Peng Dehuai

Biography

Peng Dehuai was born in 1898 into a poor peasant family in Xiangtan County, Hunan. Poverty ended his schooling at ten, and he worked as a labourer and coal miner before enlisting in a Hunan warlord army in 1916. After training at the Hunan Military Academy in 1922-23 he rose to battalion command, fought in the Northern Expedition once his army joined the Nationalists, and was drawn to communism by its programme of land reform. In 1928, stationed at Pingjiang to suppress communist guerrillas, he instead led his troops in revolt and joined the Red Army.

He became one of the Red Army's leading commanders in the defence of the Jiangxi Soviet, took part in the Long March and backed Mao Zedong at the 1935 Zunyi Conference. As deputy commander of the Eighth Route Army during the war with Japan he directed the 1940 Hundred Regiments Offensive, and in the civil war his Northwest Field Army defended the communist base around Yan'an and went on to take the northwest.

In October 1950 he agreed to lead the Chinese People's Volunteer Army in Korea, where he directed its offensives and in July 1953 signed the armistice. As Minister of National Defense from 1954 he set out to professionalize the army on the Soviet model, introducing ranks, salaries and conscription, and was named one of the ten marshals in 1955. He also disliked the growing cult around Mao.

At the 1959 Lushan Conference he criticized the Great Leap Forward, whose policies were causing mass famine, in a private letter to Mao; Mao denounced him and he was removed as defence minister. After years in obscurity he was arrested by Red Guards in 1966, subjected to repeated struggle sessions and beatings, and sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in prison in 1974, his death kept secret, and was posthumously rehabilitated in 1978.