Ts’ai’s father was an official in the Kiangnan Arsenal in Shanghai, which was established by the Ch'eng statesman Tseng Kuo-fan, to whom her mother was distantly related. An official Communist source described her family as “bankrupt small landlords and as a consequence she could not attend school until the age of 7.
She was helped in her efforts to get an education by her mother, a modem-minded woman who took a keen interest in the careers of Ts’ai and her brother, Ts’ai Ho-sen. Ts’ai Ch’ang graduated from the Chou-nan Girls’ School in Changsha, where one of her teachers was Hsu T’e-li today one of the “elders” of the Party. At Chou-nan, Ts'ai became close friends with Hsiang Ching-yii, who later married Ts’ai Ho-sen. While Ts’ai and her brother were in Changsha their father died, so their mother moved to Changsha and quickly became the mistress of a home which served as a meeting place for her children's politically minded friends, among them Mao Tse-tung.
After graduation from the girls' school, Ts'ai took a job as a school teacher at the primary school which was affiliated to her alma mater. Her first political activity grew out of the establishment by her brother and Mao of a student society, whose members came mainly from the students and faculty at the Hunan First Normal School. The society succeeded far beyond the expectations its founding members could have had, because an impressive number of its members later became Communists. Among the 80-odd early members, Hsiang Ching-yii and Ts'ai Ch’ang were the leaders of the women’s group.
In 1919 Ts'ai Ho-sen and Mao organized a Hunan group to take part in the work-and-study program in France, which was then attracting many young Chinese intellectuals. In France they hoped to learn more about the challenging new ideas which had struck intellectuals so forcibly when the May Fourth Movement erupted among Chinese students in 1919. The work- and-study scheme had the support of several provincial governments, in the case of Hunan, the government offered relatively good stipends to many of the students. Thus, of the 1,600-odd uworker-students, who went to France in 1919-20, the largest group (roughly a quarter) came from Hunan. In the Changsha area, Ts'ai Ho- sen and Mao were the major organizers among the male students (although Mao himself did not go to France), and Hsiang Ching-yii and Ts’ai Ch’ang served a similar function among the women students at Chou-nan and other schools.
Ts’i returned home in 1932 and immediately proceeded to the Communist base in Kiangsi where her husband was working. In December 1933 she was elected to Executive Committee membership in the Kiangsi Provincial Soviet, one of the constituent bodies of the Chinese Soviet Republic established in Juichin in November 1931. When the Second Congress of the Republic was held in January-February 1934, Ts'ai and her husband were elected members of the Republic’s Central Executive Committee, the leading political organ of the Juichin government until the Long March began in the fall of 1934. She was one of the few women who made the year-long trek to the northwest, but because her health was impaired by the rigors of the march she was sent to the Soviet Union for medical treatment. Ts’ai was back in China by the end of the summer of 1936 when journalist Edgar Snow interviewed her and her husband in Kansu. She was then in charge of women’s work for the CCP and was also engaged in “white areas work,” the term normally denoting efforts by the CCP to gain adherents in areas controlled by the KMT. A year later Snow’s wife, Nym Wales, interviewed Ts'ai in Yenan, Miss Wales wrote that Ts'ai had just come to Yenan from Kansu “where she had been in charge of secret organizational work in the White areas.” Wales described her as the “dean” of Communist women and, more picturesquely, as “Chirm’s Rosa Luxemburg.”
During the war years Ts’ai directed women’s work for the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia Border Region Government, headed the Party’s Women’s Committee, and worked in the Party Organization Department, in which her husband was a leading official. When the Party held its Seventh Congress in Yenan from April to June 1945, only three women were placed on the Central Committee. Teng Ying-ch'ao (Mme. Chou En-lai) and Ch’en Shao-min were elected alternates, but only Ts'ai was elected a full member, thus reconfirming her status as the leading woman member of the CCP. She continued to be secretary of the Party’s Women’s Committee and still holds this post (redesignated first secretary by 1956). In 1945 Ts’ai became chairman of the newly established Preparatory Committee for the China Liberated Areas Women’s Federation, and in this capacity she began to participate in the affairs of tfie Communist-dominated Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF).
Like most of the top Communist leaders then in Peking, Ts’ai was busily engaged throughout the spring and summer of 1949 in the preparations for the establishment of the national government and the numerous “people’s” organizations which were also set up in tliis period. In May 1949 she was appointed director of the Women Worker’s Department under the Labor Federation，a post she held until the mid-1950’s when she was succeeded by Yang Chih-hua, the widow of early Party leader Ch'ii Ch'u-pai. In June, under the chairmanship of Mao Tse-tung, the Preparatory Committee of the CPPCC was established; TsTai was a member of the Standing Committee, and a few weeks later she was named to membership on the Preparatory Committee of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association. But most important, Ts’ai represented the Women’s Federation at the sessions in September of the CPPCC, the organization which brought the national government into existence. She served as a member of the CPPCC presidium (steering committee) and was elected to membership on the permanent CPPCC National Committee. In the new government organs, she became a member of the Central Peopled Government Council (CPGC), a body which had legislative, executive, and judicial responsibilities and which, in its 34 meetings between 1949 and 1954, passed on virtually all the vital measures adopted in the formative years of the PRC. It consisted of a chairman (Mao), six vicechairmen, and 56 members. Apart from a few non-Party women (e.g., Mme. Sun Yat-sen), Ts'ai was the only woman member of the CPGC.
In early 1953 Ts’ai was named to a special committee to draft the Election Law, and when the elections were held in the following year, she became a deputy from her native Hunan to the First NPC. At the inaugural session of the Congress in September 1954, when the central government was reorganized, Ts'ai was elected to membership on the NPC Standing Committee. She was re-elected to this post at the first sessions of the Second and Third NPCs, held in April 1959 and December 1964-January 1965, respectively. Here again, however, most of the major statements on women’s affairs (a frequent topic at the 10 sessions of the NPC between 1954 and 1965) have come from other women leaders. In fact, it appears that Ts’ai’s last important, policy-level statement on the role of women was delivered at the Party's Eighth National Congress in September 1956. Her speech dealt with the training and promotion of women cadres. Ts’ai noted that from 1951 to 1955 the number of women cadres had grown from eight to 14.5 per cent of the total number of cadres throughout China, and she urged in strong terms that these figures be increased. Her speech also included an unusually candid statement in support of birth control, she phrased this not in terms of population control, but rather as being beneficial to "women's health, child care, home life and national prosperity.” During the congress TsJai served on the presidium and the credentials committee, and most important, she was again elected a member of the Party Central Committee.
Sometime in 1924 Ts’ai and her husband joined the exodus of Chinese students leaving France for Moscow where they attended the Communist University of the Toilers of the East. Li Fu-ch'un returned to China in late 1924 or early 1925, but Ts’ai remained in Moscow long enough to attend the fifth meeting of the Comintern’s Executive Committee (ECCI) in March 1925. Soon afterwards she returned home and was thus in China during the early period of the KMT-CCP alliance. Like many of her colleagues, Ts'ai had joined the KMT by this time.6 Working initially in Canton, then the revolutionary center of the nation, she immediately plunged into the task of organizing women laborers. When the Communist-supported Canton-Hong Kong strike and boycott began in June 1925, Ts'i was named to the strike committee. This was headed by Communist labor leader Su Chao-cheng, whose biography describes this important strike in detail. During this period Ts’ai was often associated with Ho Hsiang-ning, the wife of the important Left- KMT leader Liao Chung-k’ai who was assassinated in August 1925.
Because of the increasingly dangerous situation in China .for Communist Party members, the CCP held its Sixth National Congress in Moscow in June-July 1928. Many of the Chinese delegates to the congress were studying in Moscow, but others traveled there for the meetings, like Ts'ai and her brother (but not her husband, who remained in China). Ts'ai was elected to the CCP Central Committee, and immediately afterward she was one of the Chinese delegates to the Sixth Comintern Congress (July-Septem- ber). She remained in the Soviet Union for the next four years, but nothing is known of what she did there. Whatever the nature of her activities, it is clear that she had little trouble in keeping abreast of Party developments in China. During her days in the Russian capital the Chinese had a delegation to the Comintern which included such important men as her brother, Ch’li Ch’iu-pai and Chang Kuo-fao, older Party leaders like Lin Po-ch'ii and Hsu T'e-li were receiving advanced training at Sun Yat-sen University, and up-and-coming younger leaders like Ch'en Shao-yii and Chin Pang-hsien were at the same school.
She was elected a member of the WIDF Council in 1946, and in 1947 she represented the Chinese Women's Federation at a WIDF meeting in Prague. She was promoted to a vice-chairmanship of the WIDF at a meeting in Rome in May and she was back in Europe to attend the Second WIDF Congress held in Budapest in December 1948, Ts’ai addressed the congress on the development of the women’s movement in Asia and Africa, and she was re-elected a WIDF vice-chairman. Earlier that year, at the Sixth Labor Congress, held in Harbin in August 1948, Ts'ai served on the congress presidium (steering committee) and was elected a member of the Sixth Executive Committee of the All-China Federation of Labor (known later as the Federation of Trade Unions). She was also a member of the Seventh Executive Committee from 1953 to 1957.
