Kuan Hsiang-ying (1902-July 1946), Chinese Communist who became general secretary of the Communist Youth League in 1928. A close associate of Ho Lung, he served as Ho's political commissar at the Hunan-Hupeh soviet base (1932-33) and in the 120th Division of the Eighth Route Army (1937-40). Although in poor health after 1941, Kuan headed the Communists' Shansi-Suiyuan organization in 1942-15.
Born into a poor family in Manchuria, Kuan Hsiang-ying received only a few years of formal education before being apprenticed to a printer. After completing his apprenticeship, he went to Shanghai and worked in a printing shop. He soon began to participate in activities sponsored by the Socialist Youth League, which had been established in August 1920 under Comintern guidance. About 1922 he joined the league. In 1924 he was among those chosen by the league to study at the Communist University for Toilers of the East in Moscow. He joined the Moscow branch of the Chinese Communist party in 1925.
After returning to China in the summer of 1925, Kuan Hsiang-ying worked in the Communist party organization at Shanghai for a short time before being sent to Honan as secretary of the party's Honan provincial committee. When Jen Pi-shih (q.v.) succeeded Yün Tai-ying (q.v.) as general secretary of the Communist (formerly Socialist) Youth League in 1926, Kuan was recalled to Shanghai to succeed Jen as head of the league's organization department. In 1927 he helped organize a strike of Shanghai textile workers. In 1928 Kuan Hsiang-ying succeeded Jen Pi-shih as general secretary of the Communist Youth League. At the Sixth National Congress of the Chinese Communist party, held at Moscow in the summer of 1928, he was elected to the Central Committee. After returning to China from the congress, he was assigned to work undercover in Shanghai. In 1930 he served on the military committee and the Yangtze bureau of the Central Committee, utilizing his early training to plan the printing and distributing of Communist propaganda. He also became secretary of the Shanghai Industrial Workers Association.
For reasons that are unclear, Kuan Hsiangying was arrested and imprisoned in 1931. It is known, however, that his Shanghai captors were not aware that he was an important Communist leader. Kuan spent about a year in jail, studying Chinese literature and cultivating a taste for T'ang poetry.
After his release from prison in 1932, Kuan went to the Hunan-Hupeh border district, where Ho Lung (q.v.) was establishing a soviet base, to serve as political commissar of Ho's Second Red Army. The two men became close friends and often were referred to as "Ho- Kuan." In 1933 Nationalist units forced Ho and Kuan to abandon their soviet area and make a circuitous retreat to the Hunan- Kweichow border. They joined forces with the Sixth Red Army, led by Hsiao K'o (q.v.), in October to form the Second Front Army, with Ho Lung as commander and Jen Pi-shih as political commissar. The Second Front Army established a base in the Szechwan-Hunan- Hupeh-Kweichow border area, but Nationalist units forced it to abandon the base and move northward in 1935. After joining the Fourth Front Army {see Chang Kuo-t'ao) at Kantzu in June 1936, it completed the Long March to northern Shensi in November.
When the Eighth Route Army was organized after the Sino-Japanese war began in 1937, Ho Lung received command of its 120th Division, with Kuan Hsiang-ying as political commissar. In the autumn of 1937 the 120th Division marched into northwestern Shansi and began to create a base area along the Shansi-Suiyuan border. In 1938 Ho and Kuan marched the division into central Hopei to assist Nieh Jung-chen (q.v.) and Lü Cheng-ts'ao in guerrilla operations. They returned to northwestern Shansi to assume command of the Shansi- Suiyuan military district in 1940.
In 1941 Kuan Hsiang-ying, who had contracted tuberculosis in the late 1930's, was bedridden for a time. In 1942 he became secretary of the Shansi-Suiyuan sub-bureau of the Chinese Communist party. Although his health did not improve, he continued to perform his party and Central Committee duties for three years before being confined to bed at Yenan in 1946. He died in July 1946, at the age of 44.
Kuan Hsiang-ying devoted himself completely to the Chinese Communist cause, and he never married. Next to Ho Lung, his closest friend was Hsü Fan-t'ing, whose defection from the Shansi forces of Chao Ch'eng-shou in 1937 had helped Ho Lung and Kuan Hsiang-ying to establish a base in northwestern Shansi quickly. Kuan is known to have composed a number of verses. He reportedly was fond of Sung poems, particularly those of Lu Yu.
