Background
A native of Hopeh province, he was born in either Feng-jun (a small town near Tang-shan) or Paoting. He has spent a considerable part of his life in the vicinity of the important Hopeh cities of T’ang-shan, Tientsin, Paoting, and Peking.
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Wu Te
Edit ProfileEducation
He reportedly studied at Peking National University, presumably in the late twenties or early thirties. Before the Sino-Japanese War, Wu worked as a labor organizer in the mines of eastern Hopeh.
Career
During the war he entered the Communist-supported labor movement and worked in the border area between the provinces of Hopeh, Chahar, Jehol, and Liaoning. Subsequently, he apparently made contact with the troops of a Manchurian military leader, Lii Cheng-ts'ao, whose troops had been decimated while fighting the Japanese along the Peking-Hankow Railroad in 1937. In the winter of 1937-38 Lii and his guerrillas began to cooperate with the Communists, and Communist political officers were sent to Lii's base to help organize the central Hopeh plains (see under Lii Cheng-ts'ao). Sometime prior to 1940 Wu was reported to be serving as a regimental political commissar with Lii's army. Later he was identified as the secretary of the Political Department of the Shansi-Chahar- Hopeh (Chin-Ch’a-Chi) Border Region, to which the central Hopeh base belonged. Described as the “leading cadre responsible for Party work in eastern Hopeh/ Wu went to Yenan in the early fall of 1940 to report on his work to Mao Tse-tung.
There is no further mention of Wu’s activity until 1948 when he was a leader of the labor movement in the Hopeh-Chahar-Jehol-Liaoning area; he was identified in this capacity when he became a member of the Preparatory Committee for the Sixth National Congress of the All China Labor Federation (ACFL), which met in Harbin in August 1948. At this same time he was also identified as a “former” member of the North China Staff Office of the Federation of Labor. The Congress elected him to the ACFL Executive Committee where he served until the federation held its Seventh Congress in May 1953.
Four months after the Harbin labor congress, Tang-shan in east Hopeh fell to the advancing Communist armies (December 1948). Wu became the secretary of its municipal Party Committee. When the central government was established in October 1949 he relinquished this post for a national government portfolio as a viceminister of the Ministry of Fuel Industry, headed by Ch'in Yii. Wu held the post for less than a year, because by mid-1950 he had already assumed important responsibilities in local administration that took him away from Peking.
As of mid-1950 he was serving as the ranking secretary of the Pingyuan Provincial Party Committee, a member of the Pingyuan Provincial Peopled Government, and a vice-chairman of the Government’s Finance and Economics Committee. Pingyuan was created by the Communists in August 1949 out of territories in the wartime Shansi-Honan-Hopeh Border Region plus a large segment of Shantung. It was dissolved in November 1952 at which time the old provincial boundaries were approximately restored. However, by August 1952, Wu had been transferred to Tientsin where he remained for the next four years. During this time he apparently made a reputation for himself, taking an active part in many phases of Tientsin’s political life as the following assignments indicate.
After arriving in Kirin, in his capacity as the chief Party representative there, Wu was host to a number of important foreign visitors, especially Koreans. He has also frequently taken such leading Party officials as Chou En-lai, Tung Pi-wu, and Lin Feng on tours to inspect the province. Wu’s only known trip abroad took place in October-November 1963 when he was a member of a Party delegation to North Korea, led by the first secretary of the Party's Northeast Bureau, Sung Jen-ch'iung. The purpose of this visit was not revealed in the official releases. In this same month (October 1963) Wu was first identified as one of the secretaries of the CCP Northeast Bureau.
Wu remained in Kirin until mid-1966 when, in the early stages of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, he was transferred to Peking to become second secretary of the Peking CCP Committee and acting mayor of the city, thereby replacing Liu Jen in the former post and P'eng Chen in the latter.
Membership
During the 1953-54 period Wu was also a member of the North China Administrative Committee, the regional government for north China, and from 1954 to 1959 he represented Tientsin in the First NPC. However, he was not re-elected to the Second NPC, which opened in April 1959.
In September 1956 Wu was elected an alternate member of the Party Central Committee at the CCP’s Eighth National Congress. He submitted a written speech to the Congress entitled A Manifestation of Contradictions with Industrial Construction. One of the few other reports or articles by Wu appeared in the JMJP (May 24, 1958) under the title Liberation of Thought in Preparation for the Technological Revolution.
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Born
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Nationality
China -
Ethnicity
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Political Party
Chinese Communist Party
Career
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1940
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1948
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1949
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1963
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1966