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Teng Hsiao-p'ing: a Political Profile
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 February 2009
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Writing some four hundred and fifty years ago, the founder of the modern realist school of political analysis struck the mark. “The first impression that one gets of a ruler and of his brains,” Machiavelli observed, “is from seeing the men that he has about him.” To the student of the terrain of post-1928 Chinese political history, the prominent positions of Chiang Kai-shek's Chekiang clique in the Kuomintang and of Mao Tse-tung's Hunan faction in the Chinese Communist Party are obvious landmarks. Yet the difference in the political styles of Chiang and Mao, as revealed in the men around them, has been less emphasised. Chiang Kai-shek's trusted political and military associates, with some exceptions, have been either members of his own family or natives of his own province of Chekiang in east China. Mao Tse-tung, while revealing similar parochialism in selecting and retaining associates from his native province of Hunan, has nevertheless shown more imagination and less inflexibility than Chiang.
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- Copyright © The China Quarterly 1965
References
* I am indebted to the following men who have taken time to offer critical comment and bibliographical leads on an earlier version of this paper: William F. Dorrill, Harold C. Hinton, Donald W. Klein, S. B. Thomas, and Allen S. Whiting. Selection of data and interpretations are my own responsibility.
1 The Prince, XXII, “Concerning the Secretaries of Princes.”Google Scholar
2 See “Tung Pi-wu: a Political Profile,” The China Quarterly, No. 19, July–September 1964, pp. 66–83.Google Scholar
3 In an interview with Edgar Snow in 1936, Teng himself reportedly gave his birth date as 1896, but this seems unlikely. See Snow, , Random Notes on Red China, 1936–1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957), p. 137. Other sources have given the date as 1904, which also seems dubious.Google Scholar
4 Among the Szechwanese leaders who were active in recruiting and assisting students from that province to go to France were Wu Yü-chang (1878– ), later of the Chinese Communist party; and Tseng Ch'i (1892–1951) and Li Huang (1895– ), later of the Youth Party.Google Scholar
5 I am indebted to Conrad Brandt of St. Antony's College, Oxford, for data on the French interlude.Google Scholar
6 See the unpublished paper, “Feng Yü-hsiang's Relations with the Soviet Union,” by Professor James E. Sheridan, Department of History, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, delivered at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, April 1964.Google Scholar
7 As a group, the French-returned and Russian-returned Communists in the Chinese Party were slow in moving to the countryside after the 1927 coup.Google Scholar
8 A convenient summary of this period, with maps, is given in Kung Ch'u, Wo yü Hung-chün (The Red Army and I) (Hong Kong: Nan-feng ch'u-pan-she, 1954), chapter 6, “The creation of the Kwangsi soviet district,” pp. 165–209.Google Scholar Peking's version is given in Mu Wen-hua, , “Reminiscences of the Birth of the Red 7th Army,” Min-tsu T'uan-chieh (Nationalities Unity), No. 7, July 7, 1961, translated in Selections from China Mainland Magazines (Hong Kong: U.S. Consulate General), No. 285.Google Scholar
9 Li Li-san's policies of that period represented an attempt to use rural-based Red Army Forces to gain an urban base for the anticipated Communist revolution in China. See James P. Harrison, , “The Li Li-san Line and the CCP in 1930,” The China Quarterly, No. 14 (April–June 1963), pp. 178–194, and No. 15 (July–September 1963), pp. 140–159.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
10 He taught “party-building.” See Hung-ch'i P'iao-p'iao, III, 1957, p. 46.Google Scholar
11 There is, for example, no reference to Teng Hsiao-p'ing in the annotated bibliography prepared by Chun-tu Hsueh, , The Chinese Communist Movement, 1921–1937 (Stanford, California: The Hoover Institution, 1960).Google Scholar
12 Evans Fordyce Carlson, Twin Stars of China (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1940), p. 252. Carlson gives Teng's name as “Tun Shao-p'in.”Google Scholar
13 His writings of the period include, “The Two Lines in the Enemy's Rear,” a substantial report first printed in the Chün-cheng Tsa-chih (Military-political Magazine) of the Eighth Route Army, 1, 5, May 15, 1939, and subsequently reprinted in Chieh-fang (Liberation), No. 72, May 30, 1939.Google Scholar This article was accorded special treatment, as evinced by publication at Yenan in two important Communist journals. Other articles credited to Teng include “Mobilising New Troops and Political Work among New Troops,” Ch'ien-hsien (Front Line). Yenan, No. 3/4, February 12, 1938;Google Scholar “South Hopei in Bitter Struggle,” Chieh-fang, Yenan, No. 71, May 15, 1939;Google Scholar and “The Eighth Route Army Maintains the War of Resistance in North China,” Ch'ün-chung (The Masses), Chungking, III, No. 8/9, July 16, 1939.Google Scholar
14 The declaration released by the Communists in July 1943 on the sixth anniversary of the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war included statements by Mao Tse-tung, Chu Teh, P'eng Te-huai, Ch'en Yi, Liu Po-ch'eng, and Teng Hsiao-p'ing. See Chun-tu Hsueh, , The Chinese Communist Movement, 1937–1949 (Stanford, California: The Hoover Institution, 1962), item 73, p. 34.Google Scholar At the beginning of 1944, Teng's article, “Economic Reconstruction in the T'aihang Area,” appeared in Ch'ün-chung (The Masses), Chungking, IX, No. 1, January 11, 1944, pp. 10–12.Google Scholar
15 See the romanticised version of events during the summer of 1947, “Thrust into the Tapieh Mountains,” The Great Turning Point (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1962), pp. 114–136.Google Scholar
16 The General Front Committee was established in accordance with a decision of November 16, 1948, of the Revolutionary Military Commission of the Central Committee of the Party. See Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, IV (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1961), p. 339, n. 2.Google Scholar For the major military engagement of the 1948–49 period, see O. Edmund Clubb, , “Chiang Kai-shek's Waterloo: the Battle of the Hwai-Hai,” Pacific Historical Review, XXV, 4, November 1956, pp. 389–399.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
17 For fuller discussion, see Current Background (Hong Kong, U.S. Consulate General) No. 170, “Pattern of Control: the Regional Organization of Communist China, April 1952.”Google Scholar
18 He replaced Po I-po and was in turn replaced by Li Hsien-nien, who has held the finance minister post at Peking since 1954.Google Scholar
19 See Teng's explanation of the Electoral Law for the National People's Congress carried in English translation in the supplement to People's China, April 1, 1953.Google Scholar
20 Teng's orthodoxy in expounding the “mass line” was already apparent in his statement of July 1, 1951, prepared for the celebrations marking the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. An English translation of that statement, “To Maintain Close Ties with the Masses is Our Party's Glorious Tradition,” appeared in People's China, IV, 1, July 1, 1951, pp. 32–35.Google Scholar
21 The only official biographical notice on Mao Tse-tung which Peking has released in recent years appeared in People's China, IV, 1, July 1, 1951, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the party.Google Scholar
22 Because of the widespread confusion surrounding this post, a note of explanation is necessary. Beginning in the spring of 1954 Teng Hsiao-p'ing was identified as mi-shu-chang (Secretary-General) of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party; and it was in that capacity that he delivered the report on the Kao Kang-Jao Shu-shih affair to the National Conference of the Party held in March 1955. The eighth National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in September 1956 revived the post of tsung shu-chi (General-Secretary) and assigned Teng to fill it. The distinction between these two posts is significant organisationally. In the party committees at the provincial level, for example, the First Secretary position may be described as corresponding to that of the general-secretary of the Central Committee; but there is also an entirely separate position of Secretary-General, responsible for administrative matters. At present it is not clear whether the Party Central Committee in China still retains the Secretary-General post which Teng Hsiao-p'ing held from at least May 1954 to September 1956.Google Scholar
It should also be pointed out that Teng's present position of General-Secretary at Peking was enhanced by the Central Committee decision of January 1961 to re-create the six regional Party bureaus in substantially the same form as they had existed from 1949 until probably 1954 or 1955. The regional Party bureaus are now the only organs at the regional level in China and actually, if not officially, possess substantial authority over regional administrative and possibly even military affairs. As General-Secretary of the Central Committee, Teng Hsiao-p'ing is the senior officer at Peking with direct authority over the first secretaries of the regional bureaus, some of whom have had working connections with him in the past.Google Scholar
23 John Wilson Lewis of Cornell University has written a new estimate, Chinese Communist Party Leadership and the Succession to Mao Tse-tung: an Appraisal of Tensions (Washington: U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, External Research Staff, Policy Research Study, January 1964).Google Scholar
24 The official English translation of Teng's report of September 16, 1956, is given in Eighth National Congress of the Communist Party of China, Volume I, Documents (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1956), pp. 169–228. The sentences quoted appear on p. 209.Google Scholar
25 Report on the Rectification Campaign, delivered at the third plenary session, enlarged, of the eighth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on September 23, 1957 (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1957).Google Scholar
26 Chou En-lai has also been a frequent visitor. Chou headed the Chinese delegations to the 21st and 22nd congresses of the Soviet Communist Party held, respectively, in February 1959 and October 1961, which Teng did not attend.Google Scholar
27 Mao had, of course, previously visited Moscow to confer with Stalin (December 1949–February 1950).Google Scholar
28 A useful summary is given in Edward Crankshaw, , The New Cold War: Moscow v. Pekin (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1963), Chapter 12, “The Final Breach: Moscow 1960”), pp. 122–135. See, however, the jovial picture of the senior Chinese delegates (Liu Shao-ch'i, Teng Hsiao-p'ing, and P'eng Chen) and their Russian hosts carried in the Jen-min Hua-pao (People's Pictorial), No. 1, 1961, and reproduced in The China Quarterly, No. 5, January–March 1961.Google Scholar
29 He had also presented the report on the 1957 Moscow meeting at the second session of the eighth National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, held at Peking in May 1958.Google Scholar
30 NCNA, September 12, 1961, cited in Donald S. Zagoria, , The Sino-Soviet Conflict, 1956–1961 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), p. 450.Google Scholar
31 During Chou En-lai's trip to Africa in the winter of 1963–64, Teng was officially named acting premier at Peking.Google Scholar
32 Michael Croft, , Red Carpet to China (New York: St. Martin's, 1959), chapter 25, “Separate Viewpoints,” pp. 248–256.Google Scholar
33 See Teng's special article written to mark the tenth anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1959. That article, “The Great Unity of the Chinese People and the Great Unity of the Peoples of the World,” appeared in Pravda on October 1, 1959, and in the People's Daily at Peking on the following day. An English translation is available in Ten Glorious Years (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1960), pp. 90–104.Google Scholar
34 Some photographs show Teng carrying a cane. Starting from that fact, outside observers have credited Teng with a wartime wound, venery, an attack of polio, and other maladies.Google Scholar