Gao Gang

The Shaanxi–Gansu Red Army and the Northwest Base (1905–1937)

Gao Gang was born in 1905 in Hengshan, Shaanxi, and joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1926. According to the People's Daily Party-history entry, from 1927 to 1931 he carried out clandestine agitation among Nationalist local forces in the northwest; in January 1932 he became Party committee secretary of the Shaanxi–Gansu Workers' and Peasants' Red Army guerrillas, in August 1933 political commissar of the provisional general command of the Shaanxi–Gansu border Red Army, and from November political commissar of the 42nd Division and then of the 26th Red Army — "one of the founders of the Shaanxi–Gansu Red Army and revolutionary base".

In February 1935, when the CCP Northwest Work Committee and the Northwest Revolutionary Military Commission were set up to unify leadership of the Shaanxi–Gansu and northern Shaanxi bases, he became vice-chairman and chief political commissar of the commission; after the 25th Red Army joined the 26th and 27th to form the 15th Army Group that September, he became its deputy political commissar.

The Border Region and the Northwest Bureau (1937–1945)

In May 1938 Gao became Party secretary of the Shaanxi–Gansu–Ningxia Border Region, and in January 1939 the first session of the border region's assembly elected him its speaker. In early 1941 he became secretary of the CCP Central Bureau of the border region; when that bureau merged with the Northwest Work Committee that May to form the CCP Northwest Bureau, he became its secretary. In 1945 he was elected to the Seventh Central Committee and its Politburo.

The Northeast (1945–1952)

After Japan's surrender Gao was sent to the northeast, becoming commander of the North Manchuria Military Region in November 1945, deputy secretary of the CCP Northeast Bureau and deputy political commissar of the Northeast Democratic Allied Army in June 1946, and first deputy commander and deputy political commissar of the Northeast People's Liberation Army at the end of 1947. From 1949 he was secretary of the Northeast Bureau, chairman of the Northeast People's Government and commander and political commissar of the Northeast Military Region, running Party, government and military affairs in the region.

In September 1949 the First Plenary Session of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference elected Mao Zedong Chairman of the Central People's Government and named six vice-chairmen: Zhu De, Liu Shaoqi, Soong Ching-ling, Li Jishen, Zhang Lan and Gao Gang.

Transfer to Beijing and the Gao–Rao Affair (1952–1954)

In November 1952 Gao was appointed chairman of the State Planning Commission of the Central People's Government while remaining chairman of the Northeast Administrative Committee, and moved to work in Beijing in 1953; in May 1953 eight industrial ministries under the Government Administration Council were placed under his direction. According to the historian Lin Yunhui, at the national conference on financial and economic work from June to August 1953 Gao used criticism of the new tax system drawn up by Finance Minister Bo Yibo to aim at Liu Shaoqi — "criticising Bo to shoot at Liu".

Deng Xiaoping recalled in 1980 that after Mao proposed dividing the leadership into a first and second line at the end of 1953, Gao "was extremely active", approached him to "negotiate" about joining forces to "topple Liu Shaoqi", and told Chen Yun, "let's have several vice-chairmen — one for you, one for me"; Chen and Deng then reported this to Mao. On 24 December 1953 Mao told a Politburo meeting that "there are two headquarters in Beijing". In February 1954 the Fourth Plenum of the Seventh Central Committee adopted a resolution on strengthening Party unity without naming names, after which the Secretariat held meetings to verify Gao's activities; the People's Daily entry says he was "exposed and criticised" at the plenum. On 17 August 1954 Gao killed himself while under house arrest.

Verdict and Assessments

On 31 March 1955 the National Conference of the CCP adopted a resolution on the "anti-Party alliance" of Gao Gang and Rao Shushi, expelling him from the Party and declaring that "from 1949 onwards" he had conspired to seize leadership of the Party and state, treated the northeast as an "independent kingdom" and formed an "anti-Party alliance" with Rao. Mao told the conference that "there was indeed no written agreement" between the two, but "there was an alliance". The 1981 historical resolution described the episode as a struggle against the "careerists" Gao Gang and Rao Shushi, who had "conspired to split the Party and usurp supreme power in the Party and the state".

Discussing the draft of that resolution in 1980, Deng Xiaoping said the exposure of Gao and Rao "was not wrong", but asked: "What line did Gao Gang actually put forward? As I see it, there really was no line." Zhang Baijia, former deputy director of the Party History Research Centre, wrote in 2016 that the case was "not among those reversed" in the mass rehabilitations after the Cultural Revolution, though all cadres implicated in it were rehabilitated; recent official Party histories no longer say the two tried to "usurp the Party and seize power" or formed an "anti-Party alliance", but maintain that they committed the error of "splitting the Party", and the 1962 case of the novel Liu Zhidan is among the episodes seen as sequels to the struggle. The American scholar Michael M. Sheng argued in 2011 that Mao first promoted Gao to weaken Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai, then abandoned him at the end of 1953 when he came to doubt Gao's loyalty, so that Gao fell as quickly as he had risen.