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Yen Hung-yen
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A veteran of Communist-led guerrilla warfare in Shensi from the mid-1920’s, Yen Hung-yen remained in this area until the postwar period when he was a political officer with troops that won important victories in north-central and southwest China in the late forties. He served as a senior Communist political and military official in Szechwan during the first decade of Communist rule, and since 1959 he has been a top official in Yunnan.
Education
In 1924, while still a teenager, Yen entered the army of a local warlord in north Shensi, and he joined the Party a year later while still with this army. In the fall of 1927, following the break between the Communists and the Nationalists, Yen began organizing local units of Shensi peasant guerrillas into a Red Army unit.
Career
Yen’s wartime record is not well documented, but he apparently remained for most of this period in his native Shensi. He was a deputy from Fu-hsien, Shensi, to the Second Assembly of the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia Border Region Government, which first met in Yenan in November 1941. (Fu-hsien is located on the Lo River 40 miles south of Yenan.) Yen also attended the second session of the Second Assembly in December 1944. In the postwar period he was assigned to the Shansi-Hopeh-Shantung-Honan Field Army, serving by 1947 as director of the Political Department of Army’s Third Column. The Third Column, under the command of Ch’en Hsi-lien, took part in the successful Huai- Hai Campaign in north-central Anhwei in late 1948 and early 1949. By this time Yen was deputy political commissar of the Third Column, and when the column was designated the Third Army Corps in 1949 (subordinate to Liu Po- ch’eng’s Second Field Army), Yen was appointed director of the Corps’ Political Department. Liu’s Field Army won a number of key victories in central China during the spring of 1949, and in the latter part of the year and early 1950, it was largely responsible for the conquest of southwest China.
Yen was with the Second Field Army when it moved into Szechwan in late 1949. He remained in Szechwan, China’s most populous province, for a decade, fulfilling the triple functions of military, Party, and government administrator. Unlike any other province, the Communists divided Szechwan into four geographic units until the traditional boundaries were restored in August 1952. From early 1950 until August 1952, the government organ where Yen operated was known as the East Szechwan People's Administrative Office. Under this office, Yen held the ranking administrative and judicial posts, serving as chairman of the office and as chief justice of the People’s Court. In the military field he was deputy political commissar of the East Szechwan Military District from 1950 to 1952, and under the Party Committee for East Szechwan he was first deputy secretary by late 1951. Although a very important official in East Szechwan, Yen was subordinate to Hsieh Fu-chih, who was secretary of the East Szechwan Party Committee and the political commissar of the Military District.
Although Yen’s major contributions in the early 1950's were in East Szechwan, he was also a member of the Southwest Military and Administrative Committee (SWMAC), the organ that governed Szechwan, Kweichow, Yunnan, and Sikang. Like the East Szechwan Administrative Office, the headquarters of the SWMAC was located in Chungking. When the SWMAC was reorganized into the Southwest Administrative Committee in February 1953, Yen continued to serve with the new organization until it was abolished in November 1954. In August 1952 the four separate units that had governed Szechwan were combined into a single unit, with Yen assuming important posts, mainly subordinate to Li Ching-ch’iian, the top leader in Szechwan after 1952 and a Politburo member after 1958. Yen’s principal posts were: vice-governor of Szechwan 1952-1959, first deputy political commissar of the Szechwan Military District (under Political Commissar Li Ching-ch’liang secretary of the Szechwan Party Committee (under First Secretary Li Ching-ch'uan), by late 1956-1959, deputy political commissar of the Chengtu Military Region (responsible for Szechwan), 1957-1959. Yen was also a deputy from Szechwan to the First and Second NPC's (1954-1964), the legislative council that brought the constitutional government into being at its initial session in September 1954. However, after his transfer in 1959 to Yunnan (see below), he was elected as a Yunnan deputy to the Third NPC, which opened its first session in December 1964.
Yen’s lengthy military record received official recognition in 1954 and 1955. When the National Defense Council was created in September 1954 Yen was named as a member. He was reappointed to this military advisory body in April 1959 and January 1965. In September 1955, when national military honors were first awarded, he received all three of the top awards (the Orders of August First, Independence and Freedom, and Liberation) for service from 1927 to 1950. Personal military ranks were also created in 1955, although it was not until September 1957 that Yen was identified as a colonel-general, equivalent to a three-star general in the U.S. Army Yen was elected an alternate member of the Party Central Committee at the Eighth CCP Congress in September 1956. Three years later (September 1959), after nearly a decade in Szechwan, he was transferred to neighboring Yunnan to assume the first secretaryship of the Party Committee. Yen replaced his former superior, Hsieh Fu-chih, who was made the new minister of Public Security in Peking. In Szechwan, Yen had spread his activities rather evenly among the various duties involving military, governmental, and Party affairs. His work in Yunnan has apparently centered more narrowly on Party activities, but by the spring of 1964 he was identified as a “responsible official” of the Kunming Military region.
Although Szechwan and Yunnan are situated in rather remote parts of China, Yen has had a limited involvement in foreign affairs. While still in Szechwan he had participated in a large delegation drawn from all parts of China, which visited North Korea to “comfort” Chinese troops stationed there. The delegation visited Korea in October-December 1953 under the general leadership of Ho Lung, Yen was a deputy leader of one of the sub-delegations. In 1960 and 1963, Yen was a vice-chairman of two closely related ad hoc committees that had been set up to receive and resettle returning overseas Chinese. The first of these, established in February 1960, was charged with the task of resettling the thousands of Chinese returning from Indonesia, where they allegedly had been mistreated by the Indonesians. In similar circumstances, a special committee to resettle Chinese from India was formed in April 1963, not long after the border conflict between India and China in late 1962. In addition to such short-term ventures, Yen has been in contact regularly with foreign visitors because Kunming, the Yunnan capital, is frequently visited by foreigners from Southeast Asia as well as Chinese leaders en route abroad.
Politics
Fighting in the Shensi-Shansi border area, in the years after 1927 he organized a small band of fighters known as the “west Shansi guerrilla band.” Late in 1931 he led his men across the border to join forces in Shensi with Communist guerrilla units led by Liu Chih-tan. Liu, a graduate of the Whampoa Military Academy, had joined the Party in 1925 and returned to his native Shensi to work with the peasant guerrillas in 1928. A brief history of Liu's army is contained in his biography; the army was active in north Shensi by the time Mao Tse-tung Long Marchers arrived there in the fall of 1935 and united with Liu^ troops. Yen probably also became a member of the merged army, for by 1936 he was identified as a commander of the 30th Red Army. The 30th Army initially belonged to the forces under Chang Kuo-t’ao and Hsu Hsiang-ch’ien, which moved out of the Oyiiwan Soviet in the fall of 1932 and reached north Shensi in 1936.
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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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1944
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1949
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1952 - 1959
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1960 - 1963