Zhang Wentian (1900-1976)

Devoted Marxist; Chinese proletarian revolutionary and theorist; one of the important leaders of the Communist Party of China in the early period. Original name Ying Gao (also known as Yin Gao), he was renamed Luo Fu, courtesy name Wentian. Native of Nanhui, Jiangsu (now in Shanghai). In 1917, he went to Nanjing Hohai Engineering College (now Hohai University) to study and inclined to revolution under the influence of New Youth. After the May Fourth Movement broke out in 1919, he devoted himself to the student movement and began to engage in literary and artistic creation and translation, commented on foreign literary masterpieces, and later joined the Young China Society in Nanjing. From 1920 to 1923, he successively studied and worked in Tokyo, Japan and San Francisco, USA. In June 1925, he joined the CPC in Shanghai. In the winter of the same year, he was sent to study at the Moscow Sun Yat-sen University and went to the Institute of Red Professors in 1928 to study. Returning to Shanghai in February 1931, he served as the head of the Publicity Department of the CPC Central Committee. In January 1934, at the Fifth Plenary Session of the Sixth Central Committee of the Party, he was elected member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee and Secretary of the Secretariat of the Central Committee.

In October 1934, he participated in the Long March. At the Zunyi Conference in January 1935, he made a counter-report criticizing the wrong “Left” deviation error in the military line and drafted the "Resolution on Summing up the Campaign against the Enemy's Fifth ‘Encirclement’”. When the Central Red Army was transferred to the border area of Sichuan, Yunnan and Guizhou, the Standing Committee of the Central Committee discussed and decided to replace Bo Gu with Zhang Wentian with overall responsibility. After the victory of the Long March, he made arduous efforts to establish the Anti-Japanese National United Front. At the Wayaobu Conference held by the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee in December 1935, he presided over the meeting and drafted its resolution, which systematically expounded the Party's strategy and principles of the Anti-Japanese National United Front.

After the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, he went to work in Northeast China. He successively served as secretary of the provincial Party committee of Hejiang Province (now in Heilongjiang Province), member of the Standing Committee and head of organization of the Northeast Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, deputy chief of the North East China Financial and Economic Commission, and secretary of the CCP Provincial Committee of the Liaodong Province (now in Liaoning Province and Jilin Province), making important contributions to the opening up and construction of the Northeast Base Area. After the founding of New China, Zhang Wentian went to work on the diplomatic front. In April 1951, Zhang Wentian was appointed as ambassador of the People's Republic of China to the Soviet Union.

Returning to China at the end of 1954, he served as First Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs. In September 1956, he was elected alternate member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee at the First Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee of the CPC. At the Lushan Conference in the summer of 1959, he became the target of an erroneous criticism for supporting Peng Dehuai's correct opinions and was labelled as backbone member of the "Peng, Huang, Zhang and Zhou Anti-Party Clique". During the “Cultural Revolution”, he resolutely fought against Lin Biao and Jiang Qing Counter-Revolutionary Conspiracy Cliques and suffered persecution. In the face of predicaments, he continued to seek truth from facts, explore the laws of China's socialist construction and wrote a large number of documents. On July 1, 1976, he died of illness in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province. His main works are included in Selected Works of Zhang Wentian and Collected Works of Zhang Wentian.