Li Xin (aka Li Hongmo)
李欣（李鴻模）
(1917–2017)
Completed studies in 1932 - Communist Party Diplomat
1932年肄業 — 中共軍政之才
Li Xin was born in 1917. He studied at St. Paul’s College between 1931 and 1932. Li was a Communist Party (CPC) organiser, translator, and one of the People’s Republic’s first diplomats.
Li grew up in the 1920s, at the peak of Chinese anti-imperialism and during the first Kuomintang–Communist split. He was sent to St. Paul’s as a boarder in 1931, but left Hong Kong after one term.
Li joined a leftist reading society in 1933 in Guangzhou, further familiarising himself with Marxism-Leninism. He joined the CPC in 1936, where he led party activities within Qingdao’s Shantung University. In the Second Sino-Japanese War, he saw battle at Xuzhou, Wuhan, and guerrilla operations in Shandong. Li was a political commissar in different People’s Liberation Army (PLA) armies during the Chinese Civil War. He took part in the Liaoshen, Pingjin, and Guangxi campaigns.
Within the early People’s Republic, there was a sore need for diplomats. Fluent in German and English, Li was a political counsellor in China’s East German (1950–54) and British (1954–57) missions. Li returned to China thereafter, studying at the PLA’s military school. He later became the PLA Academy of Military Science’s Department of World Military Research’s deputy director. There, he oversaw the translation of von Clausewitz’s On War into Chinese, which is now thought to be the best Chinese version of the book. The Cultural Revolution saw Li exiled to labour; he was rehabilitated in 1977. Li retired in 1985.