Wang En-mao

1906

Kiangsi, China

Wang was active in the Hunan-Hupeh-Kiangsi base in the early 1930’s and was there in 1933 when Jen Pi-shih arrived to take charge of political affairs. According to a Communist account, Wang and others were saved from the serious blow of dogmatism” as a result of Jen’s leadership (see under Wang Shou-tao). Nothing more is known about Wang until 1941 when he was a political-military leader working closely with Wang Chen, then commander of the 359th Brigade. Because the careers of the two Wangs continued to be closely associated for the next 12 years, it is possible that their association antedated 1941 and that the biography of Wang Chen may shed some light on the career of Wang En-mao. The 359th Brigade was subordinate to Ho Lung’s 120th division, one of the three divisions of the Communists’ Eighth Route Army of north China. In 1942 Ho dispatched this brigade to engage in land reclamation at Nanniwan (Nan-ni-wan), a few miles south of Yenan, and by the following year Wang En-mao was identified as deputy political commissar. As late as the 1960’s the Communists have continued to praise the work that was done there as evidence of the willingness of PLA troops to engage in non-military productive labor, for their leadership at Nanniwan, the two Wangs have frequently been cited as exemplary military officers. Wang En-mao with Wang Chen in 1944 when the 359th Brigade was sent to join Li Hsien-nien of the Communists’ New Fourth Army in central China. Li was then establishing a large Communist base in the border area of Honan, Hupeh, Hunan, Kiangsi, and Anhwei. After joining Li, Wang En-mao accompanied the 359th Brigade to P'ing-chiang and Liu-yang hsien in eastern Hunan where he and Wang Chen established what the Communists called the “Hunan People's Anti-Japanese National Salvation Army.” The force, commanded by Wang Chen, was active in Liu-yang the year before the Sino-Japanese War ended. Wang Shou-tao was the army’s political commissar and Wang En-mao was its deputy political commissar. In the period from 1946 to 1949 Wang En-mao was political commissar of units led by Wang Chen in and around the Yenan area, the heart of the Shen-Kan-Ning Border Region. Their troops were subordinate to P’eng Te- huai’s Northwest PLA, which was designated the First Field Army in early 1949. During the course of that year troops from the First Field Army began to move west. When they arrived in Sinkiang they met little resistance, for both the principal military forces and the key civil officials there had gone over to the Communists (see under Burhan Shahidi) by the time the Communist units reached Tihwa, the capital, on October 20, 1949. Wang Chen commanded these forces, and Wang En-mao may have been with him at the time. In any event, Wang En-mao pushed onward, moving into Kashgar some 1,0 road miles to the southwest of Tihwa. Aside from the fact that he became chairman of the Kashgar Military Control Commission in 1950, little is known of Wang's work there, but it is reasonable to assume that he was the top Communist official in southwest Sinkiang, where some two thirds of the population live. It is evident that the Party wanted a veteran CCP member and a Han Chinese in this inaccessible area, which has witnessed so much political turmoil in recent decades. Wang is known to have remained in southwest Sinkiang until 1952 when he was transferred to Tihwa to take over the duties that Wang Chen had performed until that time. In the meantime he had received other assignments that presumably took him to Tihwa from time to time. By the latter part of 1949 he was a member of the Party’s Sinkiang Sub-bureau, and in December of that year he was appointed as a member of the newly established Sinkiang Provincial People's Government Council. In the former position he was subordinate to his long-time colleague Wang Chen, and in the latter he was nominally under Governor Burhan. In July 1950 he was given still another assignment as a member of the Northwest Military and Administrative Committee (NWMAC), a post he continued to hold (1953-54) after the NWMAC was reorganized into the Northwest Administrative Committee. At approximately the time of Wang Chen's transfer away from Sinkiang in mid-1952, Wang En-mao was brought from Kashgar to Tihwa (renamed Urumchi in February 1954) to replace him as the ranking secretary of the Sinkiang Party Sub-bureau. He was identified in this post in August 1952, and in the next month he was named to a newly established committee to prepare for the transformation of Sinkiang Province into an “autonomous region” to reflect the preponderance of minority groups that make up the Sinkiang population. (According to official Communist statistics, 95 per cent of the Sinkiang population consists of non-Han peoples, with the Uighurs accounting for about 75 per cent of the total provincial population.) On October 1, 1955, the Sinkiang-Uighur Autonomous Region (SUAR) was finally established. Wang had a prominent role in the inaugural ceremonies and was elected to membership on the SUAR Council, a position he still retains. His colleague Saifudin was named as chairman. At this same time the Sinkiang Party Sub-bureau was reorganized into the SUAR Party Committee, with Wang remaining as the first secretary, another position he still retains. In the previous month the PRC presented its army veterans with military awards and gave them personal military ranks. Wang was made a lieutenant general, equivalent to a two-star U.S. Army general, and was given one or more of the military orders. The particular awards were not specified, but in view of his long record it is probable that he received the three standard orders covering military service from 1927 to 1950: the Orders of August First, Independence and Freedom, and Liberation. In mid-October 1955, shortly after the inauguration of the SUAR, Wang led a delegation to the Soviet Union to study animal husbandry. This was his first trip abroad, and he remained in the USSR for 80 days, returning to Urumchi in early January 1956. In September 1956 Wang took a leading part in the proceedings of the Eighth National CCP Congress, serving on the Credentials Committee for the Congress and presenting a written speech entitled "The Struggle in the Transition to Socialism of the Various Peoples of the SUAR and of the Entire Country." He was elected an alternate member of the Party Central Committee, placing second on the list of alternates after Yang Hsien-chen. Therefore, when full committee members Huang Ching and Lai Jo-yii died, Yang and Wang were promoted to full membership at the Fifth Plenum held immediately following the Second Session of the Eighth Congress (May 1958). Wang received two new posts in the midsixties, one in the northwest and the other in the national government. In February 1964 he was identified as one of the secretaries of the Party Northwest Bureau headed by Liu Lan-t'ao. The bureau, established in 1961, is headquartered in Sian, and thus Wang is identified from time to time in that city attending bureau meetings. He received his new post in the national government in January 1965 at the close of the initial session of the Third NPC, when he was elected to membership on the National Defense Council. However, the post carries more prestige than actual authority and it is unlikely that Wang devotes much time to this organization.

Wang En-mao

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politician secretary CCP member

Background

He is native to Yung-hsin hsien, located in western Kiangsi not far from the Hunan border and to the east of the Chingkang Mountain base where Mao Tse- tung and his followers found refuge in the winter of 1927-28.

Education

He was educated locally.

Career

Wang was active in the Hunan-Hupeh-Kiangsi base in the early 1930’s and was there in 1933 when Jen Pi-shih arrived to take charge of political affairs. According to a Communist account, Wang and others were saved from the serious blow of dogmatism” as a result of Jen’s leadership (see under Wang Shou-tao). Nothing more is known about Wang until 1941 when he was a political-military leader working closely with Wang Chen, then commander of the 359th Brigade. Because the careers of the two Wangs continued to be closely associated for the next 12 years, it is possible that their association antedated 1941 and that the biography of Wang Chen may shed some light on the career of Wang En-mao. The 359th Brigade was subordinate to Ho Lung’s 120th division, one of the three divisions of the Communists’ Eighth Route Army of north China. In 1942 Ho dispatched this brigade to engage in land reclamation at Nanniwan (Nan-ni-wan), a few miles south of Yenan, and by the following year Wang En-mao was identified as deputy political commissar. As late as the 1960’s the Communists have continued to praise the work that was done there as evidence of the willingness of PLA troops to engage in non-military productive labor, for their leadership at Nanniwan, the two Wangs have frequently been cited as exemplary military officers.

Wang En-mao with Wang Chen in 1944 when the 359th Brigade was sent to join Li Hsien-nien of the Communists’ New Fourth Army in central China. Li was then establishing a large Communist base in the border area of Honan, Hupeh, Hunan, Kiangsi, and Anhwei. After joining Li, Wang En-mao accompanied the 359th Brigade to P'ing-chiang and Liu-yang hsien in eastern Hunan where he and Wang Chen established what the Communists called the “Hunan People's Anti-Japanese National Salvation Army.” The force, commanded by Wang Chen, was active in Liu-yang the year before the Sino-Japanese War ended. Wang Shou-tao was the army’s political commissar and Wang En-mao was its deputy political commissar.

In the period from 1946 to 1949 Wang En-mao was political commissar of units led by Wang Chen in and around the Yenan area, the heart of the Shen-Kan-Ning Border Region. Their troops were subordinate to P’eng Te- huai’s Northwest PLA, which was designated the First Field Army in early 1949. During the course of that year troops from the First Field Army began to move west. When they arrived in Sinkiang they met little resistance, for both the principal military forces and the key civil officials there had gone over to the Communists (see under Burhan Shahidi) by the time the Communist units reached Tihwa, the capital, on October 20, 1949. Wang Chen commanded these forces, and Wang En-mao may have been with him at the time. In any event, Wang En-mao pushed onward, moving into Kashgar some 1,0 road miles to the southwest of Tihwa. Aside from the fact that he became chairman of the Kashgar Military Control Commission in 1950, little is known of Wang's work there, but it is reasonable to assume that he was the top Communist official in southwest Sinkiang, where some two thirds of the population live. It is evident that the Party wanted a veteran CCP member and a Han Chinese in this inaccessible area, which has witnessed so much political turmoil in recent decades. Wang is known to have remained in southwest Sinkiang until 1952 when he was transferred to Tihwa to take over the duties that Wang Chen had performed until that time. In the meantime he had received other assignments that presumably took him to Tihwa from time to time. By the latter part of 1949 he was a member of the Party’s Sinkiang Sub-bureau, and in December of that year he was appointed as a member of the newly established Sinkiang Provincial People's Government Council. In the former position he was subordinate to his long-time colleague Wang Chen, and in the latter he was nominally under Governor Burhan. In July 1950 he was given still another assignment as a member of the Northwest Military and Administrative Committee (NWMAC), a post he continued to hold (1953-54) after the NWMAC was reorganized into the Northwest Administrative Committee.

At approximately the time of Wang Chen's transfer away from Sinkiang in mid-1952, Wang En-mao was brought from Kashgar to Tihwa (renamed Urumchi in February 1954) to replace him as the ranking secretary of the Sinkiang Party Sub-bureau. He was identified in this post in August 1952, and in the next month he was named to a newly established committee to prepare for the transformation of Sinkiang Province into an “autonomous region” to reflect the preponderance of minority groups that make up the Sinkiang population. (According to official Communist statistics, 95 per cent of the Sinkiang population consists of non-Han peoples, with the Uighurs accounting for about 75 per cent of the total provincial population.)

On October 1, 1955, the Sinkiang-Uighur Autonomous Region (SUAR) was finally established. Wang had a prominent role in the inaugural ceremonies and was elected to membership on the SUAR Council, a position he still retains. His colleague Saifudin was named as chairman. At this same time the Sinkiang Party Sub-bureau was reorganized into the SUAR Party Committee, with Wang remaining as the first secretary, another position he still retains. In the previous month the PRC presented its army veterans with military awards and gave them personal military ranks. Wang was made a lieutenant general, equivalent to a two-star U.S. Army general, and was given one or more of the military orders. The particular awards were not specified, but in view of his long record it is probable that he received the three standard orders covering military service from 1927 to 1950: the Orders of August First, Independence and Freedom, and Liberation. In mid-October 1955, shortly after the inauguration of the SUAR, Wang led a delegation to the Soviet Union to study animal husbandry. This was his first trip abroad, and he remained in the USSR for 80 days, returning to Urumchi in early January 1956.

In September 1956 Wang took a leading part in the proceedings of the Eighth National CCP Congress, serving on the Credentials Committee for the Congress and presenting a written speech entitled "The Struggle in the Transition to Socialism of the Various Peoples of the SUAR and of the Entire Country." He was elected an alternate member of the Party Central Committee, placing second on the list of alternates after Yang Hsien-chen. Therefore, when full committee members Huang Ching and Lai Jo-yii died, Yang and Wang were promoted to full membership at the Fifth Plenum held immediately following the Second Session of the Eighth Congress (May 1958).

Wang received two new posts in the midsixties, one in the northwest and the other in the national government. In February 1964 he was identified as one of the secretaries of the Party Northwest Bureau headed by Liu Lan-t'ao. The bureau, established in 1961, is headquartered in Sian, and thus Wang is identified from time to time in that city attending bureau meetings. He received his new post in the national government in January 1965 at the close of the initial session of the Third NPC, when he was elected to membership on the National Defense Council. However, the post carries more prestige than actual authority and it is unlikely that Wang devotes much time to this organization.

Politics

In the summer of 1945, just prior to the Japanese surrender, the Party decided to establish a base at Wu-ling in the border area of Kwangtung, Kiangsi, and Hunan, a region where the Communists had long been active. Consequently the 359th Brigade was dispatched on an extended march to the south. Led by the three Wangs, it fought its way from Hunan, through Kiangsi, to northern Kwangtung, while at the same time Communist guerrillas from the Kwangtung Tung-chiang (East River) District (see under Tseng Sheng) sent a group north to rendezvous at Wu-ling. The presence of Nationalist troops in areas through which the Kwangtung guerrillas had to pass, and the Japanese surrender in August 1945, kept the two Communist groups from actually meeting. Consequently, after the surrender the 359th Brigade was ordered to return north to rejoin Li Hsien- nien, then controlling the so-called “central plains" area of his former Red base. In the ensuing hostilities between the Communists and Nationalists the brigade barely escaped being trapped in an area close to Hankow, but it finally fought its way through Hupeh, Honan, Shensi, and Kansu, and in September 1946 it arrived in the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia (Shen- Kan-Ning) Border Region.

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Wang En-mao

Background

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1941

1946 - 1949

1952

1964