the newly formed Special Committee. But by September, when the Hunan Committee's advice had proven disastrous, Yang “fell ill and T’an Chen-lin took his place” as the secretary of the border region Special Committee.
When the armies commanded by Chu Te and Mao Tse-tung left Kiangsi on the Long March in October 1934, T'an was among the small group of important Party officials who remained behind. He was principally active in Fukien in the years before the Sino-Japanese War in association with Chang Ting-ch'ing, Ch'en I, Teng Tzu-hui, Ch'en T'an-ch'iu, and others, who continued to carry on guerrilla operations along the Kiangsi-Fukien border and to make further inroads into Fukien province. A description of these operations is contained in the biography of Chang Ting-ch'eng, the chairman of the Southwest Fukien Military and Administrative Committee, which existed from 1935 to the outbreak of war in 1937. Tan was the Committee's vicechairman and also director of its Military Department in these years. When the war opened in mid-1937, the group on the Kiangsi-Fukien border organized their forces into a resistance army called the People’s Anti-Japanese Volunteers (PAJV). Tan was especially active in the PAJV in southwest Fukien. At this time he was sometimes identified under the assumed name of Lin Chun.
Immediately after the fall of Hangchow, the Communists established both the Municipal Military Control Commission and the Municipal People’s Government. T’an became the chairman of the former and the mayor of the city government, but relinquished the latter post to Chiang Hua in August 1949. However,T’an’s more important positions were at the Chekiang provincial level where from 1949 to 1952 he was the top Communist leader. When the Chekiang provincial government was formed in August 1949 he assumed the governorship, and soon afterward he was also identified as the ranking Party secretary and political commissar of the Chekiang Military District. Like most important Communist leaders in the early years of the PRC, T’an also held various positions in the “mass” organizations. Thus, from October 1949 to early 1950 he was a member of the preparatory committee of the Chekiang Federation of Trade Unions; from 1949 to 1952 he headed the Chekiang branch of the Si no-Soviet Friendship Association and from 1951 to 1952 he was chairman of the Chekiang chapter of the China Peace Committee.
T’an also held posts in the regional government known as the East China Military and Administrative Committee (ECMAC), with jurisdiction over the five provinces of Shantung, Kiangsu, Anhwei, Chekiang, and Fukien. When the ECMAC was formally established in January 1950 under the chairmanship of Jao Shu-shih, Tan was named as a member, and in the following month he was appointed as chairman of the Land Reform Committee, one of the most important of the ECMACs subordinate organs. In August 1952 he was elevated to a vice-chairmanship on the ECMAC, retaining this when the ECMAC was reorganized into the East China Administrative Committee (ECAC) in January 1953. During the period from 1952 to 1954 in particular, T'an regularly attended the meetings of (and meetings sponsored by) the ECMAC and the ECAC. In fact, with the exception of Ch’en I,T’an probably had a greater voice in the affairs of the regional government than any other east China official. Even more imporiant was T’an’s role in the Party’s East China Bureau, which, like the ECMAC-ECAC, was also headquartered in Shanghai. In the first part of 1952 he began to appear frequently in Shanghai where he was usually described as a “responsible member” of the East China Bureau. By the latter half of 1952 he was serving as Third Secretary of the Bureau, and in the frequent absence of Secretary Jao Shu-shih and Second Secretary Ch'en I (whose concurrent responsibilities regularly took them to Peking), T'an often served as acting secretary in 1953 and 1954.
T’an’s stature within the CCP was reconfirmed at the Party’s Eighth National Congress in September 1956. To manage the affairs of the Congress, three major ad hoc bodies were formed: a 63-member Presidium, a 13-member Secretariat, and a 29-member Credentials Committee. Although many Party leaders sat on two of these bodies, only T'an and six others (Li Hsueh-feng, Liu Lan-t’ao,Ma Ming-fang, Lin Feng, Sung Jen-ch'ung, and Tan Cheng) were members of all three. Moreover, only Tan and Liu Lan-t’ao were also vice-chairman of the Credentials Committee. Tan was re-elected to full membership on the Party Central Committee, and immediately afterwards, at the new Central Committee's First Plenum, he was named to membership on the newly organized Central Secretariat. As originally constituted, the Secretariat was composed of only seven full and three alternate members, with Teng Hsiao-p'ing as the senior member. This new structure, in effect, replaced the system under which Teng had been the secretary-general and T’an one of his several assistants (deputy secretaries-general). The task of the Secretariat is to carry out the policies decided upon by the Politburo.
In the meantime, in early October 1958, T'an was identified as a deputy director of the Party's top organ for controlling agriculture, the Rural Work Department, thus making him (on paper) a subordinate of Director Teng Tzu-hui. (However, since 1958 T'an has not again been identified in this post.) The approximate counterpart of the Rural Work Department in the central government is the State Council’s Agriculture and Forestry Office. In October 1962 Tan replaced Teng Tzu-hui as the Office director, a post he still holds. It should be noted, however, that since the Party abandoned the Great Leap Forward in about 1961 (although, of course, it has never been officially abandoned), T’an’s role in agriculture seems to have been somewhat muted. Yet he continues to receive foreign visitors who are concerned with agriculture and to speak before most domestic agricultural conferences. For example, he made “important” speeches at the National Agricultural Science and Technology Conference in February 1963 and at the National Conference on State Farms in February-March 1964.
In view of T'an's stature within the CCP, it is probable that he was involved in more important matters than those of the relatively impotent CPPCC after his transfer to the national capital in 1954. In the light of later evidence, it seems likely that he assumed some position in the Party Center possibly in connection with international liaison. The first suggestion of this occurred in January 1955 when he attended the Fourth National Congress of the Italian Communist Party in Rome. As of that date, extremely few Chinese Communists had visited Italy. Thirteen months later, in February 1956, Tan was a member of the delegation led by Chu Te to the historic 20th Congress of the CPSU in Moscow where Khrushchev delivered his famous “secret speech” denouncing Stalin. Chu did not return to Peking for several weeks, but T'an went directly back to Peking and in March was identified as a deputy secretary-general of the Party Central Committee, a post that placed him directly subordinate to Secretary-General Teng Hsiao-p'ing, who had only recently been made a Politburo member and who was then the fastest rising figure in the CCP elite. It is possible that T’an held this post from the end of 1954 or early 1955. He attended another congress in Novem- ber-December 1959 when he led the CCP delegation to the Seventh Congress of the Hungarian Socialist (Communist) Workers’ Party, which was also attended by Soviet leader Khrushchev.
T'an's career probably reached its peak during the Great Leap Forward, when he was the most vocal of the spokesmen for policies that presumably had the full backing of Mao Tse-tung. Although the “radical” policies espoused by T'an during the Great Leap were altered during the early sixties, he has continued to hold key posts within the CCP and the central government.