Soong Ching-ling

Biography

Soong Ching-ling was born in Shanghai in 1893 into the Methodist family of the businessman Charlie Soong. After schooling at the McTyeire School for Girls she went to the United States in 1907 as one of the first government-funded Chinese women students, and graduated from Wesleyan College in Georgia in 1913. Returning by way of Japan, she became Sun Yat-sen's secretary and, against her family's wishes, married him in Tokyo in 1915.

After Sun's death in 1925 she sat on the Kuomintang's Central Executive Committee and championed his alliance with the Communists. When Chiang Kai-shek, her brother-in-law, broke with the Communists in 1927 she denounced the split and spent the following years in Moscow and Berlin. Back in China from 1931 she criticised Nationalist policy, worked with the Comintern, and helped shelter Communist figures. From Hong Kong she set up the China Defence League in 1938 to raise foreign aid for the war against Japan, later turning it into the China Welfare Institute.

She sided with the Communists in the civil war and in 1949 was named one of the six vice chairs of the new Central People's Government. She later served as a vice chair of the National People's Congress Standing Committee and, from 1959 to 1975, as Vice Chairman of the People's Republic alongside Dong Biwu. Protected by Zhou Enlai during the Cultural Revolution, she remained a leading non-Communist figure in the state. Days before her death from leukaemia in May 1981 she was admitted to the Chinese Communist Party and given the title of Honorary Chairman of the People's Republic of China.