Hsiang Ching-yü (1895-1 May 1928), the wife of Ts'ai Ho-sen (q.v.) and an early member of the Chinese Communist party, was known for her work in organizing women for the party's cause. She was executed by the Nationalist authorities.

Little is known of Hsiang Ching-yü's childhood except that she was born into a well-to-do merchant family in Hsup'u, Hunan. About 1910 she entered the Chou-nan nü-hsiao [Chou-nan girls school] in Changsha. Three of her brothers had gone to Japan in pursuit of a modern education. At school, she was a student leader and acquired the nickname of "Mo-tzu" because this humanitarian philosopher was her chief interest at that time. She came to know Ts'ai Ho-sen (q.v.) and Mao Tse-tung; and when the two men organized the Hsin-min hsüeh-hui [new people's study society] in 1918, she became a member. After graduation in 1918, Hsiang Ching-yü returned to Hsup'u and founded a girls' primary school, of which she became principal. She also traveled to other cities in Hunan to promote women's education.

Hsiang Ching-yü was about 24 at the time of the May Fourth Movement, and in the spring of 1919 she was active in patriotic demonstrations. Some members of the Hsin-min hsüeh-hui at Changsha were then making plans to go to France under the work-study plan. Hsiang Ching-yü and Ts'ai Ch'ang (q.v.), who was also a graduate of the Chou-nan nü-hsiao, organized a group of young women to join them. On the voyage to France, Ts'ai was accompanied by her mother and her elder brother, Ts'ai Ho-sen. Hsiang and Ts'ai Ho-sen were married in 1921. In France, Hsiang Ching-yü worked in a factory, studied French intensively, and began to read Marxist literature. She and her husband were leading figures in the work-study movement. In the spring of 1921 they helped organize the Chungkuo ch'ing-nien kung-ch'an-t'uan [young Chinese Communist corps], which in 1922 became the French branch of the Chinese Communist party. In 1921 Hsiang Ching-yü and her husband were leaders of the 8 February demonstrations against the anarchists, in which they were joined by Chou En-lai, Ch'en Yen-nien, and Chao Shih-yen (qq.v). The French government deported Ts'ai Ho-sen in the winter of 1921 because of his political activities. He returned to China, where he made contact with the central apparatus of the infant Chinese Communist party at Shanghai. Hsiang Ching-yü joined him in Shanghai in the spring of 1922.

Both Hsiang and Ts'ai attended the Second National Congress of the Chinese Communist party, held in July 1922, and both were elected to the Central Committee. Hsiang Ching-yü was appointed director of the newly created women's department of the Central Committee, and she played a leading role in expanding Communist influence among women. In 1924 she helped organize the strikes in the silk factories and at the Xanyang Tobacco Company in Shanghai, enterprises staffed largely by women and girls. During the period of the May Thirtieth Incident of 1925, when police fired on demonstrators in Shanghai, both Hsiang and Ts'ai were active in Shanghai, attempting to direct the political unrest resulting from the incident into channels useful to the Chinese Communist party.

Toward the end of 1925 Hsiang accompanied Ts'ai to Moscow to attend the sixth plenum of the Executive Committee of the Comintern. Ts'ai then served as Chinese Communist delegate to the Comintern, and Hsiang studied at the Communist University for Toilers of the East. They remained in the Soviet Union until May 1927, when they returned to China to attend the Fifth National Congress of the Chinese Communist party. Hsiang Ching-yü then served in the propaganda department of the Wuhan general labor union. Later, she took charge of party propaganda work in Hankow while her husband was working in the propaganda department of the Central Committee. After the left-Kuomintang group at Wuhan broke with the Communists in July 1927, Hsiang Ching-yü worked underground as a labor organizer in Hankow. The rigors of this existence affected her health. In April 1928 she was arrested and imprisoned by the French concession police in Hankow. In prison, she led her cellmates in a hunger strike to demand better treatment. She was extradited to the Chinese authorities and was executed on 1 May 1928. Large crowds of workers accompanied her to the execution ground, where she made a speech and shouted slogans before facing the firing squad. Three years later, her husband also was captured and executed.

Hsiang Ching-yü was the most prominent woman in the Chinese Communist party during its formative years. Because she believed that the emancipation of Chinese women could be attained only through radical change in the Chinese social system, she saw the Chinese Communist party as the most effective channel through which to achieve that objective. Her most important contribution to the Chinese Communist movement was the organized political mobilization, for the first time, of worker and peasant women. Her only surviving writings are contained in Hsiang-shang Vung-meng [toward a brighter day], a collection of love poems she exchanged with Ts'ai Ho-sen during their voyage to France. An official biography, Lieh-shih Hsiang Ching-yü [Hsiang Ching-yü, revolutionary martyr], was published in Peking in 1958. .