Wang Jo-fei

Background

Wang was born in 1896 into a landlord family in An-shun hsien some 50 miles southwest of Kweiyang in Kweichow province.

Education

From his early boyhood Wang was reared by his uncle, Huang Ch'i-sheng, a man who was to influence Wang throughout his career and who died with him in the same air crash in 1946. Moving to Kweiyang, Wang enrolled in the Ta-te Primary School, which his uncle had founded. He got his first taste of revolutionary activity when he joined a students’ guard unit during the 1911 Revolution, and a few years later he played a minor role in the actions taken by local military figures who were resisting Yuan Shih-k'i attempts to become the new emperor of China. Afterwards, Wang returned to the Ta-te school where he taught for a brief time. Then, having won a government scholarship to study in Japan, Wang left for Tokyo late in 1917. He spent about a year and a half there, but according to his own testimony he spent most of his time teaching himself even though he was nominally a student at Waseda University.

Career

Wang spent over three years in France (and a brief time in Belgium), but only three months of this time were devoted to formal studies. He spent the remainder of the period as a factory worker and political organizer together with Ts’ai Ho-sen, Chou En-lai, Chao Shih-yen, Ch'en Yen-nien, Li Li-san, Ch'en I, and a host of other student-workers. Few if any of them were more active than Wang in organizing political activities, including protests against the French government and Chinese diplomats stationed in France. For example, Chou En-lai and Wang were the leaders of a demonstration held in Paris in February 1921 to protest the termination of financial aid to the Chinese students. And later in the same year he was among the leaders of the so-called Lyons University demonstrations (see under Ch'en I). Wang was also one of the founders of the Socialist Youth League in the winter of 1921-22, a group that was reorganized into the European branch of the CCP in mid-1922. Also in 1922，Wang joined the French Communist Party (a fact ignored in most Chinese Communist accounts of Wang's life, but one mentioned by Wang himself), and in the same year he also became a member of the CCP. Under the organizational auspices of the Youth League (and later the European CCP branch), Wang and his worker-student colleagues founded Shao-nien (Youth) in Paris in August 1922. This important journal propagated communistic ideas and attacked other doctrines, such as anarchism, that were espoused by a number of the students in France.

In late 1922 and early 1923 a number of Chinese students in France (many of them not Communists) journeyed to Moscow to study at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East. Wang was a member of a group of 12 students who went to the Soviet Union in the spring of 1923. He remained there for two years and was still in Moscow in March 1925 when the Comintern convened its Fifth Enlarged Plenum, a session that Wang appears to have attended. Within two months, however, he was back in China where he attended the Second National Congress of Labor in Canton, which established the All-China Federation of Labor and affiliated it with the Red International of Trade Unions (Profintern). From Canton he proceeded to north China where he became, by mid-1925, secretary of the Party’s Honan-Shensi Regional Committee, a post that was presumably subordinate to Li Ta-chao's North China Regional Committee. The north China political situation at this time was extremely complex and was dominated by the intrigues of the feuding warlords, among them Feng Yii-hsiang, who was beginning to develop ties with both Soviet and Chinese Communists. A number of Chinese Communists were then cooperating to some degree with Feng’s Kuominchiin (Nationalist Army), just as they were with the KMT in southern China. Wang is reported to have engaged in labor agitation at this time among the workers on the important Peking-Hankow and Lunghai Railways.

Wang’s tenure in north China was short-lived; by the latter part of 1925 he was transferred to Shanghai to become the Party’s first secretary- general (pishu-chang), serving under Party General Secretary Ch’en Tu-hsiu. Wang’s fall from the Central Committee in 1928 (see below) may have been related to the alleged fact that he was on close terms with Ch'en Tu- hsiu. Wang is credited in Communist sources with a major role in the organization and leadership of strikes and insurrections in Shanghai in preparation for the arrival in that city of the National Revolutionary Army, which was advancing on the city during the course of the Northern Expedition (see under Chao Shih- yen). He remained there as secretary-general until April 1927 when the forces under Chiang Kai-shek suppressed the insurrections in Shanghai and executed a number of top Communists. At this juncture Wang made his way to Wuhan to attend the CCP’s Fifth Congress, which elected him a member of the Central Committee. Immediately after the meetings adjourned in May, he was sent back to Shanghai where he directed propaganda activities for the Party’s Kiangsu provincial Committee. Then, following the Nanchang Uprising (see under Yeh Ting) of August 1, 1927, which brought about the final break between the CCP and the KMT, Wang was among those who attended the important and controversial August 7 Emergency Conference (probably held in Hankow), which deposed Ch’en Tu-hsiu and elevated Ch’il Ch’iu-pai to head the CCP. In the meantime, Kiangsu Provincial Secretary Ch'en Yen-nien, Wang's colleague in France, was apprehended and executed by the Nationalists. Wang was then dispatched to Shanghai again, this time to serve as a member of the Standing Committee of the Kiangsu CCP Committee, now headed by Teng Chung- hsia. Like most Communist operatives in Shanghai during these dangerous days, Wang’s activities over the following months arc not well documented, but he is credited in Communist accounts with having organized peasant uprisings in the area around Wusih (Wu-hsi) and in northern Kiangsu at approximately the same time that Mao Tse-tung was a leader of the Autumn Harvest Uprisings in central China.

Wang remained in Moscow for the next three years as a CCP delegate to the Comintern. As he prepared to return to China in 1931, Wang could look back upon a life that had kept him abroad for 10 of his 35 years and two thirds of his adult life, a career pattern that was quite unusual among the more important Chinese Communist leaders. During these many years abroad Wang had learned Japanese, French, and Russian, and another Communist who was imprisoned with Wang in the thirties (see below) recalled that though he knew very little English he studied the language while in prison.

Wang returned to China in mid-1931, going first to Kiangsi where Mao Tse-tung and others were establishing a rural base, and then to Inner Mongolia to “carry out armed struggles” in Shensi, Kansu, Ninghsia, and Suiyuan provinces, areas where the Communist movement was underdeveloped in contrast to the more revolutionary south. He was in Inner Mongolia only a few months when, disguised as a merchant and using the alias of Huang Ching-chai, he was arrested in Paotow shortly after having made contact with Ulanfu, a top CCP operative in the area. This took place in October 1931, and for the next five and a half years Wang remained in prison, first in Paotow, then in Kweisui, and fianlly in Taiyuan. It was not until the late spring of 1937 that he was released from prison and placed under a kind of house arrest, in part through the efforts of Po I-po and K'o Ch'ing- shih.

Politics

Like so many students of his generation, Wang claims to have been deeply influenced by the October Revolution in Russia and the May Fourth Movement in China. Therefore, immediately after the latter event erupted in May 1919 he returned home, going first to Kweichow. From there he went to Shansi in the company of his uncle, who was leading an “inspection mission” to Yen Hsi-shan’s famed “model province,” and then to Kiangsu to visit a model hsien. Wang then learned that he might take part in the work- and-study program in France, which was sponsored by Ts'ai Yuan-p'i and other progressive national leaders. Having borrowed money, he left Shanghai in the fall of 1919 for France. Although he did not know them at the time, Wang sailed on the same ship that took such famous latter-day Communists to France as Ts’ai Ho-sen, his sister Ts’ai Ch’ang, and Hsiang Ching-yii.

In the wake of the numerous disasters which beset the CCP throughout 1927, the Party underwent a period of self-examination that culminated in November when the Provisional Politburo (elected at the above-mentioned August 7 Emergency Conference) issued a resolution on Party discipline. The resolution reviewed the various “mistakes” that had been made in Shanghai and other cities, as well as the abortive Party-backed peasant uprisings. Moreover, the Politburo removed a number of Communist leaders (among them Mao Tse-tung) from various key posts and reprimanded others. Wang was among those reprimanded for his “mistakes in leadership.，M This action against Wang also may have been related to his close ties with the now officially discredited Ch’en Tu-hsiu. In any event, he was under a political cloud in the summer of 1928 when he was in Moscow to attend the CCP’s Sixth Congress. Wang failed to gain re-election to the Party's Central Committee, which soon came to be dominated by Li Li-san. Official Communist accounts of his career pointedly note that he was elected to the Fifth and Seventh Central Committees, but no mention is made of the Sixth, however, Chang Kuo-t'ao has claimed that Wang was elected an alternate member at this time.

In the middle years of the war period Wang also began to make periodic visits to the liaison mission that Chou En-lai headed in Chungking, the Nationalist capital, and after the spring of 1944 he spent most of his time there in negotiations with both the Nationalists and American diplomats. At times (in the absence of Chou En-lai), he was the ranking Communist official in Chungking, as in June 1945 when he called on American Ambassador Patrick Hurley to discuss the possibilities for KMT-CCP cooperation. The famous China "White Paper's" reveals the following paraphrase of Wang’s remarks to Hurley: “General Wang stated frankly that real communism in China under present conditions was impossible. The General stated, however, with perfect candor that the Party now supported democratic principles but only as a stepping stone to a future communistic state.

In August 1945 Wang accompanied Mao Tse- tung and Chou En-lai to Chungking to hold talks with Chiang Kai-shek, and in January 1946 he was a Communist delegate to the Political Consultative Conference, which was also held in Chungking. He remained there until April 8, 1946, when, on a flight from Chungking to Yenan, he was killed in a crash in Shansi that took the lives of Ch’in Pang-hsien, Yeh T’ing， Teng Fa as well as Wang’s uncle, Huang Ch’i-sheng.

Connections

Wang was survived by a seven-year-old son and by his wife, Li P’ei-chih, whom he had married in Honan in the fall of 1925. In the early thirties, when Wang was in prison, his wife worked with the Communists in Fukien.

Since 1949 she has held a number of fairly important posts in the CCP, the PRC national government, and the “mass” organizations. A member of the Executive Committee of the AllChina Federation of Democratic Women since 1949, she was a member of the Supreme People's Court from 1949 to 1954 and has been a deputy from her native Hopeh since the latter year. In the early fifties Li was deputy director of studies at Chinese People's University in Peking and has been a vice-president of the school since April 1959. She received her most important post when the CCP expanded the size of its Central Control Commission at the 10th Plenum in September 1962 and appointed her as an alternate member.

Spouse:

Li P’ei-chih