Background
Wu was born into a large landlord family in Jung-hsien, located in southern Szechwan 25 miles west of Tzu-kung.
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Wu Yii-chang
Edit ProfileEducation
In 1892 he went to Chengtu with his older brother Wu Yung-k'un to study there, but returned home a few months later when their mother died. Wu records being influenced during this period by the reformers K’ang Yu-wei and Liang Ch’i-ch’ao, and during the famed “hundred days reform” of 1898, when he was studying at the Hsu-ch’uan Shu-yuan (Hsuchuan Academy) in Tzu-kung, he claims to have led a reform movement. Around the turn of the century Wu was tutoring the children of a landlord. In 1902 he went back to his studies, and in the same year took and failed the examinations which would have won him a place, under the imperial system, in the government bureaucracy.
At the end of 1902 Wu and his brother Yung-k'un decided to continue their studies in Japan. Leaving his wife and two infant children at home, Wu arrived in Tokyo in March 1903. Beginning that year, Japan trained more Chinese students than any other country, there were already 1,300 students there in 1904, and within two years the figure reached no less than 15,000. A great number of the participants in the 1911 Revolution were schooled in Japan, but Wu is one of the relatively few latter-day CCP members who studied there and he was there for a good deal longer than most of them.
Wu’s arrival in Japan coincided with an active “resist-Russia” campaign among Chinese students, a movement resulting from Russian penetration into Manchuria in the 1902-03 period. Two important organizations grew out of this movement, the Volunteer Corps to Oppose Russia (Chii-o i-yung-tui) and the related Society for the Education of a Militant People (Chiin-kuo-min chiao-yii hui). Wu claims to have joined both organizations soon after his arrival. During his first two and a half years in Japan, he studied at a school which offered a special course for Chinese students, but his brother returned home in early 1904. During these years he was influenced by the writings of Kotoku Shfisui, a well-known Japanese journalist who was a leading social democrat and later an anarchist. Wu joined the T’ung-meng hui upon its founding by Sun Yat-sen and Huang Hsing in 1905, and in the same year he was an executive secretary of the Association of Chinese Students studying in Japan.
Wu completed his initial schooling in 1906, and then went to the city of Okayama where he studied electrical engineering in the technology department of the Japanese government- sponsored Number Six Higher School, a preparatory school for college. In 1907 he and some Szechwanese colleagues founded Szu-ch'uan tsa-chih (Szechwan magazine), a weekly edited by Wu which had a more radical orientation than Min Pcio, the famous organ of the T'ung-meng hui. Because of these new responsibilities he took a year’s leave of absence from his school in Okayama. At this juncture, Wu was joined in Japan by his eldest brother, Wu Yung-hsun, who was a member in Szechwan of the Ko-lao-hui (Elder brother society), one of the most famous secret societies in China. Wu sponsored his brother for membership in the T’ung-meng hui. Wu claims to have played an important part, in the latter half of 1907, in establishing the Kung-chin-hui (Progressive association). This society, one of the subsidiary organizations of the T’ung-meng hui, was formed by merging several secret societies. A number of its leaders, including Sun Wu, later played key roles in the 1911 Revolution.
Career
Wu arrived in France in early 1914 and several months later enrolled in the Law University of Paris where he studied politics and economics. In 1912, previous to his departure for France, he had worked in Szechwan for the Society for Frugal Study in France, organized that year in China by several prominent Chinese, including anarchist Li Shih-tseng and educator Ts'ai Yuan- p'ei. The organization attempted to get financial help for students and established special schools to prepare them for their study in France. Yuan Shih-k'ai soon forced the dissolution of the society, but Li, Wu, and other society leaders persisted in their efforts and enlarged the program to include workers as well as students. This led to the famous work-and-study scheme, and to the formation in Paris in 1915 of the Society for Frugal Study by Means of Labor.
In the latter part of 1916 Wu left for home. He traveled through Russia with Ts’ai Yuan-p’ei and arrived in Peking in February 1917. There, continuing his efforts to encourage students to study in France, he set up a preparatory school for that purpose. One of the students, Chao Shih- yen, was instrumental in persuading Wu to join the CCP several years later. With the rapidly changing political fortunes so characteristic of that period, Wu found it expedient to flee Peking in mid-1917, and by late in the year he was back in Szechwan. The province was then controlled by Hsiung K’o-wu, with whom Wu was well acquainted from the 1911 Revolution period. During the next two years, apart from his continuing efforts to promote the work-and- study scheme, Wu worked in a liaison capacity between Hsiung and Sun Yat-sen and was involved in the endless maneuvers among the shifting warlord alliances. These tasks took him to several places in China, but after 1919 he spent most of his time in his native Szechwan.
The origins of Marxism and a Communist apparatus in Szechwan have not been studied in detail, and although Wu was one of the earlier Party members there, he was not the first. That distinction may belong to Li Shih-hsun, whom Wu memorialized in a poem published many years later. While still a teenager, Li organized chapters of the Socialist Youth League in the First Middle School and the Higher Normal Institute in Chengtu in 1921. He later attended Communist-dominated Shanghai University, took part in the Northern Expedition as a political officer under Chou Shih-ti, and participated in the Nanchang Uprising. After the CCP became an underground organization in 1927, he held top posts in Kiangsu, Chekiang, and Kwangtung. He was captured and executed on Hainan Island in 1931. By the time Wu Yii-chang arrived in Szechwan in late 1919, he claims to have been deeply impressed by the Russian Revolution (as well as by John Reed's classic Ten Days That Shook the World) and the May Fourth Movement. Wu has also described his active participation in, and subsequent disillusionment with, political activities aimed toward provincial self-government. This took place m 1920-21. In the meantime, in mid-1920, he assumed the presidency of the Chengtu Higher Normal Institute. The school, in Wu's account, soon became a center for progressive ideas, which were gaining adherents in many urban centers in China during that period.
Although undocumented, it is probable that Wu attended the Sixth CCP Congress, held in Moscow in mid-1928. From that same year until his graduation in 1930, Wu and his fellow elder Lin Po-ch'li attended Sun Yat-sen University, which was later renamed the Communist University of the Toilers of China. In an article written in 1960, Wu stated that in early 1929, after progressing in the study of Leninism,he and Lin were enrolled in a special class within the school. He further claimed, without elaboration, that they took part in the “practical struggle” against the Trotsky and Bukharin “elements.” Upon graduation, Wu and Lin went to Vladivostok where Wu taught language courses in the Far Eastern Industrial University, later known as the Far Eastern Normal University. (Another source calls this the Far Eastern Workers' Leninist School) Both men had a keen interest in language reform, and Wu taught his students about this, including a plan to Latinize Chinese characters. In September 1931 Wu and Lin attended the First Conference on the Latin- ization of Chinese in Vladivostok. (See also under Lin Po-ch'li.)
Wu was one of the speakers at the Seventh National Party Congress, which met in Yenan from April to June 1945, and he was also reelected to the Central Committee. Immediately after the war ended in August, Mao flew to Chungking for discussions with Chiang Kai- shek on a number of outstanding issues. From these talks came an agreement to convene the Political Consultative Conference in Chungking. Wu was a member of the top-level delegation of seven, led by Chou En-lai, sent to Chungking in mid-December 1945. A few weeks later, when the conference was convened (January 10, the same day a cease-fire agreement took effect between Nationalist and Communist armies), Wu was named to the special committee to draft the new national constitution. The conference had little substantive effect, and within a few months civil war was renewed throughout much of China. There remained, however, the facade of continuing negotiations, principally through the efforts of United States Envoy George C. Marshall, and thus Wu was able to remain in Nationalist-held China for more than a year. When the national capital was moved back to Nanking in the spring of 1946, Chou En-lai went there, but Wu remained in Chungking. By this time Wu was the secretary of the CCP Szechwan Provincial Committee, and he was assisted by his fellow Szechwanese Wang Wei-chou.
As a representative of the CCP, Wu attended the meetings of the CPPCC in September 1949. In the new central government, established on October 1, he became a member of the important Central People’s Government Council, which was chaired by Mao. He was also made a member of the Political and Legal Affairs Committee under Chou En-lai's Government Administration Council (the cabinet). Wu held both posts until the government was reorganized in the fall of 1954. In October he was elected a vice-chairman of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association, a post he retained to his death.
In December 1949 the government approved the establishment of the Chinese Peopled University, one of the most important in China. The university traces its origins back to the schools in Shensi and Shansi with which Wu had long been associated. It began operations in early 1950 and was formally inaugurated in September; Wu was the first and only president until his death. At least in its formative years, emphasis was placed on enrolling students who had been industrial “model” workers and “revolutionary cadres,” many of them of peasant origin with a few years of “practical revolutionary experience.” The early a decade later it was claimed that more than 3,000 teachers had been trained in Maixist-Leninist theories, and another 12,000 in financial, economic, political, and legal fields. By then the university had an enrollment of 7,000 regular and 7,200 correspondence students, and a faculty and staff of 2,000.
In August 1950 Wu was elected chairman of the China Educational Trade Union, and from 1953 he was an Executive Committee member of the parent organization, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions. He continued in both positions until his death. Also in August 1950, Wu chaired a nationwide conference of scientists, and from this came the establishment of two scientific organizations. One, the All-China Federation of Scientific Societies, was the parent body for professional societies (for example, chemistry and physics). The other, the All-China Association for the Dissemination of Scientific and Technical Knowledge, was set up to spread rather elementary technological information on a wide-scale basis. (See under Li Szu-kuang and Liang Hsi, the respective chairmen.) Wu was named honorary chairman of both organizations and continued to be so until September 1958 when they were merged to form the China Scientific and Technical Association.
Wu died in Peking on December 12, 1966, in his 88th year. He was given the press coverage and memorial services befitting his long revolutionary career. He was apparently survived by a daughter and son, both of whom were born around the turn of the century. His son, an electrical engineer, studied in France and worked in a Nationalist factory during the Sino-Japanese War.
Politics
He was particularly active in both the KMT and the CCP during the period of their collaboration in the mid-twenties. He spent most of the period from 1927 to 1938 in the USSR, but for a brief period he edited a newspaper in France. During the Sino-Japanese War he was one of the key educators in Yenan, a role in which he continued after the establishment of the PRC in 1949. He was the major figure in the program to reform the Chinese written language. Wu was elected to the CCP Central Committee in 1938, and re-elected in 1945 and 1956. He and his colleagues Lin Po-ch'li, Tung Pi-wu, Hsu T’e-li, and Hsieh Chueh-tsai are often referred to as the “five elders”
The origins of Marxism and a Communist apparatus in Szechwan have not been studied in detail, and although Wu was one of the earlier Party members there, he was not the first. That distinction may belong to Li Shih-hsun, whom Wu memorialized in a poem published many years later. While still a teenager, Li organized chapters of the Socialist Youth League in the First Middle School and the Higher Normal Institute in Chengtu in 1921. He later attended Communist-dominated Shanghai University, took part in the Northern Expedition as a political officer under Chou Shih-ti, and participated in the Nanchang Uprising. After the CCP became an underground organization in 1927, he held top posts in Kiangsu, Chekiang, and Kwangtung. He was captured and executed on Hainan Island in 1931. By the time Wu Yii- chang arrived in Szechwan in late 1919, he claims to have been deeply impressed by the Russian Revolution (as well as by John Reed's classic Ten Days That Shook the World) and the May Fourth Movement. Wu has also described his active participation in, and subsequent disillusionment with, political activities aimed toward provincial self-government. This took place m 1920-21. In the meantime, in mid-1920, he assumed the presidency of the Chengtu Higher Normal Institute. The school, in Wu's account, soon became a center for progressive ideas, which were gaining adherents in many urban centers in China during that period.
Membership
In July 1951 Wu was named to the Administrative Committee of the newly founded Central Political and Legal Cadres Academy (sec under P'eng Chen). He was selected in early 1953 to serve on a committee to draft the election law, one of the first steps in preparation for the convocation of the NPC in 1954. Wu was elected from his native Szechwan to the First NPC, which held its inaugural session in September 1954. He was elected a member of the NPC Standing Committee and was re-elected in April 1959 and January 1965 to the Second and Third NPC Standing Committees.
In the meantime, Wu had received some new appointments. From the end of 1954 to April 1959, as a representative of the CCP, he was a member of the Second National Committee of the CPPCC. In May 1955 he was made a member of the newly established Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences under the Academy of Sciences, and in October he was made a member of the Academy’s Science Awards Committee. As already noted, Wu was among the speakers at the Eighth Party Congress in September 1956; at the close of the congress he was again re-elected a member of the CCP Central Committee. Exactly a year later he was appointed president of the Institute of Socialism, which formally opened in October 1956.
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Born
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Died
December 12, 1966 (aged 88) -
Nationality
China -
Ethnicity
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Political Party
Chinese Communist Party
Education
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1906
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1914