Zhu De

Biography

Zhu De was born in 1886 into a poor tenant-farming family in Yilong County, Sichuan, and at nine was adopted by a well-off uncle who paid for his education. After a short spell as a physical education teacher he entered the Yunnan Military Academy in Kunming, where he joined the Tongmenghui. Graduating in 1911, he fought with Cai E's forces in the revolution against the Qing and in the 1915-1916 campaign against Yuan Shikai, becoming a brigade commander.

After Cai's death in 1916 he became a warlord commander and an opium addict. He broke the habit in 1922 and, turned down by the Chinese Communist Party, went to Germany, where he met Zhou Enlai, joined the party and studied at Göttingen. Expelled in 1925, he studied in Moscow at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East and returned to China in 1926.

He helped lead the Nanchang Uprising of 1927 and in 1928 joined Mao Zedong in the Jinggang Mountains, where their combined forces became the Fourth Red Army with Zhu as military commander. He backed Mao at the Zunyi Conference during the Long March, and as commander-in-chief of the Red Army and Eighth Route Army he led communist forces through the war against Japan, planning the 1940 Hundred Regiments Offensive with Peng Dehuai, and through the civil war.

In the People's Republic he was commander-in-chief of the People's Liberation Army until 1954, the first head of the party's discipline commission, vice-chairman of the state from 1954 to 1959 and of the party from 1956 to 1966, and in 1955 the first-ranked of the ten marshals. Sidelined during the Cultural Revolution, he chaired the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress from 1959 until his death in July 1976.