Jao Shu-shih (1901-), Communist official who served as political commissar of the New Fourth Army after October 1942. With the establishment of the Central People's Government in 1949, he received a number of important posts in east China. In 1953 he became a member of the State Planning Committee and director of the Chinese Communist party's central organization department. In 1954-55 he and Kao Kang (q.v.) were accused of forming an "anti-party alliance," and Jao was stripped of his posts.

Linchuan hsien, Kiangsi, was the birthplace of Jao Shu-shih. Little is known about his childhood or his family background except that his father was a scholar who taught at the Nanchang First Provincial Middle School. According to one source, he went to France in 1919 to participate in the work-study movement {see Li Shih-tseng). He was graduated from the Nanchang First Provincial Middle School about 1923.

Jao Shu-shih enrolled at Shanghai University, where he came under the influence of such radicals as Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai, Teng Chung-hsia, Shih Ts'un-t'ung, and Yün Tai-ying. In 1925 he joined the Chinese Communist party. He was active in the May Thirtieth Movement and worked as a labor organizer in the Shanghai area. In the spring of 1927 he worked under Chao Shih-yen, Ch'en Yun, and Chou En-lai (q.v.) in organizing the workers' uprising that facilitated the entry of the National Revolutionary Army into Shanghai. There is little clear information about Jao's activities during the next decade. He reportedly served as head of the Communist Youth League in Manchuria in 1929-30, and he apparently lived in Moscow for a time. He may have worked for the Chiu-kuo shih-pao [national salvation news], which was published in the Soviet Union from 1931 to 1935 under the editorship of Wu Yü-chang (q.v.). In any event, when the Chiu-kuo shih-pao began publication in Paris in 1935, it listed Jao Shu-shih as a contributor. Other sources indicate that Jao visited the United States in the 1930's and worked on the staff of a Chinese-language newspaper in New York.

In 1936 Jao was assigned to work under Liu Shao-ch'i (q.v.) in the Communist political mobilization programs in north China. After the Sino-Japanese war broke out in the summer of 1937, he worked at the Communist base in Yenan. In the winter of 1939 he was made deputy to Liu Shao-ch'i, who then headed the party's central China bureau. He also served as head of the bureau's propaganda department. When the New Fourth Army was organized at Nanchang in January 1938, Jao was assigned to serve under Yeh T'ing and Hsiang Ying (qq.v.) and was given responsibility for political training.

In the so-called New Fourth Army Incident of January 1941 Hsiang Ying was killed by the Nationalists; Yeh T'ing and Jao Shu-shih were captured. Because the Nationalists failed to recognize Jao, he was able to escape and make his way to northern Kiangsu. He then became deputy commissar of the New Fourth Army, once again serving under Liu Shao-ch'i. In October 1942 he succeeded Liu as political commissar of the New Fourth Army, secretary of the central China bureau, and head of the party's central China school. The New Fourth Army spent most of the next two years in areas that were behind the Japanese lines, and it performed well. In recognition of his wartime service, Jao Shu-shih was elected to the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist party at the Seventh National Congress in 1945. After the Japanese surrendered, the Nationalists and the Communists resumed their struggle for power. As a result of American mediation efforts, a truce agreement was signed by Chou En-lai and Chang Ch'ün (q.v.) injanuary 1946. An executive headquarters for the implementation of the agreement was established at Peiping, and the Communists appointed Yeh Chien-ying (q.v.) their representative to the headquarters. Jao was assigned to Yeh's staiT as political adviser, and he traveled regularly between Peiping and the Communist headquarters at Yenan. Control of Manchuria soon became a prime issue between the Nationalists and the Communists, and in June 1946 an advance section of the executive headquarters was established at Changchun, with Jao as the Chinese Communist representative. When the truce agreement expired on 30 June, the civil war resumed, and Jao returned to Yenan with Yeh Chien-ying. He then went to northern Kiangsu to resume the post of political commissar of the New Fourth Army, now called the East China People's Liberation Army. He was one of the first Communist leaders to enter Shanghai after its capture in May 1949. With the establishment of the Central People's Government, Jao became a member of the Government Council and the Military Council. He also served in east China as political commissar of the military district, chairman of the military and administrative committee, first secretary of the party's regional bureau, secretary of the party's Shanghai municipal committee, and a member of the standing committee of the Shanghai General Labor Union. In October 1952 Jao Shu-shih and Liu Shao-ch'i went to Moscow for the Soviet Communist party's Nineteenth Congress. At the end of the year, Jao resigned from most of his posts in east China and went to Peking, where he became a member of the State Planning Committee, headed by Kao Kang (q.v.), and of the committee assigned to draft a new constitution. In the spring of 1953 he was appointed director of the party's central organization department. Jao's promising political career came to a sudden halt in 1954 when he and Kao Kang mysteriously disappeared from public view-. There was no further word of him until 4 April 1955, when Peking issued a report on what it termed the Kao Kang-Jao Shu-shih anti-party alliance. Kao Kang committed suicide. Jao refused to confess to alleged anti-party crimes. Most of the charges against him were based on the testimony of one of his former subordinates in east China, Hsiang Ming. A national conference of the Chinese Communist party had passed the following resolution on 31 March: "Tt was fully established that in the ten years between 1943 and 1953 Jao on many occasions resorted to shameless deceit in the party to seize power. During his tenure of office in east China, he did his utmost to adopt a rightist policy of surrender to the capitalists, landlords, and rich peasants in the cities and countryside. At the same time he did everything possible to protect counterrevolutionaries in defiance of the Central Committee's policy of suppressing them. After his transfer to the Central Committee in 1953, he thought that Kao Kang was on the point of success in his activities to seize power in the Central Committee. Therefore, he formed an anti-party alliance with Kao Kang and used his office as director of the organization department of the Central Committee to start a struggle aimed at opposing leading members of the Central Committee and actively carried out activities to split the party. From the fourth plenary session of the Seventh Central Committee [held in February 1954] to the present, Jao has never shown any signs of repentance and now persists in an attitude of attacking the party." Jao Shu-shih was stripped of his many posts. Nothing further is known of him. Jao's wife, Lu Ts'ui, was educated in France. In September 1952 she became secretary of the China branch of the International Federations of Democratic Women. Her last recorded public appearance was made in 1954, when she attended sessions of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association.