Wang Jiaxiang

Communist Party of China Marxism–Leninism 1906–1974 ○ Died

One of the Twenty-Eight Bolsheviks who backed Mao at Zunyi and joined the three-man military group

Born into a landlord family in Jing County, Anhui, he went to study at Moscow Sun Yat-sen University in 1925, where he formed the "Twenty-Eight Bolsheviks" with Wang Ming, Zhang Wentian, Bo Gu and others. He joined the CCP in Moscow in 1928, returned in 1930 and in the Jiangxi Soviet headed the Red Army's General Political Department. At the Zunyi Conference of January 1935 he went over to Mao with Zhang Wentian and Yang Shangkun and criticised Bo Gu and Braun, and in March formed the three-man military group with Mao and Zhou Enlai. Sent to Moscow as the CCP's delegate to the Comintern in 1937, he brought back the next year a reported oral message from Dimitrov endorsing Mao's leadership. In the People's Republic he was the first ambassador to the Soviet Union and the first head of the party's International Department.

Also known as: Wang Chia-hsiang