Bo Gu

Early Years and Study in Moscow

Bo Gu, born Qin Bangxian, was born in June 1907 in Wuxi, Jiangsu; his father died when he was nine and the family fell on hard times. In 1925 he entered the sociology department of Shanghai University and joined the CCP. In November 1926 he went to Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow, where he took the Russian name "Bogunov"; back in China he used "Bo Gu" as his alias. He returned in May 1930 and worked for the All-China Federation of Labour and the propaganda department of the Shanghai labour federation.

Head of the Provisional Centre

In January 1931 Bo Gu became propaganda head of the Communist Youth League and in April its secretary. When Wang Ming left for Moscow that year, a Provisional Politburo of Bo Gu, Chen Yun, Zhang Wentian, Kang Sheng, Lu Futan and Li Zhusheng was formed with Comintern approval, and Bo Gu — 24 years old and not yet a Central Committee member — gradually became the person in overall charge. According to People's Daily Online, in this period he carried out Wang Ming's "leftist" dogmatist line, causing grave losses to the revolution. In 1933 the Provisional Centre moved into the Central Soviet Area and merged with the Soviet Area Central Bureau as the "CCP Central Bureau", with Bo Gu as secretary in overall charge; in 1934 he was elected to the Politburo and Secretariat at the Fifth Plenum of the Sixth Central Committee.

The Fifth Campaign and the Zunyi Conference

During the fifth anti-encirclement campaign, Bo Gu and the Comintern military adviser Li De (Otto Braun) dominated military decision-making; after the Red Army's defeat it was forced to abandon the Central Soviet Area and begin the Long March. At the Zunyi Conference of January 1935 he delivered the summary report, attributing the failure mainly to objective factors such as the enemy's superior strength; most participants criticised him, and the conference stripped him and Li De of supreme military command. Shortly afterwards Zhang Wentian replaced him in overall charge. According to People's Daily Online, he handed over power "without complaint", and later resisted Zhang Guotao's split and Wang Ming's rightist errors.

Journalism

In January 1937 Bo Gu became director of the Xinhua News Agency; when the Liberation Daily was founded in Yan'an in May 1941 he became its director, and at the end of the year also head of Xinhua and of the CCP Central Party Newspaper Committee. Xinhua describes him as "one of the founders of our Party's journalism", under whom the agency grew "from a simple cave news agency into a regular news agency of some scale".

Death

In 1946 Bo Gu attended the Political Consultative Conference as a CCP representative and served on the group reviewing the draft constitution. On 8 April that year he was flying from Chongqing to Yan'an with Wang Ruofei, Ye Ting, Deng Fa and others when the plane crashed at Heichashan in Xing County, Shanxi, killing him and his fellow passengers; he was 39.