politician secretary CCP member
Tung was born in Huang-an (now Hung-an) hsicn, 50 miles north of Wuhan in the foothills of the Ta-pieh Mountains. Other prominent Communists from Huang-an include Li Hsien- nien and Cheng Wei-san. His family has been described as “landless gentry” and “urban petty-bourgeois.” The household liad 30 persons living under one roof, but the immediate family consisted of only Tung's parents, a brother, and two sisters.
Tung had just begin a middle school teaching career not far from Wuchang when the 1911 Revolution broke out. After the KMT-CCP split in 1927, he studied in Moscow and then returned to become a key official in the Central Soviet in Kiangsi.
At the request of Sun Yat-sen, Tung interrupted his schooling in Japan in 1915 to return to Hupeh to engage in secret work among military forces. He was arrested and imprisoned for half a year. Released in 1916 after Yuan Shih- k’ai’s political downfall, Tung returned to Japan and completed his legal studies the following year. In 1917 and 1918, back in China, Tung engaged in propaganda work in the so-called “Defense of the Constitution Army” in west Hupeh near the Szechwan border. In the spring of 1919 he went to Shanghai where he first began his study of Marxism. In this endeavor he was influenced by another Japanese-trained student, Li Han-chiin, who, like Tung, was to become a founding member of the CCP in 1921.
Returning to Hupeh after the national congress, Tung was a delegate to the First Hupeh CCP Congress in September 1921, and during the next few years he played a key role in developing the Hupeh branch of the Party. However, he had a year-long interlude in Szechwan where he was sent, in his own words, to ^revive some of my old tactics of winning over the military forces to revolution.” He returned again to Hupeh (about early 1923) where, paralleling the growth of the CCP, a significant labor movement had developed in Wuhan and nearby cities, in which a number of Communists were particularly active (see under Hsiang Ying and Ch'en T^n-ch'iu). The development of the labor movement received a severe blow in February 1923 when warlord Wu P’ei-fu savagely suppressed the railroad workers' union on the Peking- Hankow Railway.
When the Northern Expedition began in mid- 1926, Tung was in Wuhan. He claims to have taken part in sabotage against enemy troops to help the Northern Expeditionary forces capture the city in the fall of 1926. After the KMT transferred the “national” government to Wuhan during the winter of 1926-27, Tung joined the Hupeh Provincial government as head of the Peasants’ and Workers’ Bureau.
Tung was one of those who assisted Chou En-lai in his negotiations with Chiang Kai-shek during the famous Sian Incident in December 1936 (see under Chou), and then in September 1937, shortly after the Sino-Japanese War began, he was sent to Sian again. On this occasion he worked with Lin Po-ch'ii. Lin was in charge of the Communists’ Eighth Route Army liaison office there, which had been set up during this period of renewed KMT-CCP cooperation. Tung continued as a key liaison official with the KMT for most of the next decade. In the latter part of 1937, not long before Nanking fell to the Japanese, the national capital was moved to Hankow. Tung went there in 1938 as a liaison official with the Nationalist government, and for a period in that year he served as head of the Communists’ Yangtze Bureau, apparently replacing Ch’en Shao-yii when Ch'en returned to Ycnan in the fall. At one time or another in 1938 ail impressive number of top Communists were in Hankow, including Chou En-lai, the head of the CCP group there, and the Communist delegates to the Peopled Political Council (see below).
In March 1945, Tung was appointed by Chungking as the only Communist on the 10- member delegation headed by T. V. Soong, which the Chinese sent to the conference in San Francisco to establish the United Nations (April-June 1945). The inclusion of Tung in this group resulted from the insistent urgings of Chou En-lai (who initially suggested himself, Tung, and Ch'in Pang-hsien for membership on the delegation), Chou's position was backed by the United States, which saw this as a means of fostering Chinese unity.
Apart from Tung’s work as an assistant to Chou, he had also been chairman of the Chinese Liberated Areas Relief Association (CLARA) since 1946. This organization had been set up to channel to Communist-held areas relief supplies which had been donated by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, the International Red Cross, and other such agencies. Because of the general political and military turmoil throughout the nation, as well as the remoteness of many Communist areas, there were considerable difficulties in getting supplies to persons living in Communist regions. On numerous occasions from 1946 to 1948, Tung issued appeals for more aid, usually coupling these with charges that the Nationalists were sabotaging efforts to get supplies to Communist areas. On the other hand, a detailed study of the UNRRA efforts in China noted that local Communist guerilla units and advancing Communist armies periodically ambushed and seized UNRRA equipment, supplies and relief personnel in convoys along disputed borders, and several casualties were suffered at Communist hands.” Tung relinquished his CLARA post in April 1950 when this and related organizations were incorporated into the Chinese People's Relief Administration, Tung was elected one of the vice-chairmen, a position he still holds. (Further details on CLARA are found in the biography of Wu Yun-fu, the secretary-general of the organization.)
In January 1953 Tung was appointed a member of a committee to draft the national constitution. In the next year he was elected a deputy from his native Hupeh to the First NPC, which, at its inaugural session in September 1954, adopted the constitution. Tung was subsequently returned as a Hupeh deputy to the Second and Third NPC, which opened their inaugural sessions in April 1959 and December 1964, respectively. At the close of the September 1954 NPC session, he relinquished his post as a vice-premier and was named to succeed Shen Chun-ju as chief justice of the Supreme People's Court. In this capacity Tung spoke on judicial work at the next three sessions of the First NPC (July 22, 1955, June 25, 1956, and July 2, 1957). Although Tung has worked chiefly in domestic affairs since 1949, he was called upon to lead two delegations abroad between 1954 and 1958. In September 1954 he was Peking's representative in Sofia for the 10th anniversary of the celebrations marking the defeat of Nazi Germany in Bulgaria. He was back in Bulgaria on a more important mission in June 1958 when he led the CCP delegation to the Seventh Congress of the Bulgarian Communist Party. From Sofia, Tung took his delegation to Prague for the 11th Congress of the Czech Communist Party, which opened in mid-June, and from there he went to East Berlin for the Fifth Congress of the Socialist Unity (Communist) Party of East Germany in July. After more than two months abroad, he returned home on August 7.
Tung spent a month in Shanghai and then went to Juichin, the capital of the Central Soviet area which Mao Tse-tung and Chu' Te had developed into the Party's chief rural guerrilla base in the early thirties. He claims to have been political director of the Red Academy (presumably the Red Army Academy, established in 1933) and to have organized and served as principal of the Communist Party School. Prior to the Long March in 1934, he also worked in educational affairs under Ch'li Ch'iu-pai. Also in 1934, presumably at the Fifth Plenum in January, he was elected an alternate member of the CCP Central Committee. (At some time before 1945, possibly at the Sixth Plenum in October-Novembcr 1938, he was promoted to a full member.) Immediately after the Fifth Plenum, the Communists held the Second All-China Congress of Soviets (January-February 1934). Tung was elected a member of the Central Executive Committee (CEC) of the Chinese Soviet Republic, as well as president of the Supreme Court. He told Nym Wales that he later became commissar for Workers' and Peasants, Supervision, one of the cabinet posts under the CEC, if so, he presumably replaced Hsiang Ying, who was named to that position at the Second Congress.
