Former Chinese Vice Premier Wu Guixian, who served from 1975 to 1977, has recently passed away at the age of 87. Wu Guixian, originally a textile factory worker, was promoted by Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution to become the first female vice premier of the Chinese Communist Party at the young age of 37. She became a symbol of that tumultuous era.
The Shenzhen Association for Promoting Shaanxi announced on April 27th that Wu Guixian, a retired Chinese Communist Party official and the first president of the Shenzhen Association for Promoting Shaanxi, passed away at 5:58 p.m. on April 25th in a Shenzhen hospital at the age of 87 due to illness.
Public records show that Wu Guixian was born in 1938 in Henan. In 1951, at the age of 13, Wu Guixian misrepresented her age to join the newly established Northwest National Cotton Factory in Xianyang City, Shaanxi Province, becoming one of the first workers at the state-owned factory and was assigned to work in the fine filament workshop as a doffer. In 1965, she was honored as an “exemplary advanced worker in the national textile system.” Shortly after, she became the deputy factory director of the Northwest National Cotton Factory and later studied at Northwest University, graduating in 1968.
During the Cultural Revolution, known as the “Ten-year Turmoil” from 1966 to 1976, Wu Guixian was designated as an “active advocate of applying Mao Zedong Thought.” In that unique era, she continued to be promoted and held various positions such as committee member and director of the Northwest National Cotton Factory Revolutionary Committee, vice director of the Xianyang City Revolutionary Committee, deputy secretary of the Shaanxi Provincial Committee of the CPC, and committee member of the Provincial Revolutionary Committee.
Starting from 1969, Wu Guixian was elected as a central committee member three times and became an alternate member of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the CPC during the first plenary session of the Tenth Central Committee in August 1973. In 1975, Mao Zedong proposed selecting a female vice premier from among workers to nurture revolutionary successors, leading to the appointment of Wu Guixian at the age of 37. Wu Guixian became the first female vice premier of the Chinese Communist Party and the youngest vice premier in China’s history.
After Mao Zedong’s death and the end of the Cultural Revolution, Deng Xiaoping took power and Wu Guixian, along with other high-ranking officials from the Mao era, was dismissed. In September 1977, Wu Guixian returned to the Northwest National Cotton Factory and later served as the deputy party secretary. In 1988, she became the chairman and general manager of a textile joint venture company in Shenzhen with Hong Kong investors and retired in 1994.
Wang Juntao, the chairman of the National Committee of the China Democracy Party, told Epoch Times that Mao Zedong promoted figures like Chen Yonggui, Wu Guixian, and Li Suwen to enhance the party’s image.
Apart from Wu Guixian, a former worker who rose to vice premier, there were other figures from the Mao era such as Chen Yonggui, a former member of the CPC Political Bureau and vice premier of the State Council, who was semi-literate and was dismissed from his position in September 1980. Chen Yonggui passed away in Beijing on March 26, 1986, at the age of 72. Another similar figure was Li Suwen, a vegetable vendor in Shenyang, who became a vice chairperson of the National People’s Congress Standing Committee after meeting Mao during the Cultural Revolution.
The Chinese Communist Party has been predominantly male-dominated, but following Wu Guixian’s tenure, there has been a practice of allowing individual women to enter positions of power for appearance’s sake. Several female vice premieres have followed Wu Guixian, including Chen Muhua, Wu Yi, Liu Yandong, and Sun Chunlan. After the 20th National Congress of the CPC, Chen Yiqin succeeded Sun Chunlan in entering high-ranking positions but only as a State Councilor without becoming a vice premier.