Wang Ts’ung-wu was a veteran specialist in Party organizational and control work. A member of the Party since the mid-twenties, Wang spent most of his early Party career in north China. Elected an alternate member of the Party Central Committee in 1945, he was promoted to full membership in 1956. He has also been a deputy secretary of the Party's Central Control Commission since 1956.
Background
Wang was born in the village of Hou-hua, Nei-huang hsien. Nei-huang is a rural community in northeast Honan, located some 25 miles southeast of the industrial city of An-yang and not far from the borders of Hopeh and Shantung. His family was so poor that they had to send him to beg along with his mother and sister.
Education
In the early twenties he came into contact with the Communist movement through a local organization known as the Society of Poor People, supported by the CCP and working to bring relief to the needy. His sister, Wang Hsien-jung, now acclaimed by the Communists as a “revolutionary mother,” joined the society, and presumably Wang did too. A CCP member by 1925, he was occupied from that year to 1927 organizing Party branches among peasants and salt workers in towns and villages just to the east of his native Nei-huang. By 1929 Wang was head of the Party underground in Nei-huang.
Between 1929 and 1949 there is a gap in detailed information about Wang’s career, and the scattered references to his activities do not mention specific dates. At some time after 1929 he went to the Soviet Union where he graduated from the University of the Toilers of China, the successor to Sun Yat-sen University.
Career
After returning home, Wang served with the Red Army as a political officer, rising from political commissar at the division level, to the army, and finally to the army corps level. During the middle years of the Sino-Japanese War worked in Yenan under Wang Jo-fei in an investigation of land policies, this led to the adoption in early 1942 of a new agrarian program, the significance of which is discussed in the biography of Liu Hsiu-feng. Later, he became director of the Organization Department of the Par-ty's Central Plains Bureau, responsible for the area centering around the territory of the old Oyliwan Soviet, which was located on the borders of Hupeh, Honan, and Anhwei. During the war he was also secretary of a Party district committee in the Hopeh-Shantung-Honan Border Region (located to the north of the Central Plains area), as well as a CCP official in the larger Shansi-Hopeh-Shantung-Honan (Chin- Chi-Lu-Yu) Border Region (see under Yang Hsiu-feng).
Wang's work as a Party organizer and underground worker was given recognition at the Party’s Seventh National Congress, held in Yenan in April-June 1945, when he was elected an alternate member of the Central Committee. By March 1946 he was director of the Organization Department of the Chin-Chi-Lu-YU Party Committee he was identified in this post when he attended a session of the Chin-Chi-Lu-Yii Assembly, held in Han-tan, southwest Hopeh. By the late forties he had been promoted to director of the Organization Department of the Party's North China Bureau, a post he held until the Bureau was dissolved in 1954. He received his first governmental post in December 1951 when he was named to membership on the newly created North China Administrative Committee (NCAC). Responsible for the provinces of Hopeh, Pingyuan, Suiyuan, Shansi, and Chahar, the NCAC was chaired by Liu Lan-fao, another veteran of Party work in north China. In 1953-54 Wang also chaired the NCAC’s People’s Supervision Committee, a body that carried out in the government some of the supervisory tasks performed for and within the Party by the Organization Department. He held these posts in the NCAC until August 1954, just before the creation of the constitutional government, which absorbed the NCAC into the national bureaucracy.
Wang’s work with the NCAC was clearly less important than his activities on behalf of the Party's North China Bureau. As already noted, he headed the Bureau’s Organization Department. In addition, from 1951 to 1954 he was head of both the Rural Work Department and the Discipline Inspection Committee. The 1945 Party Constitution had provided for the establishment of both central and local Control Commissions, but these were not set up at the time, and instead less authoritative Discipline Inspections Committees were formed, such as the one headed by Wang. The latter were abolished in 1955 when Control Commissions were finally instituted in the wake of the Kao Kang purge. Wang rose to a still higher position in the North China Bureau by 1953 when he was identified as second deputy secretary, and in the following month he became first deputy secretary, a post that placed him under three more senior secretaries, Po I-po, Nieh Jung-chen, and Liu Lan-fao.
When the CCP met for its Eighth National Congress in September 1956, Wang was promoted to full membership on the Central Committee. The day after the Congress closed, at the First Plenum of the new Central Committee, he was elected a member and one of the five deputy secretaries of the Party Control Commission, headed by Tung Pi-wu. In 1958 Wang made two of his relatively few public appearances, both in connection with control and supervision work, he spoke at the Seventh National Supervision Work Conference sponsored by the Ministry of Supervision (February- March) and at the Party's Third National Control Conference (March). He received a new assignment by September 1961 when he was identified as president of the Party’s Higher Party School, the principal institute for the training of high-ranking Party members. He held this position until the fall of 1962 or possibly the spring of 1963. Wang’s predecessor was Yang Hsien-chen, who was last identified in the post in the spring of 1959, the change in the presidency may have resulted from Yang’s political difficulties, which were made public in 1963. It may be noteworthy that though Yang had had long years of theoretical training (mainly in the Soviet Union), Wang had a very different background, his training having been almost entirely in Party organization and control work. After a little over a year as president, Wang was in turn replaced by the politically more important Lin Feng Wang was last identified in the presidency in October 1962, and by at least May 1963 Lin had assumed the position.
Politics
Possibly in connection with his Discipline Inspection Committee Work, Wang made a number of trips in the early fifties on so-called comfort missions, essentially entertainment and inspection missions sent out to a given area or battle front. In August 1951 he was a deputy leader of one such mission to the old liberated areas” in the former Chin-Chi-Lu-Yii region. In the same capacity in January 1953 he visited units of the “Chinese People’s Volunteers,” the Chinese forces then fighting in Korea. In both February and July 1954 he performed the same function in visiting PLA units stationed in China.
Wang has represented the CCP in the CPPCC since the Second National Committee was formed in December 1954. He has been both a National Committee and Standing Committee member of the Second CPPCC (1954-1959) the Third CPPCC (1959-1964), and was reelected to the Fourth CPPCC, which held its initial session in December 1964-January 1965. In April-May 1956 he made a second trip to North Korea, this time as a member of Nieh Jung-chen's delegation, which attended the Third Congress of the Korean Workers’ (Communist) Party. He was abroad again in November-December 1959 as a member of T'en Chen-lin delegation to the Seventh Congress of the Hungarian Socialist Workers' (Communist) Party.
Since relinquishing the presidency of the Party School, Wang has apparently concentrated on international Party liaison work. Virtually every appearance he has made in recent years has been associated with foreign Communist Party leaders, as in March 1964 when I. G. Maurer, a member of the Rumanian Politburo, visited China. Wang has not been a frequent contributor to the Party press, although he did write an article entitled 44The Solidarity and Discipline of the Party” for the December 16, 1959, issue of Hung-ch’i (Red flag), the Party’s leading journal.