Deng Yingchao

Tianjin and the May Fourth Movement (1904–1924)

Deng Yingchao, whose family came from Guangshan, Henan, was born in Nanning, Guangxi, on 4 February 1904, moved to Tianjin with her mother in 1910 and studied at the Zhili First Women's Normal School. According to her biography on the CPPCC website, during the May Fourth Movement of 1919 she organised the Tianjin Women's Patriotic Comrades Association, serving on its executive and leading its speakers' corps, and with Zhou Enlai and others founded the progressive Awakening Society. From 1920 to 1925 she taught primary school in Beijing and Tianjin and organised the Zhili branch of the Women's Rights League and the Women's Star Society; in early 1924 she helped found the Socialist Youth League in Tianjin.

From the Great Revolution to the Long March (1925–1936)

In March 1925 Deng moved from the Youth League to the Communist Party and became head of the women's department of the CCP Tianjin committee; that August she was transferred to Guangzhou as a member of the Guangdong–Guangxi regional committee and head of its women's department, and at the end of the year she married Zhou Enlai. In 1926 she attended the Second National Congress of the Kuomintang and was elected an alternate member of its Central Executive Committee. From May 1927 she was secretary of the CCP Central Women's Work Committee in Shanghai; in May 1928 she attended the Sixth Party Congress in Moscow as a non-voting delegate, then returned to underground work in Shanghai. In May 1932 she went to the Central Soviet in Jiangxi, serving as secretary-general of the Central Bureau, secretary to the Politburo and a member of the Central Executive Committee of the Chinese Soviet Republic; ill, she set out on the Long March in October 1934 and reached northern Shaanxi in October 1935.

The War against Japan and the Civil War (1937–1949)

After the outbreak of full-scale war Deng worked on the united front in Wuhan and Chongqing, serving as women's organiser at the Eighth Route Army office in Wuhan and a member of the women's committee of the CCP Yangtze Bureau; in March 1938 she helped found the Chinese Wartime Child Welfare Association, becoming a standing director, and in June she became a CCP member of the People's Political Council; in 1939 she joined the CCP Southern Bureau and headed its women's committee. She returned to Yan'an in the summer of 1943 to study at the Central Party School and was elected an alternate member of the Central Committee at the Seventh Party Congress in 1945. In January 1946 she attended the Political Consultative Conference in Chongqing as a member of the CCP delegation. In March 1949 she became vice-chairwoman of the All-China Democratic Women's Federation, and that September she attended the First Plenary Session of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and was elected to the Standing Committee of its National Committee.

From 1949 to Zhou Enlai's Death (1949–1976)

According to a commemorative article by the CCP Institute of Party History and Literature published in People's Daily in 2024, Deng helped lead the drafting of the PRC's first Marriage Law, and at her suggestion it included a clause allowing divorce "when one party insists on divorce and mediation by the district people's government and the judicial organ has failed". She was elected to the Central Committee at the Eighth Party Congress in 1956.

According to "The Last Journey of Life: Zhou Enlai in Illness" on the Institute's website, during the Cultural Revolution Deng was "sidelined" and adopted a policy of seeing, corresponding and associating with no one; the article also says that in 1975 the Centre decided to make her a vice-chairwoman of the NPC Standing Committee, but the gravely ill Zhou firmly objected and blocked the appointment. Once Zhou was hospitalised she visited him every day. The article says that soon after the Centre decided on cremation in 1956, the couple agreed to have their ashes scattered over the country's rivers and land. According to an article on People's Daily Online's Party history channel by a researcher at the Zhou Enlai Memorial in Huai'an, on 8 January 1976, the day Zhou died, Deng conveyed to the Central Committee his last request — that his ashes not be kept but scattered; once it was approved, Zhou's ashes were scattered from an aircraft over Beijing, the Miyun Reservoir, the Hai River at Tianjin and the mouth of the Yellow River.

The Reform Era (1976–1988)

In December 1976 Deng was elected vice-chairwoman of the Standing Committee of the Fourth National People's Congress, and she was re-elected to the Fifth in March 1978. At the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee in December 1978 she was added to the Politburo and elected Second Secretary of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection; according to the Institute's article, she took a direct part in redressing major unjust cases and in drafting the "Guiding Principles for Inner-Party Political Life". In December 1979 she became head of the Central Leading Group on Taiwan Work, and in 1981 she guided the drafting of Ye Jianying's statement on Taiwan's return to the motherland and peaceful reunification (the "Nine Points"). From June 1983 to March 1988 she was Chairwoman of the Sixth CPPCC National Committee. In September 1985 she was among 64 senior figures, including Ye Jianying, Xu Xiangqian and Nie Rongzhen, whose requests to leave the Central Committee were approved by the National Conference of the CCP.

Death and Assessment

Deng Yingchao died in Beijing on 11 July 1992, aged 88. According to the Institute's article, in accordance with her wishes she was dressed in the old suit she had worn to see Zhou off sixteen years earlier, her ashes were placed in the old urn that had held his, and they were scattered on the Hai River at Tianjin. The article calls her "an outstanding representative of Chinese women of the 20th century" and says she fully deserved to be called "a great pioneer and outstanding leader" of the CPPCC's work.