Wang Jo-fei (1896-8 April 1946), founding member of the European branch of the Chinese Communist party. In the 1920's he organized workers in Shanghai. In 1931 he went to Inner Mongolia, where he was arrested by Nationalist agents. After his release in 1937, he held important staff positions' at Yenan. From 1944 until his death in 1946 he served in the Communist liaison mission at Chungking. Anshun hsien, Kweichow, was the birthplace of Wang Jo-fei. When Wang was only seven, he, a younger sister, and their mother went to live with his mother's brother, Huang Ch'isheng, a well-known educator. Wang began his formal education in the institution his uncle headed, the Ta-te Academy in Kweiyang. The school administration was progressive and was sympathetic to the revolution of 1911. After being graduated from the academy in 1912, Wang worked for two years in a Kweiyang bookstore owned by Ts'ai Heng-wu, a former teacher for whom he had great respect.

In the meantime, Huang Ch'i-sheng had entered politics as commissioner for external affairs for Kweichow province, and Huang's younger brother had become commissioner of industry. In 1914 Wang Jo-fei worked for a time in a mining company which was under his younger uncle's jurisdiction. In 1915, when Yuan Shih-k'ai's monarchical ambitions became apparent, Huang Ch'i-sheng and Wang Jo-fei went to Shanghai to participate in the anti-Yuan movement. Wang returned to Kweichow in 1917 and became a teacher at the Ta-te Academy. Toward the end of that year, he won a government scholarship for study in Japan. In the spring of 1918, accompanied by Huang Ch'i-sheng, he went to Japan and enrolled at Meiji University. Because of the Russian Revolution, interest in socialism was intense, and Wang soon became so absorbed in the study ofsocialist literature that he completely neglected his courses. He returned to China in 1919, at the time of the May Fourth Movement. Wang Jo-fei soon became interested in the work-study movement in France (see Li Shihtseng). Accompanied by Huang Ch'i-sheng, he left Shanghai for France in October 1919 in a group which also included Ts'ai Ho-sen (q.v.). On arrival in France, the group proceeded to Montargis to study French. Three months later, Wang began working in factories to support himself. Work was not easy to find, and Chinese officials in Paris could do nothing to alleviate the students' hardships. Early in 1920 Ts'ai Ho-sen and Wang Jo-fei decided to organize a mutual aid society. At its inaugural meeting, Wang made a speech in which he called on his fellow students to "take to the road of the working class of the Soviet Union." As his devotion to Marxism increased, Wang Jo-fei began to travel throughout France in an attempt to turn the hitherto anarchistic tendencies among Chinese students into socialist channels. In the winter of 1921 he helped organize the China Socialist Youth Corps in France. Its members included Chou En-lai, Chao Shih-yen, Ch'en Yen-nien, Hsiang Chingyü, Li Fu-ch'un, and Nieh Jung-chen (qq.v.). Wang Jo-fei also joined the French Communist party in 1922. That summer, the Socialist Youth Corps was reorganized as the European branch of the Chinese Communist party. Wang and a group which included Chao Shihyen and Ch'en Yen-nien then went to the Soviet Union to study at the Communist University for Toilers of the East. During his two years in Moscow, Wang served as head of the Chinese Communist party branch at the university. Upon his return to China in 1925, Wang Jo-fei was appointed secretary of the Chinese Communist party's Honan-Shensi committee. That May, he attended the All-China Labor Congress at Canton, after which he concentrated on organizing the workers on the Peking- Hankow and Lunghai rail lines. About this time, he met and married Li P'ei-chih. Toward the end of 1925, he was called to Shanghai to become the first chief executive officer (mishu-chang) of the Chinese Communist party's Central Committee. When the Central Committee was moved to Wuhan early in 1927, Wang was transferred to the Kiangsu provincial committee of the party with the special assignment of directing the organization of workers in the Chinese city of Shanghai. Wang joined with Chou En-lai and Chao Shih-yen in directing the general strike that aided the Nationalist occupation of Shanghai. At the Fifth National Congress of the Chinese Communist party, held at Wuhan in May 1927, Wang was elected to the Central Committee. Because of the Kuomintang purge of Communists in the Shanghai area, for a brief period he was the only active Communist leader there. That autumn, after leading an unsuccessful peasant uprising at Wusih, he fled to the Soviet Union. In the summer of 1928 Wang Jo-fei attended the Sixth National Congress of the Chinese Communist party, held at Moscow. He was elected a delegate of the Chinese Communist party to the Comintern, and in that capacity he lived in Moscow for the next three years. Upon his return to China in the summer of 1931, he was assigned to work with Ulanfu (q.v.) in Inner Mongolia, the immediate task being the organization of Mongols in Shensi, Kansu, Ninghsia, and Suiyuan. At the beginning of November, Wang was arrested at Paotow by Nationalist agents and sent to a prison in Kweisui, Suiyuan. He was not tried until 1934, when the Suiyuan Higher Court sentenced him to a prison term of 15 years. In June 1936, because of the Communist threat to Suiyuan, he was moved to Taiyuan. When a new period of Kuomintang-Communist cooperation began with the Sian Incident of December 1936 (see Chiang Kai-shek; Chang Hsueh-liang) and the outbreak of the Sino- Japanese war in July 1937, Wang was released. He had spent five years and seven months in prison.

Wang Jo-fei immediately went to Yenan, where he was appointed director of the propaganda department of the Shensi-Kansu- Ninghsia Border Region committee of the Chinese Communist party. In 1939 he became deputy chief of staff of the Eighth Route Army (Eighteenth Army Group). His next assignment was as secretary general of the Central Committee's north China-central China work committee. When this committee's work was done, he became the Central Committee's chief executive officer and director of its party affairs research bureau. In 1944 he was sent to Chungking to serve in the Communist liaison mission there with Chou En-lai and Lin Po-ch'ü (q.v.). He returned to Yenan in August 1945 to accompany Chou and Mao Tse-tung to Chungking for discussions as part of the American effort to mediate the Kuomintang-Communist conflict. In January 1946 he participated in the Political Consultative Conference, at which a Kuomintang-Communist truce agreement was signed. On his way back to Yenan on 8 April 1946, the plane in which he was traveling crashed, and he was killed. Other victims of this tragedy included Ch'in Panghsien, Teng Fa, Yeh T'ing (qq.v.), and Wang's uncle Huang Ch'i-sheng. Wang was survived by his mother, his wife, and a son born in 1939.