T'ao Chu was one of the leading Communist officials in Kwangtung in the early fifties. Within a few years he was also the most prominent political figure in all of central-south China and became first secretary of the Party’s Central-South Bureau in 1961. He was elected to the Central Committee in 1956 and a decade later, during the early stages of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
Education
Like many youths of leftist persuasions, T’ao seems to have made his way by the mid-twenties to Kwangtung, then the center of revolutionary activity in China. It is rumored that he was a student at Whampoa, the KMT military institute, which opened in 1924, and that there he was a friend of Lin Piao.
Career
Moreover, a Communist history published in 1959 asserts that Tao, as a regimental staff officer, participated in the abortive Canton Uprising of December 1927 (see under Chang T'ai-lei) and that after the Communist units were bady mauled in the uprising he was appointed as chief-of-staff of a reorganized Red Army regiment. Many of the defeated Communist elements fled from Canton eastward to the Hai-lu-feng area (see under P’eng P’ai) and although there is no evidence to document this, T’ao’s later career suggests that he may have been among those who followed this course. His activities are unreported for the next three years, but then in 1930 he was working as a Party official in Fukien, possibly in connection with the Communists in west Fukien, led by Chang Ting-ch’eng, Teng Tzu-hui and T’an Chen-lin, who had set up a base there in the late twenties and early thirties.
T'ao whereabouts and activities are undocumented for the latter war years and the immediate postwar period, but it appears that he was among the Communists sent to Manchuria after the Japanese surrender in 1945. In any event, when the Communists occupied Mukden in November 1948, he was named to membership on Ch’en Yun’s Military Control Commission. However, he only remained briefly in Mukden, because a few weeks later he was among the key officers in Lin Piao’s army, which was laying siege to Peking in the early days of 1949. With the KMT position in north China growing ever more hopeless, General Fu Tso-i, the Nationalist commander in Peking, dispatched a group of top aides to negotiate with the Communists, who were on the outskirts of the city. Two of Fu’s negotiators returned to the city on January 17, accompanied by T’ao, who was then serving as chief-of-staff of the Peking-Tientsin Front Headquarters. T'ao had been sent into the city to work out the final surrender details a surrender that was completed on January 31 when the Communist troops marched into their future capital.
To provide for the administration of Peking, the Communists had arranged with the surrendering officials to set up a Joint Administrative Office with three subordinate committees responsible for military, political and cultural, and financial affairs. Headed by PLA veteran Yeh Chien-ying, the Office had six other membersthree Communists and three Nationalists. T’ao served on this seven-member body (along with Communists Hsu Ping and Jung Tzu-ho) and was the Communist representative on the military sub-committee.G Already the chief-of-staff of the Peking-Tientsin Front Headquarters, he assumed the concurrent post of deputy director of the headquarters' Political Department in March 1949. But when Lin Piao’s Fourth Front Army began to push southward in early spring, T’ao was removed from his Peking posts to accompany the troops, an assignment presumably based on his familiarity with both central and south China.
He became deputy director under T’an Cheng of the Central China Military Region’s Political Department, and when the PLA captured Wuhan in May 1949, he again served under T'an as vice-chairman of the Wuhan Military Control Commission. Then, by the end of the year when Tan Cheng had moved to higher positions, T’ao succeeded him as commission chairman. As the PLA forces moved southward toward Canton the Central China Military Region was redesignated the Central-South Region, T'ao continued to serve as deputy director under Tan Cheng in the Political Department and concurrently as deputy director of the Political Department of Lin PiaoJs Fourth Field Army, serving here too under T’an. Then in early 1950 he succeeded T’an in both posts, retaining them until 1954-55. In the military sphere, this had the effect of placing T'ao under Lo Jung-huan, Teng Tzu-hui, and Tan Cheng, the first, second, and third political commissars of the PLA forces in central-south China. In fact, however, Lo was occupied for most of this period in Peking, and Teng Tzu-hui devoted most of his time to government administration and economic affairs.
His place in the Party hierarchy in Kwangtung already established, T'ao was appointed in May 1953 as a provincial vice-governor, and five months later he began to serve as acting governor, again filling the shoes of Governor Yeh Chien-ying. With the establishment of the constitutional government in Peking in 1954, a number of key regional and provincial leaders were permanently transferred to Peking, among them Governor Yeh. Thus, in February 1955 Tao formally succeeded Yeh as the Kwangtung governor, a post he assumed just a few days after he had been elected (January) as chairman of the Kwangtung Committee of the CPPCC. Not long after these events took place, the South China Party Sub-bureau was abolished (July 1955) and although Tao then relinquished his top post in the Sub-bureau, he continued to serve as the ranking secretary of the Kwangtung Party Committee, a post he was to hold for another decade.
When the central government and the various “mass” organizations were established in Peking in 1949, T'ao had not received any national post of significance. In fact his only position in a national organization was the rather nominal one of membership on the Preparatory Committee of the All-China Athletic Federation as a representative of the Fourth Field Army. He held this from October 1949 until the Federation was established on a permanent basis in mid-1952. T’ao did not receive another past in Peking until December 1954 when, representing the CCP, he was named to membership on the CPPCC's Second National Committee. He was again elected to represent the Party on the Third Committee (1959-1964). But neither of these assignments took T'ao to Peking very often, rather, he remained in Kwangtung for most of the fifties and early sixties where he continued to be the dominant Party figure.
In August 1957 Tao resigned his Kwangtung governorship on the grounds that he was too fully occupied with his roles as secretary of the Kwangtung Party organization and chairman of the Kwangtung Committee of the CPPCC. He was succeeded as governor by Ch’en Yii, a Central Committee member and a Kwangtung native. Although T'ao did not mention the fact, he had just assumed still another significant post (by June 1957) that may have partially accounted for his resignation. The new post was that of political commissar of the Canton Military Region, which controls military affairs in Kwangtung, Kwangsi, and Hunan, he held this post for nearly a decade. These heavy burdens of office may also account for the fact that he was succeeded as chairman of the Kwangtung CPPCC in December 1960 by Miss Ou Meng-chueh. Like virtually all leaders of importance, T’ao was active in the “rectification” campaign of 1957-58 heading the special committee established in Kwangtung to carry out the movement. He took on still further responsibilities in early 1958 when he became chairman of a committee to establish an institute in Canton for overseas Chinese, known as Chinan University in late 1959 he assumed the presidency of the school, continuing in this post until mid-1964.
Politics
In a speech made to Party cadres in the early fifties, T’ao claimed that he had made the Long March (1934-35), but there does not seem to be any corroboration of this in the scores of historical articles the Communists have published about this famous trek. He is next mentioned in the latter half of 1938 as being in central Hupeh, where he was attempting to organize armed resistance to the Japanese and to build a Communist base. Among his colleagues there were Yang Hsueh-ch'eng (who died later in the war) and Miss Ch’ien Ying, with whom he was later associated in central-south China after the PRC was established. The weakness of T'ao minuscule guerrilla force is illustrated by the admission that they had “only eight rusty old guns.” His units were later incorporated into the far more significant guerrilla forces led by Li Hsien-nien, which, in the early forties, became the nucleus of Li’s Fifth Division, one of the major components of the Communists’ New Fourth Army. Li’s forces fought during the war in areas to the north and east of Wuhan, an area where T’ao was to work again a decade later.
When T’ao arrived in Canton, the land reform program, probably the most important political and economic movement during the Communists' consolidation period, was running far behind schedule. In fact, it appears that he was transferred to Kwangtung to speed up the process that seems to have been delayed by Yeh Chien-ying and Fang Fang, both Kwangtung natives. One of Tao's first actions was to order a survey of the land reform situation, thus bypassing Fang Fang, technically his superior as Sub-bureau third secretary, as well as chairman of the provincial Land Reform Committee. T’ao’s arrival in Kwangtung also coincided with the beginning of the “three-anti” movement, a campaign to tighten Party discipline. It fell to T’ao, for example, to announce the expulsion of Tso Hung-t’ao from all of his many positions in Canton and Kwangtung. Tso, another native of Kwangtung, was a veteran of the Communist-led guerrilla campaigns in the province and a close associate of Fang Fang's.
In the view of one Party official who had worked under him, T’ao's growing importance in Kwangtung in that period was due to his extensive knowledge of the Party apparatus and his wide experience regarding agricultural problems. This same official described him as intelligent and tough-minded, with a straightforward and sometimes blunt manner. These qualities and his work in Kwangtung apparently met with the approval of higher authorities. By the fall of 1952 less than a year after T’ao’s arrival, Fang Fang had been demoted to fifth secretary of the South China Sub-bureau, the position of third secretary being assumed by T’an Cheng, T’ao Chu’s longtime colleague. T’an however, was primarily active in military affairs; moreover, by the early summer of 1953 T’ao was serving in place of Yeh Chien-ying as acting secretary of the sub-bureau, and immediately previous to this he had also replaced Yeh in the Kwangtung Party Committee by becoming acting secretary. These changes had the effect of making T'ao the top Communist in both Kwangtung and Kwangsi, and he obviously had an important voice in the affairs of the higher-level Central-South Bureau in Wuhan. Though it is evident that Tao had bypassed Fang Fang in the Party hierarchy, the situation in regard to Yeh Chien-ying, a veteran Communist and already a member of the Party Central Committee, is more complex. It is true that in a June 1952 speech Yeh had admitted to shortcomings, but any suggestion that he might have been in political difficulties must take account of the fact that he was called upon to fill the higher post of acting firsl secretary in the Party organization for the entire six-province central-south region, in order to replace the ailing Lin Piao.
Membership
It appears that T’ao was with the PLA troops when they captured Canton in October 1949, because in the following month he was identified as director of the Canton Municipal Government's Staff Office. However, the assignment seems to have been short-lived, for he was back in Wuhan by the turn of the year and remained there until at least May 1950. Wuhan, the key industrial city in central China, became the capital of the Central-South Military and Administrative Committee (CSMAC), which was established in February 1950 to govern six provinces, Hupeh, Hunan, Kiangsi, Honan, Kwangtung and Kwangsi. The CSMAC was chaired by Lin Piao and included T’ao among its members, he retained his membership from 1953 to 1954, when the CSMAC was known as the Central- South Administrative Committee, and also served from March 1950 to May 1953 as a member of its Finance and Economics Committee. By the summer of 1951 Tao was serving as acting secretary (in place of Chang Yun-i) of the CCP Committee in Kwangsi, but his assignment there was of relatively short duration, because early in 1952 he was transferred to Kwangtung, where within a brief period he was to become the dominant political figure.
Connections
T’ao is married to Tseng Chih who was born in 1910. Like her husband, she is a Hunanese, coming from I-chang hsien. A Party member since 1933, Tseng worked in the Industry Department of the Central Plains Provisional People's Government (see under Teng Tzu-hui) in 1949, and later in the same department in the CSMAC during the early fifties. She has been a deputy to the NPC since its inauguration in 1954, rising to membership on the Standing Committee in January 1965. Tseng has also worked directly under her husband in the Canton and Kwangtung Party organizations, advancing from deputy secretary (1955) to secretary (1958) of the Canton CCP Committee, and then becoming a deputy secretary of the Kwangtung Committee in 1963. As of the early 1960’s the T’ao’s were believed to have two sons, one in his early teens and the other nearing 20.