Background
Wan I was born about 1904 or soon thereafter in Manchuria, not far from China’s important iron-manufacturing center at Anshan, Liaoning.
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Wan I
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After graduation from the ninth class of the Northeast Military Academy, he joined the Northeast Army of the famous Manchurian warlord Chang Tso-lin, and then of his son, Chang Hsueh-liang. Wan had risen to be commander of the 33rd Regiment of the 11th Division of this army prior to the 1930-1933 period when he is said to have joined the CCP.
Career
His record is obscure until the beginning of the Si no-Japanese War in 1937, at which time he was with the Nationalists’ 11th Division, then commanded by Ch’ang En-to and stationed on the Shantung-Kiangsu border. In August 1939 he reportedly forced Ch’ang to capitulate to the Communists, after which he brought some 1,500 troops from this army in south Shantung to join them. Wan was subsequently made a deputy division commander in the Communist armies. Later in the war he transferred to the fighting in the Honan-Kiangsu-Anhwei border area, where he was director of the Honan-Kiangsu- Anhwei Administrative Office, a government unit under the general control of the Communist New Fourth Army. Early in 1945 he was identified as director of the Kiangsu-Anhwei Administrative Office.
At the Seventh National Party Congress held in Yenan in April-June 1945 Wan was elected to alternate membership on the Central Committee. After hostilities ended in August 1945, many units of the New Fourth Army were transferred north of the Great Wall into Manchuria, where they joined forces with local resistance groups and eventually formed into the Communist Northeast Democratic Allied Army under the command of Lin Piao. Wan went to his native Manchuria sometime after August 1945 where he became commander of both the Liaopei Military District (1946-47) and the First Column of the Kirin-Liaoning Military Region (1946-1948), both subordinate to the Northeast Democratic Allied Army.
Soon after their arrival in Manchuria, the Communists set up (1946) the Northeast Administrative Committee to govern the territory controlled by their armies. Wan was an original member of this administration, and by 1948 the commander of the First Column of Lin Piao's Northeast Democratic Allied Army. After taking control of Manchuria, the army began to move south into China proper, eventually sweeping across the Yangtze Valley and on to Kwangtung and Hainan (April 1950). Early in 1949 the army was renamed the Fourth Field Army. Wan initially followed Lin’s army, but it is not clear where he was stationed. From 1949 to 1951 he was commander of a “special army corps” in the Fourth Field Army and from March 1950 to mid-1951 was a member of the regional government, which the army helped create in central and south China, the Central-South Military and Administrative Committee (CSMAC). From about 1950 until 1952 Wan held another post with the PLA, serving as a deputy commander of the PLA Artillery Force.
In August 1952 he was called to Peking to serve in the newly established Second Ministry of Machine Building, headed by Chao Erh-lu. Wan was a vice-minister until September 1954 when the central government was reorganized. He was identified in February 1954 as director of an unspecified organ under the General Staff of the PLA. In September 1954 he was named to membership on the National Defense Council, the newly created and generally unimportant military advisory body. He was reappointed to the Council in April 1959 but was not reappointed at the Third NPC meeting in January 1965. Also in 1954, Wan was elected a deputy from the Shenyang (Mukden) municipality to the First NPC. He served throughout the term of the First NPC but was not reelected to the Second Congress, which opened in 1959.
Since 1956 Wan has had three other appointments, each of them related to technical work. From 1957 to 1958 he served as a member of the State Council's Scientific Planning Commission under top science administrator Nieh Jung-chen. He held this post until November 1958 when the Commission was merged with another organization to form the Scientific and Technological Commission. In May 1957 and May 1958, Wan was identified as director of a little-known department under the PLA, the Equipment Planning Department. In September 1958, when the China Scientific and Technical Association was formed by merging two mass organizations for the promotion of science,
Wan became a vice-chairman of the new association, a post he continues to hold. The above record, taken in conjunction with his former role in the Second Ministry of Machine Building (then producing munitions), leads to the assumption that Wan must be an important specialist in the armaments field. However, his continued absence from public attention is puzzling. Apparently his last public appearance occurred in March 1956 when he paid his respects at the Polish Embassy in Peking on the death of Polish First Party Secretary Bole-slaw Bierut. An assessment of his political stature became even more difficult when, in January 1965, he was not reappointed as a member of the National Defense Council. Wan was one of only nine men not reappointed to the Council, several of whom were in some or total political disfavor.
Politics
In September 1955 Wan was among those to receive the PRC’s first national military awards and a personal military rank. He received two of the three top awards, the Independence and Freedom Order and the Liberation Order. Subsequent to these awards he was identified as holding the military rank of lieutenant-general, the equivalent of a two-star general in the U.S. Army.
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Born
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Nationality
China -
Ethnicity
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Political Party
Chinese Communist Party
Education
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1930
Career
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1945
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1948
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1954
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1954
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1957 - 1958