Education
Teng coipes from Lung-yen hsien in Fukien, a hilly rural area northwest of Amoy where the CCP has been active since the 1920's. Teng's parents were small merchants, they sent him to Amoy where he graduated from middle school. Many young men from Fukien were educated in Japan at that time and Teng himself went there in 1916. After spending a year in Tokyo he returned to China, but his career is undocumented until 1925 when he joined the KMT. The following year he became a CCP member. Between his study in Japan and 1927, when he was teaching in a village school in his native community, Teng may have been associated with the Whampoa Military Academy. Japanese sources assert that he was enrolled there, but this cannot be corroborated in Chinese sources. Moreover, because Teng was about 29 when Whampoa opened in 1924, it seems more likely that he would have been on the administrative staff, rather than a member of the student body.
Career
In 1929, after Mao Tse-tung and Chu retreated from their base on the Hunan-Kiangsi border, they moved across Kiangsi and into west Fukien. Teng, then secretary of the Party organization in west Fukien, participated in the creation of a 'revolutionary base' in the area. In the same year he was also the political officer of a detachment of guerrillas operating in Yung-ting hsien, and by about 1930 he had become chairman of a small “soviet” of eight hsien, which was probably subordinate to the larger West Fukien Soviet headed by Chang Ting-ch’eng.
Representing Communist-held areas in Fukien, Teng attended the First All-China Congress of Soviets, held in Juichin, Kiangsi, in November 1931. The congress established the Chinese Soviet Republic, as well as the Republic's Central Executive Committee (CEC) and a Council of People’s Commissars (in effect, the cabinet). Both Teng and his Fukien colleague Chang Ting-ch’eng became members of the CEC, and both were given cabinet-level assignments in the council. Chang was made People’s Commissar for Land, Teng was given the portfolio for Finance, and for a period in mid-1932 he served as acting commissar of Land in place of his colleague Chang. However, Teng lost his Finance post during an intense political controversy which concerned various military, political, and economic policies being administered by the acting Party secretary in Fukien, Lo Ming. (Lo Ming’s biography contains a discussion of the important “Lo Kling line.”) Many years later, Mao Tse-tung termed the charges against Lo and others as an error, but in the meantime, in 1933, Teng proved to be one of the major targets of the anti-Lo Ming group. In August 1933, Lin Po-ch’ii replaced Teng as commissar of Finance, although Teng was made the vice-commissar. The principal charges against him concerned the economic sector. Attacked for his “right conservatism” and “wavering” in the face of difficulties, it was claimed that he had failed to mobilize the masses to collect sorely needed funds, and that he was too willing to resort to the printing press as a means of getting funds. It is noteworthy that Teng’s “conservatism” in economic policy was demonstrated a quarter of a century later, when he once again found himself in political trouble (see below).
In the latter half of 1937 the Communists held talks with the Nationalists to create the New Fourth Army, which was to operate along the central and lower Yangtze. (The army, drawn mainly from Communist guerrilla units in central-south China and augmented by units dispatched from the Eighth Route Army, is described in the biographies of its two principal commanders, Yeh T’ing and Hsiang Ying.) When the New Fourth Army went into the field in the spring of 1938, Teng was deputy director of the Political Department under Yuan Kuo-p’ing. (Yuan, a veteran political officer, had participated in the Canton Uprising in 1927 and had served in P'eng Tc-huai's Third Army Corps as head of the Political Department.) The New Fourth Army, in the early months of its operations, was headquartered south of the Yangtze. In its first year, three of the four detachments were also south of (he river, but the Fourth Detachment, commanded at least by 1939 by Chang Yun-i, was in northeast Hupeh, from which it moved eastward into north Anhwei. The forces north of the river had steadily increased in number, and therefore, in late 1939, the North Yangtze Command was established under Chang's command. (The South Yangtze Command was headed by Ch’en I.) Teng, who had been north of the river by mid-1939, was appointed director of the northern command’s Political Department.
In January 1941 the New Fourth Army headquarters staff was almost totally destroyed as it began to move north of the Yangtze (the New Fourth Army Incident; see under Yeh Ting). Commander Yeh T’ing was captured by the Nationalists, and both Deputy Commander Hsiang Ying and Yuan Kuo-plng (Teng’s former superior) were killed. Because Teng was already north of the river, he was not involved in any of this fighting. The New Fourth Army staff was immediately reorganized, Ch'en I became acting commander, Chang Yun-i was appointed deputy commander, and Liu Shao-ch'i became the political commissar. Teng was placed directly under Liu as director of the Political Department. He held this post until 1946 when the New Fourth Army began to expand its operations. In addition, from 1941 Teng concurrently served as political commissar in P'eng Hsueh-feng’s Fourth Division. (P’eng had initially been both commander and political commissar.) Then about 1944, Teng in turn relinquished the post of political commissar to Chang Ai-p’ing.
In March 1950, one month after the establishment of the CSMAC, Teng was named to chair its Finance and Economics Committee. In December of the same year he was demoted to vicechairman of this committee, relinquishing his chairmanship to the politically more important Lin Piao. It appears, however, that Lin's prolonged absence from public duties meant that Teng continued to be the de facto chairman of the Finance and Economics Committee. A further indication of Teng importance in central-south China was revealed in May 1950 when he was named to head a special ad hoc organization (pien-chih) committee responsible for establishing and staffing the organizations subordinate to the CSMAC. His key role in central-south China during the formative years of the PRC is also illustrated by the large number of his speeches and reports that appeared in the two major Party papers, the Wuhan Ch'ang-chiang jih-pao (Yangtze River daily) and the Canton Nan-fang jih-pao (Southern daily). His chief responsibilities seem to have been in the field of economics. For example, following the demands made at the third session of the CPPCC (October-November 1951) for greater emphasis on economic problems, the Communists established regional “simplification and austerity” committees. In November 1951 Teng was named to chair the committee for central-south China. He was also appointed director of the Central-South Flood Prevention Headquarters on its formation in April 1952.
In the period from late 1952 through the summer of 1954 a large number of key regional leaders moved to Peking. Some transferred there permanently in 1952, but others (like Teng) made the transfer in gradual phases in the sense that they shuttled back and forth from the provinces to Peking before transferring permanently in 1954, when the constitutional government was established. As already described, Teng had been made a vice-chairman of the national government’s Finance and Economics Committee (headed by Ch'en Yun) in November 1952. At this same time he was also appointed as the vice-chairman of the State Planning Commission, newly established to deal with the problems of the First Five-Year Plan, which began in 1953. As originally constituted, the commission had Kao Kang as its chairman, Teng as the only vice-chairman, and 15 members. These were Teng’s first two active administrative posts at the national level. Within less than a year he was to receive three others. In January 1953 he was made a member of the committee chaired by Mao Tse-tung to draft the national constitution, and in the following month he was also made a member of a committee (headed by Liu Shao-ch’i) to prepare for the elections (in 1954) to the NPC. Most important, however, was the identification of Teng by July 1953 as head of the Party’s Rural Work Department. In spite of the importance of agriculture in China, the department was not identified in Chinese sources until this time. However, the biography of Teng in Moscow's Bolshaya Sovetskaya Entsiklopedya (Large Soviet Encyclopedia, Moscow, 1958, LI, 110) asserts that he held the post from November 1952. In any case, Teng appears to have been the first and, as of the early 1960’s, the only director of this highly important body one that is generally regarded as the chief policy-making organization for agricultural policies within the Communist regime.
Politics
In any case, by 1927 he was engaged in Party work and the peasant movement in Lung- yen (his native hsien), Shang-hang, and Yung-ting, and by the following year he was collaborating with Liu Yung-sheng and Chang Ting-ch’eng in organizing peasant resistance in these areas in southwest Fukien (see under Chang Ting-ch’eng). All three men worked together in Fukien until the Sino-Japanese War began, when they entered the Communists’ New Fourth Army.
Among others affected by the Lo Ming line were Mao Tse-t’an (a younger brother of Mao Tse-tung), T’an Chen-lin, Teng Hsiao-p’ing, Ch’en T’an-ch’iu, and Hsiao Ching-kuang. Teng Tzu-hufs political difficulties were illustrated anew when the Second All-China Congress of Soviets was convened in January-February 1934 at Juichin. He was demoted from full to alternate membership on the CEC (although it is not known if he lost his post as vice-commissar in the Commissariat of Finance). Yet these political problems became largely academic when, in the fall of 1934, the principal forces evacuated the Kiangsi area to begin the famed Long March to north Shensi. Teng was among those left behind and was placed in charge of a band of local guerrillas, which was forced to move eastward into Fukien. Attached to a battalion under the Independent 24th Division led by Hsiang Ying, Teng made his way back to his native area where he merged his forces with those of Chang Ting-ch’eng and T'an Chen-lin. Other key Communists who also remained behind included Ch’en I and Ch’ii Ch’iu-pai. Teng was with Ch'ii in the Ch’ang-t’ing area in west Fukien in March 1935 when they were apprehended by Nationalist forces. Teng managed to escape, but Ch'ii was taken to Ch’ang-t’ing and soon afterwards executed.
Teng is known to have been in Yenan in the spring of 1946, perhaps to attend conferences related to the forthcoming military campaigns against the Nationalists. He was identified at that time as political commissar of the Central China (Hua-chung) Military Region. Teng had been given this new assignment sometime in the latter part of 1945 or in early 1946 as the Communists readjusted their staff assignments to the newly evolving military situation. Several other key officers in Ch’en I’s New Fourth Army were also assigned to the Central China Military Region, most notably Chang Ting-ch'eng, the Region commander, Su Yii, the deputy commander, and T'an Chen-lin, the deputy political commissar (under Teng). Concurrently with his new political assignment, Teng was also made secretary of the CCP Central China Sub-bureau, then subordinate to the East China Bureau that had its headquarters in the territory under Ch’en Ts control in Shantung. According to some reports Teng was a political officer in 1946 in Liu Po-ch’eng’s army, which was stationed in the Shansi-Hopeh-Shantung-Honan Border Region. It is not known if Teng went to the border region to assume this role, but it is clear that he was in dose contact with Liu’s forces, which, in mid-1947, thrust southward across the Yellow River and moved into the Ta-pieh Mountains northeast of Wuhan (the locale of the old Communist Oyiiwan soviet area). Liu turned back north for further campaigning, but he left a number of officers in the Oyiiwan region, Teng among them. Later in 1947, those areas in the Oyiiwan region under Communist control were merged with another Communist base on the borders of Honan, Anhwei, and Kiangsu provinces. The merger of these two areas, plus some territory in west Honan, became the Central Plains Liberated Area, with Teng as the top official. The Liberated Area was under the general control of Liu Po-ch'eng army, now called the Central Plains PLA.
In spite of this impressive array of positions in the national government, Teng's tasks in the early years of the PRC were largely confined to the central-south region. His importance there was accentuated by the lingering illness of Lin Piao and the frequent absences of Lo Jung-huan. On paper, Lin held virtually all the critical positions of power in the central-south area from 1949 to 1954 and Lo was initially the second- ranking official. In fact, however, Lo spent most of his time in Peking, where he had important responsibilities with the central government. As the Communists pushed south in 1949, the Central China Military Region evolved into the Central-South Military Region, and, similarly, the CCP’s Central China Bureau (formerly a sub-bureau) became the Central-South Bureau. In the military hierarchy Teng became the second political commissar (under Lo Jung-huan) of the Military Region and its Fourth Field Army, and (by 1950) the second-ranking political commissar (again under Lo) of the Central-South Military and Political Academy.0 In 1952 he was also identified as the deputy commander of the Military Region. However, there is little to suggest that Teng devoted much time to military affairs. Rather, he was deeply involved with Party and government policies, particularly those pertaining to economic problems.
In the meantime, during the mid-fifties Teng had received a number of important posts in the national government and the CCP. In 1954 he was elected as a deputy from Wuhan to the First NPC (1954-1959). He was re-elected from Hupeh (which had absorbed the Wuhan constituency in the interim) to the Second NPC (1959-1964) and again to the Third NPC, which opened in December 1964. In September 1954 he was appointed as a vice-premier under Chou En-lai in the State Council, and in the next month he was also named as director of the State Council’s Seventh Staff Office. The Staff Office was in charge of coordinating the activities of the ministries and commissions related to agriculture, forestry, and water conservancy. From its inauguration in March 1956 until May 1957, Teng was a member of the State Council’s Scientific Planning Commission. At the Party’s Eighth National Congress (September 1956) he served on the Congress presidium (steering committee), made the major speech on agricultural policy, and was re-elected to membership on the Central Committee. In July 1957 he assumed still another position (apparently ad hoc) when he was named to head the Central Relief Commission, the commission seems to have been established in response to a strong attack in the JMJP (July 17) on the inadequacies of disaster relief work.
