Zeng Zhi

Zeng Zhi
曾志
Deputy Head of the Organization Department of the CCP Central Committee
In office
December 1977 – 1982
Secretary of the CCP Guangzhou Municipal Committee
In office
1955–1966
Personal details
BornZeng Zhaoxue
(1911-04-04)4 April 1911
Yizhang County, Hunan, Qing China
Died21 June 1998(1998-06-21) (aged 87)
Beijing, China
PartyChinese Communist Party (from 1926)
Spouses
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(m. 1927; died 1928)​
Cai Xiemin
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(m. 1928; sep. 1932)​
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(m. 1932; died 1969)​
Children4, including Tao Siliang
EducationHengyang Peasant Movement Training Institute
Yan'an Marxist–Leninist Academy

Zeng Zhi (Chinese: 曾志, 4 April 1911 – 21 June 1998), born Zeng Zhaoxue, was a Chinese communist revolutionary and politician. She took part in the Southern Hunan Uprising and reached the Jinggang Mountains with the Red Army in 1928, and she is counted with He Zizhen and Wu Ruolan among the "three heroines" of the Red Army there. She spent much of the following decade in underground work in Fujian, where she helped to establish the Eastern Fujian Soviet.

After 1949, Zeng held senior posts in Guangzhou, where she was the first director of the city's electric power bureau and, from 1955 to 1966, a secretary of the municipal party committee responsible for industry. During the Cultural Revolution, she was criticised and investigated again after Tao's downfall and was sent to do manual labour in rural northern Guangdong. In December 1977, she returned to work as a deputy head of the Organization Department under Hu Yaobang, where she was one of his principal assistants in reversing verdicts in political cases and took part in selecting younger cadres for promotion.

Early life

Zeng was born Zeng Zhaoxue on 4 April 1911 in Yizhang County, Hunan, into a family of intellectuals. She was also known by the alias Zeng Xia.: 172–173  In the autumn of 1924, she entered the Third Women's Normal School of Hunan Province in Hengyang.

In August 1926, Zeng enrolled at the Hengyang Peasant Movement Training Institute. She registered under the name Zeng Zhi, explaining that she wanted to win dignity for women, as the character zhi means "will" or "aspiration". She was one of the few women at the institute. In October 1926, she joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and she wrote to her mother to break off the marriage that her parents had arranged for her.

Revolutionary career

After graduating in the spring of 1927, Zeng worked in the organisation department of the CCP's Hengyang prefectural committee. Later that year, she moved to Chenzhou for underground work as secretary-general of the Chen County party committee. In January 1928, she took part in the Southern Hunan Uprising. She then became secretary of the party committee office of the Seventh Division of the Workers' and Peasants' Revolutionary Army, and she went with the division to the Jinggang Mountains in April 1928.

Jinggang Mountains

In the Jinggang Mountains, Zeng served in turn as party branch secretary of the Fourth Red Army's rear hospital at Xiaojing, an officer in the army's organisation section and head of the women's group of the front committee's workers' and peasants' movement committee. In June 1928, while pregnant, she took part in the fighting at Longyuankou, and she later helped to build the Xiaojing hospital when she was more than seven months pregnant. In August 1928, she took part in the Battle of Huangyangjie. More than 130 wounded and sick soldiers at the hospital were later killed in an enemy raid. In early 1929, Zeng left the mountains with the main force of the Fourth Red Army.

After the Fourth Red Army took Changting in Fujian in March 1929, Zeng helped to arrange the marriage of Zhu De and Kang Keqing. When He Zizhen was pregnant later that year, Mao Zedong asked Zeng to look after her, and Zeng at first objected, believing that she was being asked to give up her own work.

Fujian

From June 1930, Zeng did underground work in Xiamen and Fuzhou, 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. After the Red Army withdrew from Zhangzhou in 1932, the local party organisation led by her husband, Cai Xiemin, collapsed, and in October 1932, Cai and Zeng were criticised and removed from their posts.

In 1933, Zeng was posted to eastern Fujian, where she helped to establish the Eastern Fujian Soviet and served 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 central county committee. In 1935, as Nationalist forces overran most of the soviet, Zeng, who was seriously ill, was sent to Guangdong for treatment, and she then lost contact with the party. She moved between Shantou, Hengyang, Yizhang, Guangzhou and Shanghai for about twenty months, supporting herself with casual work, before re-establishing contact in Shanghai in October 1936. Her departure from eastern Fujian became the basis of political investigations into her over the following decades.

Second Sino-Japanese War

Zeng Zhi with Tao Zhu in Hankou in 1938

After the outbreak of war with Japan in 1937, Zeng was reunited in Hankou with her husband, Tao Zhu, who had been released from prison through the party's efforts. 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.: 172–173  In October 1938, after the fall of Wuhan, Zeng became secretary of the CCP committee for the central district of Jingmen, Dangyang and Yuan'an, which became a central county committee in February 1939.: 172–173  She led anti-Japanese mobilisation in the area, reorganised the local party organisation and helped to prepare guerrilla forces.: 172–173 

In December 1939, Zeng was sent to study at the Marxist–Leninist Academy in Yan'an, and in 1940, she became secretary-general of the Central Women's Committee. During the Yan'an Rectification Movement, Zeng was accused of having fled the Eastern Fujian Soviet and was labelled politically wavering. She was detained for investigation for a year and four months, and no conclusion was reached. In 1945, she was elected an alternate delegate to the 7th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party.

Northeast China

In June 1945, Zeng travelled south with a military column intended to set up a base area in Guangdong and Guangxi, but after Japan's surrender, the column was redirected to Northeast China. In the northeast, Zeng was a member of the Shenyang municipal party committee and secretary of its Tiexi district committee, a member of the Liaoning–Jilin provincial committee and deputy secretary of two of its prefectural committees, and later a member of the standing committee of the Shenyang committee and head of its workers' department.

Political career

Guangdong

Zeng Zhi with Tao Zhu and daughter Tao Siliang, 1954

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. In 1952, she was transferred to Guangdong as deputy head of the industry department of the Central South Bureau and the first director and party secretary of the Guangzhou Electric Power Bureau. Describing herself as a newcomer to the industry, she set up her office in the Xicun power plant and housed her family in the workers' dormitory. The bureau's headquarters, the Hua'an Building, became known as the "ancestral home" of electric power in Guangzhou, and it was restored and opened as the Guangzhou Electric Power Exhibition Hall in December 2018.

From 1955 to 1966, Zeng was a secretary of the CCP Guangzhou municipal committee responsible for industry, and she was also a member, standing committee member and alternate secretary of the Guangdong provincial committee. In 1957, after a two-year investigation by the Guangdong provincial committee, the Organization Department approved a conclusion that her history was clear and that she had no political problems. She was the founding president of the Guangzhou Institute of Technology, now part of Guangdong University of Technology, and of the Guangzhou Mechanical and Electrical Industry School, both founded in 1958.

Cultural Revolution

重上战场我亦难，感君情厚逼云端。
无情白发催寒暑，蒙垢余生抑苦酸。
病马也知嘶枥晚，枯葵更觉怯霜残。
如烟往事俱忘却，心底无私天地宽。

To return to the battlefield once more is hard for me,
Yet I am moved by your affection, profound as the soaring clouds.
Relentless graying hair marks the rush of seasons,
Disgraced in these remaining years, I suppress my grief and bitterness.
A sick horse still knows to neigh at its trough in old age,
A withered sunflower fears even more the harshness of the ruinous frost.
Let all past affairs, like smoke, be forgotten—
When the heart is selfless, heaven and earth open wide.

— Tao Zhu, "Presented to Zeng Zhi (Part II)" (1969)

At the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Tao Zhu was transferred to Beijing as executive secretary of the Secretariat, and Zeng, then a deputy secretary of the Guangzhou committee, went to Beijing on sick leave. After Tao was purged in early 1967, Zeng stayed with him while he was confined in Zhongnanhai. She was criticised as his wife, and the investigation into her past in eastern Fujian was reopened. In her memoirs, she attributed the fact that she was not physically assaulted to her acquaintance with Mao from the Jinggang Mountains. When Tao was moved to Hefei in 1969, Zeng was sent to the countryside in northern Guangdong to do manual labour, and the couple did not meet again. Tao died in Hefei on 30 November 1969.

In December 1978, the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee reversed the verdict on Tao, and a memorial meeting was held for him in Beijing.

Organization Department

In December 1977, Zeng returned to work as a deputy head of the Organization Department, which Hu Yaobang headed from that month. She was one of Hu's principal assistants in reviewing and reversing the verdicts in political cases. By her account, Hu described the backlog of cases at his first meeting with the department's staff as a mountain, citing the "sixty-one renegades" case, the cases left by successive political campaigns and those from the Yan'an "rescue campaign". The department then set up groups to receive veteran cadres, to place more than six thousand cadres awaiting posts in central government bodies and to correct the cases of people labelled rightists.

Zeng's portfolio included the assessment and training of cadres in the economic and scientific sectors. At the time, the party was campaigning to promote middle-aged and younger cadres, and in 1980, the principal leaders of more than thirty central government bodies were on average 63 years old. Rather than relying on personnel files and reports, Zeng, then about seventy, visited factories, mines and research institutes to observe candidates at work. The approach preceded the department's large-scale selection of "third echelon" successor cadres in 1983 and 1984.

At the 12th National Congress in September 1982, Zeng was elected to the Central Advisory Commission, where she was deputy secretary of its provisional party committee.: 172–173  She retired in 1983. After Hu Yaobang was removed as general secretary in 1987, she wrote an account of his work at the Organization Department, which she completed in hospital. It was later published in Hong Kong under the title Hu Yaobang Outside the Red Wall.

Later life and death

Zeng did not use her position to obtain jobs for her family. When her eldest son's son, Shi Jinlong, came to Beijing in the 1980s to ask for her help in obtaining an urban household registration, she declined, saying that the country still needed peasants. In 1987, she returned to the Jinggang Mountains for the 60th anniversary of the base area and shared a meal with her son's family, asking that they receive no special treatment.

In her last years, Zeng was treated for lymphoma and underwent twelve courses of chemotherapy over two years. Weighing about 37 kilograms (82 lb), she completed her account of Hu Yaobang and an autobiography of 400,000 characters in hospital. She lost consciousness on 16 June 1998, and her last words, on being told that her autobiography would be published, were a request not to be praised too highly. She died in Beijing on 21 June 1998, at the age of 87.

After her death, Tao Siliang found Zeng's will in an old envelope. It asked that there be no memorial meeting, farewell ceremony or mourning hall, that her body be given to a hospital for dissection and the remainder cremated, and that part of her ashes be buried under a tree in the Jinggang Mountains and the rest beneath a boulder on Baiyun Mountain in Guangzhou. It also asked that her death be announced only three months later, without a biography. She had written to the Central Committee asking for a simple funeral, and the Organization Department held no farewell ceremony.

Zeng's body was cremated on 26 June without public notice, although more than three hundred people came to the hospital. The head of the Organization Department, Zhang Quanjing, accompanied the cortège. On 1 July, her family scattered part of her ashes on the hillside behind the former Xiaojing Red Army hospital, about 400 metres (1,300 ft) from the grave of the soldiers killed there, and planted a cypress. The gravestone reads "Spirit returned to Jinggang: veteran Red Army soldier Zeng Zhi". On 4 July, the rest of her ashes were buried with part of Tao Zhu's ashes beneath the boulder on Baiyun Mountain.

Personal life

Marriages

In 1927, Zeng married Xia Mingzhen, the dean of studies at the Hengyang training institute, who also headed the prefectural party organisation department. She later wrote that the marriage had been arranged at the request of the party organisation. In Chenzhou, Xia was secretary of the Chen County party committee, and in March 1928, he was killed by a crowd during the "anti-white incident" in the county, at the age of 21.

Shortly afterwards, Zeng married Cai Xiemin, the party representative of the Seventh Division. In her memoirs, she described their relationship as closer to that of comrades-in-arms, and she wrote that she regarded marriage at the time as secondary, because revolutionaries could be killed at any moment. According to her memoirs, she ended the marriage in October 1932, after the two had been removed from their posts in Zhangzhou and before Cai left for Shanghai to appeal against the decision. Cai was betrayed and arrested in April 1934 and was executed in Zhangzhou in July that year.

In Fuzhou, Zeng and Tao Zhu were assigned to work together posing as a married couple, and their relationship became a real marriage, which accounts date to 1932 or early 1933. Tao was later arrested by the Nationalist authorities and sentenced to life imprisonment, and the couple were reunited after his release in 1937. Their marriage lasted 37 years, until his death in 1969.

Children

Zeng had three sons and a daughter, and the three sons were given to other families as infants. Her eldest son was born on 7 November 1928 in the Jinggang Mountains. When he was 26 days old, with the army about to move, she entrusted him to Shi Libao, a deputy company commander in the 32nd Regiment, who raised him under the name Shi Laifa. Tao Siliang has written that he was the posthumous son of Xia Mingzhen. In 1951, Zeng had colleagues search for him, and the two were reunited in Guangzhou after more than twenty years apart. He returned to the mountains, took the name Cai Shihong and worked as a farmer and forest ranger.

Her second son, known as Tie Niu, was born in 1931.: 178  When he was a little over sixty days old, the Xiamen central municipal committee, which was short of funds, decided without her knowledge to give him to a doctor surnamed Ye in exchange for one hundred silver dollars.: 178  Zeng accepted the decision, and the child died of smallpox a few weeks later.: 178 

Her third son, Cai Chunhua, was born in February 1933 and was given to another family thirteen days later. Zeng traced him in 1950, and he later worked as an assistant engineer in Lechang County, Guangdong.

Her daughter with Tao Zhu, Tao Siliang, was born in Yan'an in 1941. When her parents left for the northeast in 1945, she was left in the care of a nursery in Yan'an. She later worked as a military doctor for about twenty years and then in charitable work.

Legacy

Zeng is counted with He Zizhen and Wu Ruolan among the "three heroines" of the Red Army in the Jinggang Mountains. Party media and discipline-inspection bodies have presented her as an example of frugality and of refusing privileges for her family. At a symposium marking the centenary of her birth in April 2011, Li Yuanchao, then head of the Organization Department, called on officials to learn from her revolutionary spirit and character. An illustrated biography by Wang Qingqing was published that year, and an earlier biography for young readers by Xin Xuezi had appeared in 1991. Her memoirs have been noted for their frankness about her early marriages, the surrender of her sons and the investigations she underwent. Tao Siliang wrote in a funeral inscription that her mother had given more than a woman and more than a mother could give.

Works

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 曾志 [Zeng Zhi]. Hengyang Women's Federation (in Chinese). 10 October 2015. Retrieved 27 October 2026.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 Party History Office of the CCP Yichang Municipal Committee, ed. (2018). 中国共产党宜昌历史人物 [Historical Figures of the Chinese Communist Party in Yichang] (in Chinese). Beijing: Chinese Communist Party History Publishing House.
  3. 1 2 3 曾志和她的农民儿子 [Zeng Zhi and Her Peasant Son]. Sina (in Chinese). 13 May 2011. Retrieved 10 September 2026.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 党史中的吉安故事（六）：曾志和她在井冈山的亲人 [Ji'an Stories in Party History, Part 6: Zeng Zhi and Her Relatives in the Jinggang Mountains]. People's Daily (in Chinese). 6 May 2021. Retrieved 27 October 2026.
  5. ↑ 曾志与小井红军医院 [Zeng Zhi and the Xiaojing Red Army Hospital]. National Treasure Archives (in Chinese). CCTV-4. 19 March 2018. Retrieved 27 October 2026.
  6. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 Lu, Xiaofei; Ye, Lin (3 August 1998). 曾志的遗嘱 [Zeng Zhi's Will]. China Women's News (in Chinese). Retrieved 10 September 2026 – via Hu Yaobang Historical Materials Network.
  7. ↑ 传奇红军曾志：敢与毛泽东当面顶撞的女人 [The Legendary Red Army Soldier Zeng Zhi: The Woman Who Dared to Argue with Mao Zedong to His Face]. People's Daily Online (in Chinese). 14 January 2013. Archived from the original on 23 February 2020. Retrieved 8 April 2017.
  8. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Zeng, Zhi (1999). 一个革命的幸存者——曾志回忆实录 [A Survivor of the Revolution: Zeng Zhi's Memoirs] (in Chinese). Guangzhou: Guangdong People's Publishing House. ISBN 7-218-02997-3.
  9. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Yang, Cijun (14 October 2025). 先锋开讲·大红湘南｜心底无私天地宽 [Pioneer Lectures, Red Southern Hunan: A Selfless Heart Makes Heaven and Earth Broad]. Xinhunan (in Chinese). Hunan Daily. Retrieved 27 October 2026.
  10. 1 2 3 4 5 Zhu, Huaxin (16 September 2019). 陶铸和曾志：共产党人的真性情 [Tao Zhu and Zeng Zhi: The True Nature of Communists]. Caixin (in Chinese). Retrieved 10 September 2026.
  11. 1 2 3 4 Dai, Hesheng (23 February 2024). 陶铸诗词中的高风劲节 [Lofty Integrity in Tao Zhu's Poetry]. Study Times (in Chinese). Retrieved 27 October 2026 – via Chinese Communist Party News Network.
  12. 1 2 Hao, Siyuan; Huang, Zhiju (30 December 2018). 注入现代电力元素，“华安楼”变身广州电力展示馆 [With Modern Electric Power Elements Added, the Hua'an Building Becomes the Guangzhou Electric Power Exhibition Hall]. Jiemian News (in Chinese). Retrieved 27 October 2026.
  13. 1 2 【奋斗百年路 启航新征程】星火耀羊城 [A Spark Lights Up Guangzhou]. China Electric Power News (in Chinese). 2021. Retrieved 10 September 2026 – via Rural Electrification Information Network.
  14. 1 2 3 曾志 [Zeng Zhi]. Library of the Party School of the CCP Chenzhou Municipal Committee (in Chinese). Retrieved 10 September 2026.
  15. ↑ 广州市机电技师学院 [Guangzhou Mechanical and Electrical Technician College]. Guangzhou Mechanical and Electrical Technician College (in Chinese). Archived from the original on 21 June 2021. Retrieved 10 September 2026.
  16. ↑ 中国共产党第十一届中央委员会第三次全体会议公报 [Communiqué of the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party]. Chinese Communist Party News Network (in Chinese). 22 December 1978. Retrieved 27 January 2026.
  17. ↑ 在陶铸同志追悼会上 陈云同志致悼词 [Comrade Chen Yun Delivers the Eulogy at the Memorial Meeting for Comrade Tao Zhu]. People's Daily (in Chinese). 25 December 1978. Retrieved 27 January 2026.
  18. 1 2 3 4 胡耀邦与冤假错案平反 [Hu Yaobang and the Reversal of Unjust, False and Wrong Cases]. Economic Observer (in Chinese). 26 April 2012. Retrieved 10 September 2026.
  19. 1 2 3 4 陈云情系新时期干部队伍年轻化 [Chen Yun's Concern for Rejuvenating the Cadre Corps in the New Period]. Institute of Party History and Literature of the CCP Central Committee (in Chinese). 28 February 2019. Retrieved 10 September 2026.
  20. ↑ Oka, Takashi (12 March 1980). "'Young Turks' taking over in China". The Christian Science Monitor. Retrieved 27 October 2026.
  21. 1 2 Zeng, Zhi. 胡耀邦中组部纪实 [A Factual Record of Hu Yaobang at the Central Organization Department] (in Chinese).
  22. 1 2 Zeng, Zhi. 红墙外的胡耀邦 [Hu Yaobang Outside the Red Wall] (in Chinese). Hong Kong: Zhonghua Ernü Publishing House.
  23. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 中组部原副部长曾志的红色家风：让儿子终生务农 [The Red Family Tradition of Zeng Zhi, Former Deputy Head of the Organization Department: Letting Her Son Farm All His Life]. People's Daily Online (in Chinese). 23 January 2017. Retrieved 10 September 2026.
  24. 1 2 3 “革命的幸存者”曾志：“开怀天下事，不言身与家” ["A Survivor of the Revolution" Zeng Zhi: "Care for the Affairs of the World, Say Nothing of Self and Family"]. 12371.cn (in Chinese). 17 November 2021. Retrieved 10 September 2026.
  25. ↑ 曾志同志逝世 [Comrade Zeng Zhi Dies]. Guangming Daily (in Chinese). 5 July 1998. Retrieved 27 October 2026.
  26. 1 2 3 4 5 Tao, Siliang (12 October 2013). 陶斯亮：曾志与夏明震 [Tao Siliang: Zeng Zhi and Xia Mingzhen]. Gongshi (in Chinese). Archived from the original on 17 October 2013. Retrieved 27 August 2020.
  27. ↑ 归来 [Return]. PLA Daily (in Chinese). 21 June 2019. Retrieved 10 September 2026.
  28. ↑ 陶铸曾志珍贵合影：回顾红色伴侣三十七载深情（组图） [Rare Photographs of Tao Zhu and Zeng Zhi: Thirty-Seven Years of a Revolutionary Couple's Devotion]. People's Daily Online (in Chinese). 15 January 2014. Archived from the original on 9 February 2014. Retrieved 30 November 2025.
  29. 1 2 3 一个“卖”孩子的母亲，却足以赢得所有中国人的爱戴 [A Mother Who "Sold" Her Child Yet Deserves the Love of All Chinese]. Xiangchao (in Chinese). 9 August 2017. Retrieved 10 September 2026.
  30. 1 2 3 Cai, Jun (21 April 2021). 【写给革命先烈的告慰信】开怀天下事，不言身与家 [Letters of Comfort to Revolutionary Martyrs: Care for the Affairs of the World, Say Nothing of Self and Family]. Women of China (in Chinese). Compiled by Su Rong. All-China Women's Federation. Retrieved 27 October 2026.
  31. 1 2 3 大爱无声处，热血自难凉——陶斯亮的慈善公益长歌 [Great Love Is Silent: Tao Siliang's Long Song of Charity]. The Paper (in Chinese). 13 August 2025. Retrieved 27 October 2026.
  32. ↑ Li, Yuanchao (6 April 2011). 学习曾志同志的共产党人革命精神和高尚品德 [Learn from Comrade Zeng Zhi's Revolutionary Spirit and Noble Character as a Communist]. Chinese Communist Party News Network (in Chinese). Archived from the original on 4 August 2013. Retrieved 10 September 2026.
  33. ↑ Wang, Qingqing (2011). 曾志画传 [An Illustrated Biography of Zeng Zhi] (in Chinese). Beijing: Peking University Press.
  34. ↑ Xin, Xuezi (1991). 曾志的故事 [The Story of Zeng Zhi] (in Chinese). Hebei Children's Publishing House.
  35. ↑ 女英自述 [Accounts by Heroines] (in Chinese). Nanchang: Jiangxi People's Publishing House. 1988.
  36. ↑ Zeng, Zhi (2011). 百战归来认此身：曾志回忆录 [Back from a Hundred Battles: Zeng Zhi's Memoirs] (in Chinese). Beijing: People's Literature Publishing House. ISBN 978-7-02-008425-8.
  37. ↑ "Zeng Zhi's Memoir, by Zeng Zhi: Beijing, People's Literature Publishing House, 2011, 449 pp". Journal of Modern Chinese History. 6 (1). 2012. doi:10.1080/17535654.2012.670977. Retrieved 27 October 2026.
  38. ↑ Zeng, Zhi (2020). 一个革命的幸存者：曾志回忆录 [A Survivor of the Revolution: Zeng Zhi's Memoirs] (in Chinese). Sichuan People's Publishing House. ISBN 978-7-220-11381-9.