Peng Dehuai

Peng Dehuai the Chinese communist marshal and field commander (1898-1974) who led the People's Liberation Army in its greatest campaigns and then commanded the Chinese forces in the Korean War. A blunt and demanding officer, he was celebrated for his victories and later purged for criticising the policies of the Great Leap Forward.

Peasant Origins and Military Career

Peng Dehuai was born on 24 October 1898 into a poor peasant family in Xiangtan county, Hunan province. His mother died when he was young and his father remarried, leaving the boy in difficult circumstances; he worked as a cowherd, a coal miner and a labourer before he enlisted in the army of the warlord era. The poverty of his childhood left him with a lasting sympathy for the rural poor.

He entered the Hunan provincial army and rose through the ranks, and he was marked by a stern discipline and an indifference to personal comfort that would characterise his whole career. He studied at a military academy, joined the Nationalist movement, and served in the Northern Expedition of 1926-1927, where he came into contact with the emerging communist movement among the ranks.

He joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1928 and led his regiment in the Pingjiang uprising of that year against its Nationalist commanders, taking his troops over to the communist side. He became one of the ablest commanders of the Red Army, first in the Jiangxi soviet and then on the Long March, where his skill in rearguard action and in mobile defence gave him a reputation for tactical brilliance.

The Red Army and the War with Japan

During the Long March and the campaigns of the early 1930s Peng Dehuai was among the most successful of the Red Army commanders, and it was he, with Lin Biao, who is often credited with the suggestion at the Zunyi meeting of 1935 that Mao Zedong take over the military leadership. After the march he commanded forces in the northwest, guarding the approaches to the communist base at Yan'an.

In 1936 he led the Red Army's campaign into Shanxi and Gansu, and he directed the operations that defeated the forces of the Ma warlords. With the outbreak of full war against Japan in 1937 the Red Army became the Eighth Route Army, and Peng Dehuai was appointed its deputy commander and, in practice, the principal operational leader of the communist forces in the north.

His most celebrated action of the war was the Hundred Regiments Offensive of August to December 1940, a large coordinated series of attacks on Japanese communications, railways and strongpoints across northern China. The offensive inflicted heavy damage and demonstrated the scale of the communist forces, but it also provoked devastating Japanese reprisals against the villages of the base areas and later drew criticism within the party for having exposed the army to the enemy.

Victory in the Civil War

In the civil war of 1945-1949 Peng Dehuai commanded the Northwest Field Army, the force charged with defending the Yan'an base against the much larger Nationalist armies of Hu Zongnan. In 1947 he fought a series of mobile battles in the inhospitable terrain of northern Shaanxi, trading space for time, wearing down the enemy through attrition, and preserving the communist leadership through the most dangerous period of the war.

His campaigns in the northwest, short of men, food and ammunition, are often studied as classic examples of the deliberate use of interior lines and of dispersed guerrilla warfare against a stronger opponent. After the Nationalists evacuated the region, Peng's armies drove west and took the strategic towns of the northwest, opening the way to the subsequent occupation of Xinjiang and the consolidation of the western frontier.

In 1950 he was appointed a marshal of the People's Liberation Army upon the creation of that rank and served as the first minister of national defence and as a member of the Central Military Commission. He was responsible for the reorganisation of the army after the decades of civil war and for the integration of the former field armies into a single national force.

The Korean War and Later Criticism

When Chinese forces intervened in the Korean War in October 1950 Peng Dehuai was appointed commander of the Chinese People's Volunteers. He directed the great counter-offensives that drove the United Nations forces back from the Yalu river, and he presided over the stubborn defensive battles of 1951-1953 that held the line near the 38th parallel until the armistice of July 1953 was signed at Panmunjom.

The Korean campaign consolidated his fame as one of the great commanders of the age, but it also placed him at odds with the political leadership over the conduct of the war and the needs of the army. After the war he returned to his posts as minister of national defence and worked to modernise and professionalise the armed forces, and he urged that military policy be based on professional competence rather than on political enthusiasm alone.

In 1959, at the Lushan conference of the party, he submitted a letter criticising the Great Leap Forward, the radical agricultural and industrial campaign whose excesses had caused widespread famine and hardship. He spoke of the suffering of the peasants he had seen on a tour of his native Hunan, and he urged a correction of the policy. Instead of the discussion he hoped for, his intervention was condemned as a rightist challenge to the leadership, and he was removed from his offices and publicly disgraced.

Purge, Death and Rehabilitation

In the years of the Cultural Revolution Peng Dehuai suffered renewed persecution. He was attacked at mass struggle meetings, held in confinement for long periods, and subjected to humiliating interrogations that broke his health. He died in custody in Beijing on 29 November 1974, a victim of the political campaigns he had dared to oppose.

His reputation was restored after the death of Mao Zedong, when the party reassessed the events of the 1950s and admitted that the criticism of Peng had been unjust. A formal rehabilitation was pronounced in 1978, and his contribution to the revolution and to the defence of the state was publicly acknowledged. His criticism of the Great Leap Forward, once treated as treason, came to be seen as the honest judgement of a soldier for the suffering of the people.

Peng Dehuai is remembered as one of the finest field commanders of modern Chinese history, a general of aggressive spirit and iron discipline who led his armies in three of the republic's greatest conflicts. His willingness to speak truthfully at cost to himself became a powerful part of his legend, and his name stands both for military skill and for the moral courage to dissent.

See also

• Korean War
• Great Leap Forward
• Hundred Regiments Offensive
• Long March