Yang Shangkun joined the General Office of the CPC Central Committee in 1945, and served as the Director of the General Office of the CPC Central Committee in 1948 until 1965. In 20 years, he witnessed the new China from a dentist to a first-class country, and also made great con

The famous leader of my country

Yang Shangkun joined the General Office of the CPC Central Committee in 1945, and served as the Director of the General Office of the CPC Central Committee in 1948 until 1965. In 20 years, he witnessed the new China from a dentist to a first-class country, and also made great contributions to the construction of the new China with his hard work.

Chairman Mao’s right-hand assistant

Yang Shangkun was born on May 25, 1907 in Shuangjiang Town, Tongnan County, Sichuan Province.

In the summer of this year, he entered Shanghai University to study, engaged in student movement, and went to Moscow, the Soviet Union at the end of the year to study at Sun Yat-sen University .

, he was brave and fearless, and always bravely moving forward on the road of revolution.

Time came to the spring of 1947. He also served as the commander of Central Guards, defending Chairman Mao and the central organs from safely evacuating Yan'an. In March 1948, he served as the Director of the General Office of the CPC Central Committee and Deputy Secretary-General of the CPC Central Committee, assisting Chairman Mao and other central leaders in handling the daily work of the CPC Central Committee and the Central Military Commission. He was Chairman Mao's right-hand assistant.

After the founding of New China, Yang Shangkun continued to serve as Director of the General Office of the CPC Central Committee, Deputy Secretary-General of the Central Committee, and alternate secretary of the Central Secretariat, and has always worked with Chairman Mao.

Secretary and petition work of the General Office of the Central Committee

The work of the General Office of the Central Committee can be divided into three parts in total, including secretarial work, petition work and service of security services. Among them, secretarial work is the most important, and petition work is gradually established under the organization of Yang Shangkun.

When the system was incomplete at the beginning, the central security work was not under the leadership of the General Office of the Central Committee, so the General Office of the Central Committee had few institutions and staff, but the affairs responsible were relatively complicated.

In addition to reporting to national first-level leaders such as Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou, Yang Shangkun also has to deal with the work of the leaders who are too busy with daily life, such as the approval of telegrams and screening documents. In addition, organizing meetings, listening to reports from subordinates, and sorting out files are all tasks that he needs to complete. In the early days of

, the documents formulated by national first-level leaders needed other important personnel to pass the documents, and the secretary of the leaders took the paper documents to find other personnel, and asked them to check them in person before they could arrange subsequent release matters. File circulation process such as

not only wastes time and is inefficient, but also cannot check the file circulation process. Even the comments after review by leaders sometimes do not remember them clearly, which has caused many unnecessary troubles to the central work.

So after discussing with others, Yang Shangkun established a detailed system for the circulation of central documents in New China, so that the circulation records and post-arrangements of each document were clearly registered, greatly improving office efficiency, and making the post-processing of documents easier.

The General Office of the Central Committee is also responsible for keeping all important party historical documents. There are many archives and insufficient staff, which makes it very inconvenient to re-review some documents.

Premier Zhou noticed this issue, not only raised this issue at the founding meeting of the General Office of the CPC Central Committee in 1945, but also raised this issue to Yang Shangkun many times after the founding of the People's Republic of China.

So under the leadership of Premier Zhou, Yang Shangkun led Zeng San, then director of the Secretariat, and Pei Tong to start preparing for the systematic archive management of New China. In addition to establishing a relatively complete archive management system, the Archives Bureau was also opened.

On August 26, 1954, the Secretary-General of the State Council passed the proposal to Architecture Central Archives at the 23rd meeting.

In order to include the construction of the archives as the basic task of national construction in 1956, the General Office of the Central Committee and other relevant collaborative departments carried out the rice paper, design and planning of the archives in a intensive manner.

Zeng San, who was nearly 50 years old, led the cadres to inspect the natural environment, geographical and hydrology and traffic conditions of various mountainous areas such as Changping, Haidian, etc. under the leadership of Yang Shangkun, and finally selected Changjiafen west of Baijiatong Village, Wenquan Township as the final location.

In early December, the Secretariat of the General Office of the Central Committee was established, and the Preparatory Office of the Central Archives was under the supervision of the Secretariat. In mid-December, the National Archives Administration was officially established as an administrative institution in charge of the national archives business.

In January 1955, the Political Bureau of the Central Committee decided to formally build the Central Archives . Yang Shangkun's proposal to the Central Committee to appoint Zeng San and Deng Diantao as deputy directors of the General Office of the Central Committee was also approved. The preparation for the establishment of the Central Archives began under the leadership of the General Office of the Central Committee.

In October 1959, the Central Archives was officially completed and opened.

In addition to keeping and processing Party Constitution files, Yang Shangkun is also responsible for handling letters to the central government and deciding which ones need to be approved by the leader in person.

Soon he discovered that there were many letters from the people who paid tribute to Chairman Mao and raised questions to the central government. The letters from the people are very important. Due to the large number, in order to distinguish them from the letters of some foreign leaders, Yang Shangkun proposed to establish an institution that specializes in handling letters from the people.

In early 1950, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China decided to establish the Secretary-General of the Communist Party of China Office, which specifically handles letters written by the masses to Chairman Mao and other central leaders. This is the predecessor of the Letters and Calls Bureau . After the establishment of the secretary's office, the General Office of the Central Committee will write a report to Chairman Mao and other leaders every quarter under the organization of Yang Shangkun.

After reviewing the report for the first quarter of 1951 in 1951, Chairman Mao highly affirmed the work of the secretariat on May 16, and said: "We must pay attention to the communication of the people, send letters to the people to appropriately handle, and meet the legitimate requirements of the masses."

's instructions became the most important policy in the future work of the secretariat.

In addition to establishing an archives and secretariat, Yang Shangkun was also responsible for diplomatic work such as the connection between the two parties of the Sino-Soviet Party and the second national census in 1964, and was completed on time with quality and quantity, which was highly praised by Chairman Mao and other national leaders.

The security work of the General Office of the Central Committee

As the comprehensive strength of the new China continues to rise, the number of times our leaders attend foreign countries is becoming more and more frequent.

However, in the 1950s and 1960s, the international situation was turbulent, and the safety of life was not fully guaranteed when leaders visited internationally.

Originally, the safety of the leader relied on the Ministry of Public Security, the Guard Corps and the Investigation Department, but when the leader’s travel involves diplomatic and international affairs, the General Office of the Central Committee must play a coordinated role in coordinating and organizing all forces.

Therefore, whenever the leader visits abroad, Yang Shangkun's work becomes twice as busy.

However, even though Yang Shangkun put all his energy into the international visits, there were two very critical situations in the 1950s.

The first time was in 1955 when Premier Zhou led a Chinese delegation to India to attend the Asian and African Conference. Imperialists and colonialists hated this conference very much and tried every means to destroy and obstruct.

Yang Shangkun and others learned in advance that Taiwan will take this opportunity to endanger Prime Minister Zhou's life and safety in Hong Kong. For this reason, he discussed with the Ministry of Public Security and the Central Security Bureau of , and decided to let Premier Zhou bypass Hong Kong and start from Kunming. The remaining staff and reporters took the " Kashmir Princess " transfer in Hong Kong as originally planned.

It is sad that although Premier Zhou deliberately asked the Hong Kong authorities to ensure the safety of our personnel's lives, an accident occurred on April 11. After it took off from Hong Kong, all 11 people on board, including 8 Chinese staff members, were killed.The incident of

made Yang Shangkun and others sweat. They could not imagine what would happen to Premier Zhou, who had not received the information in advance, who had originally planned to take the "Kashmir Princess"?

To make matters worse, on the evening of the 11th, Premier Zhou’s security secretary He Qian was hospitalized with acute appendicitis, and Premier Zhou was left with only one guard.

The two bad news combined made Yang Shangkun and others feel very worried. They not only had to solemnly negotiate with the United Kingdom and India to investigate the matter, but also wanted to re-arrange the foolproof guard work for Premier Zhou. After discussions all night, it was finally decided to send Yang Qiqing, then deputy minister of the Ministry of Public Security, as the delegation's advisor to Indonesia , who is fully responsible for the security guards and intelligence work during the meeting, and at the same time, Li Fukun was added as the guard of the Chinese Prime Minister.

On April 14, Prime Minister Zhou set out as planned regardless of his personal safety and met with Myanmar Prime Minister Wu Nu , Indian Prime Minister Nehru and Egyptian Prime Minister Nasser in Yangon .

On April 20, the third day after the meeting began, we were informed of threatening Premier Zhou's life safety, which made Yang Shangkun and others even more uneasy because they were worried about Premier Zhou.

Finally, with the efforts and negotiations between the General Office of the Central Committee and the Ministry of Public Security and other parties, Premier Zhou returned to Kunming safely on April 29, and the British authorities were also criticized for admitting that the explosion of the "Kashmir Princess" was a political murder case with ill-gotten plots.

The second thrilling thing was that in 1964, Liu Shaoqi and Chen Yi visited Indonesia, Myanmar and other countries. When the situation in Cambodia was very unclear, Yang Shangkun and others still worked tirelessly and ensured the smooth progress of this trip to Cambodia on the premise of ensuring the safety of the leaders' lives.

Throughout the diplomatic tasks, Yang Shangkun not only ensured the safety of the lives of national leaders with his outstanding diplomatic and coordination capabilities, but also made great contributions to the construction of the image of our country's diplomatic power.

Not only that, Yang Shangkun also established deep friendships with important figures from many countries in his work, including Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh and Soviet ambassador to China Chervonko.

The role of the General Office of the Central Committee in line with the past and the future

Yang Shangkun believes that the essence of the General Office of the Central Committee is to serve the central government. The central government needs to handle complicated affairs every day. The General Office of the Central Committee needs to listen to the central government's orders, convey and implement the central government's decisions, and report to the central government's outstanding issues.

Therefore, in addition to handling tasks issued by the central government every day, Yang Shangkun also pays great attention to the role of the General Office of the Central Committee in connecting the past and the future.

At that time, communication facilities across the country were not fully popularized. Despite this, Yang Shangkun insisted on maintaining communication with the heads of various provinces and localities every day. If any province talks first, then contact which province will never hinder him from playing his role in connecting with superiors and subordinates for objective reasons.

In this way, Yang Shangkun implemented the implementation of the central decision-making to each person in charge through personal point-to-point communication, and at the same time understood the living conditions of the people of each province and the key difficulties in the governance process, which provided great help to the implementation of various new policies in New China.

Yang Shangkun will also actively contact each department, and he will coordinate one by one to give his own opinions and solutions in a timely manner.

Under his organization and coordination, over the past twenty years, the work of the General Office of the Central Committee has gradually formed a complete system with twice the efficiency, and the division of various departments has also been gradually improved.

In 1998, 92-year-old Yang Shangkun died of illness in Beijing, ending his long and glorious life.

Reference materials:

"Memoirs of Yang Shangkun"; Central Documents Publishing House; 2001.09

"Yang Shangkun Talks Several Historical Issues in New China"; Sichuan People's Publishing House; 2010.01