Liu Chih-tan (1903-April 1936), Chinese Communist guerrilla leader who, with Kao Kang (q.v.), carved out the northern Shensi base that became the final destination of the Long March.
A native of Shensi, Liu Chih-tan was born into a landowning family in the Paoan district. After completing his primary education in the early 1920's, he enrolled at the Yülin Middle School, where one of his schoolmates was Kao Kang (q.v.). Some of Liu's teachers were former students of Li Ta-chao (q.v.) who had been sent to Shensi to stimulate interest in Marxism. Liu soon became interested in radical politics; he joined the Socialist Youth League in 1924 and the Chinese Communist party in 1925. He then went to Canton and enrolled at the Whampoa Military Academy. After being graduated from Whampoa in 1926, Liu returned to northwest China and joined the political department of the Kuominchün. He also became an instructor at the Chungshan Military Academy, which Feng Yü-hsiang had established at Sanyuan. One of his students at the academy was Kao Kang.
In 1927, after Feng Yü-hsiang agreed to support Chiang Kai-shek rather than the left- Kuomintang at Wuhan, all known Communists in the Kuominchün, including Liu Chih-tan, were relieved of their posts. Liu went to the Anhwei-Hupeh area and worked to foment peasant unrest. In the spring of 1 928 he returned to Shensi and, supported by radical members of the Chungshan cadet brigade, led an insurrection in the Weinan-Huayin area which became known as the W'ei-Hua uprising. After the revolt was suppressed, he went to Paoan and worked to strengthen Communist organization in northern Shensi. Late in 1929, on orders from Chinese Communist leaders in Shensi, he joined the Kansu military forces under a false name and became a regimental commander. His identity soon was discovered, however, and he was imprisoned; but friends and former teachers managed to secure his release. In 1931 Liu Chih-tan and Hsieh Tzu-ch'ang organized Communist guerrilla units in the Sanshui area. After troops led by Kao Kang and remnants of the Twenty-fourth Red Army joined forces with Liu, a new army, the Anti- Imperialist Allied Army, was created. At the end of 1932 the combined force was designated the Twenty-sixth Red Army. At this point, Kao Kang, who had been serving as Liu's political commissar, left the army and began to organize a guerrilla band at Yuehhsien. The Twenty-sixth Red Army then moved into the Weinan region, but it soon was attacked, defeated, and shattered. Liu Chih-tan and a few other survivors of the debacle returned to central Shensi and rejoined Kao Kang. Liu and Kao established a base at Lung-chia-chai and built up a large force. By the end of 1933 they had created a new Twenty-sixth Red Army. In 1934 they decided to move to northern Shensi, which was loosely controlled by the unpopular warlord Ching Yueh-hsiu, rather than to attempt to wrest control of parts of central Shensi from more powerful generals. By the spring of 1935 they had established a Shensi-Kansu soviet regime at Wa-yao-pao and had organized a new unit, the Twenty-seventh Red Army. Nationalist units had encircled the area, but Liu's forces broke through their lines, defeated troops under Kao Kuei-tzu, and crushed the army of Ching Yueh-hsiu. Thus, Communist control was extended over six hsien—Yench'uan, Yench'ang, Paoan, Anchai, Anching, and Chengpien—and a safe base area was ready to receive the main Communist forces from Kiangsi which were working their way northward on the Long March.
In the summer of 1935 Liu Chih-tan's armies were combined with the newly arrived Twentyfifth Red Army of Hsü Hai-tung (q.v.) to form the Fifteenth Group Army. The new force was placed under the over-all command of Hsü Hai-tung. A few senior party officials also arrived in Shensi that summer. In August, Liu Chih-tan, Kao Kang, and a number of Shensi cadres were arrested on charges of having "deviated from the party line" and imprisoned. They were released when Mao Tse-tung reached northern Shensi in October. An official Communist explanation of this episode blamed "sectarianism" within the party and the ambitions of some party leaders for the arrest of Liu and Kao. It also stated that Liu, Kao, and other leaders accepted the "order and sentence" without protest because they respected the need for party unity.
After his release, Liu Chih-tan served as vice chairman of the northwest military committee, garrison commander at Wa-yao-pao, commander of the Northern Route Army, and commander of the Twenty-eighth Army. In the spring of 1936 he led a strike eastward into Shansi province. In the course of his campaign against Nationalist forces on both sides of the Yellow River, he was severely wounded. He died in April 1936, at the age of 33. His exploits in the northwest during the early 1930's soon became legendary. The American journalist Edgar Snow, who visited Shensi in 1937, described him as a "modern Robin Hood." Little is known about Liu Chih-tan's personal life. According to Edgar Snow, his widow and son were living at Paoan in 1937. His younger brother, Liu Ching-fan, became vice chairman of the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia Border Region government in 1947 and vice chairman of the Committee on People's Supervision in late 1949.
