Men of the Moment (III)

Extract

Hsiung Hsiang-hui, Peking's Chargé d'Affaires in London, is one of the extremely few American-educated Chinese Communists. Now in his mid-forties, Hsiung comes from a large and well-to-do gentry family (his father was once a district judge) in which, as the second son, he bridled under the petty tyrannies of his elder brother. By the mid-1930s he was a student in one of China's finest universities, Tsinghua, where he first came into contact with left-wing elements. After the war broke out in 1937, he studied briefly in Changsha but then joined the First Army of Hu Tsung-nan, a top KMT general. After a year's schooling in the Central Cadets School in Sian, Hsiung became aide-de-camp to General Hu, a post he held from about 1940 to 1943. Hu began to suspect him of being a communist and, to get him out of the way, assigned him back to the Cadets School. Towards the end of the war Hsiung attended a training course established by Hu in preparation for taking over areas held by the Japanese. After this, Hsiung took and failed a government scholarship examination. But then Hu provided the necessary funds for Hsiung to study in the U.S.