Lo Ch'i-yuan (1893-1930), leader of the peasant movement during the 1924-28 period and head of the Chinese Communist party's peasant department in 1929-30. He was arrested and executed by Kuomintang authorities at Shanghai. Little is known about Lo Ch'i-yuan's childhood or early life except that he was born into a family of wealthy landowners in Waichow (Huichou), Kwangtung, and that he was graduated from a middle school in Kwangtung. He joined the Socialist Youth League in Canton about 1921, and he later joined the Kwangtung branch of the Chinese Communist party, headed by T'an P'ing-shan and Ch'en Kung-po (qq.v.). By 1924, when the Chinese Communist party and the Kuomintang established a formal alliance, Lo had become an important leader in the peasant movement. He became affiliated with the Peasant Movement Training Institute when it was established under the direction of P'eng P'ai (q.v.) in July 1924, and he served as director of its second class, which was graduated on 30 October 1924, and its fifth class, which was graduated on 8 December 1925. One of the lecturers for the fifth session was Mao Tse-tung. The purpose of the institute was to train cadres who would organize peasants in various provinces to aid the proposed Northern Expedition. Lo Ch'iyuan also contributed to the peasant movement in 1925 by helping to organize a Kwangtung provincial peasants' congress, which met in May at Canton.

After the ex-Communist Ch'en Kung-po succeeded Liao Chung-k'ai (q.v.) as head of the Kuomintang's peasant department in 1925, Lo Ch'i-yuan became secretary of the department. Working with Lo in the department as secretaries in charge of organization work were P'eng P'ai, Juan Hsiao-hsien, and Tan Chiht'ang. By this time, Lo, like many other Communists, had joined the Kuomintang. He and his associates worked to organize peasant associations and militia in the North River area of Kwangtung.

By the spring of 1927 Lo had become the commander of all peasant militia in Kwangtung, and when Ch'en Yen-nien (q.v.) went to Shanghai in April 1927, Lo succeeded him as secretary of the Kwangtung committee of the Chinese Communist party. In these two capacities, he attended the Fifth National Congress of the Chinese Communist party, at which he was elected to the Central Committee. Because Chiang Kai-shek had begun to purge Communists in the Shanghai area about two weeks before the congress began, a number of party leaders challenged the leadership of Ch'en Tu-hsiu (q.v.) at the congress, for he had followed the Comintern-determined policy of cooperation with the Kuomintang. The peasant movement was another subject of debate. Ch'en, heeding Comintern instructions of December 1926, advocated a policy of "political confiscation" of land which allowed landlords with revolutionary ties to keep their land. Such peasant leaders as Lo Ch'i-yuan and P'eng P'ai fought for the more radical policy of immediate confiscation of all land, but Ch'en's proposal finally was approved by the congress.

When the left-wing Kuomintang regime at Wuhan also turned against the Communists and began to suppress peasant associations, Lo Ch'i-yuan withdrew from Kwangtung with part of his peasant militia, thus failing to coordinate his actions with those of P'eng P'ai, who was establishing the Hai-lu-feng soviet. Lo's troops soon were crushed, and he was forced to flee to Shanghai at the beginning of 1928. At the Sixth National Congress of the Chinese Communist party, held in Moscow in the summer of 1928, Lo Ch'i-yuan was reelected in absentia to the Central Committee. In 1929 he succeeded P'eng P'ai as head of the party's peasant department. Although the new party leader, Li Li-san (q.v.), regarded the peasant movement as an appendage of the labor movement, Lo occupied an important position in the central apparatus of the party. Lo's career was cut short when he and another Communist leader, Yang P'ao-an, were arrested in Shanghai in 1930. Soon afterwards, Lo was executed by the Kuomintang authorities in the Shanghai area.