CONFIDENTIAL
HU YAOBANG: GENERAL SECRETARY OF THE CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY (CCP) AND MEMBER OF THE STANDING COMMITTEE OF THE POLITBURO
1. Hu Yaobang was born in 1915 in Zhanghe, a small mountain village of some 30 households in Hunan Province in China's southwest. He is usually described as coming from a family of poor peasants although one report that the family lived in a nine-room brick house would suggest that it was comfortably off by the standards of the day. Hu also benefited from a relatively good education,
He has one brother, attending primary and middle school. who is still alive.
2.
Hu's revolutionary career began early.
At the age of
He
14 he left his home village to join the Red Army. He joined the Communist Youth League in 1930 and three years later, at 18, was admitted into the Communist Party. then became an official of the Communist Youth League, embarking upon work with young people which was to become a feature of his career. In 1934-35 he went on the Long March, the epic trek of 6000 miles from Jiangxi Province in the southeast to Yanan in the northwest, which the embattled communists undertook to escape the attacks of the Nationalists and establish a base from which they could fight on. Only from five to ten per cent of those who began the Long March arrived in Yanan. Hu himself suffered from a serious illness at its beginning (possibly malaria or typhoid) and later suffered shrapnel wounds to his hip. In Yanan he attended the Anti-Japanese Military and Political University.
3.
Clearly Hu came through this desperate and testing period with great credit for in 1938, still only 23, he was appointed to the important post of director of the Central Military Commission's Organisation Department. Hu continued as a political officer working with military units throughout the War against the Japanese and the Civil War up to the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949. His appointment to the 2nd Field Army in 1945 probably brought him into close contact with Deng Xiaoping, who was the Political Commissar of the 2nd Field Army at this time. Since then Hu's career has run parallel to Deng's, sharing his disgrace in the Cultural Revolution and benefiting from his subsequent return power in the late 1970s.
4.
a senior
In the early years after 1949, Hu worked as Party official in Sichuan Province in southwest China,
CONFIDENTIAL
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