Background
Ulanfu was born on December 23, 1906 in Tabu village in Tumet Banner in what came to be known as Inner Mongolia.
Ulanfu was born on December 23, 1906 in Tabu village in Tumet Banner in what came to be known as Inner Mongolia.
His initial involvement in political activity appears to have been a student demonstration in September 1921 against a Japanese-funded electrical light company in the city of Guisui (today's Hohhot) where, in 1919, Ulanfu had enrolled as a student in the Tumet Upper Primary School. In 1922, he took part in the organizing of a wwork-study society for the masses,'' and in May of the following year, he participated in a series of demonstrations organized by the Guisui student federation to boycott Japanese goods. In Autumn 1923, Ulanfu enrolled, along with 40 other Mongol youths, in the Mongolian-Tibetan School in Beijing. It was at this school, and through the propaganda work done by Li Dazhao, Deng Zhongxia and Zhao Shiyan, that Ulanfu was introduced to Marxist thought and socialist theory.
In December 1923 he joined the Chinese Socialist Youth League, and soon became an active organizing member of Li Dazhao's Marxism study groups. At this time, Ulanfu became involved in debates regarding Inner Mongolia's political future, a debate which was intensified by the declaration of independence of the People's Republic of Mongolia (PRM, i.e., what used to be called “Outer Mongolia”）in 1924, and one that informed, and in turn was significantly influenced by, an article, The Mongol People’s Path of Liberation,M that Li Dazhao published in the Minguo ribao on March 20, 1925.
By this time, the still-fledgling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had formed a United Front with the Guomindang (GMD, or Nationalist Party) on the basis of principles that Sun Yat-sen had articulated. Ulanfu therefore became involved in the effort to form what was in essence a socialist or-ganization, but which appeared, formally, to be a GMD, or at least GMD- affiliated Party organization, in Inner Mongolia. In April 1925 together with several Mongol compatriots, Ulanfu launched the magazine Mertggu nongmin (Peasants of Mongolia). He also took an active part in organizing student demonstrations in Beijing in reaction to the May 30th incident that occurred in Shanghai that year. In June he returned to Guisui to continue the work of organizing students and young people in anti-imperialist demonstrations and in preparation for the formation of a Nationalist Party movement. In September, Ulanfu officially became a member of the CCP (with simultaneous membership in the GMD, as provided by the terms of the United Front). Then on October 12, 1925, he attended the first congress of the Inner Mongolia Nationalist Party as a student delegate.
In late 1925, Ulanfu and four other Mongol youths (including his older brother) joined a large group of over 300 students who were sent to the Soviet Union by the GMD-CCP to further their political and ideological studies. Ulanfu enrolled in Sun Yat-sen University from which he would graduate in July 1927. After his graduation, and subsequent to a short-term military training course, he was sent to the University of the Toilers of the East to work as a classroom interpreter in early 1928. In the autumn of that year he was transferred back to Sun Yat-sen University to continue the same work. In September 1929, Ulanfu returned to Inner Mongolia.
Ulanfu was engaged for the next four years in propaganda and organizational work for the CCP, mainly in the region of Guisui and the Tumet Banner in Western Inner Mongolia. The United Front relationship between the CCP and the GMD had been broken off since April 1927, and China's CCP forces had largely been driven underground. Ulanfu's work in Inner Mongolia was therefore clandestine and extremely dangerous, operating in the shadow of warlord governments aligned with the GMD. Moreover, since there was no practical way of connecting directly with the leadership of the uCentral Soviet,5 or the Central Committee (CC) of the CCP in Jiang-xi or with other major CCP forces, Ulanfu often had to secretly cross the border into the PRM to report on his work to the Third International. In mid-1931 the CCP’s “Northwest Special Work Committee,” led by Wang Ruofei (whom Ulanfu had met and befriended earlier in Moscow) was dispatched from the Soviet Union to Inner Mongolia, and for a short time, Ulanfu worked under Wang’s supervision. Wang was arrested by the GMD secret police on November 22, 1931, and Ulanfu went into hiding, while making repeated attempts to organize political support from the Third International to secure Wang's release from prison as well as carry on clandestine organizational work in Wang's absence.
With Japanese forces, which had begun their invasion of China in Manchuria in 1931, penetrating Rehe (Jehol) and Chahar in 1932, Ulanfu began to organize anti-Japanese guerrilla forces in Inner Mongolia and took part in founding the Mongol-Han Anti-Japanese Alliance Military Committee at Zhangjiakou in February 1933. In April and July 1934, the Mongolian Regional Autonomy Political Council and the Inner Mongolia People's Revolutionary Alliance were formed, respectively. When the leadership of the former of these organizations split in late 1935, with two Mongol princes, De Wang and Yun Wang, defecting to the Japanese, Ulanfu and other leaders who remained anti-Japanese established the Suiyuan-Mongolia Political Council to continue the defense of Mongolia against Japanese invasion. By late-1935, the Chinese Red Army had reached northern Shaanxi after the arduous Long March, and Ulanfu's group was able to connect with the CCP forces at Yan’an. Also the GMD generals in the northwest, especially Fu Zuoyi, had declared their intent to collaborate with the Communists in defending northwest China against Japan, thus it was possible for Ulanfu to “come out of hiding” and, in fact, join Fu Zuoyi’s staff as a Russian interpreter.
In 1945, Ulanfu had been elected to the Seventh Central Committee (CC) of the CCP, as that body's only non-Han member at the time. As the civil war drew to a close, he was named to the Standing Committee of the Preparatory Committee for the Chinese Peopled Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and in September 1949, when the CPPCC was convened, he became a member of the Standing Committee of the Presidium of the CPPCC. He was also a member of a committee charged with drafting the Common Program and a member of the Central People’s Government Council (CPGC). In the early years of the People’s Republic of China, a period of transition from a largely regional structure to a centralized system of civil and military administration, Ulanfu's unparalleled position in Inner Mongolia placed him, at once, at the head of the Party organization, the government and the military administration in the autonomous region (as secretary of the Inner-Mongolia Sub-bureau of the CCP, chairman of the IMAR Peopled Government from 1947, member of the North China Administrative Council in 1951, and chairman of the Suiyuan Peopled Government after 1952, and the commander and political commissar of the Inner Mongolia Military Region) while holding national offices at the CC of the CCP and in national government at the same time. In 1954, with the promulgation of the PRC Constitution and resulting government reorganization, Ulanfu began to become more involved in politics at the national level. He became a vice-premier of the state council, serving also as the chairman of the State Council Nationalities Affairs Commission and a member of the National Defense Council. Within the CCP structure, having served as a vice-chairman of the Nationalities Affairs Committee and a member of the Political-Legal Affairs Committee, he became a secretary of the IMAR Party (CCP) Committee (becoming First Secretary in 1956). He was named an alternate member of the Politburo, the highest executive body of the CCP, at the First Plenum of the Eighth CC of the CCP in 1956.
As high as his political star had risen, Ulanfu was brought down in the Cultural Revolution. On April 13, 1967, the CC of the CCP issued a ''Resolution on Dealing with the Inner Mongolia Problem,M which called for the formation of a preparatory committee for the establishment of an IMAR Revolutionary Committee. A military force under Teng Haiqing was introduced to enforce this Cultural Revolutionary transformation of the political structure in the IMAR, and when the IMAR Revolutionary Committee was established in November 1967, Ulanfu, who had been labeled in a September 20 broadcast as wthe agent of China's Khrushchev in Inner Mongolia,w was excluded from its membership. Ulanfu then virtually disappeared from the political scene until his rehabilitation in 1973, when he was elected to the Tenth CC of the CCP in August. Although between then and his final resignation from governmental and Party positions in 1985 Ulanfu continued to be elected to high positions both in the Party and in the state structure he regained membership in the Politburo in 1977, for instance, and was apparently still active as head of the CCP's United Front department in the same year and was vice-president of the PRC from 1983 to the time of his death on December 8, 1988 it would appear that in the last decade and a half of his life Ulanfu was largely uninvolved in day-to-day political affairs and, especially, in the political struggles in the late-Mao and post-Mao eras. For the most part, he was even out of the politics of Inner Mongolia, and did not seem to have played any significant or active role in the 1976 struggle of Hua Guofeng and the “old revolutionary guard against the Gang of Four, or in the Hua-Deng Xiaoping struggle in the late-1970s and early-1980s.
Ulanfu was the key Communist cadre (not to mention the highest ranking one) in Inner Mongolia throughout his long political career, and played a critical role in keeping Inner Mongolia within the PRC and the Party organizations in the IMAR within the mainstream of the CCP after 1949. He was one of the highest ranking, if not thehighest ranking, non-Han CCP cadres, and had tremendous influence on the conducting of nationalities affairs in Chinese politics over the last six decades.
Ulanhu married twice and had four sons and four daughters. His son, Buhe, served as the Chairman of Inner Mongolia from 1982 to 1993. His granddaughter (Buhe's daughter) Bu Xiaolin was appointed Chairwoman of Inner Mongolia in March 2016, making her the third generation of the Ulanhu family to hold that position. Another son of Ulanhu, Uje, served as mayor of Baotou.
