Soong Ching-ling (1890-1981) was a prominent figure in the Chinese Communist government. She served as a vice chairman in the government from 1949 to 1975. Soong Ching-ling served as head of a national woman’s organization and of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association after the Communist victory in China. She was awarded the 1951 Stalin Peace Prize.
Soong Ching-ling was also known as Madame Sun Yat-sen. She was the second wife of Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the Chinese Republic (see Sun Yat-sen). She worked with him in Japan and married him there in 1914. After Sun’s death in 1925, Soong became active in the left wing of the Chinese government. When Chiang Kai-shek, the president of the Chinese Nationalist government, broke with the Chinese Communists in 1927, Soong left China for about four years and lived in Europe, mostly in Moscow. She returned to China in 1931 and became a leading opposition voice to Chiang’s government until 1937, when the Communists joined together with the Nationalists to fight the Japanese. She did not officially become a Communist Party member until shortly before her death on May 29, 1981.
Soong Ching-ling, the daughter of Charles Jones Soong, was born in Kunshan, Jiangsu, on Jan. 27, 1893. She attended high school in Shanghai and graduated from Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, in the United States. Her younger sister, Soong Mei-ling, was married to Chiang Kai-shek (see Chiang Kai-shek; Chiang Soong Mei-ling).
