Hsiang Ying (1897- January 1941), Chinese Communist labor organizer and military leader, was one of the two vice chairmen of the central soviet government headed by Mao Tse-tung (1931-34) and became deputy commander and political commissar of the New Fourth Army. He was killed in the January 1941 clash with Nationalist forces in Anhwei. Born into a poor family in Huangp'i, Hupeh, Hsiang Ying was orphaned at an early age. After serving as an apprentice in a pawnshop, he worked as a laborer on the Peking-Hankow railway. About this time, the Communist-led China Trade Union Secretariat moved to Peking. The secretariat concentrated on organizing the Peking-Hankow railroad workers, and Hsiang became one of the local labor leaders. After the incident of 7 February 1923, when Wu P'ei-fu (q.v.) took action to prevent the formation of a labor union among the railroad workers, Hsiang joined the Chinese Communist party.

For the next two years, Hsiang Avorked as a labor organizer in his native Hupeh. By May 1925 he had become sufficiently prominent to be chosen to represent the Wuhan workers at the Second All-China Labor Congress in Canton, which established the All-China Federation of Labor. He also was elected to the 25-man executive committee of the All-China Federation of Labor. In 1926 he became Communist party secretary at the Hupeh general labor union and head of the union's organization department. In 1927 he became party secretary at the Shanghai general labor union. In this capacity he worked with Chou En-lai, who was one of the principal organizers of a general uprising in the spring of 1927 which was intended to facilitate the seizure of Shanghai by the National Revolutionary Army. After the Kuomintang-Communist split in mid- 192 7, Hsiang Ying went to the Soviet Union, Where he reportedly received military training. In the summer of 1928 he attended the Sixth Congress of the Chinese Communist party, held at ^Moscow, at which the leadership of Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai (q.v.) was repudiated. Hsiang Chung-fa (q.v.) was elected general secretary of the party, and Hsiang Ying was elected to the Central Committee and the Political Bureau. After returning to China, Hsiang Ying became chairman of the All-China Federation of Labor at its fifth congress, which was held secretly in Shanghai. At that time, Li Li-san (q.v.) was very active in party and labor work in Shanghai, and Hsiang Ying reportedly was one of his trusted supporters. Little is known of Hsiang Ying's role in the Chinese Communist party from 1928 to 1931. After the political downfall of Li Li-san in late 1930 and the capture and execution of Hsiang Chung-fa in mid- 1931, Ch'en Shao-yü (q.v.) became the general secretary of the party. Some sources suggest that Ch'en Shao-yü's group, in cooperation with Chou En-lai, sent Hsiang Ying to Kiangsi as a representative of the Political Bureau to establish contact with the rural areas under Communist control, where the influence of Mao Tse-tung and his associates was increasing steadily. In any event, when the First All-China Congress of Soviets met in Juichin, Kiangsi, in November 1931 to establish a central soviet government, Mao Tse-tung was elected chairman, and Hsiang Ying and Chang Kuo-t'ao (q.v.) became vice chairmen. Hsiang Ying also served as a member of the military committee, commander of the Eighth Red Army, and chairman of the supervisory committee.

When the main Communist armies left Kiangsi on the Long March in the autumn of 1934, Hsiang Ying remained behind to cover the retreat and to attempt to develop a newbase of operations in the area. He took charge of party affairs in what had been the central soviet area. His guerrilla troops fought savagely to escape annihilation by the Nationalist armies; by mid- 1936 they had been driven east to the Kiangsi-Fukien border. Hsiang divided the remnants of his forces into smaller units which dispersed through the rural area of central China into Kiangsi, Fukien, Hunan, Chekiang, and Anhwei. After the outbreak of the war with Japan in July 1937, the Nationalist armies were forced to halt their campaigns against the Communists, and, gradually, the guerrilla units began to reassemble. In September 1937 Hsiang Ying met with Hsiung Shih-hui (q.v.), the representative of Ho Ying-ch'in (q.v.), the Nationalist war minister. They agreed to cease hostilities in central China. Tentative plans were made for reorganizing the Communist troops in the area and for incorporating them into the Nationalist military establishment. It appears that Hsiang Ying visited Yenan after this meeting. When he returned to central China in January 1938, negotiations had been completed for the creation of the Communist New Fourth Army, named for the Fourth Red Army, which had been organized when Chu Teh (q.v.) and Mao Tse-tungjoined forces at Chingkangshan in 1928. On 4 January 1938 the New Fourth Army, numbering about 12,000 troops, established headquarters at Nanchang, Kiangsi. It was assigned a territory of operations along the Yangtze in central China about 50 miles wide and 150 miles long. Yeh T'ing (q.v.), who had achieved prominence on the Northern Expedition and who later had broken with the Communist party, was appointed commander; Hsiang Ying became deputy commander and political commissar. In addition to his military responsibilities, Hsiang served as secretary of the southeast bureau of the Chinese Communist party.

In April 1938 the New Fourth Army established headquarters in Anhwei and began to extend its territory of operation. Guerrilla raids ^•ere made along the Nanking-Shanghai and the Wuhu-Nanking railways and along the Nanking-Hangchow highway. When Hsüchow in northern Kiangsu fell to the Japanese in May 1938, the Communist forces moved northward. From that time on, the New Fourth Army maintained two detachments north of the Yangtze. Between the spring of 1938 and the autumn of 1939 the Chinese Communist guerrillas won in several engagements with the Japanese. The Communists were more successful in areas north of the Yangtze than in the areas to the south; by 1940 almost four-fifths of their troops were north of the river. In the autumn of 1940, Nationalist elements began to agitate for the removal of all Communist troops to bases north of the Yangtze and the Yellow rivers. An ultimatum to that effect was issued in December. However, the Communist forces moved in a direction more to the east than to the north. In January 1941 units of the New Fourth Army came into sharp conflict with Nationalist forces at Maolin in southern Anhwei. The ensuing battle (6-14 January 1941), which resulted in an almost total rout of the Communists, is known in Communist literature as the New Fourth Army Incident. Yeh T'ing, the commander, was captured by the Nationalists; and Hsiang Ying was killed.

Of the leaders of the New Fourth Army, it was Hsiang Ying who was blamed in Yenan for the destruction of the army. Specifically, he was accused of entertaining rightist ideas and of failing to implement a series of directives drafted for the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist party by Mao Tse-tung on 4 May 1940, thereby exposing the New Fourth Army to attack by Nationalist forces.

This criticism notwithstanding, Hsiang Ying was known throughout his career as an effective agitator and guerrilla commander. According to the renegade Communist Li Ang (Chu Ch'i-hua, q.v.), Hsiang also was a formidable figure in intraparty disagreements, far more vigorous and outspoken than was Ch'ü Ch'iupai. Hsiang's speeches and instructions to the cadres of the New Fourth Army, some of which were collected and published in a small volume entitled Hsiang Ying chiang-chünyen-lun chi (1939), suggest that he was a persuasive speaker and that his knowledge of contemporary affairs was quite extensive.

Hsiang's wife was arrested in Fukien in February 1935, together with Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai. Nothing further is known of her.