Hsü T'e-li ( 1876-), educator, Chinese Communist party ekier, and one-time teacher of Mao Tse-tung. He served the Communist governments at Juichin and Yenan as an educational administrator. In 1947 he became deputy director of the propaganda department of the Chinese Communist party's Central Committee.

Changsha, Hunan, was the birthplace of Hsü T'e-li. From 1885 to 1891 he attended an old-style school and received a traditional education in the Chinese classics. He taught Chinese at Changsha from 1891 until 1905. During the late Ch'ing period, many Hunanese became interested in modernization through educational reform. Hsü, then nearly 30, enrolled in the Hunan First Normal School, a "new-style" institution at Changsha, and studied there from 1905 to 1907. After graduation, he taught mathematics at a girls school for a year before going to Shanghai, where he worked with the Kiangsu Educational Association from 1908 to 1910. He then returned to Hunan, where he worked to promote opposition to the Ch'ing government's program of nationalizing the railroads. He also supported the movement to convene a national parliament. In 1911 Hsü T'e-li spent several months in Japan studying the Japanese educational system. He came to know republican revolutionaries in Japan, and he joined the T'ung-meng-hui shortly after returning to Hunan. After the Wuchang revolt of October 1911 and the proclamation of the republic, Hsü became a member of the short-lived provincial assembly in Hunan. From 1912 to 1919 he was principal of the Chou-nan Girls School at Changsha, and among his students were Hsiang Ching-yü and Ts'ai Ch'ang (qq.v.), who later became prominent in the Chinese Communist party. During this period, Hsü also taught mathematics at the Hunan First Normal School, where Mao Tse-tung was a student.

Hsü's career as a teacher was interrupted again in 1919. Several of his students, including Ts'ai Ho-sen (q.v.) and Mao Tse-tung, were active in the work-study program {see Li Shih-tseng), and some of them were about to set out for France. Hsü T'e-li, though 43, decided to join the program and went to fVance with a group of Hunanese students in 1919. He studied at Lyon and worked part-time in a factory to earn money. By tutoring Chinese students in mathematics and doing factory work, he was able to support himself while studying at the University of Paris from 1920 to 1923. He did not participate in the radical and nationalist political activities of the younger Chinese students.

After returning to China in 1923 by way of Germany, where he spent six months, Hsü T'e-li established two normal schools at Changsha. From 1923 to 1925 he served as principal of the Hunan First (also known as Tao-t'ienj Girls Normal School. He also joined the Kuomintang.

In 1925 Hsü read Stalin's Problems of Leninism in Chinese translation. He read Mao Tse-tung's Report of an Investigation into the Peasant Movement in Hunan in 1927 and became particularly interested in the organization of peasant associations in rural areas. After Chiang Kai-shek's anti-Communist coup, Hsü K'o-hsiang, a regimental commander in the Hunanese army of T'ang Sheng-chih (q.v.), carried out a vigorous purge of Communists and suspected radicals at Changsha on 21 May 1927. Incensed by the brutality of the executions, Hsü T'e-li determined to join the Chinese Communist party. He went to ^Vuhan in July to see Mao Tsetung, and shortly thereafter he joined the party. Hsü T'e-li went to the Soviet Union in 1928 and studied at the Communist University for Toilers of the East until 1930. His stay in Moscow coincided with that of Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai (q.v.), who was serving as a Chinese delegate to the Comintern. Ch'ü also was continuing studies on the romanization of the Chinese language which he had begun about 1921 during an earlier visit to Moscow. Hsü T'e-li soon came to share Ch'ü's belief that simplifying the Chinese written language was essential to the process of extending literacy and expanding education in China. In mid- 1930 Hsü returned to China, probably with Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai, and went to the Communist-controlled area in Kiangsi. He did educational work in the soviet government headed by Mao Tse-tung at Juichin, serving in 1934 as deputy commissioner of education under Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai.

Although he was in his late fifties, Hsü T'e-li left Kiangsi in October 1934 and made the Long March to northern Shensi. When the news that Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai had been captured and executed in Fukien in the summer of 1935 reached Shensi, Hsü was named to head the educational section of the Communist government in the northwest. In 1936, on the occasion of Hsü's sixtieth birthday, Mao Tse-tung honored him by stating that: "Twenty years ago you were my teacher. You are my teacher now, and it is certain that in the future you will continue to be my teacher." After the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937, Hsü was assigned to return to Hunan and stir the people to support the united front >see Chiang Kai-shek) against the Japanese. From 1938 to 1945 he served as director of education in the government of the Shensi- Kansu-Xinghsia Border Region. In 1940, despite the lack of basic texts and laboratory equipment, he undertook the task of establishing the Yenan College of Natural Sciences, the predecessor of Peking Industrial College, and served as its first president. At Yenan, Hsü was closely associated with Hsieh Chueh-tsai (q.v.), another party elder who also had been a teacher in Hunan.

In 1945 the Seventh National Congress of the Chinese Communist party, meeting at Yenan, elected Hsü T'e-li to the party's Central Committee. He became a deputy director of the propaganda department of the Central Committee in 1947. In the autumn of 1949 he was named a member of the official delegation of the Chinese Communist party to the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. Soon afterwards, he was elected to the Central People's Government Council. He attended the National People's Congress in 1954 as a delegate representing Hunan and became a member of the Standing Committee of the congress. He was reelected to the Central Committee at the Eighth National Congress of the Chinese Communist party, held in September 1956. Hsü also became honorary chairman of the China Geographical Society in 1956. He was reelected to the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress in 1959 and 1965.

Hsü T'e-li's primary concern, both in his years as a teacher in Hunan before 1927 and in his post- 192 7 career as Communist, was education. He never sought or gained positions of political authority. He wrote many textbooks and essays on Chinese educational problems, including articles on the use of romanized Chinese as an aid in teaching illiterates. Because he admired the abilities and contributions of the prominent Anhwei educator and promoter of popular education T'ao Hsing-chih, for a time he adopted Shih-t'ao [learning from T'ao] as his alternate name. Throughout his active career as a teacher, Hsü T'e-li was known for his genuine interest in young people and their problems, qualities which eventually earned him an affectionate nickname, wai-p'o [granny]. Hsü, when still a boy, submitted to an arranged marriage, and he and his wife had four children.