Background
Wang was born in Liu-yang hsien, Hunan, an important center of revolutionary activities in the twenties.
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Wang Shou-tao
Edit Profilecommunication specialist CCP member
Education
Born into a poor peasant family, as a youth Wang sold firewood and tended the family's only ox. He told Edgar Snow that because firewood was available only on places owned by landlords, he and his brother were forced to steal it. One day they were caught and his brother was imprisoned by the landlord, an act that embittered Wang. He did not attend primary school until the age of nine or ten, but poverty soon forced him to leave. Wang was then apprenticed to a maker of firecrackers by an uncle who had be come his guardian when his family had “moved to a distant place.” After half a year in this work, his uncle put him back in school, this time under an uold-style Chinese teacher,with whom he studied for a year. This same teacher helped Wang enter a higher primary school.
Although still a young teenager, Wang claimed that under the influence of the May Fourth Movement (beginning in 1919) he agitated for education for the masses and resistance to Japanese aggression in China. At this juncture, Wang's father returned to Liu-yang and insisted that the young Wang prepare for a wedding that his father had arranged years earlier. Wang refused and quarreled with his father, and eventually the match was broken off. Then, with help from a teacher and relatives, Wang enrolled (1922) in a middle school in Changsha, the Hunan capital and a center of revolutionary thought in the twenties. Wang has written that “progressive” periodicals uawakened in me a strong desire to help to save the motherland.” Still later, he entered a state agricultural school in Changsha and while there became a member of the Socialist Youth League (1924).
Wang was expelled from school for writing a manifesto attacking school and government authorities, after which he returned to his native Liu-yang. Influenced by articles in Chung-kuo chHng-nien (China youth), one of the most important journals of that period, Wang set about organizing peasant groups in Hunan. According to his account, by then he “understood the nature of the class struggle.” Fearing arrest for his activities, he fled to Canton, traveling via Shanghai where he was briefly detained by British police for passing a counterfeit silver dollar. Once in Canton (1925), he enrolled in the Peasant Movement Training Institute and in the same year joined the CCP. (In Wang’s own account, he asserts that he went to Canton in 1926 and studied at the Institute from May to September, but this appears to be a falsification designed to place him at the school when Mao Tse-tung was the director, in any case, it differs from the accounts he gave to Edgar Snow ten years after he had been there.) While at the Institute, Wang studied under such top Communists as P?eng P'ai, Mao, Chou En-lai, Wu Yu-chang, Ch’ii Ch’iu-pai, Teng Chung-hsia, and Yun Tai-ying. Prior to graduation, Wang’s class spent two weeks under P’eng P’ai’s direction in Hai-feng, Kwangtung, gaining practical experience in the peasant movement in the area where P’eng’s Communist leadership had been quite successful.
Career
Until the spring of 1927 the Communists had cooperated with the KMT during the course of the Northern Expedition, but then in the late spring and early summer the KMT carried out a number of anti-Communist actions. As a consequence, Wang was forced to flee southward from Ch'i-yang to find refuge. He remained in hiding for nearly half a year, during which he first read the Communist Manifesto and a condensation of Marx's Das Kapital. Toward the end of 1927 he returned to his native Liu-yang to help organize peasant uprisings. A short period before this Mao Tse-tung had conducted similar operations during the famous Autumn Harvest Uprisings, only to be driven away a short time later. Wang, however, in his capacity as secretary of the CCP Liu-yang hsien Committee, remained in this area where, in mid- 1928, P’eng Te-huai and Huang Kung-lueh staged the P’ing-chiang Uprising (not far north of Liu-yang) and established the Fifth Red Army. P’eng was soon forced to move most of his troops southward, but Huang Kung-lueh remained in the area which was soon designated by the Communists as the Hunan-Hupeh-Kiang-si Border Region. In 1928 Wang became secretary of the CCP organization in the area, known as the Hunan-Hupeh-Kiangsi Special Committee and in the next year, when a “soviet government” was formed there, he was made a member of the government committee.
In early 1936, soon after the arrival of the Long March forces in north Shensi, the Communists undertook a brief campaign into neighboring Shansi. This foray into Shansi (described at further length in the biography of Liu Chih-tan) gained for the Communists new recruits for their military forces and badly needed supplies. At this time Wang was appointed director of the Political Department of the 15th Red Army, which was commanded by Hsu Hai-tung. After the westward withdrawal from Shansi in the spring of 1936, the 15th Corps maintained its headquarters in Yu-wang, then in Kansu, but now in Ninghsia. Wang was in Yii-wang when he was interviewed in mid-1936 by Edgar Snow.
At about the time of the outbreak of war in 1937, Wang went to Yenan to be secretary-general to Chang Wen-t'ien, then general secretary of the CCP Central Committee. Apparently this assignment was of short duration, for beginning in 1938 he taught at three of the major Party schools in Yenan the Marx-Lenin Institute, the Central Party School, and the Central Research Institute. According to one source (allegedly quoting an official document), Wang was praised for his activities during these years: “Particularly during the literary purge of 1942, Wang contributed much to the struggle against Wang Shih-wei.’’ The latter, a Moscow-trained CCP member and author-translator, was one of the major victims during the Mao-led cheng-feng (rectification) movement of 1942. Wang himself has written that during the period from 1941 to the fall of 1944 he worked directly under his old colleague Jen Pi-shih in the Party Center.
Wang presumably accompanied Lin Piao’s forces as they pushed southward into China proper over the winter of 1948-49, first taking Tientsin and Peking and then moving into the Yangtze Valley area. He remained with these forces until they “peacefully liberated” Hunan in August 1949. For the next three years Wang worked in Hunan and its capital city, Changsha, where he was one of the top leaders. He became a vice-chairman of the Changsha Military Control Commission in August 1949 under Hsiao Ching-kuang who, like Wang, was also a Central Committee alternate. By the end of 1949 Wang was identified as the first deputy secretary of the Hunan CCP Committee. Here he served under Huang K’o-ch’eng still another alternate member of the Party Central Committee. During Huang’s absences in 1950 and 1951, Wang served on occasion as the acting Hunan secretary. He was also prominent in the Hunan government structure, serving as governor from March 1950 until early 1952 when he was transferred to Peking (see below). In addition to the gubernatorial post, he headed the Hunan Finance and Economics Committee briefly in mid-1950 but was then demoted to a vice-chairmanship to give way to the more politically senior Huang K'i-ch'ing, who assumed the chairmanship in September 1950. In addition, Wang also chaired the Hunan government’s Nationalities Affairs Committee from November 1951 to March 1952. Like most officials of his stature, Wang was affiliated with the regional Central-South Military and Administrative Committee (CSMAC), chaired by Lin Piao, headquartered in Wuhan, and responsible for the six provinces of Honan, Hupeh, Hunan, Kiangsi, Kwangtung, and Kwangsi. Wang was a member of the CSMAC from its inauguration in February 1950.
From 1952 to 1954, Wang spoke before several communications conferences, as in August 1952 when he addressed a nationwide meeting. He also led a scientific and technical delegation abroad from July to September 1954; in July he signed a scientific and technical cooperation agreement with the Poles and then spent a month in the USSR, presumably inspecting Soviet communications facilities. In September-October 1954 the central government was reorganized; Wang lost his post in the Communications Ministry, but immediately afterwards (October) he was appointed to head the newly created Sixth Staff Office of the State Council. In effect, this was a promotion, for the Staff Office was responsible for coordinating the work of all central government agencies concerned with rail, highway, and water communications. He remained in this assignment for almost five years until, during another reorganization, the Sixth Staff Office was merged with two others into the Industry and Communications Office (September 1959) and placed under the directorship of economic specialist Li Fu-ch'un.
From December 1954 to April 1959, Wang was a CCP representative on the CPPCC's Second National Committee (as well as a Standing Committee member), but the post was largely nominal and most of his efforts continued to be directed toward technical and industrial matters. Having already negotiated with the Poles over technical questions in 1954, Wang headed the Chinese side in talks held in Peking in May 1955 by the Joint Commission for Sino-Polish Scientific and Technical Cooperation, and then from March 1956 to May 1957 he was a member of Ch'en Fs Scientific Planning Commission, established to implement a 12-year scientific program launched in early 1956.
After more than five years in the post, Wang turned over the Communications Ministry portfolio to Sun Ta-kuang, one of his deputies, in July 1964. The reason for his removal was revealed a few days later when he was identified as a secretary of the Party's Central-South Bureau in Canton. Familiar with the area from his service there in the early fifties, Wang worked under First Secretary T’ao Chu. By the mid-sixties, the Central-South Bureau seemed to be staffed with more senior Party leaders than any of the five other regional bureaus. Amang these are Central Committee members Ch’en Yii and Wu Chih-p’u and alternates Wang Jen-chung and Huang Yung- sheng. It is possible, though undocumented, that Wang was sent to this region as a communications specialist, in view of the intensification of the nearby Vietnam war.
Although Wang’s responsibilities are mainly in the south, he holds two positions in the national administration (apart from his Party Central Committee membership). As already described, he was elected as a Kwangtung deputy to the Third NPC, which held its first session in December 1964-January 1965. He was also named as a representative of CCP to the Fourth National Committee of the CPPCC, which held its initial session concurrently with the NPC meetings. At the close of the CPPCC meetings in January 1965, he was named as a member of its Standing Committee.
Politics
He became an alternate member of the Party Central Committee in 1945 and then served in Manchuria during the late forties. In the early years of the PRC he was a top Party official in Hunan and then in the 12-year period from 1952 to 1964 he was one of the central government's leading specialists in communications and transport work, heading the Communications Ministry for five of these years. Elected a full member of the Party Central Committee in 1956 Wang has been a secretary of the Party^ Central-South Bureau since 1964.
In mid-1930, under the direction of the Li Li-san leadership, the Communists made their ill-fated attempts to capture key central China cities. Wang, who had been operating in areas not far from Changsha, the Hunan capital, was assigned to the forces led by P’eng Te-huai, which assaulted Changsha at the end of July and held it for a few days. With the capture of Changsha, Li Li-san was made chairman of the so-called Hunan Provincial Soviet Government. However, because Li never arrived, Wang substituted for him as the chairman. When the Communists were driven from the city, Wang’s wife, who had accompanied him to Changsha to work among the textile workers, was arrested and executed. Her husband narrowly escaped and fled to Shanghai where he worked in the CCP underground, this probably brought him into close contact with Party leaders Li Ki-nung, Ch’en Keng and K’o Ch’ing-shih, all of whom were then active in the underground. During his time in Shanghai Wang claims that he attended a CCP-organized “secret training class” where Party leader Jen Pi-shih gave lectures on Party organizational methods.
Membership
Although Wang had not been elected to the First NPC when it was established in 1954, he had spoken before the legislature in his capacity as a government administrator, as in June 1956 when he addressed the NPC on the subject of transport and telecommunications. But then, to replace a deceased NPC deputy, he was named to represent Shensi in time for the third session of the NPC in June-July 1957. He subsequently served as a deputy from Shantung to the Second NPC (1959-1964) and from Kwangtung to the Third NPC, which opened in December 1964. In July 1957 he was also named as a member of the Central Relief Committee, formed in response to charges in the national press that famine relief had been mismanaged.
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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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1922
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1925
Career
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1937
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1937
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1949
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1954 - 1959