Background
Wu was born about 1908 in Wuchang, the important port on the Yangtze River.
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Wu Hsiu-ch’tian
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A veteran Red Army officer, Wu Hsiu-ch’tian worked in the Foreign Ministry before becoming Peking’s first ambassador to Yugoslavia. Since the mid-fifties he has devoted his time almost exclusively to the international Communist movement, and from 1960 has been in the forefront of the ideological dispute with the Soviet Union.
Education
Wu graduated from a middle school in Wuhan and then went to the Soviet Union for further study, remaining there from 1926 to 1931. Chang Kuo-fao, who was in Russia at the same time and saw Wu frequently, characterizes him as a uman with ability and ambition a dedicated and disciplined Communist.
Within a year of his arrival in Moscow Wu joined the CCP. While in the USSR he attended Sun Yat- sen (Chung-shan) University, a school that attracted a large number of Chinese youths in the mid-twenties, and also studied at a Red Army artillery school. At the latter he acted as an interpreter for Chinese colleagues whose Russian was not as fluent as his. (Wu is also said to have a limited command of English.) It is probable that Wu attended the Sixth National Congress of the CCP, which was held in Moscow in mid-1928 because of repression of the CCP in China following the 1927 split with the KMT.
Career
When Wu returned to China in 1931 he taught briefly at Futan University in Shanghai and then made his way to the Kiangsi base where the Chinese Soviet Republic headed by Mao Tse- tung was established in November of that year. Wu was assigned to the army, serving successively as a battalion and regimental commander. In 1932 he was chief-of-staff of the Red Army Headquarters in Kiangsi, and when the Communists opened the Red Army Military Academy near Juichin in 1933, Wu served as an instructor. At the same time he was able to put his Russian to use by acting as a translator in the office of the Comintern, which had a representative in the Chinese Soviet area. Toward the end of the Kiangsi Soviet period Wu became a member of P’eng Te-huai’s Third Army Corps, and as chief-of-staff of his force he made the Long March (1934-35).
P’eng’s force was an important element in the First Front Army, commanded by Chu Te and Mao Tse-tung, which led the Long March from Kiangsi to the northwest. In mid-1935, when the First Front Army rendezvoused in western Szechwan with Chang Kuo-t’ao’s Fourth Front Army, which had come from its base in Szechwan, a disagreement arose between Mao and Chang. Consequently, the two leaders separated, Chu Te remained with Chang while Mao and his forces, including P’eng’s Third Army Corps, continued north to Shensi. Wu remained Third Corps chief-of-staff (although some reports state that he was deputy chief-of-staff). After arriving in north Shensi he is reported to have been briefly assigned to the 15th Army Corps (see under Hsu Hai-tung), which was already operating in north Shensi when Mao’s army arrived there in the fall of 1935. In December 1936 the Communists moved their north Shensi capital to Yenan and Wu was put in charge of a reception center which was subordinate to the Party's United Front Work Department. In 1936 Wu also became the director of the Party's Foreign Affairs Department, although it is not known how long he held this position.
From 1938 to 1939 Wu was secretary-general of the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia (Shen-Kan-Ning) Border Region Government. In this capacity he served under Lin Po-ch'ii, the chairman of the government. At some time in 1939 Wu was transferred to Lanchow, the Kansu capital, where he became director of the Communists' Eighth Route Army Office which was maintained for liaison with the KMT. He is reported to have returned to Yenan in 1940, but nothing further was heard of his activity until the end of the Sino-Japanese War.
The Northeast People’s Government (NEPG) was formed in Mukden (Shenyang) in August 1949 under Kao Kang, just one month prior to the establishment of the central government in Peking. Wu was among those originally elected to membership on the NEPG Council, but almost immediately afterwards he was transferred to Peking to work in the Foreign Ministry, where he was to remain for the next several years. Probably because of his experience in the Soviet Union and his knowledge of Russian, Wu was assigned (December 1949) to head the Foreign Ministry's Soviet Union and East European Affairs Department, which, during the first years of the PRC, was by far the most active of the ministry’s foreign desks. From this time onward, Wu has devoted himself almost exclusively to the field of international relations. His first important assignment came in January 1950 when he accompanied Chou En-lai to Moscow to join Mao Tse-tung (who had arrived a month earlier) for the negotiations that led to the signing by Chou on February 14, 1950, of the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance, the cornerstone of Sino- Soviet relations for the next decade. Wu went in the company of other such important Communists as Li Fu-ch’un and Yeh Chi-chuang. Mao, Chou and most of the delegation left for home in mid-February, but Wu remained behind to take part in further negotiations led by Minister of Trade Yeh Chi-chuang. These talks finally led to the signing of still further agreements in April, after which Yeh and Wu returned home.
Following the lead of the Russians in their efforts to improve relations with the Yugoslavs, the Chinese and Yugoslav ambassadors in Moscow began negotiations in late 1954 to establish formal diplomatic relations. (In October 1949 the Chinese had ignored the offer by the Yugoslavs to establish diplomatic ties.) Then, on January 10, 1955, the PRC and Yugoslavia agreed to establish relations at the ambassadorial level. In March Wu was removed as a vice-minister of Foreign Affairs and named as Peking's first (and only) ambassador to Belgrade. He arrived in the Yugoslav capital in May 1955 at almost the same moment that Soviet leaders Khrushchev and Bulganin arrived there in an attempt to secure a rapprochement with Tito.
Wu's activities as one of Peking’s top international Communist Party experts is well-illustrated by his activity in the six-year period from 1959 to 1964 when he led or was a member of delegations to 11 different countries (including three trips to Moscow and two to Pyongyang). All but one of the important visits were to the Communist bloc, the one exception occurring in March-April 1959 when he accompanied Wang Chia-hsiang to London for the 26th Congress of the British Communist Party, immediately after he had accompanied Marshal Chu Te to the Third Congress of the Polish Communist Party in Warsaw (March 1959). He was a member of two historic delegations in 1960，the first led by Politburo alternate K’ang Sheng to meetings of the Warsaw Treaty Political Consultative Committee in Moscow (February) and the second led by Politburo member P’eng Chen to the Third Rumanian Workers’ (Communist) Party Congress in Bucharest (June). At the former, the Sino-Soviet rift came partially into the open, and then in Bucharest P’eng Chen and Nikita Khrushchev openly traded hostile remarks as the ideological conflict moved into high gear (see under K’ang Sheng and P'eng Chen). In August 1960, a few weeks before Castro recognized the Peking government (and while a Chinese Nationalist embassy still existed in Havana), Wu led a CCP delegation to the Eighth Congress of the Cuban Peopled Socialist Party, as of that time, he was one of the very few Chinese Communist leaders who had visited Castro’s Cuba.
Between these many trips abroad and directly in connection with them, Wu was reported with great regularity in Peking where he was a participant in the talks with nearly every foreign Communist party delegation to visit Peking. Particularly in the post-1960 period, as the Russians and Chinese jockeyed for supremacy in the Communist world, the number of such Communist party delegations visiting both Moscow and Peking grew to large proportions. Apart from his post in the Party center, the only other position that Wu is known to hold is with the quasilegislative and largely impotent CPPCC. As a Party representative, Wu was named to the Third National Committee of the CPPCC, and at the close of the first session (April 1959) he was named to the Standing Committee. He was renamed to both posts in the CPPCC’s Fourth National Committee, the first session of which closed in January 1965.
Politics
Wu was the leader of a landmark delegation in the history of the PRC, when, in November 1950, he led a group to New York to present the Chinese case before the United Nations regarding the outbreak of the Korean War and the entry of Chinese troops into that conflict (which occurred just one month before he arrived in New York). Wu made a long and vitriolic attack on the United States, demanding that the Security Council condemn the United States and further demanding the withdrawal of the United States from both Korea and Taiwan. Although no actions were taken on Wu’s demands, the delegation is unique in that it is the only Chinese Communist group to have gone to the United States in the history of the PRC. Wu returned to Peking via London, Prague, and Moscow, arriving home on December 30, 1950, just four days after he had officially been appointed as a vice-minister of Foreign Affairs. At the same time, he continued to head the Soviet Union and East European Affairs Department until July 1952. In April 1951, not long after his return, he was named to the second board of directors of the Chinese People's Institute of Foreign Affairs, holding this post until July 1955 when the third board was formed (at which time Wu was abroad).
Throughout the remainder of the early fifties, Wu continued to be mainly concerned with bloc affairs, frequently participating in negotiations with other Communist countries and serving as a host for visiting bloc delegations in China. He also made two more trips abroad, serving as a member of Nieh Jung-chen’s delegation that attended the funeral of Mongolian Party leader Choibalsan in February 1952, and also as a member of Chou En-lai’s delegation to the funeral ceremonies for Stalin in March 1953. In 1954 he was elected as a Szechwan deputy to the First NPC; this was one of Wu’s few assignments not directly related to foreign affairs, but even this became largely nominal when he was sent abroad in the spring of 1955. In December 1954, he attended the second national conference of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association as a representative of the CCP, but he was not elected to a permanent post and does not seem to have been active in the organization.
Wu's role as a senior international Party liaison official serves as a useful barometer for gauging Chinese Communist policies. Thus, in the earliest days of the PRC, Wu was spokesman at the United Nations for Peking’s unyielding posture. In the mid-fifties, during the relatively “soft” period of Chinese Communist foreign policy, it was Wu who represented Peking in the rapprochement with the Yugoslavs. And, when the pendulum swung to a tougher and more strident foreign policy, Wu was among those in the forefront as a major CCP spokesman.
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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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1926
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1928
Career
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1932
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1938 - 1939
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1949
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1959