Pan Fusheng

Pan Fusheng (; December 1908 – April 1980) was a Chinese Communist revolutionary and politician. He was the first party secretary of the short-lived Pingyuan Province of the People's Republic of China, and also served as the First Secretary (i.e. party chief) of Henan and Heilongjiang provinces.

During the Great Leap Forward, Pan sympathized with Marshal Peng Dehuai, a critic of Mao Zedong's collectivization policy. As a result, in 1958, he was dismissed as party chief of Henan and subjected to persecution, but was later rehabilitated.

When the Cultural Revolution began, Pan, then party chief of Heilongjiang province, embraced the rebel Red Guards movement and gained the support of Mao. However, he was soon involved in major factional violence, and was dismissed again in 1971 and put under investigation. In 1982, the Chinese Communist Party posthumously criticized him for committing "serious mistakes" during the Cultural Revolution.

In 1929, he was admitted to the Shandong Number One Rural Normal School, where he was influenced by communist classmates, and joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1931. After the Mukden Incident, which led to the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, Pan organized the Shandong students to join the anti-Japanese and anti-Kuomintang (KMT) protests in the capital Nanjing. In March 1932, he was arrested by the KMT government and held at the Jinan Number One Prison. He was sentenced to ten years for "endangering the Republic", but was released in late 1937, after the eruption of the Second Sino-Japanese War. As a result, he became a major target of persecution by the fervent Mao loyalist Wu Zhipu, the Second Secretary of Henan, with the approval of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.

During the 9th plenum of the Henan Provincial Party Congress in June 1958, Pan Fusheng and two lower-ranking officials, Yang Jue and Wang Tingdong, were denounced as the "Pan, Yang, Wang right-deviating anti-party clique", and subjected to brutal struggle sessions. By enthusiastically embracing the "power seizure" movement by the rebel Red Guards, Pan was able to gain Mao's support and became a well-known figure throughout China. During the Cultural Revolution, Pan became chairman of the Heilongjiang revolutionary committee in March 1967, one of the only three provincial party chiefs in the country to have transformed from an incumbent provincial First Secretary to head of the revolutionary committee. This was considered a rare feat, as the vast majority of provincial First Secretaries were overthrown through power seizures by radicals and Red Guards, or were removed from power through other means. In April 1968, Pan was elected a member of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, and in April 1969, he became a member of the Central Military Commission.

Soon after the establishment of the revolutionary committee, however, a faction opposing Pan emerged and sought to remove him from power. Pan became involved in factional violence. He jailed people from the rival faction, including party members and ordinary people. His supporters and opponents fought each other in major armed conflicts, and Pan had serious disagreements with the local military leadership. In June 1971, the central government dismissed him from his posts and put him under investigation.

Death In April 1980, Pan died of a stroke in Harbin. In 1982, the CCP Central Committee issued a statement criticizing Pan for committing "serious mistakes" during the Cultural Revolution.