Lo Lung-chi (1896-7 December 1965), Westerneducated political scientist who gained prominence in China as the editor of the I-shih pao and the Peking Ch'en Pao. During the Sino-Japanese war he became prominent in the China Democratic League. After 1949, he served the Central People's Government, becoming minister of timber industry in 1956. As a senior leader of the Democratic League he tried to create a loyal opposition at Peking, but in 1957 he and Chang Po-chün were accused of having formed a rightist coalition and were removed from all official posts.

The son of Lo Nien-tzu, a scholar, Lo Lungchi was born in Anfu hsien, Kiangsi. After receiving a traditional education in the Chinese classics, he went to Peking in 1912 and entered Tsinghua College, where he became known for participating in student activities and for leading student movements. He was president of the Tsinghua Student Union and chief editor of the student magazine, the Tsinghua Weekly. He also took an active part in the May Fourth Movement of 1919. Because of these and other activities, it took him nine rather than the usual eight years to complete his course requirements. In 1921, after graduation from Tsinghua, Lo Lung-chi went to the United States on a Boxer Indemnity Fund scholarship. He enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, receiving the B. A. in 1923 and the M.A. in 1925. After spending a year in England studying under Harold Laski at the London School of Economics, he returned to the United States and enrolled at Columbia University. He received a Ph.D. degree in 1928 after writing a dissertation entitled "Parliamentary Elections in England." During this period, Lo continued to be active in Chinese student activities. He served for a time as president of the Association of Chinese Students in America and editor of its Chinese Students Quarterly.

After returning to China in 1928 Lo Lung-chi became chairman of the department of political science at Kuang-hua University in Shanghai. He also assumed the editorship of the leading literary magazine Hsin-yüeh [the crescent moon] after its offices were moved from Peking to Shanghai. Articles on current politics and political ideas soon began to appear in the Hsin-yüeh. Until Hu Shih (q.v.) established the Tu-li p'ing-lun [independent critic] in 1932, his most important political essays were published in the Hsin-yüeh.

Lo Lung-chi's strong criticism of the National Government resulted in arrest, imprisonment, and dismissal from Kuang-hua University in November 1930. After being released early in 1931, he contributed an essay to and published a book entitled Jen-ch'üan lun-chi [on the rights of man]. He went to Tientsin and became a lecturer at Xankai University and editor of the I-shih pao, which had been founded by Father Vincent Lebbe (Lei Ming-yuan, q.v.), a Roman Cathohc cleric. Because of its foreign sponsorship, the I-shih pao was relatively free from National Government control. As its editor, Lo soon became known as a crusading journalist.

In 1932 Lo Lung-chi became associated with a new political party headed by Carsun Chang (Chang Chia-sen, q.v.). Two years later, this group held a national meeting at Tientsin and formally established the National Socialist party [kuo-chia she-hui tang]. Because the formation of dissenting political parties had been forbidden by the National Government, the National Socialist party was a secret organization until 1938. Perhaps because of his association with Carsun Chang, Lo Lung-chi became editor in chief of the Peking CKen Pao [morning post] in 1936. Lo Lung-chi also participated in the activities of other organizations which stressed the threat to China posed by Japanese aggression. In 1936 he became a founding member of the National Salvation Association and an executive member of its Tientsin and Peiping branches. However, he differed from other leading members of the association in that he did not accept the Chinese Communist policy that called for the formation of a united front against the Japanese under the national leadership of Chiang Kai-shek. Lo, in the I-shih pao and the Ch'en Pao, called for opposition to Chiang in north China and resistance to the Japanese in south China. He later (1957, at Peiking) was criticized for this position on the grounds that opposition to Chiang in north China, where Sung Che-yuan (q.v.) was being pressed by the Japanese to turn the area into a special zone under their sponsorship, served only to aid the Japanese.

The Sian Incident of December 1936 {see Chiang Kai-shek) and the outbreak of the Sino- Japanese war in July 1937 led the National Government to invite leaders of all political parties and factions to assist in its resistance effort. Lo Lung-chi served as an adviser to the political department of the Military Affairs Commission (1937-38), a member of the People's Political Council (^1938-41), and a member of the Chinese Political Science Society (1939-41). In 1939 he taught at Southwest Associated University, but he later was dismissed from its staff for criticizing the National Government and advocating that its executive powers be curtailed.

With the breakdown of the Kuomintang- Communist united front, leaders of some of the minority political parties joined together in 1941 to form the League of Chinese Democratic Political Groups. In Ocfober 1944, when this federation was reorganized as the China Democratic League, with Chang Lan (q.v.) as its chairman, Lo Lung-chi became head of its Kunming branch and a member of the standing committee of its central committee. Because membership was now on an individual rather than a party basis, Lo was able to form his own faction within the Democratic League. The question of cooperation with the major political parties brought him into conflict with Carsun Chang. Lo entertained the idea of cooperating with the Chinese Communists, while Chang thought the Kuomintang to be the lesser of two evils. In 1945, having become head of the Democratic League's propaganda department, Lo began publishing the Democratic Weekly. In 1946, the War in the Pacific having ended, Lo Lung-chi represented the Democratic League at the Political Consultative Conference and served on the conference's constitution drafting committee. When the conference failed to reach an agreement on the formation of a coalition government, Lo went to Shanghai. He published the Democratic League's Democratic Daily News and served as the organization's Shanghai spokesman until it was declared illegal by the National Government in 1947. At that juncture, many of the league leaders went to Hong Kong, where they convened a plenary session in May 1948, pledged opposition to the United States and Chiang Kai-shek, and declared their support of the Chinese Communist party. Lo was unable to attend the meeting because he was convalescing in the Hung-ch'iao Sanatorium in Shanghai. However, he immediately voiced his opposition to the league's anti-American stand. Lo had come to know General George C. Marshall in 1946 and later had tried to influence the China policy of the United States by talking with J. Leighton Stuart, who had become American ambassador to China. Stuart and such other friends as the Kuomintang official Yang Hu had helped guarantee Lo's safety in Shanghai after 1947. Lo hoped to gain American assistance in the formation of a government by the democratic leaders of minority parties. He also supported Li Tsung-jen (q.v.) as an alternative to Chiang Kai-shek. During -the last stages of Nationalist control of Shanghai, Lo was virtually a prisoner in the sanitorium. In the spring of 1949 he and Chang Lan w^ere spirited away and hidden by Chinese Communist agents.

Lo Lung-chi went to Peiping in mid- 1949 to help in the preparations for the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. He was one of sixteen Democratic League representatives to the conference and a member of its National Committee. When the Central People's Government was inaugurated at Peking on 1 October 1949, he was appointed to the Government Administration Council. He also became a member of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association and a director of the Chinese People's Institute of Foreign Affairs. When the Korean war broke out, he accepted the directorship of the China Peace Committee. In 1952 he was a delegate to the Asian and Pacific Regions Peace Conference at Peking and to the Peace Conference at Vienna. He represented Kiangsi at the First National People's Congress in 1954 and became a member of the congress's Standing Committee. He attended the World Peace Congress at Helsinki in 1955 and became a member of the World Peace Council, attending its special session at Stockholm in April 1956. In May 1956 he was named minister of timber industry in the Central People's Government. Regarded as an expert on foreign affairs, he became chairman of the international affairs committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and vice chairman of the Chinese People's Institute of Foreign Affairs. He attempted to have these two bodies serve as foreign policy study and advisory groups to the ministry of foreign affairs.

Throughout this period, Lo Lung-chi continued to be active in the China Democratic League. In 1952 he became a member of the administrative committee of the league's paper, the Kuang-ming jih-pao, and began to influence its editorial policy. He was elected a vice chairman of the league in 1953. The death of Chang Lan in 1955 and the virtual retirement of Shen Chün-ju (q.v.) in March 1957 made Lo and Chang Po-chün (q.v.) the senior leaders of the Democratic League.

During the Hundred Flowers period in 1957 Lo Lung-chi and Chang Po-chün openly criticized the Central People's Government. Lo remarked that the main contradiction in the Chinese intelligentsia at that time was the contradiction in positions given to the highlevel intellectuals of bourgeois background and the petty intellectuals of the proletarian class. He decried the misuse of intellectual talent, saying that "there are returned-students from England who make their living as drag-coolies, and returned-students from the United States who run cigarette stalls." Several times he professed support of the Chinese Communist party as well as the democratic parties and love for socialism as well as democracy. Lo saw himself as a spokesman for a loyal opposition, but his enemies interpreted his statements to mean that he considered democracy and socialism to be equally progressive and that he considered socialism as practiced in the People's Republic of China to be undemocratic. Lo was attending a World Peace Council meeting at Colombo, Ceylon, in June 1957 when the Hundred Flowers faded and an "anti-rightist" campaign began. He and Chang Po-chün were denounced and were charged with having formed the "Chang- Lo Anti-Party, Anti-Socialist, Anti-People Alliance." The attack was led by Shih Liang, a woman leader of the Democratic League. Members of the league tried to force Lo's wife, P'u Hsi-hsiu, to testify against him. His brothers—Lo Yao-lin, Lo Mu-tseng, and Lo Chao-jui—were attacked as exploiters of the people. It seems that Lo, in trying to create a loyal opposition, had convinced a number of intellectuals to join the Democratic League and had used the league and its publications to propagate this concept. The Peking regime, however, interpreted his aim as being the creation of a party that opposed the Chinese Communist party and advocated bourgeois democracy. Lo requested that evidence of the extent of his plotting with Chang be produced to substantiate the allegations made against them, and he denied any desire to see the Chinese Communist party or the Central People's Government overthrown. However, he confessed to being "a guilty creature" and admitted that he had "attempted to negate the leadership . . . of the Party." By the end of 1958 he had been stripped of all his important posts. He died in Peking on 7 December 1965. At that time, the Knang-min jih-pao identified him as a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and a central committee member of the China Democratic League.