labor leader political leader alternate member
Unlike most of the Chinese Communist elite, Ts'ai came from the working class. He was born into a family of coal miners, both his father and uncle worked in the important mines at Ta-yeh and Han-yang near Hankow. Three days after Ts’ai’s birth his family moved to the famous coal mines at An-yuan in western Kiangsi not far from P'ing-hsiang.
He attended primary school in An-yuan for only two years before he too became a miner. For three years he served an apprenticeship with the well-known Han-yeh-p’ing Company at P’ing-hsiang where he engaged in manual work on the motors, pumps and trams." In 1921 Mao Tse-tung had gone to the Han-yeh-p’ing mines to organize workers. This work was continued by Li Li-san who came to P'ing-hsiang in 1922 where he established a part-time school for workers that Ts'ai attended. In an autobiographical account given to Nym Wales (which provides much of the information for this sketch), Ts'ai claimed that he promoted strikes in the 1923-24 period as a member of the An-yuan Coal Miners’ Labor Union. Then only in his middle teens, he joined the Socialist Youth League in 1923. In the next year, when provincial troops were called in to suppress the unions, Ts'ai fled to nearby Changsha. Upon his return to An-yuan he learned that his family had been arrested and was forced to escape again, this time to Nanchang, the Kiangsi capital where he organized workers at an arsenal. In 1926 he was imprisoned for a short time and in 1927, when just 19, he joined the CCP.
In August 1927, shortly after the KMT-CCP split, Ts’ai left for Moscow where he spent the next three years. He enrolled in the Communist University of the Toilers of the East where he studied Chinese and the natural sciences. After completing a six-month term he attended the Sixth Comintern Congress in mid-1928. He subsequently spent six months at Sun Yat-sen University, which had been founded in 1925 and had attracted large numbers of Chinese students in the next few years, only some of whom were Communists. Ts'ai later studied for nine months at the important Lenin School. While enrolled there he was involved in a minor way in one of the many incidents concerning the Chinese Eastern Railway in Manchuria.
The railway was jointly administered by Chinese, Manchurians, and Russians, but on July 10, 1929, Manchurian warlord Chang Hsueh-liang, in conjunction with the Nationalist government, seized the line. After futile diplomatic negotiations the Russians moved troops into western Manchuria and captured a number of Chang’s soldiers. According to Ts’ai’s account he was temporarily assigned to work with these prisoners. Afterwards he returned to the Lenin School. In 1930 he attended the Fifth International Labor Congress in Moscow and then returned to China. During his long stay in the Soviet Union Ts'ai married a Russian.
Upon his return home Ts’ai worked briefly in the Shanghai labor movement and then, traveling via Hong Kong, made his way on foot to Communist-held areas in Fukien and then to the Kiangsi Soviet area. After working there again briefly in the labor movement, he was assigned to the guerrilla force that Lo Ping-hui had established on the Fukien-Kiangsi border. In 1930 Lo's 12th Army was placed under the First Army Corps, which was one of the major components of the First Front Army led by Chu Te and Mao Tse-tung. Ts'ai fought with this corps during the second and third Annihilation Campaigns conducted in 1931 by the Nationalists against the Communists. He was wounded in 1931 and again in mid-1933 when he lost his left arm. Ts’ai was then serving as political commissar of the Seventh Army Corps, but after he recovered from his injury he was transferred to the same position in Lo Ping- hui newly organized Ninth Army Corps.
At the Second All-China Congress of Soviets, held in Juichin in January-February 1934, Ts'ai was elected a member of the Central Executive Committee, the governing body of the Chinese Soviet Republic. In the fall of 1934 he was among those who set out on the Long March, and when they reached Kweichow in January 1935 he became a member of the Political Department of the Revolutionary Military Council. After arriving in north Shensi in the fall of 1935, he was made commissioner of the Interior and of Judicial Affairs (posts that were presumably subordinate to the Chinese Soviet Republic). In early 1936 Ts'i was among those who took part in the thrust from Shensi into Shansi, which ended in defeat for the Communists at the hands of Shansi warlord Yen Hsi-shan (see under Lin Piao). In this endeavor he engaged in organizing partisans for the Communists' 30th Army, led by Yen Hung-yen.
When war with Japan broke out in mid-1937 it appears that Ts'ai worked briefly in the Communists' Eighth Route Army liaison office in Sian, but by 1939 he was serving as director of the Political Department of the Army’s 129th Division, commanded by Liu Po-ch'eng. Concurrently, Ts'i was head of the Political Department in the T'ai-hang Military Region in the mountains of southeast Shansi where the 129th Division made its headquarters. However, by the end of the war in 1945 he had been transferred to Nieh Jung-chen's Shansi-Chahar-Hopeh Military Region, where he was deputy director (until 1948) of the Political Department. Then in 1948-49 he was deputy director of the Political Department for the North China Military Region (which included Shansi and Hopeh). Ts’ai returned to Liu Po-ch’eng’s forces in 1949 (now known as the Second Field Army) and in this capacity he attended the inaugural session of the CPPCC in Peking in September 1949 when the central government was established. He subsequently participated in the campaigns of the Second Field Army in central and southwest China during the closing months of 1949.
Brought from the southwest to Peking when the First NPC inaugurated the constitutional government in September 1954, Ts’ai represented Chungking in the NPC and continued to do so until his death. With the establishment of the new government, however, he became much less active in labor work and entered into the new field of sports promotion. In October 1954 he was named a vice-chairman under Ho Lung of the State Council’s Physical Culture and Sports Commission. By the following fall Ts'ai held two further assignments in the sports field, in November he was named chairman of a committee to organize the 1955 International Friendly Marksmanship Contest, and he was also identified as director of the National Defense Sports Club.
In January 1956 Ts’ai became chairman of a committee to prepare for China’s participation in the 16th Olympic Games, held in Melbourne that year, and in October he was made the chief of the 92-member Chinese delegation to the games. However, when it became apparent that the Nationalists would also send a Chinese team to Melbourne, Peking withdrew. In the meantime, in June-July 1955 he led a delegation which included a 159-member gymnastic team to the Czech National Spartakiade in Prague and from July to August 1956 he headed a group of Chinese athletes on a visit to East Germany. Then in October 1956 Ts'i was elected to membership on the National Committee of the All-China Athletic Federation.
In September 1956, at the Eighth Party Congress, Ts'ai was elected an alternate member of the Central Committee. In 1958, on the eve of their annual October celebration of Chinese National Day, the PRC established 10 friendship associations for the development of cultural relations with bloc nations; Ts'ai was named to head the China-Hungary Friendship Association. A few days later, while en route to Moscow, he died in an air crash (October 17) that also took the life of the well-known literary figure Cheng Chen-to.
Ts’ai served on the preparatory committee for the Seventh National Labor Congress held in Peking in May 1953. He was made a member of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions’ Executive Committee and of the Presidium, which conducts the work of the organization between congresses. In December 1957, at the Eighth Labor Congress, he was re-elected to the Executive Committee but not to the Presidium, because by this time he had become engaged in other fields of work. He returned to Moscow for a second time in April-May 1953 as leader of the Chinese delegation attending the Russian May Day celebrations.
From 1950 to 1954 Ts'ai was a member of the regional government for southwest China, the Southwest Military and Administrative Committee (SWMAC), reorganized into the Southwest Administrative Committee (SWAC) in 1953. He was also a member of the SWMAC- SWAC's Finance and Economics Committee. More important, however, were his posts in the field of labor. From 1950 to 1954 he was director of the Southwest Branch of the All-China Federation of Labor (ACFL), in 1950 he was director of the SWMACs Labor Department, and in 1952 a vice-chairman of the SWM AC’s Labor Employment Committee.
