Soong Ching-ling - Biography

Biography

Soong Ching-ling was born to businessman and missionary Charlie Soong in Chuansha (a part of present-day Pudong), Shanghai, the second of six children. She attended McTyeire School for Girls in Shanghai, and graduated from Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, United States. Her Christian name was Rosamonde (in her early years, her passport name was spelt as Chung-ling Soong, and in her Wesleyan College diploma, her name was Rosamonde Chung-ling Soong).

She married Sun Yat Sen, leader of China's 1911 revolution and founder of the Kuomintang (KMT or Nationalist Party), on 25 October 1915, even though her parents greatly opposed the match. (Dr. Sun was 26 years her senior.) After Sun's death in 1925, she was elected to the KMT Central Executive Committee. However, she left China for Moscow after the expulsion of the Communists from the KMT in 1927.

Soong returned to China in June 1929 when Sun Yat-sen was moved from his temporary resting place in Beijing to a new memorial in Nanjing, but she left again three months later, and did not return until July 1931, when her mother died. She resided afterwards in Shanghai until July 1937, when the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) broke out. Following the outbreak of hostilities, she moved first to Hong Kong, then to Chongqing, the wartime capital of the Chinese government. In 1939, she founded the China Defense League, which later became the China Welfare Institute. The committee now focuses on maternal and pediatric healthcare, preschool education, and other children's issues.

During the Chinese Civil War, Soong sided with the Communists. In the concluding months of the civil war, she left Shanghai for Beijing, to attend the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, convened by the Chinese Communist Party to establish a new Central People's Government. On October 1, she was a guest at the ceremony in Tiananmen Square marking the birth of the new People's Republic of China. This led her husband's former party, the Kuomintang, to issue an arrest order for Soong on 9 October 1949, but the swift military victory of the Communists led to the KMT's retreat from mainland China to Taiwan soon after this.

After the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, she became one of two Vice Chairmen of the People's Republic of China, Head of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association and Honorary President of the All-China Women's Federation. In 1951 she was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize.

In the early 1950s, she founded the magazine China Reconstructs, later renamed China Today. The magazine continues today and is published monthly in six languages (Chinese, English, French, German, Arabic and Spanish). In 1953, a collection of her writings, Struggle for New China, was published.

She became the first female President of the People's Republic of China: from 1968 to 1972 she served jointly with Dong Biwu as head of state.

Soong aroused the jealousy of Mao Zedong's wife Jiang Qing, who attempted to have her purged by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. However, Mao himself and Zhou Enlai ordered her not to be touched along with several other communist and non-communist cadres. Being a vice-chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress since 1954, she was elected acting executive chairman of it on 30 November 1976 replacing Zhu De, who died on 6 July.

On 16 May 1981, two weeks before her death, she was admitted to the Communist Party and was named Honorary President of the People's Republic of China. She is the only person ever to hold this title.