Hsieh Chueh-tsai (1881-), Chinese Communist leader, held important party offices in the 1930's and 1940's. He served the Central People's Government as minister of interior (1949-59) and was president of the Supreme People's Court (1959-64).

Born into the family of a landholder in the Ninghsiang district of Hunan province, Hsieh Chueh-tsai received his early education in the Chinese classics and passed the examinations for the sheng-yuan degree. In the late 1890's he became associated with other young Hunanese who were agitating for modernization. Hunan, which had provided important anti- Taiping leadership in the mid-nineteenth century, gave equal support to the reform programs advocated by K'ang Yu-wei (q.v.) and his followers. Hsieh came under the influence of Ho Shu-heng (q.v.), Wang Ling-po, and Chiang Meng-chou, leaders of the young Hunanese radical nationalists, all of whom became Communists in later years. For a time, Hsieh also served as an adviser to the prominent scholar-official T'an Yen-k'ai (q.v.). Little is known about Hsieh's activities during the early years of the century, but he apparently earned his living as a schoolmaster. From 1921 to 1924 he taught in schools in Hunan organized by Ho Shu-heng and Mao Tse-tung. Although his life-long friendship with Ho Shu-heng had been formed in late Ch'ing times, Hsieh seems to have been unaware of Ho's connection with the infant Chinese Communist party and of the fact that the schools had been established to disseminate Marxist ideas. After T'an Yen-k'ai joined the Kuomintang at Canton, Hsieh became a member of that party in 1924. Together with Li Wei-han (q.v.), Chiang Meng-chou, and others, Hsieh founded the Hsiang-chiang Middle School, where he taught Chinese. In addition to teaching at the school, he wrote for and later edited the T'ung-su jih-pao [popular daily] at Changsha. It was while working for this paper that Hsieh had his first personal contact with Mao Tse-tung, who took time from his other activities to give the paper ideological direction.

When the Northern Expedition forces reached Hunan in 1926, Hsieh became a member of the provincial committee of the Kuomintang, editor of the Kuomintang newspaper Min-pao [people's journal] in Hunan, and counsel to the Special Court. At that tüne, Hsieh was identified as a member of the left-Kuomintang, but in 1925 he had joined the Chinese Communist party. He had kept his membership a secret, but when Hsti K'o-hsiang began the mass arrest and execution of Communists and leftists in Hunan in May 1927, he went into hiding. In December 1927 he went to Hankow and then to Shanghai. Possibly following in the footsteps of Liu Shao-ch'i (q.v.), who had also fled from Hankow and who subsequently was assigned to take charge of Communist party affairs in Manchuria, Hsieh traveled from Shanghai to Mukden, where he remained for about two years.

In 1931 Hsieh left Shanghai for the Hunan- Hupeh region to help Ho Lung (q.v.) develop a Communist base at Sangchih in western Hunan. He edited the Kung-nung-pao [workers' and peasants' paper], and taught at the Communist party school where junior cadres were indoctrinated and trained. In 1932 when this soviet area was encircled by National Government troops, Hsieh went with Ho Lung's army to the Hung Lake area to establish a new base. This new soviet was besieged, and Hsieh was arrested by Kuomintang troops. He was released, however, allegedly because he looked like a traditional Chinese scholar rather than a Communist. He went to Shanghai, where, at the height of the Nationalist suppression drive, he worked in the secretariat of the All-China Federation of Labor, under the leadership of Lo Teng-hsien. When Lo was arrested in March 1933, this Communist-led labor organization disintegrated, and Hsieh left Shanghai for Kiangsi, where he was made secretary of the central soviet government at Juichin. Hsieh Chueh-tsai made the Long March at the age of 53 and arrived in good health in Shensi late in 1935. He continued to hold the post of secretary of the soviet government at Paoan and Yenan until 1937. Then, after a brief stay in Lanchow as Communist party representative, he became secretary general of the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia Border Region government for a short time. In 1938 Hsieh lived quietly near Hengyang, Hunan. He was not known locally as a Communist; he may have been doing secret work for the party. It soon became impossible for Communists to work in Hunan, however; and he returned to Yenan to head the central party school.

At Yenan, Hsieh served as second secretary of the northwest bureau of the Chinese Communist party and vice chairman of the people's political council of the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia Border Region. Hsieh was a close friend of Hsü T'e-li (q.v.), and Western observers in northern Shensi often noted the two elders walking arm-in-arm down the primitive main street of the Communist wartime capital. Hsieh remained in Shensi after the Japanese surrender in 1945. In August 1948, when the Communists established the North China People's Government in Hopei under the chairmanship of Tung Pi-wu (q.v.), Hsieh became its minister of justice and a member of the government council.

In October 1949 the Central People's Government was established at Peking, and Hsieh became a member of the Government Administration Council, a member of its committee on political and legal affairs, and minister of interior. As the Communists consolidated nation-wide political control and assigned more responsibilities to younger men, Hsieh was gradually relieved of duties in the legal field. His principal concern was the ministry of interior, which he headed until April 1959. He became a vice chairman of the China People's Relief Committee, headed by Madame Sun Yat-sen (Soong Ch'ing-ling, q.v.), in April 1950. From April 1953 to March 1956 he was vice chairman of the Chinese political and legal society. In 1953 he was on the committee for drafting the constitution and the central government election committee which prepared for the National People's Congress. In July 1954 he became vice president of the central political-legal cadres school. He attended the National People's Congress in 1954 as a representative from Shantung. At the Eighth National Congress of the Chinese Communist party, held in 1956, Hsieh was elected to alternate membership on the Central Committee. His last substantive position at Peking was that of president of the Supreme People's Court; he succeeded Tung Pi-wu and served from April 1959 until December 1964.

Hsieh Chueh-tsai attained ministerial rank at Peking and was regarded as one of the senior figures of the Chinese Communist party. His career was marked more by durability than by brilliance. He was often referred to as a mild and scholarly man, trained in the classical tradition and known for his essays and poetry. He maintained an interest in political movements devoted to the modernization of China — the reform movement at the turn of the century, the beginnings of the Kuomintang, and the Chinese Communist party. Perhaps more significant is the fact that he belonged to that small coterie of Hunanese Communists who had long been associated with Mao Tse-tung. Hsieh Chueh-tsai was the author of a number of articles on revolutionary theory and practice which were published in Communist newspapers and in memorial volumes dedicated Hsieh Chueh-tsai [100] to Communist comrades. His writings include San-san chih-tu li-lun yü shih-chi [theory and practice of the three-three system], which appeared in 1945; an outline of Communist study methods and Communist ethics, published in 1957; and a collection of essays, Pu-huo-chi [no doubts]. He also contributed to Kuan-yü jen-min min-chu chien-cheng [concerning the establishment of a democratic government], published in 1951, and to Alao Tse-tung ti ku-shih [stories of Mao Tse-tung], published in 1954.

Hsieh Chueh-tsai was married and had two children, a son and a daughter. His son, Hsieh Hsuan-ch'ü, was a graduate of the VVhampoa Alilitary Academy. He became a Communist, but left the party in 1928. During the Sino-Japanese war, Hsieh Hsuan-ch'ü served under Ho Chung-han (q.v.) doing political work in the National Government military forces. Hsieh Chueh-tsai's daughter became a nurse.