Li TeTe

Li Tete (Li Tete), born in 1923 in France, was the daughter of Cai Chang and Li Fuchun. Her mother underwent sterilization in the delivery room. To commemorate this life, her grandmother Ge Jianhao gave her the name “Tete.” After her birth she was raised in France by her grandmother. Around seven years old, during the First United Front between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, Li Fuchun and Cai Chang, arranged by the CPC, went to the Soviet Union to study, and Li Tete was taken back to Hunan by her grandmother to be raised. Because the family lived frugally in Paris, Cai Hesen sold the copyright to his work History of Social Evolution at a low price to fund the mother and daughter’s return to China.

After returning to China, grandmother Ge Jianhao founded a civilian women's vocational school in Changsha, which also served as a secret activity and liaison venue. Li Tete spent her childhood in Yongfeng, Hunan, and in 1928 accompanied her grandmother to Shanghai, living with Cai Chang. In 1931, Cai Chang and Li Fuchun moved to the Central Soviet Area in Ruijin, Jiangxi; Li Tete followed her mother back to Hunan and experienced a long separation from her parents, with seven years without contact.

In the summer of 1938, Li Tete and Cai Chang reunited in Dihua (Urumqi) in Xinjiang, then traveled with their mother to the Soviet Union. There she learned Russian and took part in military recruit training, later moving from Almaty to Moscow. In Moscow, at Moscow Sun Yat-sen University, she was reunited with her mother and adopted the Russian name “Roza.” With the outbreak of the Soviet war effort in 1941, Li Tete underwent military training and helped care for the wounded. In 1944 she entered Bauman Engineering and Technical Institute; after six months she transferred to the Soviet Broadcasting Administration to work on broadcasting to China and proofreading texts, for a little over a year.

In 1947 she married Varya in Moscow, and in 1948 they had their elder son, Andrei. Cai Chang visited their grandson in Moscow the same year. In 1952 she returned from the Soviet Union to China, initially working at Beijing’s North China Agricultural Research Institute. In 1954 she carried their second son, Li Jianbei, who was only three months old, to Beidahuang (the Northeast development project). After returning to China in 1957, she joined the Institute of Nuclear Energy at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, established a data library, and from 1958 to 1960 oversaw six isotope training courses, training over a thousand professionals. Her husband, due to cultural differences and adjustment difficulties, later returned to the Soviet Union and Li Tete and he became estranged.

After China’s first atomic bomb test in 1964, Li Tete conducted experiments and research in the Gobi Desert of Xinjiang. During the Cultural Revolution, Li Fuchun and Cai Chang faced political setbacks; Li Tete went to Henan’s “Five-Seven” Cadre School for labor reform in 1967, then to a Five-Seven Cadre School in Jilin. In 1974 she returned to Beijing, no longer working at the Nuclear Effects Research Institute, but instead engaged in translation work at the Institute of Intelligence Research of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences; in 1980, her project “Biological Effects of Nuclear Radiation on Crops” won the Ministry of Agriculture’s National Scientific and Technological Progress Second Prize, and she also edited foreign agricultural publications such as Foreign Agriculture and Foreign Agricultural Science.

After retiring in 1988, Li Tete served as a lifetime director of the China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation, conducting cross-province field surveys, fundraising, and promoting poverty-relief projects. She advocated “work-for-relief” as a poverty-alleviation strategy, spanning more than a dozen provinces and regions including Shaanxi, Gansu, Jiangxi, Hunan, Yunnan, Guizhou, Sichuan, Guangdong, and Fujian. In 1990 she was awarded the title of “Advanced Individual in Ethnic Unity and Progress” by the National Ethnic Affairs Commission. In the 1990s and thereafter she received multiple honors. In 1998 she published a biographical work, She Is Cai Chang’s Daughter. In 2015 she received Russia’s commemorative medal for the 70th anniversary of the victory in the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945). Li Tete died in Beijing on February 16, 2021, at the age of 97.