Hu Lanqi
After the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, she organized a team of women soldiers to resist the Japanese invasion, and became the first woman to be awarded the rank of Major General by the Republic of China.
Based on her early life, the writer Mao Dun wrote the novel Rainbow (1929), whose heroine, Mei, would become more famous than Hu herself.
She rejected a marriage proposal from the Sichuan warlord Yang Sen, and was later engaged to Chen Yi, the Chinese communist leader who would become one of China's Ten Marshals and would serve as Foreign Minister, but they never married.
Hu Lanqi was born to an affluent family in Chengdu, Sichuan Province in 1901, during the tumultuous late Qing dynasty.
[6] In the spring of 1926, Hu Lanqi left home for Guangzhou to work for He Xiangning, Minister of Women's Affairs of the Kuomintang (KMT) government.
[7] The following year, she became a cadet of the Whampoa Military Academy in Wuhan and enlisted in the KMT's National Revolutionary Army, which was then waging the Northern Expedition against the warlords.
[10] Instead of returning home, she continued to work for the left-wing KMT leader He Xiangning, helping her unionize female workers.
She briefly shared an apartment with He Xiangning in Berlin, and through the introduction of He's son Liao Chengzhi and Cheng Fangwu, she joined the Chinese-speaking group of the Communist Party of Germany.
When the news reached China, Soong Ching-ling and the prominent writer Lu Xun formally petitioned the German consulate in Shanghai and secured her release.
[12][11] In the summer of 1934 the Soviet luminary Maxim Gorky invited her to attend the First Congress of Russian Writers, and reportedly singled her out for praise.
[11] After a brief stay in Hong Kong, where she met the disaffected KMT leader Li Jishen,[11] Hu was in Shanghai when the Japanese launched an all-out attack on the city in August 1937, at the beginning of the eight-year-long Second Sino-Japanese War.
[14] Late in 1937, she brought her corps to Nanchang, where she reunited with her old friend Chen Yi, who was by then a top commander of the Communist New Fourth Army.
[11] Hu did not witness the worst atrocities of the war, such as the Nanjing Massacre, but she was present when the retreating KMT soldiers burned down the city of Changsha.
In her reports she wrote about the numerous dead and dying soldiers and civilians she had encountered, and her corps was frequently attacked by Japanese bombing raids.
[14] After her corps was disbanded in 1942, she was sent to Jiangxi Province to reclaim abandoned farmland where war orphans could work, feed themselves and receive education.
When Mao Zedong launched the Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957, Hu, like many other political activists, was denounced as a "Rightist" and expelled from the Communist Party.
