Liao Chengzhi

Family and Early Years

Liao Chengzhi, who also used the name He Liuhua, came from a family of Guishan (now Huiyang), Guangdong, and was born in Tokyo in 1908 to Liao Zhongkai and He Xiangning, both elders of the Kuomintang. His childhood home in Tokyo was a meeting place for Sun Yat-sen's revolutionary activities. He returned to China in 1919 to study at Lingnan University, joined the Kuomintang as a young man and left it after the April 12 Incident of 1927. He then went to Japan and entered the First Higher School of Waseda University, but was arrested and deported by the Japanese authorities for revolutionary activity. He returned to Shanghai in July 1928 and joined the Chinese Communist Party in August.

Seamen's Work and the Long March

From 1928 to 1932 he was sent to Hamburg and elsewhere to work with the international seamen's union, leading Chinese seamen in their struggles, and was expelled from both the Netherlands and Germany; in 1930 he attended the Fifth Congress of the Red International of Labour Unions in Moscow. Returning to China in 1932 he became propaganda chief of the All-China Federation of Labour and Party secretary of the seamen's union; arrested the following year and released after efforts on his behalf, he went to the Sichuan–Shaanxi Soviet in August 1933 under the name He Liuhua to join the Red Army, becoming secretary-general of the Fourth Front Army's General Political Department in 1934. At the end of 1934 Zhang Guotao had him arrested as a "Chiang Kai-shek spy" and expelled from the Party, and he made the Long March as a prisoner; after the three main Red Army forces joined up in October 1936 he was released through Zhou Enlai's intervention and his Party membership was restored.

Hong Kong and the War of Resistance

In January 1938 he went to Hong Kong to set up a semi-public Eighth Route Army office and became its director, raising funds and supplies for the Eighth Route and New Fourth Armies, assisting the China Defence League led by Soong Ching-ling, and sending large numbers of young people, overseas Chinese and Hong Kong and Macao compatriots to the war effort. After the South Anhui Incident of 1941 he founded the Hua Shang Bao newspaper in Hong Kong. In May 1942, betrayed by an informer, he was arrested by Kuomintang agents in northern Guangdong; released in January 1946, he went to the CCP delegation in Nanjing to assist Zhou Enlai, and later served as director of the Xinhua News Agency and deputy head of the CCP Propaganda Department.

Overseas Chinese and Japanese Affairs

After 1949 he served as deputy head of the CCP International Liaison Department and the United Front Work Department, director of the State Council's Overseas Chinese Affairs Office and president of the China–Japan Friendship Association, long overseeing overseas Chinese affairs and unofficial exchanges with Japan. On 9 November 1962 he and Takasaki Tatsunosuke, a former Japanese Minister of International Trade and Industry, signed the Memorandum on Long-Term Comprehensive Trade in Beijing, known in Japan as "LT trade". According to Foreign Minister Ji Pengfei, Zhou Enlai "generally relied on Comrade Liao Chengzhi" in handling relations with Japan; when preparing for normalisation in 1972 Zhou designated Ji, Qiao Guanhua, Liao, Han Nianlong and others as a "Japan group", and Liao attended the second meeting between Zhou and Tanaka Kakuei on 26 September.

Last Years

In 1978 he was elected a vice chairman of the Standing Committee of the Fifth National People's Congress, and later also served as director of the State Council's Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office. On 24 July 1982 he issued an open letter to Chiang Ching-kuo, addressing him as "my younger brother Ching-kuo" and calling for a "third cooperation" between the two parties and peaceful reunification; that year he was elected to the Politburo of the 12th Central Committee, and in October his alma mater Waseda University awarded him an honorary doctorate of laws. On 6 June 1983 he was nominated as a candidate for Vice President of the PRC at the first session of the Sixth National People's Congress, but died of illness in Beijing on 10 June, aged 75. That year the Japanese government conferred on him the Order of the Rising Sun, First Class.