Tseng Shan has been an important Party leader since the days of the Kiangsi Soviet in the early 19305s. A member of the Party Central Committee since 1945, he was prominent in cast China in the late forties and early fifties as a specialist in economic affairs. Since the mid-fifties he has been active in international liaison work with foreign Communist parties and since 1960 has headed the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
Background
Tseng Shan was born about 1904 into a family deeply involved in revolutionary work in the course of his youth. Tseng's native hsien, Hsing- kuo in central-south Kiangsi, had an important revolutionary history in the late 1920's and early 1930's when the Communists were successfully establishing bases in central China.
Education
Politburo member Tan Chen-lin has written of Tseng that he “did not study in a university or receive any kind of higher education” but began his career as an apprentice to a silk worker. This was very probably the effect of the unsettled revolutionary times in which Tseng grew up, which in turn had their effects upon the Tseng family fortunes. However, he was not lacking in early revolutionary training and experience and by 1930, when in his middle twenties, was serving in the Tung-ku-Hsing-kuo soviet area. He belonged to the military forces led by Mao Tse-tung; some reports speak of him at this time as a personal envoy of Mao. According to one account, Mao dispatched P’eng Te-huai and Tseng to Fu-t'ien in December 1930 to put down an insurrection there, which Mao feared would further endanger the Red armies already endangered by the Annihilation Campaigns of the Nationalists.
Career
In the years of the thirties before the Communists embarked upon the Long March (1934), Hsing-kuo was the scene of intense fighting between Communist and Nationalist armies during some of the Annihilation Campaigns waged by the Nationalists in an attempt to stamp out Communism. Tseng's rural hsien is located east of the Kan River, with its capital seat, Hsing-kuo, some 60 miles southeast of the larger river port city of Chi-an (Kian) where for a time Tseng’s father, Tseng Ts'i-ch'en, taught school. Other episodes in the general area of Hsing-kuo which have became famous events in Communist annals include the establishment of a small soviet called the Tung-ku-Hsing-kuo Regional Soviet by the army of Chu Te and Mao Tse-tung in 1929, Chu Te's occupation of Chi-an in October 1930, the occupation of Hsing-kuo by the Nationalists in July 1931 during their Third Annihilation Campaign and its recapture by the Communists in September. Not far northeast of Hsing-kuo are the two small towns of Tung-ku and Fu-fien, which figured prominently in the Fu-fien Rebellion of December 1930 (see below). Some or all of these events must have involved the Tseng family, who were all said to have joined the Communist Party in the year 1927-28. Later, two of Tseng's brothers and two of his sisters-in-law were captured and died at the hands of the Nationalists. As of 1963 one brother and Tseng’s mother were still living and were then in a rural area of China.
It also appears that Tseng was unpopular with the Fu-fien rebels, who were able, at least temporarily, to oust him from that officer, However, two years later, in May 1932 when the Communists held the first congress of a re-established Kiangsi Provincial Soviet in central Kiangsi, Tseng was again made chairman of the soviet government with Ch’en Cheng-jen as his vice-chairman. Then there was a second congress of the Kiangsi Provincial Soviet held in December 1933, and at this time Liu Ch’i-yao became chairman, while Tseng was demoted to a vice-chairmanship and Ch’en was dropped. This congress named an Executive Committee of 67 members, which included a number of persons who became prominent in the later Maoist Party leadership. These included: Ch’en I, Ch’en Ch'i-han, Li Fu-ch’un, and Ts’ai Ch’ang.
Tseng, along with major forces in the New Fourth Army, had transferred from Kiangsu to Shantung, and when the Shantung provincial capital at Tsinan was captured by the Communists in September 1948, he was named as a vice-chairman of the municipal Military Control Commission. In order to unify the civil administration of those portions of north China held by the Communists, the Shansi-Chahar-Hopeh (Chin-Ch’a-Chi) and the Shansi-Hopeh-Shan- tung-Honan (Chin-Chi-Lu-Yii) Border Regions were merged in August 1948 to form the North China People's Government. Immediately afterwards Tseng was named as a member of the government's Finance and Economics Committee, an appointment that was a prelude to a number of similar economic administrative tasks he was given in the ensuing years.
In May 1949 Tseng was transferred from Shantung to serve as one of the key civil administrators in Shanghai, which the Communists had just captured. He was immediately named as the ranking vice-mayor under Mayor Ch’en I the commander of the forces that had captured the city. One of the first acts of the new administration was the establishment of the East China Branch of the People’s Bank of China with jurisdiction over banking in Kiangsu, Chekiang, and Anhwei; Tseng was appointed (May 1949) to head the branch and held the post until mid-1950.
In September 1949 he received a closely related appointment when he was named to head the newly established East China Finance and Economics Committee (ECFEC). Because the governmental apparatus for east China had not yet been set up, the ECFEC was originally subordinate to Ch'en's East China Military Region, the civil-military organ that administered cast China throughout 1949. Then, over the winter of 1949-50, the Communists established a civil administration known as the East China Military and Administrative Committee (ECMAC). Jao Shu-shih, the top political figure in east China at that time, was appointed as head of the ECMAC, with Tseng named as one of the vicechairmen. The ECMAC was formally established in January 1950 with jurisdiction over Kiangsu, Chekiang, Anhwei, Fukien, and Shantung. The Finance and Economics Committee that Tseng had headed from the previous September was placed under the jurisdiction of the ECMAC, with Tseng remaining as the chairman, a post he continued to hold until the abolition of the regional governments in 1954.
Meanwhile, in October 1949, the central government had been formed in Peking. The cabinet, then known as the Government Administration Council (GAC), was composed of Premier Chou En-lai, four vice-premiers and 15 members. Tseng was appointed as one of the members and was also named to membership on one of the four coordinating committees directly subordinate to the GAC, the Finance and Economic Committee headed by top economic administrator Ch'en Yun. Most important, however, he was named to head the Ministry of Textile Industry. Though it is highly unusual for a cabinet minister not to reside in Peking, the explanation in this instance derives from the fact that Shanghai was the center of the textile industry in China. Tseng spent most of the period from 1949 to 1952 in Shanghai, the ECMAC capital, but occasionally he went to Peking to give periodic reports to the GAC. For example, he gave a report before the GAC in February 1950 on steps taken in east China to ameliorate flood and famine conditions.
In the 1950-1952 period, Tseng received further appointments in east China. From October 1950 to November 1952 he served as director of the Huai River Harnessing Commission, an organization subordinate to the central government’s Ministry of Water Conservancy. In November 1951 he was named to the council of the East China Branch of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association, and in the same month he was appointed to head the ad hoc East China Committee to Increase Production and Practice Economy. The establishment of the latter committee came as a result of decisions taken at the third session of the First CPPCC (October- November 1951) when major stress was placed upon the need to improve production and to encourage economic austerity. In June of 1952 Tseng became the director of the newly established East China Revolutionary Bases Reconstruction Committee a reflection of the priority attention the CCP has always given to the former guerrilla areas where Communist cadres and soldiers had worked and fought from the early 1930's.
With the abolition of the regional governments in 1954, Tseng was permanently transferred to the capital. In July 1954 he was elected to the national committee of the All-China Federation of Supply and Marketing Cooperatives (AC- FSMC), more important, he was named to head the Federation’s Supervisory Committee. The Federation works in close coordination with the Ministry of Commerce (then headed by Tseng) and is charged with the task of stimulating the flow of goods and commodities between the rural and urban sectors of the economy. Although Tseng may continue to be a national committee member of the ACFSMC, he was dropped as the Supervisory Committee chairman in about 1962, a reflection of the fact that by that time he had given up his responsibilities in connection with domestic commerce (see below).
When the constitutional government was inaugurated in the fall of 1954, Tseng was reappointed as head of the Commerce Ministry. The four former coordinating committees under the old GAC were now reorganized into eight staff offices under the State Council, each headed by a top Party figure. Tseng, who had been a vice-chairman of the Finance and Economics Committee, was given a roughly comparable post when he was appointed (October 1954) to be a deputy director of the Fifth Staff Office, the office concerned with finance and trade. In this position Tseng served under Party veteran Li Hsien-nien, the Finance minister. In December 1954 Tseng was made a member of the Second National Committee of the CPPCC, serving as a Party representative. He served in a like capacity on the Third Committee (1959-1964) and was again named as a Party representative to the Fourth National Committee, which opened its first session in December 1964.
Tseng was elected in 1958 as a deputy to the Second NPC from Shantung, the province in which he had worked a decade earlier. When the Second NPC held its first session in April 1959, he was elected to the NPC Standing Committee as well as chairman of the NPC Budget Committee. In November 1960 he was named to succeed Miss Ch’ien Ying as minister of Internal Affairs, thus returning to a post similar to the one he had held in 1934 in the Chinese Soviet Republic in Kiangsi. Unlike the situation in many Communist nations, the Internal Affairs Ministry in China is not a euphemism for the secret police, its main tasks are related to veterans' affairs, the census, and emergency relief measures when natural calamities strike. Because the PRC has followed the principle of the separation of powers in the national government, soon after receiving his ministerial post in 1960, Tseng was removed as a member of the NPC Standing Committee. He continued, however, to serve as a deputy to the NPC and to head the NPC Budget Committee throughout the existence of the Second NPC (1959-1964). Although he was re-elected as a Shantung deputy to the Third NPC, he was replaced by Ku Mu as chairman of the NPC Budget Committee when the Third NPC held its first session in December 1964-January 1965.
Politics
The Fu-fien insurrection was all the more threatening to Mao because it took place among some of the local forces in his own army, causing him to expel a number of officers and men from the Red Army, as well as to reorganize his remaining forces. At the time of the Fu-t'ien rebellion Tseng was chairman of the Kiangsi Provincial Soviet government, which had been established earlier when the Red armies captured Chi-an (Kian), a commercial center on the Kan River west of Fu-t’ien. The circumstances that surround Tseng's assumption of this post are little known but they have been interpreted by one scholar as part of a maneuver sponsored by Mao Tse-tung to get one of his own men into a position of authority in the Kiangsi provincial government.
It also appears that Tseng was unpopular with the Fu-fien rebels, who were able, at least temporarily, to oust him from that officer, However, two years later, in May 1932 when the Communists held the first congress of a re-established Kiangsi Provincial Soviet in central Kiangsi, Tseng was again made chairman of the soviet government with Ch’en Cheng-jen as his vice-chairman. Then there was a second congress of the Kiangsi Provincial Soviet held in December 1933, and at this time Liu Ch’i-yao became chairman, while Tseng was demoted to a vice-chairmanship and Ch’en was dropped. This congress named an Executive Committee of 67 members, which included a number of persons who became prominent in the later Maoist Party leadership. These included: Ch’en I, Ch’en Ch'i-han, Li Fu-ch’un, and Ts’ai Ch’ang.