KANG SHENG

born 1899, Chu-ch'eng, Shantung province, China died Dec. 16, 1975, Peking Wade-Giles K'ang Sheng, original name Chao Jung Chinese Communist official who is considered to have been one of the three or four most powerful individuals in the government during the Cultural Revolution (196676). Most Chinese Communist leaders belonged to the peasantry, but Kang was born into a large landholding family. After completing a Western education in Shanghai, he joined the Chinese Communist Party in the early 1920s. As a labour organizer there, he led workers in several uprisings. Later he became director of the party's intelligence bureau. In 1930 he went to the Soviet Union, where, except for a brief interval, he remained for seven years as an active participant in the Comintern, the Russian Communist Party's international organization. In 1937 he went to Yen-an, in Shensi province, where he took charge of the Chinese Communist Party's internal security operations; in 1945 he became a member of the party's governing body, the Central Committee, and the committee's governing body, the Politburo. After the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Kang occupied various party and governmental positions, several times accompanying Premier Zhou Enlai on diplomatic missions abroad. With the reorganization of the central administration in 1954, his importance declined, and in 1956 he was made an alternate rather than a full member of the Politburo, although he continued to be linked with the government's intelligence and security operations. With the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1965, however, he was reelected to the Politburo, becoming a member of its powerful five-man Standing Committee. In 1970 his name was listed just below that of Zhou Enlai in official party pronouncements, and in 1973 he was made third vice chairman of the party.