Background
Nothing is known about his background.
Nothing is known about his background.
Wei Heng was educated locally.
By January 1955 Wei had risen to second deputy secretary of the Shansi Party Committee and two years later (February 1957) was a secretary (still under First Secretary T'ao Lu-chia). In the interim he was also moving up the hierarchical ladder in the Shansi government channels. In April 1956 he was elected as a vicegovernor, by October of the same year he was acting governor in place of Governor Wang Shih-ying, he continued to serve as acting governor until he finally replaced Wang as governor in elections of December 1958. Thus by the late 1950Js Wei was probably the second- ranking official in the province after First Party Secretary T’ao Lu-chia (an alternate member of the Party Central Committee). Wei has been reported in the press with the frequency generally accorded an official of his stature, thus he has received press attention in connection with inspections in Shansi, celebrations normally attended by senior provincial leaders, and meetings over which he presided. Of interest is the fact that he accompanied three Politburo members (Chu Te, Ch'en I, and Tung Pi-wu) on inspections made in Shansi in September 1958, May- June 1959, and May I960, respectively.
One of the rare occasions when Wei left Shansi was in June-July 1960 when he led a delegation to the 29th Poznan International Fair in Poland, a somewhat unusual assignment for a provincial official. Another assignment which has presumably brought him to Peking from time to time has been as a Shansi deputy to the NPC. He served as a deputy for the Second NPC (1959-1964) and was then re-elected in October 1964 for the Third NPC, which held its first session in December 1964-January 1965. At the meeting in October 1964, Wei was re-elected as the Shansi governor.
In the spring of 1965 Shansi First Secretary T'ao Lu-chia was transferred to Peking to assume an important position in the field of economic planning. Not long after, in July 1965, Wei was identified as the successor to Tao in the post of the provincial Party first secretary. Probably because of this new assignment in the Shansi Party hierarchy, Wei relinquished the provincial governorship to Wang Ch'ien in December 1965. At the same time, however, he was elected a member of the Shansi Provincial People’s Council and chairman (replacing T’ao Lu-chia) of the Third Shansi Committee of the CPPCC.