Chou Pao-chung (1902-22 February 1964), Communist general, was best known as a guerrilla leader in Manchuria from 1932 to 1945. Born in Tali, Yunnan, Chou Pao-chung belonged to the ethnic minority in Yunnan known as the Pai or Min-chia. The youngest son of a shoemaker father and a peasant mother, he completed primary school, but left junior middle school to join the army. In the 1915-16 campaign against Yuan Shih-k'ai, he served as a platoon leader under Ts'ai O (q.v.). In 1918 he became a company commander. Chou entered the Yunnan Military Academy in 1921 as a member of the seventeenth class. He specialized in logistics, and he was graduated with distinction two years later. He then went to Moscow and studied at the University for Toilers of the East from 1923 to 1925. Chou Pao-chung returned to China in 1925 and became a cadet officer at the Whampoa Military Academy. When the Northern Expedition began in mid- 1 926, Chou served as a deputy regimental commander in the Sixth Army, commanded by Ch'eng Ch'ien (q.v.). He participated in the capture of Nanchang and Nanking.
Despite his Moscow training, Chou did not become a Communist until 1927, when he was deputy commander of the 18th Division of the Sixth Army, in which the Communist Lin Po-ch'ü (q.v.) was political commissar. In 1928, when Chou was serving as garrison commander in eastern Hunan, he ignored orders to suppress Communist-led peasant uprisings. After being dismissed from his position and interned by the authorities, Chou managed to escape to Shanghai, where he remained in hiding for about three years.
When the Japanese began military operations in Manchuria in September 1931, the Chinese Communist party ordered Chou to go there and attempt to organize anti-Japanese resistance. At this time he changed his name to Chou Pao-chung. Chou arrived in Manchuria in January 1932 to work under Lo Teng-hsien (1904-33), who was then in the Harbin area as secretary of the Northeast branch of the Chinese Communist party. Finding the indigenous resistance movement led by Ma Chan-shan (q.v.) to be ineffectual, Chou joined the non- Communist National Salvation Army [Chiukuo-chun], commanded by Li Tu, and became Li's chief of staff. Most of the anti-Japanese forces in Manchuria suffered severe defeats during 1933, and such guerrilla leaders as Li Tu and Wang Te-lin were forced to leave the area. Chou Pao-chung then rallied the remnants of the National Salvation Army. He placed these troops under Communist control and marched them to the Liaoning-Kirin border area. In 1934 Chou gradually incorporated other guerrilla units into his forces and extended his activities into the east Kirin area. In 1935 these troops were designated the Fifth Army of the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army. When the entire Communist-directed guerrilla force in Manchuria was reorganized in 1936, Chou became commander of the Second Route Army. During that period he also served as secretary of the Manchurian provincial committee and of the Kirin committee of the Chinese Communist party underground organization. He remained in Manchuria as a guerrilla leader until 1945; the Chinese Communists later used that fact to substantiate their claim that the Communists had been in the vanguard of the "anti-Japanese patriotic movement." After the Japanese surrender in 1945, Lin Piao (q.v.) was assigned by the top Chinese Communist command to assume over-all direction of Communist military operations in Manchuria. Lin Piao and the substantial number of Communist officers assigned to that theater made contact with Chou Pao-chung's guerrilla forces and used them as the nucleus of the military forces which were gradually developed in Manchuria. By 1946-47 the Communist forces in Manchuria had been designated the Northeast Democratic United Army. They were commanded by Lin Piao, with three deputy commanders, Chou Pao-chung, Hsiao Chingkuang, and Lü Cheng-ts'ao. Hsiao and Lü had accompanied Lin Piao from Yenan to Manchuria in 1945. Chou continued to work in eastern Manchuria and became chairman of the Kirin provincial government and commander of the Kirin military district when these were formally established by the Communists. The Communist forces in Manchuria were later renamed the Northeast People's Liberation Army and, in 1948, the Fourth Field Army of the People's Liberation Army. Chou remained with these forces, commanded throughout by Lin Piao, as they completed the military occupation of Manchuria and swept southward across China in 1949.
After the Communists consolidated their control of the mainland, Chou was assigned to positions in the southwest and in his native Yunnan province. He became vice chairman of the Yunnan provincial government at Kunming and a member of the regional Southwest "Military and Administrative Committee. However, Chou Pao-chung never gained national prominence during the final years of his life. As a result of his long guerrilla experience in Manchuria, he was in poor health. He became very ill in the winter of 1952-53. In 1954, as a representative of the Min-chia in Yunnan, he was invited to Peking to serve on the nationalities committee of the National People's Congress. In September 1954 he was named to membership on the National Defense Council, and in 1955, when the Chinese Communists for the first time awarded military honors, he received a number of decorations. In September 1956 he was elected an alternate member of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist party at its Eighth National Congress, but he was given no substantive position at Peking. When a North Korean military mission visited Peking shortly before Chou's death, at the official banquet, Chou was extolled as a wartime hero who had fought shoulder to shoulder with the Koreans against the Japanese in Manchuria. Some members of the visiting Korean delegation had served under him during the war. However, no major public tribute was paid him at the time of his death in February 1964. Chou Pao-chung married Wang I-chin, a guerrilla fighter who was known for her expert marksmanship.
