ABSTRACT
Li Yunyang (or Li Zhiliang as he was also known in Xinjiang) was born in 1914 in the coastal city of Taishan in Guangdong, China’s southernmost province, and began what was to be a life-long involvement in education as a primary school teacher in his native village. In 1935 he went to Japan as a student, like many able young people of his generation, and while there became involved in political activity among the small but influential Chinese student community and joined the Chinese Communist Party. He returned to China in September 1936 with a fellow student Wu Naijun, whom he soon married and who also became a committed teacher. Like many of their generation of young, educated and patriotic Chinese, frustrated at Japan’s economic and political aggression towards China, they headed for the ‘sacred revolutionary base’ of Yan’an where the Communist Party had established its headquarters after the Long March from Jiangxi. In March 1938, Li was sent by the CCP to Xinjiang where he became head
teacher in No.1 Middle School in the provincial capital, Urumqi, which was then better known by its Chinese name, Dihua (Tihua). In March 1939, he was transferred from Urumqi to Kashgar (possibly because even at that stage the Governor, Sheng Shicai, was beginning to be concerned about the influence of CCP members in the provincial capital) where he was appointed Deputy Head of the Educational Department and then in June 1940 to Maralbashi (Bachu) to an appointment as County Head (xianzhang). Although Li Yunyang and many of his colleagues had been directed to work in
Xinjiang in the interests of the CCP, these appointments were to organisations of the provincial government. At the time, this was nominally loyal to the Guomindang National Government of Chiang Kai-shek, which had its capital initially in Nanjing and then in Chongqing after the Japanese occupation of 1937. Between 1936 and 1941, the CCP and the Nationalist Guomindang had a United Front agreement to oppose the Japanese occupation. This was an uncomfortable and untidy relationship: the CCP and the GMD co-existed, occasionally co-operated (although rarely effectively) and from time to time fought each other. Xinjiang had always been at best semi-detached from the government of China Proper and this was certainly the case during the period of Japanese occupation when Chiang’s National Government was weak, isolated and far from universally
respected. Xinjiang, under Governor Sheng Shicai, who in practice ruled the province as an independent warlord from 1933 to 1944, was not under Chiang’s control: it was heavily influenced by the USSR until 1942 when Sheng broke from Stalin. CCP members working in the province during this period were not necessarily working clandestinely as the policies of the United Front enabled them to work openly and the presence of the Chinese Communist Party was also welcomed by the USSR: nevertheless many of them worked in Xinjiang under assumed names. When Sheng Shicai switched his allegiance away from the USSR in 1942, Li
Yunyang, like many of his colleagues, was arrested and imprisoned and was not released until June 1946 when all the CCP members who had been incarcerated in Urumqi were set free as a group and were allowed to return to Yan’an. After 1949, Li worked as a head teacher in a Beijing middle school and then in a number of roles as a political education cadre, including senior posts in Jiangxi University and what was then the branch campus of the Chinese University of Science and Technology in Hefei. His final senior role was as Deputy Principal of Jinan University in Guangzhou and he retired in that city in 1985.
