Tan Pingshan

Early Years and May Fourth

Tan Pingshan, born Tan Mingqian, was born in 1886 in Gaoming, Guangdong, and joined the Tongmenghui as a young man. In 1917 he entered Peking University, joined the Marxist study society founded by Li Dazhao and others and helped organise the magazine New Tide; in 1919 he published in it an essay on the "four aspects of democracy" introducing socialist ideas, and took part in the May Fourth Movement. Through the university's journalism society he came to know Mao Zedong.

Founder of the CCP in Guangdong

After Chen Duxiu and others founded a communist group in Shanghai in August 1920, Tan Pingshan organised the Guangzhou Socialist Youth League at Guangdong Higher Normal School, becoming the principal founder of the CCP's Guangdong organisation and one of the Party's early leaders; in July 1921 he missed the CCP's First Congress because he was helping Chen Duxiu raise funds in Guangzhou. During the first united front he joined the Kuomintang as a Communist, heading its Central Organisation Department from 1924, and in 1927 became Minister of Peasant Affairs in the Wuhan Nationalist government.

The Nanchang Uprising and Expulsion

In July 1927 Tan Pingshan went to Jiujiang with Li Lisan, Deng Zhongxia and others, took part in the decision to stage the Nanchang Uprising, and sounded out He Long on the plan beforehand. He held a leading place in the Revolutionary Committee of the Chinese Kuomintang set up after the uprising; according to Li Lisan's report, he was made its chairman when the army reached Tingzhou in Fujian. On the march south he and Zhou Yiqun sponsored He Long's admission to the CCP. That November the enlarged meeting of the Provisional Politburo adopted a Resolution on Political Discipline which accused him of having advocated "abolishing the CP and organising a third party" and of obstructing agrarian revolution, and expelled him from the Party.

KMT Democrats and the Revolutionary Committee

Tan Pingshan thereafter worked for many years as a Kuomintang democrat. Around the end of the war against Japan he led the Three People's Principles Comrades Association; in 1947, after openly criticising the Nationalist authorities, he left Shanghai for Hong Kong, where he worked with Li Jishen, He Xiangning and others to unite the KMT's democratic factions. When the Revolutionary Committee of the Chinese Kuomintang was founded in Hong Kong on 1 January 1948, he was elected to its central standing committee.

After 1949

In September 1949 Tan Pingshan attended the first plenary session of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. After the founding of the PRC he served as a member of the Central People's Government Council and of the Government Administration Council, and as chairman of its People's Supervisory Committee, helping to set up the people's supervision system; in 1954 he was invited to discuss the draft of the first constitution. He was elected vice chairman of the Revolutionary Committee of the Chinese Kuomintang in March 1956 and died in Beijing on 2 April 1956.