ABSTRACT
Zhou Chunlin, who was also known as Zhou Yulong, came from Macheng County in Hubei Province, where he was born in 1912 into a poor farming family. He joined a peasant Red Guard unit in 1928 during a period of widespread rural uprisings and enrolled in the Chinese Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army – the military backbone of the CCP and the forerunner of the People’s LiberationArmy – in 1930, finally becoming a member of the CCP itself in 1932. During this period of rural revolution, he rose rapidly through the ranks, becoming a battalion political commissar [ying zhengwei] in the Red Army. During the Long March, he twice ‘crossed the grasslands’ [guo caodi], the self-deprecatory description for operations in the most arduous part of the expedition which took the CCP units through some of the wildest and most remote terrain in western China. At the beginning of the War of Resistance against Japan, which began in 1937, he served with the Western Route Army [Xilujun] of the Red Army, fighting his way into Xinjiang as battalion political commissar and commander of the 48th Kashgar Regiment [tuan] with the rank of Major, until he was taken prisoner. By January 1940, he was out of prison and was transferred to Yan’an, the CCP
headquarters, from where he was detailed to serve with the New Fourth Army [Xin sijun] and he fought with this army in all their major campaigns. He saw distinguished service throughout the civil war of 1946-49, for which he was decorated, and after 1949 held senior positions in the military establishment, attaining the rank of Major-General in 1955. He was also a member of the Shanghai Municipal CCP Standing Committee and served as its secretary in 1970 when much of China was still emerging from the period of military rule that ended the Cultural Revolution. He ‘opposed the left adventurism of the Cultural Revolution, Lin Biao and the “Gang of Four”’ and was selected as a member of the post-Cultural Revolution tenth and eleventh Central Committees and in 1983 of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Committee. He died in Shanghai in 1986. This was a man who had played an important role in Xinjiang in the 1930s and 1940s and subsequently rose to high positions in the military and Communist Party establishments from where he was in a position to influence national policy on Xinjiang.
