People of the Revolution and the USSR

Communist Party of China Chinese communism 1893–1981 ○ Natural causes

Sun Yat-sen’s widow who stayed with the Kuomintang left and became a vice-chair of the People’s Republic

At the 1922 mutiny she stayed behind to cover Sun Yat-sen's escape, saying 'China can do without me; it cannot do without you.' On 16 May 1981, weeks before her death, she was admitted to the CCP and named honorary chairman of the PRC.

The second of the three Soong sisters of a wealthy Christian Shanghai family, she married Sun Yat-sen in 1915. Opposing Chiang Kai-shek’s anti-Communist coup in 1927 she became the symbol of the Kuomintang left, went to Moscow, and in the 1930s led the China League for Civil Rights in Shanghai. During the war with Japan she organised the China Defence League in Hong Kong to supply the Communist base areas. In 1949 she became a vice-chair of the Central People’s Government; shortly before her death in 1981 she joined the Communist Party and was named honorary president. Her younger sister Soong Mei-ling was Chiang Kai-shek’s wife.

People’s Republic of China Chinese communism 1898–1976 ○ Natural causes

The PRC's first premier and an architect of its foreign policy

His 1971 secret talks with Kissinger opened the way for Nixon's arrival in Beijing on 21 February 1972, and the Shanghai Communiqué of 28 February 1972 reordered the Cold War triangle.

A Chinese statesman born in Huai'an, Jiangsu in 1898 and died in Beijing in 1976. One of the CCP's earliest leaders, he joined a Chinese communist cell in Paris, served in the Political Department of the Whampoa Military Academy, and acted as the Party's chief negotiator through the Xi'an Incident and the Chongqing negotiations. Appointed premier (of the Government Administration Council, later the State Council) with the founding of the PRC in October 1949, he served until his death in 1976, and concurrently as foreign minister from 1949 to 1958, becoming an architect of early PRC foreign policy. After the Zunyi Conference he was subordinate to Mao, and amid the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution he kept the state running and managed the balance of power.

Communist Party of China Chinese communism 1906–1947 ✕ Executed

The writer whose “Wild Lilies” criticised privilege at Yan’an and made him the rectification movement’s first victim

A Party member who in 1942 attacked Yan’an’s privileges in “Wild Lilies”, he was expelled, imprisoned and secretly executed in 1947; Dai Qing called his case the movement’s key measure of repression.

A translator and writer from Henan, he went to Yan’an in 1937 and translated Marxist classics. In March 1942 his essay “Wild Lilies” in Liberation Daily pointed to graded rations and clothing for cadres and to the disillusionment of the young; in the rectification movement he was branded a “Trotskyist” and became the target of mass criticism meetings. Arrested in 1943, he was executed at Xing County, Shanxi, in 1947 during the retreat from Yan’an before the Nationalist offensive. In 1991 the Ministry of Public Security formally withdrew the Trotskyist charge.