Nie Rongzhen

Nie Rongzhen the Chinese communist marshal and technological administrator (1899-1992) who commanded the North China armies in the war with Japan and the civil war, and who later directed the programme that produced China's nuclear weapons and other advances in defence science. He was the founding organiser of the research and industrial base of the modern Chinese military.

Scientific Education and Revolutionary Beginnings

Nie Rongzhen was born on 29 December 1899 in Jiangjin county, Sichuan province, into a family of some education and standing. He studied in France as a young man as part of the work-study movement, in which Chinese students went abroad to combine labour with study, and while in Europe he was drawn into the communist movement. He joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1923.

He studied engineering and science in France and then in the Soviet Union, and the training he received abroad gave him a lasting respect for technology and for the systematic methods of modern industry. These interests, unusual among the revolutionary commanders, would later make him the natural leader of the scientific programmes of the new state.

He returned to China in the mid 1920s and served as a political officer in the Nationalist armies, working for the communist cause within their ranks. He took part in the Nanchang and Guangzhou risings of 1927 and afterwards worked in the underground and in the military apparatus of the party.

Red Army Officer and the Anti-Japanese War

In the Red Army Nie Rongzhen served as a political commissar, the officer responsible for the political loyalty and morale of the troops, and as a commander of formations in the central soviet area. His combination of technical knowledge and political reliability made him a trusted figure, and he took part in the Long March as one of the senior officers of the central column.

During the war with Japan he commanded the forces of the Eighth Route Army in the Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei border region, one of the most important communist base areas in northern China. He built a network of local government, militia and guerrilla units across the mountains west of Beijing, and his command developed the political and military structures that sustained the communist movement in north China.

In 1939 his forces won the battle of Mount Wutai, in which a Chinese column killed an officer of high rank of the Japanese army, one of the most celebrated victories of the war. He combined military operations with the organisation of the countryside, teaching the villagers the arts of resistance and drawing them into the institutions of the base area.

Civil War and the Modernisation of the Army

In the civil war Nie Rongzhen commanded the North China Military Region and the forces that operated around the capital. He directed the campaigns that cleared the Nationalists from the countryside of Hebei and Shanxi and prepared the way for the entry of the communist armies into Beijing and Tianjin in 1949. He served as the first mayor of Beijing after its peaceful occupation.

He was created a marshal of the People's Liberation Army in 1955, one of the ten commanders honoured with that rank, and he became a vice premier and a member of the Central Military Commission. In the 1950s he was placed in charge of the development of science and technology, and he supervised the planning of the defence industries and the growth of the research institutes of the new republic.

He argued that the state must build a scientific and industrial base if it were to defend itself in the modern world, and he worked to train engineers, to import and adapt foreign technology, and to establish the laboratories and factories of the armament programme. His administration was marked by a pragmatic concern for results and by an insistence on the necessary material foundations of power.

The Nuclear Programme

In the late 1950s and early 1960s Nie Rongzhen was the principal administrator of the effort to develop nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. He coordinated the work of scientists, engineers, soldiers and construction workers, and he was responsible for the selection of sites, the allocation of scarce resources and the protection of the programme from the political turmoil of the period.

Under his direction the Chinese state assembled a remarkable group of scientists, including many who had trained abroad, and pushed forward the research that led to the first Chinese atomic test on 16 October 1964 and to the first hydrogen bomb test in 1967. The achievement made China a nuclear power and transformed its standing in the world.

He also guided the development of the rocket and missile programme that would later serve both military and civilian purposes. He was among the leaders who insisted that the diffusion of scientific knowledge and the training of a new generation of researchers were as important as any single weapon, and he built the institutions of higher technical education that trained them.

Later Years and Reputation

In the Cultural Revolution Nie Rongzhen was attacked as part of the campaign against the veteran leaders, and the scientific programme he had built was disrupted by the political upheaval and by the persecution of many of its personnel. He worked to protect as many of the scientists as he could and to keep the essential programmes alive, against great opposition.

After the fall of the radical faction he returned to public life and continued to serve in the leadership of the Central Military Commission and in scientific administration, lending his authority to the rehabilitation of persecuted scholars and to the modernisation of the armed forces that began in the reform era. His interest in the peaceful uses of advanced technology fitted the new emphasis on economic development.

He died in Beijing on 14 May 1992, one of the last of the ten marshals. He is remembered as the soldier-scientist of the revolutionary generation, a commander who fought the great campaigns of the civil war and then made possible the technological achievements that secured the state in the nuclear age. His name is closely associated with the rise of Chinese defence science.

See also

• Nuclear weapons programme
• Mount Wutai
• North China Military Region
• People's Liberation Army