Tso Chilian

Background

He was born in Li- ling hsien, an agricultural community about 50 miles from Changsha, the Hunan capital. Li-ling is the home of a number of important Communists, including Li Li-san.

Education

Tso's family of landowners sent him to a provincial middle school, which he attended during the early years of the May Fourth Movement. He went to Kwangtung at age 17 and joined the KMT. That same year, 1923, he entered the Hunan Cadets’ School there, one of the several military schools for the different provincial armies supporting the Revolution. In 1924 he transferred to the KMT.

In 1926 Tso went to Moscow to attend the Communist University of the Toilers of the East. He spent four years in the Soviet Union, transferring in 1928 to the Red Army Academy (Frunze Military Academy), where one of his classmates was Liu Po-ch'eng.

Career

In 1930 he was operating in Fukien in association with Yang Te-chih, also a native of Li-ling hsien. The two men worked closely together for a number of years. In 1931 they were in southern Fukien in Nan-ching hsien, about 50 miles from Amoy. Tso was then political commissar (and by early 1932 also the commander) of the 15th Red Army, a unit initially subordinate to the Fifth Army Corps and later to Lin Piao’s First Army Corps. Tso and Yang transferred to the Red Army Academy (Hung-chiin ta-hsueh) near Juichin, Kiangsi, when it opened in 1933. Yang enrolled as a student and Tso became a faculty member. Also serving as a lecturer was Liu Po-ch’eng, who from 1932 to about 1937 was the chief-of- staff of the Revolutionary Military Committee. At some time prior to the opening of the Long March in the fall of 1934 Tso served as his deputy. His most important military post in this period, however, was as chief-of-staff to Lin Piao from the time that LinJs force was reorganized to form the First Army Corps (see under Lin Piao). Tso held this post from 1932 up to and during the Long March. In the spring of 1935 Tso commanded troops which played an important role in the military maneuvers leading to the successful crossing of the Tatu River in Szechwan (see under Yang Ch’eng- wu), one of the most important episodes of the Long March.

Tso continued to serve in Lin Piao’s First Army Corps after the close of the Long March in the fall of 1935. He was still Lin's chief-of-staff as late as the end of 1935, but when Lin became absorbed in the work of re-establishing and enlarging the Red Army Academy, Tso frequently served as acting commander of the Corps. He was identified in this capacity by American author Edgar Snow when he visited north Shensi in 1936. In the late summer of that year Nieh Jung-chen and Tso began to move units under their command to the Hui- ning area of east Kansu to make contact with two other Red Armies that were making their own separate marches to north Shensi. These were the Second Front Army led by Ho Lung and the Fourth Front Army under Chang Kuo-fao, to which Chu Te had been attached since mid-1935. The rendezvous was accomplished in October 1936. However, according to an account by Liu Po-ch'eng, Nieh and Tso tried in vain to convince Chang Kuo-t’ao to continue his march northward to Shensi rather than to lead his troops westward, a move that led to disastrous results for Chang's troops.

He was then serving as acting commander of the Corps. When war with Japan broke out in mid-1937 the Communists created the Eighth Route Army and made Tso a ranking staff officer. Once again he frequently assumed the role of his superior, Chief-of-StafF Yeh Chien-ying, who spent most of the early war years in Nationalist areas carrying on liaison work for the Communists. During the early months of the war, in his capacity as acting chief-of-staff, Tso was with Commander-in-Chief Chu Te and Political Department Director Jen Pi-shih at the Eighth Route Army's front-line headquarters in Shansi. For a time in the fall of 1938, while his superiors Chu Te and P'ing Te-huai were in Yenan for the Sixth Party Plenum, Tso was actually in charge of Eighth Route Army operations. He was later assigned to Liu Po-ch'eng's 129th Division, which made its headquarters in the Tai-hang Mountains of eastern Shansi. Tso was there in the spring of 1940 when, concurrently with his post as Eighth Route Army deputy chief-of-staff, he became commander of the Army’s Second Column. Units of the Second Column were sent at this time to the Hopeh-Shantung-Honan (Chi-Lu- Yii) Military Region, but Tso was unable to go there himself because of the press of work at the T'ai-hang headquarters. Two years later he was with the Communist units that were driven from central Hopeh by the Japanese and was killed in early June 1942 in the ensuing fighting along the Ch’ing-chang River in southeast Shansi.

Politics

Tso was among those who attended the CCP's Sixth National Congress, held in Moscow in mid- 1928. He returned to China in 1930 and went to join the Communist armies in Kiangsi.

Membership

In addition to the Party hierarchy in the Northeast, the Communists also formed a governmental unit known as the Northeast Administrative Committee (NEAC), Tsou was a member of the NEAC from its formation in 1946.

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• When Evans Carlson interviewed Tso in 1937 he spoke of him as having a bearing that “suggested long military training.” Agnes Smedley described him as a “suave but reticent intellectual.” In the four years he spent in the Soviet Union Tso became sufficiently proficient in Russian to translate a number of Soviet works into Chinese, including a staff manual dealing with combat regulations of the Soviet Red Army. During the war he also wrote several articles on military affairs, especially on the subject of recruiting. Sketches of Tso's life are included in a number of the memorial biographies published by the Communists since 1949. Schools, towns, and even folk songs have been named for him, and amidst considerable ceremony his remains were reburied in Han-tan in south Hopeh on October 20, 1950. On the same day the JMJP carried several articles about his career, including one by his long-time colleague Nieh Jung-chen.