Zhang Wentian

Early Years and Study in Moscow

Zhang Wentian, born Zhang Yinggao and known by the alias Luo Fu, was born in August 1900 in Nanhui, Jiangsu (now part of Pudong, Shanghai). After the May Fourth Movement broke out he threw himself into the patriotic movement, joined the Young China Association founded by Li Dazhao and others, published commentaries and translations in many journals, and spent time studying in Japan and working in the United States. He joined the CCP in June 1925 and that November went to Moscow among the first students of Sun Yat-sen University, entering the Institute of Red Professors in 1928.

The Provisional Centre and the Central Soviet Area

Returning in February 1931, Zhang became head of the CCP's Central Propaganda Department and editor of the journals Red Flag and Struggle; 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, bringing him into the central leadership. According to People's Daily Online, in this period he propagated and carried out the "leftist" line. He entered the Central Soviet Area in 1933, was elected to the Politburo and Secretariat at the Fifth Plenum of the Sixth Central Committee in 1934, and that year became chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Chinese Soviet Republic.

The Zunyi Conference and Overall Charge

On the Long March Zhang gradually came to agree with Mao Zedong and Wang Jiaxiang on military questions. At the Zunyi Conference he delivered a report against the "leftist" military errors, based on views agreed with Mao and Wang beforehand, and was entrusted with drafting the conference resolution. Shortly afterwards the Politburo Standing Committee decided that he would replace Bo Gu in overall charge of the Party. In the Yan'an years he long oversaw the Party's theoretical propaganda and cadre education, also heading the Central Propaganda Department and the Marx–Lenin Institute; after the Yan'an Rectification began in 1941 he spent more than a year conducting rural surveys in northern Shaanxi and northwest Shanxi.

The Northeast and Diplomacy

After the war against Japan Zhang went to work in the Northeast, serving as secretary of the Hejiang provincial committee and as a standing committee member and organisation head of the CCP Northeast Bureau. From 1950 he moved into diplomacy, serving as ambassador to the Soviet Union and executive vice minister of foreign affairs, and in 1956 was elected an alternate member of the Politburo at the Eighth Party Congress.

The Lushan Conference and Later Years

At the Lushan Conference of July 1959 Zhang voiced objections to the Great Leap Forward and was branded, along with Peng Dehuai and others, a member of an "anti-Party clique"; removed from his posts, he became a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Economics. During the Cultural Revolution he was placed under guarded investigation and sent to Zhaoqing, Guangdong, where he wrote the essays later known as the "Zhaoqing manuscripts"; he was afterwards settled in Wuxi, Jiangsu, under the name "Zhang Pu", and died there on 1 July 1976. In August 1979 the CCP Central Committee rehabilitated him and held a memorial meeting at which Deng Xiaoping delivered the eulogy.