page_title: Xu Lai (actress)
section_title: After 1949 and death
hierarchical_section_title: Xu Lai (actress) / After 1949 and death
caption_attribution_description: English: Cover of Liangyou magazine, #100, featuring Xu Lai (徐来).
context_page_description: Xu Lai was a Chinese film actress, socialite, and World War II secret agent. Known as the "Standard Beauty", she was active in the film industry for only three years, and quit acting after the suicide of the great star Ruan Lingyu in 1935. Her first husband was Li Jinhui, the "Father of Chinese pop music".
  During the Second Sino-Japanese War, Xu and her second husband, Lieutenant General Tang Shengming, ostensibly served under the Japanese-controlled Nanking puppet regime, but secretly worked as agents for the Republic of China resistance based in Chungking.
  With the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War, Xu and Tang defected to the People's Republic of China, but were severely persecuted during the Cultural Revolution. Xu Lai died in prison in 1973; her husband survived and lived until 1987.
context_section_description: In 1949, as it was becoming clear that Mao Zedong's Communists were winning the Chinese Civil War, Xu Lai moved her family from Shanghai to British Hong Kong, while Tang Shengming went to Changsha to join the surrender of Hunan Governor Cheng Qian to the Communists. His brother Tang Shengzhi also surrendered. In 1950, Tang Shengming was appointed deputy commander of 21st Group Army of the People's Liberation Army and fought battles against the Kuomintang troops in Guangdong and Guangxi provinces.
  In 1956, Tang was appointed a counsellor of the State Council of the People's Republic of China, and Xu Lai moved with her husband to Beijing.
  When the Cultural Revolution started in 1966, Mao's wife Jiang Qing, who had been a minor actress in Shanghai during the 1930s, began persecuting many of her former colleagues who were familiar with her "bourgeois" past. Xu Lai and her husband were both imprisoned for unfounded criminal charges. On 4 April 1973, Xu died in prison after years of torture and maltreatment, at the age of 64. Tang survived the tumultuous period, and lived until 1987.
caption: Xu Lai on the cover of The Young Companion, a Shanghai pictorial.
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