Chang Wen-t'ien (1898-), known as Lo-fu, a writer and translator, was one of a group of Russian-trained Chinese Communists known as the 28 Bolsheviks. General secretary of the Chinese Communist party in the mid-1 930's, he was ambassador to the Soviet Union 1951-55 and senior vice minister of foreign affairs 1955-59.

Nanhui, a suburb of Shanghai, was the birthplace of Chang Wen-t'ien. His father was a prosperous farmer who permitted his son to begin a formal education at an early age. Chang Wen-t'ien was graduated from the Woosung Middle School at the age of 16. Then he went to Nanking to enter the engineering college, where he studied for three years. However, he left before completing his studies. While at college in Nanking, Chang came under the influence of Tso Shun-sheng, a faculty member who then was associated with other young intellectuals at Peking in planning the establishment of a Young China Association [Shao-nien Chung-kuo hsueh-hui] to mobilize patriotic opposition to the pro-Japanese policies of Tuan Ch'i-jui's government at Peking. Utilizing the prestige of his teaching position, Tso Shun-sheng began to recruit members for the organization in the Nanking-Shanghai area. Chang Wen-t'ien, together with Shen Tse-min (q.v.), a fellow student who became his close friend, was attracted by the avowed patriotic purpose of the association, which was formally established in the summer of 1919. Chang was admitted to the association that winter. Since the several branches of the organization kept in contact with each other regarding membership and activities, Chang Wen-t'ien became acquainted by letter with a number of men who later became prominent in the affairs of the Chinese Communist party, such as Li Ta-chao, Mao Tse-tung, Teng Chung-hsia, and Yun Tai-ying.

Before that time, however, he and his comrade Shen Tse-min had become restless at Nanking. Both were more interested in literature, politics, and current affairs than in engineering. After the May Fourth Movement of 1919, they left college to go to Shanghai. Shen Yen-ping (q.v.), Shen Tse-min's elder brother, was then working at the Commercial Press in Shanghai, and, apparently through that connection, Chang Wen-t'ien obtained a minor editorial post. In the autumn of 1920, Chang Wen-t'ien and Shen Tse-min went to Japan to study. In six months they were back in Shanghai. In July 1921 the two young men went to Nanking to attend the first conference of the Young China Association and to meet and exchange ideas with members of that organization from other cities. Although Shen Tse-min and many other members of the Young China Association joined the Chinese Communist party after its establishment in 1921, Chang Wen-t'ien did not commit himself to any doctrinal or partisan affiliation. After the meeting at Nanking, he sailed from Shanghai for the United States. For a year he earned his living as a translator on a Chineselanguage newspaper in San Francisco, while he also worked in the library and perhaps attended classes at the University of California in Berkeley. Although some sources identify Chang as "American-trained," it is unlikely that he matriculated at Berkeley.

After his return to China late in 1922, Chang Wen-t'ien became an editor at the Chung-hua Book Company in Shanghai under Tso Shunsheng, who had become chief editor of that firm. In Shanghai he came to know Yun Tai-ying, who was then an active Communist and director of propaganda work of the Communist Youth League in Shanghai. Yun had recently returned from Szechwan, where he had taught for two years, and it was probably through his influence and recommendation that Chang Wen-t'ien went to Szechwan in 1923 to teach in a normal school.

Although he was acquainted with Marxism and with some of the early activities of the Chinese Communist party, Chang Wen-t'ien was primarily intent upon a literary career. As early as 1921, he had begun contributing to the Hsiaoshuo yueh-pao [short story magazine], the organ of the Society for Literary Studies. Most of his early contributions were translations of and commentaries on Western authors, and Chang's subjects reflected the literary eclecticism and experimentation of that period. The Commercial Press published three of his translations: Le Rire, by Henri Bergson ; The Ballad of Reading Gaol, by Oscar Wilde ; and The Waltz ofthe Dogs, a play by Leonid Andreyev. The Chung-hua Book Company published his Chinese renderings of two novels: Gioconda, by Gabriele D'Annunzio, and The Blind Musician, by V. G. Korolenko. Chang's article on Kahlil Gibran appeared in the Ch'uang-tsao chou-k'an [creation weekly] in October 1923. He also translated some of Tolstoy and Turgenev. While in Szechwan in 1923-24, Chang Wen-t'ien turned to creative writing and produced a novel, Lu-Cu {The Journey), and a play, Ch'ing-ch'un te meng {Dream of Youth) . The Journey, which first appeared in installments in the Hsiao-shuo yuehpao in 1924 and then was published in book form by the Commercial Press in 1925, won acclaim. It was a love story, set in China and the United States, written in an attractive style, with vivid description and penetrating characterization. His play Dream of Youth was also hailed in literary and dramatic circles in Shanghai. Chang's promising literary career soon was interrupted by political activity. After his return to Shanghai in 1925, he joined the Chinese Communist party. Later that year he was one of the young Chinese Communists selected to go to Moscow for study at Sun Yatsen University. The group, which also included Chang's good friend Shen Tse-min, spent nearly five years in the Soviet Union studying the Russian language, Marxism-Leninism, and revolutionary tactics under the tutelage of Pavel Mif, then head of Sun Yat-sen University. A group of Mif's favorite Chinese students were so firm in support of Stalin's China policy that they became known as the 28 Bolsheviks. That group included Chang Wen-t'ien, as well as Ch'en Shao-yti, Ch'in Pang-hsien, Shen Tse-min, Wang Chia-hsiang, and others.

After his years of study and teaching in Moscow, Chang Wen-t'ien returned to China in the summer of 1930. He was assigned to the Shanghai headquarters of the Communist party; he was there when Li Li-san (q.v.), who had dominated the central apparatus of the Chinese Communist party since 1928, lost power in November 1930. At the fourth plenum of the Sixth Central Committee, held at Shanghai in January 1931, the group that had returned from Moscow with Pavel Mif gained control of the central party organs. Chang Wen-t'ien, despite his limited practical experience in political work in China, was elected to membership on both the Central Committee and the Political Bureau of the Chinese Communist party. That summer, when Ch'en Shao-yu became general secretary of the party, Chang Wen-t'ien became head of the organization department of its Central Committee, and Shen Tse-min took over the propaganda department.

During the early 1930's Chang Wen-t'ien then better known by his pen name, Lo-fu—produced a stream of political and polemical articles for the party journals. His duties as head of the organization department in the underground party apparatus at Shanghai were more dangerous than taxing, since the urban party organization had been smashed by the Kuomintang after the 1927 break with the Communists. Chang and other members of the Shanghai group finally were forced to move to the rural base in Kiangsi, which was headed by Mao Tse-tung. After his arrival at Juichin, the Communist base in southern Kiangsi, Chang Went'ien was assigned to head the propaganda department of the Central Committee, replacing Shen Tse-min, who had gone to the Hupeh- Honan-Anhwei soviet area. Chang also edited the Communist party weekly Tou-cheng [struggle] and continued to serve during 1933-34 in articulating party policies. During that period, Ch'in Pang-hsien, who had succeeded Ch'en Shao-yu in 1932, was general secretary of the Chinese Communist party.

In October 1934 Chang Wen-t'ien left with the main force of the Chinese Communist army on its exodus from Kiangsi. A new alignment in the top party command was effected at an enlarged meeting of the Political Bureau, held at Tsunyi in January 1935. At that time Chang Wen-t'ien replaced Ch'in Pang-hsien as general secretary of the party. After the Communist forces arrived in Shensi province in northwest China in late 1935, Chang Wen-t'ien continued to serve as a member of the party's Political Bureau during the period when Mao Tse-tung was consolidating his personal control over the central apparatus of the party. After the outbreak of the Japanese war in 1937, most of Chang's writings were devoted to anti-Japanese propaganda. In 1940 he became president of the Marx-Lenin Academy at Yenan. He also served as head of the reference section of the official Communist newspaper, the Chieh-fang jih-pao [liberation daily], which began publication in 1941. Although the details of Chinese Communist party history during the Yenan period are obscure, Chang Wen-t'ien apparently continued to serve as general secretary of the party until about 1943, when Mao Tse-tung was elected chairman of the Central Committee, a new title designed to distinguish his position from that of general secretary, which had been the top post in the party hierarchy during the 1920'sand the 1930's.

Although he was no longer a spokesman on major policy matters, Chang Wen-t'ien retained his position in the top echelon of the Chinese Communist party. When its Seventh Annual Congress met at Yenan in April 1945, he was elected a member of the presidium of the meeting. At its conclusion in June, he was reelected to both the Central Committee and the Political Bureau. After the Japanese surrender, Chang Wen-t'ien was a member of the first group of Chinese Communist leaders sent to Manchuria. He held key posts there during the next five years, although he then was subordinate to such men as Ch'en Yun, Kao Kang, and Lin Piao (qq.v.). In 1945-46 Chang was secretary of the Ho-chiang (Sungkiang) provincial committee of the Chinese Communist party and political commissar of the Ho-chiang military district. Throughout the postwar period he was a member of the standing committee of the Northeast bureau of the Chinese Communist party, and he served for a period as director of the organization department of that regional bureau. When the Northeast Administrative Council was established at Mukden under the direction of Ch'en Yun, Chang became deputy director of its financial-economic committee. In August 1949, when the Northeast People's Government was set up under the chairmanship of Kao Kang, Chang became a member of its government council. He also served as secretary of the Liaotung provincial committee of the Communist party in 1949-50.

When the Central People's Government was established in October 1949, Chang Wen-t'ien was not given a senior substantive post at Peking. The reason for that omission became apparent when Peking laid claim to China's seat in the United Nations and named a full slate of delegates to that body. Chang Wen-t'ien was appointed chief delegate from the People's Republic of China to the United Nations. The delegation was not seated. In the spring of 1951, when Wang Chia-hsiang (q.v.) was recalled for reasons of health from the post of Chinese ambassador to the Soviet Union, Chang Went'ien was named to succeed him. Chang arrived in Moscow and presented his credentials as ambassador from the People's Republic of China in April 1951. Chang served as China's chief envoy to the Kremlin during the last two years of Stalin's life and during the difficult period of the Korean war. In April 1954 he was given the concurrent rank of vice minister of foreign affairs. That announcement came just before Chang left Moscow for Switzerland, where he was a member of the Chinese delegation supporting Foreign Minister Chou En-lai at the Geneva Conference on Indo-China during the summer of 1954. In November 1954, after the first session of the National People's Congress, Chang Wen-t'ien was reappointed vice minister of foreign affairs. He left the Moscow post and formally assumed his new responsibilities in the ministry of foreign affairs at Peking in January 1955. As the second-ranking official of that ministry, Chang Wen-t'ien served as acting foreign minister whenever Chou En-lai was absent from Peking, notably during Chou's attendance at the Bandung Conference in April 1955 and again when Chou visited the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe after the Hungarian uprising in late 1956. In February 1958, he accompanied Chou En-lai to North Korea and assisted in the negotiations that led to the withdrawal of Chinese Communist military forces from that country He continued to serve as vice minister when Ch'en Yi (q.v.) replaced Chou En-lai as foreign minister.

In April 1959 Chang was named to membership on the standing committee of the Second National People's Congress at Peking. In that same month he flew to Poland to attend a conference of foreign ministers of the Warsaw Treaty countries. After his return to China, Chang was relieved of his government post as vice minister of foreign affairs in September 1959, when many personnel shifts were made at Peking.

At the Eighth National Congress of the Chinese Communist party in 1956, Chang was reelected to the Central Committee and to the Political Bureau of the party. The membership of the Political Bureau was expanded at that time, and Chang was elected only to alternate membership, though he previously had been a regular member. Chang Wen-t'ien's position in the Chinese Communist hierarchy was unusual in that he retained senior positions after the party's stern criticism in 1945 of his former associates, notably Ch'en Shao-yü and Ch'in Pang-hsien. Both men were accused of having caused great damage to the Chinese Communist party during the period when they held senior rank in the party hierarchy. Chang Wen-t'ien could not escape a certain measure of guilt by association, since he had been a member of the Political Bureau at that time. However, Chang had served as general secretary during the period of Mao Tse-tung's consolidation of power, and perhaps he escaped overt criticism because of that circumstance. In any event, Chang Went'ien and Wang Chia-hsiang were the two leading survivors of the 28 Bolsheviks who made the transition to the Mao Tse-tung era in the Chinese Communist party. Chang's wife, Liu Ying, also studied in the Soviet Union and was a veteran of the Long March.