Zeng Zhi (; 4 April 1911 – 21 June 1998), born Zeng Zhaoxue (曾昭学), was a Chinese communist revolutionary and politician. One of the small number of women who reached the Jinggang Mountains base area with the Red Army in 1928, she spent the following decade in the Fujian underground and in the Eastern Fujian Soviet, and later held senior party posts in Northeast China and Guangdong.
From 1952 she was the first director and party secretary of the Guangzhou Electric Power Bureau, and from 1955 to 1966 a secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Guangzhou Municipal Committee with responsibility for industry. As the wife of Tao Zhu she was removed from office and investigated during the Cultural Revolution. In December 1977 she returned to work as deputy head of the Organization Department of the CCP Central Committee under Hu Yaobang, where she was one of the officials responsible for the mass reversal of verdicts on political cases. She was elected to the Central Advisory Commission in 1982, of which she was the only female member.
Zeng was also known for her memoirs, published shortly before her death, which describe her three arranged or party-directed marriages, the surrender of three infant sons to foster families, and the roughly forty years of political investigation she underwent for having lost contact with the party in 1935.
Early life and the Southern Hunan Uprising Zeng Zhi was born on 4 April 1911 into a rural gentry family in Wangjiachong, Yizhang, Hunan. In 1923 she was admitted to the Third Women's Normal School of Hunan Province in Hengyang, where she took part in student agitation against arranged marriage and the unequal treatment of women.
In August 1926 she enrolled at the Hengyang Peasant Movement Training Institute. She registered under the name Zeng Zhi, later explaining that she took the character zhi (志, "will" or "aspiration") in order to claim aspiration for women; she was one of the few female students to complete the institute's military training. She joined the CCP in October 1926 and wrote to her mother repudiating the marriage her parents had arranged for her.
She graduated in the spring of 1927 and became an officer in the organisation department of the CCP Hengyang prefectural committee. The institute's dean of studies, Xia Mingzhen, who was also head of the prefectural organisation department, courted her, and with the encouragement of the local party organisation the two married. Later that year she moved to Chenzhou for underground work, serving as secretary-general of the Chen County committee under Xia, who was county party secretary. She took part in the Southern Hunan Uprising in January 1928. On 22 March 1928 Xia was beaten to death by a crowd during the so-called "anti-white incident" in Chen County; he was 21 and Zeng was 16.
Shortly afterwards Zeng was transferred to the office of the party committee of the Seventh Division of the Workers' and Peasants' Revolutionary Army as its secretary, and married the division's party representative, Cai Xiemin. She went up to the Jinggang Mountains with the division in April 1928. In her memoirs she wrote that her marriage to Xia had been entirely at the request of the organisation and that her relationship with Cai was closer to that of comrades-in-arms; she also recorded her unease at remarrying so soon after Xia's death, and her reasoning at the time that revolutionaries might be killed at any moment and that marriage was therefore of secondary importance.
Jinggang Mountains In the Jinggang Mountains Zeng served in turn as party branch secretary of the rear general hospital of the Fourth Red Army (the Xiaojing Red Army hospital), an officer of the army's organisation section, head of the civil affairs section of the front committee's workers' and peasants' movement committee, and head of its women's group. In August 1928, seven months pregnant, she took part in the Battle of Huangyangjie.
While she was away at a meeting, the hospital was attacked by a Nationalist force guided along a mountain path by a defector, and more than 130 wounded and sick soldiers were shot in nearby paddy fields. Zeng asked that part of her ashes be buried on the hillside above the site.
On 7 November 1928 she gave birth to a son in Dajing village. With the army about to move, she gave the child, then a little over twenty days old, to Shi Libao, a deputy company commander in the 32nd Regiment of Wang Zuo's force, who raised him under the name Shi Laifa. On the day before the Fourth Red Army's main force left the mountains in January 1929, Mao Zedong sent her a note from Ciping instructing her to march with it as head of the newly created women's group; she left without seeing the child again.
After the Fourth Red Army took Changting, Fujian, in March 1929, Zeng acted as go-between in arranging the marriage of Zhu De and Kang Keqing. When He Zizhen was pregnant in 1929, Mao asked Zeng to look after her. Zeng remained sympathetic to He in later years, visiting her repeatedly in Shanghai in 1965.
Fujian Underground work in Xiamen and Fuzhou From June 1930 Zeng was sent to Xiamen and Fuzhou for underground work, serving as secretary-general of the Xiamen and Fuzhou central municipal committees and as head of the organisation department of the Southern Fujian special committee.
Her second son, known as Tie Niu, was born during this period, and she had intended to send him to her mother in Hunan. When the child was a little over sixty days old, the Xiamen central municipal committee, short of operating funds, decided without her knowledge to give him to a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine surnamed Ye in exchange for one hundred silver dollars. Zeng submitted to the decision and handed the child over herself. He died of smallpox about twenty days later.
When the Red Army took Zhangzhou in 1932 Zeng planned to go on to Ruijin, but stayed at Cai Xiemin's request. After the army withdrew, the Zhangzhou central county committee and its base area collapsed. In October 1932 Cai and Zeng were severely criticised and removed from their posts, and a campaign against the "Cai Xiemin line" was conducted within the party.
Zeng later described the marriage as more like father and daughter than a partnership; Cai was ten years her senior, and on one occasion, drunk, he tore up her photograph. Cai insisted on travelling to Shanghai to appeal to the party centre against the disciplinary decision, while Zeng wished to remain in Fujian to carry on practical work. Before he left in October 1932 she told him the marriage was over.
Eastern Fujian Soviet and loss of contact Her third son, Cai Chunhua, was born in February 1933 and was given away thirteen days later to the aunt of a comrade. Later that year Zeng was posted to eastern Fujian, where she helped establish the Eastern Fujian Soviet, serving as a member of the Fu'an central county committee, head of the organisation department of the Eastern Fujian special committee, and secretary of the Fuxia (Fu'an and Xiapu) central county committee.
Cai Xiemin, by then destitute in Xiamen and the subject of accusations within the party, was given help by Zeng at considerable political risk to herself, for which she was again disciplined. He was betrayed and arrested in April 1934 and executed in Zhangzhou in July of that year.
In early 1933 Zeng, aged 22, and Tao Zhu, three years her senior, were assigned to work in Fuzhou posing as a married couple. The relationship became a real one during the period they spent together. Tao was soon transferred to the party centre in Shanghai, where he was arrested by the Nationalist authorities, sent to the gendarmerie headquarters in Nanjing and sentenced to life imprisonment.
From the autumn of 1934 Nationalist forces attacked eastern Fujian in strength and most of the soviet was lost as the main Red Army began the Long March. In March 1935, seriously ill and entirely out of contact with the special committee and the independent Red Army division, Zeng was sent by the organisation to Guangdong for medical treatment; the local organisation was then broken up and she lost her connection to the party altogether. She moved between Shantou, Hengyang, Yizhang, Guangzhou and Shanghai for about twenty months, supporting herself with casual work while searching for the party, and re-established contact in Shanghai in October 1936. This period away from eastern Fujian was the basis of the political investigations she underwent repeatedly over the following decades.
Second Sino-Japanese War After the outbreak of war in 1937 Zeng intended to travel to Yan'an, but on reaching Wuhan met Tao Zhu, who had just been released from prison through the party's efforts, and the two went to Hubei together. From September 1937 she was secretary of the women's committee of the provisional Hubei provincial committee and party branch secretary and instructor at the Tangchi rural co-operative training class.
After the fall of Wuhan in October 1938, Jingmen in Hubei became a strategic point on the Xiang River defence line of the Fifth War Zone. Zeng was appointed secretary of the CCP central county committee for Jingmen, Dangyang and Yuan'an, where she worked independently to build local party organisations. She established a number of "army–civilian co-operative restaurants" that served as underground courier stations and secret contact points for the party organisation in northwestern Hubei, providing food and lodging to displaced civilians, passing Chinese units and underground party workers. Zhang Kexia, chief of staff of the Nationalist 77th Army and a secret CCP member, gave the work substantial support and cover.
In December 1939, as friction between the CCP and the Kuomintang increased and her position became conspicuous, Zeng was sent to study at the Marxist–Leninist Academy in Yan'an. In the autumn of 1940 she became secretary-general of the Central Women's Committee. Her daughter Tao Siliang was born on 4 April 1941.
During the Yan'an Rectification Movement and the accompanying "rescue campaign", Zeng was denounced on the allegation that she and others had fled the Eastern Fujian Soviet. The accusation, which was speculative, led to her being labelled politically wavering and a coward. She was suspended and held in isolation for investigation at the first department of the Central Party School while Tao Zhu was away on an investigation in northwestern Shanxi. She declined to make false statements and was detained under investigation for a year and four months, at the end of which no conclusion was reached. Only in January 1956, after a two-year re-examination by the Guangdong provincial committee, did the Central Organization Department formally approve a finding that her history was clear and that there was no political problem.
Zeng described the pressures of this period at length in her memoirs. In 1945 she was elected an alternate delegate to the 7th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party.
Northeast China In June 1945, with Mao's approval, Zeng travelled south with a military column intended to establish a base area in Guangdong and Guangxi; the party had reached Henan when Japan surrendered, and it was redirected to Northeast China. She subsequently served as a member of the CCP Shenyang municipal committee, secretary of the Tiexi district committee, member of the Liaoning–Jilin provincial committee, deputy secretary of its first and fifth prefectural committees, member of the standing committee of the Shenyang municipal committee and head of its workers' department, and director of the preparatory offices of the Shenyang federation of trade unions and women's federation.
Guangdong From May 1949 Zeng was deputy head of the materials takeover department of the Wuhan military control commission and a member of the Central South Military and Political Commission.