Tseng Ch'i (5 August 1892-7 May 1951), leader of the Young China party.
Although Tseng Ch'i was born in Lungch'ang, Szechwan, he spent his childhood in Kwangsi, where his father, Tseng Yu-san, served as a minor government official. He was orphaned while still a boy, whereupon he and his elder brother, Tseng Chao-yü, returned to Szechwan to live with a maternal uncle, Sung P'ing-chou. After completing his basic education in the Chinese classics, Tseng Ch'i enrolled at the Chengtu Higher Middle School, where he was known for his excellence in Chinese composition and for his inferiority in other subjects. He became particularly interested in works by such seventeenth-century scholars as Wang Fu-chih, Ku Yen-wu, and Huang Tsung-hsi (ECCP, I, 351-54), who expressed anti-Manchu attitudes. He also dabbled in journalism, contributing articles to the Ch'eng-tu shang-pao [commercial gazette of Chengtu] and the Szuctiuan kung-pao [gazette ofSzechwan] and editing the Min-kuo hsin-pao [a new gazette of the republic] and the Ch'un pao [newspaper for the people].
In 1912 Tseng Ch'i enrolled at the Szechwan Law School in Chengtu. With the firm establishment of the Chinese republic, he reportedly was elected to the National Assembly. In 1913 he participated in the so-called second revolution against Yuan Shih-k'ai. The failure of this movement caused Tseng to flee Szechwan in the late summer of 1913, leaving behind his cousin and bride of three months, Sung Ching-yi. He made his way to Shanghai with the intention of going to France to study. By the time he reached the port city, however, the First World War had broken out. Because he could not go to France, he enrolled at Aurora University, a French Jesuit institution in Shanghai. There he met Li Huang (q.v.) and Tso Shun-sheng, with whom he would collaborate in later years.
Tseng Ch'i went to Japan in 1 9 1 6 to become a student of government and law at Chuo (Central) University. He devoted much of his time to Chinese student politics. In 1917 he helped found the Overseas Chinese News Service (Hua-yin t'ung-hsin she) at Tokyo to report on the secret negotiations between the Tuan Ch'i-jui (q.v.) government at Peking and the Japanese. The following year he was a founder of the Liu-Jih hsueh-sheng chiu-kuo t'uan [corps of Chinese students in Japan for national salvation] and a leader of the Chinese students in Japan who decided to return home to protest the so-called Nishihara loans and the Sino-Japanese Military Mutual Assistance Conventions. Upon arrival in Shanghai, Tseng and others established the Chiu-kuo jih-pao [save-the-nation daily], in which Tseng published a series of articles urging Chinese students to join the salvation movement.
In late June 1918 Tseng Ch'i was in Peking. On 30 June, he helped organize the Shao-nien Chung-kuo hsueh-hui [young China association] to organize opposition to Tuan Ch'i-jui's pro-Japanese regime. Tseng was in Shanghai at the time of the May Fourth Incident (see Lo Chia-lun). Late in May he went to Peking, as a representative of the Liu-Jih hsueh-sheng chiu-kuo t'uan, to support the student movement at Peking. He played a significant role in the attempt to organize a boycott of Japanese goods. Sometime in the latter part of 1919, Tseng Ch'i went to Paris. He and Li Huang founded the Paris News Service as a branch office of the Shanghai Hsin-wen-pao . Under the pen name Yü Kieng, he wrote regularly for the Hsinwen-pao to support himself. As a student and journalist in France, Tseng Ch'i was politically active. Because of arguments with the Chinese Communists, on 2 December 1923 Tseng and Li Huang, having returned to Paris from a tour of Germany, became the principal founders of the Young China party, and Tseng was elected secretary general of the organization. However, not until September 1929 was the formation of this party announced publicly. Until then, its members referred to it as the Chinese Youth Corps of Nationalism (Chungkuo kuo-chia chu-i ch'ing-nien tuan). It advocated nationalism and democracy, with emphasis on "expelling internal traitors and resisting external powers." The "internal traitors," in Tseng's view, were the Chinese Communists.
In August 1924 Tseng Ch'i returned to Shanghai, where he taught at Ta Hsia University, Shanghai Law College, and T'ung-chi University. He was a founder of the Hsueh-i ta-hsueh [art and sciences college], where Kuo Mo-jo (q.v.) also taught. The years from 1924 to 1927 were also years of strenuous political activity for Tseng. In October 1924 he and his group founded in Shanghai the Hsing-shih chou-k'an [awakened lion weekly], which became a forum for advocates of nationalism. More than 30 societies to promote nationalism were founded in China's major cities, with total membership reportedly reaching about 50,000. These organizations published such magazines as Independent Youth, Self-Strengthening (Tzuch'en), the New Nation (Hsin kuo-chia), Patriotic Youth (Ai-kuo ch'ing-nien), and Light of the Nation (Kuo-kuang). The over-all aim of these magazines was to promote nationalism in opposition to Communism. They argued that all classes of Chinese society should join together instead of struggling against one another. Because Tseng and his colleagues believed that there was no such thing as an international proletariat, they opposed Sun Yat-sen's policies of collaboration with the Chinese Communist party and alliance with the Soviet Union. Tseng attempted to win over Sun Yat-sen to the views of the Young China party in the winter of 1924, but he failed. After Sun's death Tseng gave his full support to the conservative Western Hills group (see Lin Sen) in the Kuomintang. In the summer of 1927 he was arrested and imprisoned in Shanghai by the Kuomintang authorities. Upon his release later in 1927, he went to Japan, where he lived for several years.
It is uncertain when Tseng Ch'i returned to China. He probably was in Hunan in 1933 helping the Kuomintang in propagandizing against the Chinese Communists. In 1934 he went to Szechwan, where he supported Chiang Kai-shek's encirclement campaigns. In 1937 he visited Chiang Kai-shek at Fenghua and participated in the Lushan Conference. Tseng was appointed to the National Defense Council, and in 1938 he became a member, representing the China Youth party, of the People's Political Council. He accompanied the National Government to Chungking in 1938 and remained there until late 1941, when illness forced him to return to Shanghai. He lived in the French concession at Shanghai until the winter of 1944, when he went to Peiping on the first leg of the journey back to Chungking. He arrived in Chungking in 1945 just in time for the celebrations of the victory over Japan. That winter, he took part in the Political Consultative Conference at Chungking, and later in 1946 he returned with the National Government to Nanking. When a coalition government of the Kuomintang, the Social Democratic party, and the Young China party was established in the spring of 1947, Tseng was appointed an adviser to Chiang Kai-shek. In 1948 he participated in the National Assembly as a delegate from the Lungch'ang district.
In the autumn of 1948, when it seemed certain that the Chinese Communists would win control of the mainland, Tseng Ch'i left China for the United States, where he underwent medical treatment. He made speeches to overseas Chinese communities in the United States, calling for the organization of a "Chinese League of Democracy and Freedom." In 1950 he toured Europe, where he advocated the organization of an "Anti-Communist League of All Religions." That trip lasted only two months, for Tseng's health had begun to fail as a result of anemia. He returned to the United States. In May 1951 his condition was complicated by appendicitis which turned into peritonitis. On 7 May 1951 he died at George Washington Hospital in Washington, D.C., having been converted to Roman Catholicism in his last hours. He was survived by his second wife, Chou Jo-nan, and by a son, Tseng Hsienpin.
