Ho Shu-heng (1874- February 1935), an early colleague of Mao Tse-tung and the oldest of the original members of the Hsin-min hsüeh-hui and the Chinese Communist party, was prominent in the party's attempts to use the Hunan school system to spread Marxist- Leninist ideas and in the establishment of the party's branch in Hunan.

A native of Ninghsiang, Hunan, Ho Shu-heng was born into a moderately prosperous peasant family. He attended the Yunshan Primary School, where his schoolmates included Hsieh Chueh-tsai (q.v.), Chiang Meng-chou, and Wang Ling-po, all of whom later became Communists in Hunan. As students, they favored the study of science and other practical subjects which would encourage modernization and reform and strongly opposed the attitudes of conservative members of the provincial gentry.

After 1912, Ho Shu-heng studied at the Hunan First Normal School at Changsha, where he first met Mao Tse-tung. After graduation in 1914, Ho went to teach at the Ch'u-i School in Changsha, one of the better known private schools of that period. Ho and his friends, including Mao Tse-tung, Ts'ai Ho-sen (q.v.), and other students from the normal school, often met at the Ch'u-i School in Changsha to discuss political problems. The Hsin-min hsueh-hui (New People's Study Society) was formed by Mao and Ts'ai in April 1918, and Ho Shu-heng was the oldest member of the initial group invited to join the organization. Ho participated in the local movement which opposed Chang Ching-yao, the Peiyang warlord who governed Hunan from 1918 to 1920, and thus was drawn into increasingly close association with Mao. When Mao and Ts'ai Ho-sen went to Peking to investigate the possibility of participating in the work-study program in France, Ho Shu-heng took charge of the New People's Study Society and its 70-odd members.

In 1920 Ho Shu-heng was appointed by the provincial education council to the post of director of the bureau of education in Hunan. He also took over direction of the T'ung-su-pao [commoners' newspaper], published by the bureau to promote popular education in the province. The paper had been established shortly after 1911, but it had no clearly defined editorial policy or objective. Ho and the group associated with him in planning and editing the paper had little experience with popular journalism, but were determined to use the paper to spread their political ideas. This undertaking coincided with Ho Shu-heng's conversion to Marxism, probably through the personal influence of Mao Tse-tung. The T'ung-su-pao soon assumed a new aspect, opposing warlordism and advocating social reform, and it increased in circulation and influence among the students and the peasants of Hunan. In 1920, after Mao Tse-tung returned from his second trip to Peking, the provincial bureau of education at Changsha, along with the New People's Study Society, became an active center of political discussion and planning. Disturbed by the radicalism of the T'ung-su-pao, the provincial authorities dismissed Ho Shu-heng from his post in May 1921. All those on the staff of the newspaper who were members of the New People's Study Society resigned, and several of them went to teach under Mao Tse-tung at the primary school of the First Normal School. In the summer of 1921 Mao and Ho Shu-heng went to Shanghai, where they represented Hunan at the founding meeting of the Chinese Communist party organization in July. Ho was the oldest member of the small group which attended that historic gathering. Ho Shu-heng then returned to Changsha, where he worked with Mao in developing a branch of the Communist party in liunan. The activities of" the New People's Study Society came to an end, and the radical members of that group joined the Communist party branch. Ho remained in Hunan until 1927. During these years he was a member, and later the director, of the Wang Fu-chih Study Society, an institute which had been established at Changsha in the early years of the republican period to study the works of the seventeenth-century Hunanese nationalist and classical scholar {see ECCP, II, 817-19). In the early twentieth century, Chinese revolutionaries had used the writings of Wang Fu-chih to support the anti-Manchu movement. Ho Shuheng was also responsible for Communist political activities in the primary schools of the province. Many of the Hunanese Communists were teachers, and the school system was an important channel for organization and propaganda. In 1928, after the split between the Kuomintang and the Communists, Ho Shu-heng went to the Soviet Union, where he studied at the University for Toilers of the East. In Moscow, he was a close associate of the Hunanese Communist Hsü T'e-li (q.v.). Both of them were considerably older than most of the other Chinese then studying in Russia. Ho returned to China in the summer of 1930 and went to the Communist area in Kiangsi. When the central soviet government was formed at Juichin in 1931, Ho became head of the workers and peasants inspection committee of the regime. In 1931, and again in 1934, he was elected to the central executive council of the central soviet government in Kiangsi. In the autumn of 1934, when the Communists were forced to retreat from the Kiangsi base, Ho Shu-heng, who was then about 60, stayed at the base to assist the remnant units that remained there. Early in 1935 he moved from Kiangsi into Fukien with a group which also included Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai and Teng Tzu-hui (qq.v.). At the end of February, Nationalist forces surrounded this group and captured Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai and some of the others. When Nationalist forces encircled the remaining Communists near Ch'angt'ing, Fukien, Ho Shu-heng jumped off a cliff and ended his life.