Peng Dehuai

Chinese military leader

• Born: c. October 24, 1898
• Birthplace: Hsiangtan County, Hunan Province, China
• Died: November 29, 1974
• Place of death: Peking, China

Peng was a soldier for his entire adult career, all but the first few years of that career spent in the highest echelons of the Chinese Communist army. Despite making an immense contribution to the military victory of communism in China, Peng became the victim of political purges carried out by Mao Zedong in 1959 and spent his last years in official disgrace.

Early Life

Peng Dehuai (pehng deh-hwah-ee) was born in Hunan Province, China, very near to the village birthplace of his later comrade-in-arms Mao Zedong. One’s class background could be very important in later years, especially in the Cultural Revolution, in determining one’s political reliability the presumption being that higher social origins made one more unreliable. Peng described his family as “lower-middle peasant,” and clearly his family suffered severe hardships in his youth. It is not surprising then that he made the same career choice as other impoverished peasant boys military service. At the age of eighteen, he joined one of the many warlord armies that dominated the political and military scene in China from 1916 to 1928. He was to remain a soldier for the next forty-three years of his life, until he fell victim to purges carried out by Mao in 1959.

In 1922, Peng was able to gain admission to the Hunan Provincial Military Academy to receive professional training. After nine months of training, Peng was graduated and was appointed captain and commander of the very unit he had joined as a recruit seven years earlier. In 1926, the army that Peng served went over to the Nationalist army under Chiang Kai-shek, who had just launched the Northern Expedition aimed at eliminating the warlord menace. Though not an official member of the Nationalist army, Peng regarded himself as a “follower” for the next two years, during which time he rose to the rank of colonel in the Nationalist army. In early 1928, he applied for membership in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and in April of that year his entrance into the party was approved. What prompted his transfer of allegiance from the Nationalist (Kuomintang, or KMT) cause to the Communists was not ideology so much as a rebellious spirit and the conviction that the CCP and not the KMT was committed to a struggle against rural poverty.

Life’s Work

Much of Peng’s career, especially his later years, would be characterized by an antagonistic relationship with his fellow Hunanese, Mao Zedong. In the earlier years, conflicts, while frequently evident, were moderated. Building an army from scratch, challenging the much superior forces of the KMT, and, in the 1930’s, mobilizing resistance against the invading Japanese these challenging tasks overshadowed the factional struggling that often went on behind the scenes.

Though not one of the founders of the Chinese Red Army it was organized in the year before Peng joined the CCP Peng was one of the major figures in developing the guerrilla tactics that the CCP used to defend itself against the “annihilation campaigns” launched against it by Chiang Kai-shek’s forces in the period from 1930 to 1934. Like nearly all the subsequent leadership of the CCP, Peng was present on the yearlong (1934-1935) retreat called the Long March , which took the Communists on a six-thousand-mile journey from their bases in the south of China to a new headquarters in Shaanxi Province. They had barely dug in at their new base at the city of Yan’an when war erupted with Japan.

The eight-year-long Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1945, would prove to be a key factor in determining the fortunes of the CCP. At the beginning of the war, the CCP, weak and exhausted after having barely survived the ordeal of the Long March, controlled the single base at Yan’an and commanded the allegiance of no more than a million Chinese. At the end of the war, in 1945, the CCP, thanks to perfecting tactics of guerrilla warfare and mobilizing masses of China in the patriotic resistance cause, had expanded its network of bases to nineteen and controlled a population of about one hundred million. Throughout that war, Peng was deputy commander of the Eighth Route Army, the formal designation of the Chinese Red Army. While the commander, Zhu De , was a towering figure in the army and highly respected, Peng is often given credit for carrying the main responsibility of the frontline direction of the war of resistance against Japan.

The defeat of Japan did not bring peace to China for long. In 1946, one year after Japan’s surrender, a three-year civil war between Chiang’s Nationalists and Mao’s Communists swept over China. The now largely expanded Communist armies were reorganized and named the People’s Liberation Army (PLA); Chu continued as commander, with Peng as his deputy. As commander in chief of the First Field Army, Peng was responsible for the victorious offensive against the KMT armies in the northwest of China.

In 1950, one year after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), China found itself involved in the Korean War . As American forces drove into North Korea toward the Yalu River boundary with the PRC in November, 1950, Peng was called on to lead the “Chinese People’s Volunteers” into engagement with American forces. For the next three years, until the war ended in a stalemate in 1953 near the original thirty-eighth parallel, Peng remained in Korea directing the Chinese effort there. He was the only first-rank PLA veteran to participate in the Korean War. In 1954, Peng became both the de facto commander in chief of the PLA and the minister of defense. One year later he was elevated to the newly created rank of marshal.

It was exactly at this time that Peng launched a campaign to modernize the army, a venture that was eventually to arouse Mao’s suspicion. To modernize meant to professionalize and that required trimming the ranks of the PLA, which had ballooned in size. What was needed, Peng believed, was a relatively small, highly trained elite establishment rather than a mass army steeped in guerrilla traditions. Compulsory military service was substituted for the old “volunteer” system. Insignia of rank were introduced in the PLA, and distinctive uniforms and caps, modeled on those of the Soviet Red Army, were issued. It is a wonder that Peng’s reforms saw the light of day, for they contradicted Mao’s dicta that men were more important than weapons, that the guerrilla traditions of the Yan’an days had to be preserved, that political indoctrination was more important than technical training, and that political commissars were at least as important as good professional officers.

The chair’s response came in 1958, when Mao moved to check Peng’s professionalization drive by promoting his own militia movement under the slogan “Every man a soldier.” While only a limited number of the so-called core militiamen would be issued rifles and live ammunition, a second armed force was being created. In addition to this frontal challenge to Peng’s professional military convictions, Mao’s Great Leap Forward , launched in 1958, caused the rift between Mao and Peng to widen. Inspection trips into the countryside in that year caused Peng to recoil at the veritable chaos caused by the sudden rush into the communes and frenzied campaigns to increase steel production in the backyard furnaces that became the hallmark of the Great Leap Forward.

The issue came to a head at historic meetings attended by the entire top level of party leadership in the resort area of Lushan in the summer of 1959. By that time, bogus statistics and heroic slogans could no longer conceal the economic dislocations and plunging national morale that were the main legacy of the Great Leap Forward. It was Peng who stepped forward at the conference to offer the most frontal challenge to Mao’s personal leadership and policies by anyone from the party’s inner circle in the twenty-four years since the chair had assumed unchallenged control during the Long March.

Many ranking Party members endorsed Peng’s views, and in fact the party did move decisively away from the Great Leap Forward programs after the Lushan Conference. Nevertheless, Mao had a score to settle with his defense minister, and he moved swiftly to force Peng into ignominious retirement in September, 1959. During the next seven years, from 1959 to 1966, Peng was mentioned only once in the official media.

A worse fate was to befall Peng during the Cultural Revolution. In December, 1966, as that decade-long upheaval began to sweep over China, Peng was arrested. The final eight years of his life were a nightmare of imprisonment, physical abuse, and character assassination, as it was for most of Mao’s rivals in the party. Peng died of the effects of his imprisonment and medical neglect on November 29, 1974, all but forgotten. In 1978, two years after Mao’s death and the end of the Cultural Revolution, China’s new leadership, under Deng Xiaoping, posthumously “rehabilitated” Peng and restored his good name.

Significance

In his judiciously balanced biography of Peng Dehuai, Jürgen Domes argues that much of Peng’s success as a military leader must be explained by his character. He won the loyalty of his subordinate officers and troops because of his personal qualities. He led a simple, frugal life, worked hard, and was straightforward in his dealings with both superiors and subordinates. While Peng was courageous in battle and a good campaigner and tactician, Domes concludes that he was “at best a fair if not a mediocre strategist.”

Peng’s career is of great interest as a case study in intraparty conflict. Mao’s purge of Peng from the very highest ranks of the military establishment in 1959 came at a time when there was widespread dissatisfaction with Mao’s policies and tyrannical methods. Mao’s response to Peng’s challenge was to issue an ultimatum to the party leadership: If it and the PLA accepted Peng’s views, Mao would split the party by going to the countryside and mobilizing the peasants in his own private army to maintain control. The specter of such a civil war was apparently enough to isolate Peng from his supporters and leave him to face Mao’s wrath alone.

Peng’s fate illustrates the ability of the government of the PRC to reverse the public image of one of its most important leaders overnight. From being recognized as a hero of the revolution for decades, Peng was transformed overnight into an archvillain, a “great conspirator, a great ambitionist,” who had joined the movement only to advance his career and achieve fame for himself. Then, after Mao’s death, Peng’s reputation was soon elevated to almost superhuman heights. The power of a regime to manipulate personal images in such an arbitrary fashion should give caution to those seeking to separate fact from fiction in the careers of men such as Peng.

Bibliography

Domes, Jürgen. Peng Te-huai: The Man and the Image. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1985. This brief volume, the only biography of Peng in English, is an engrossing study of the man and his relationship to the political and military development of China with an especially good analysis of the intraparty conflict that swirled around Peng and Mao after 1959.

Griffith, Samuel B., II. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967. A well-respected standard authority on China’s army written by a U.S. Marine Corps general with long years of experience in China and considerable academic expertise as well. Includes valuable organizational charts and biographical sketches of all important PRC military leaders including Peng.

Joffe, Ellis. Between Two Plenums: China’s Intraleadership Conflict, 1959-1962. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1975. A highly specialized study of the three-year period of conflict touched off by Peng’s challenge of Mao at the Lushan Conference; by a recognized expert on Chinese military history.

Klein, Donald W., and Anne B. Clark, eds. Biographic Dictionary of Chinese Communism, 1921-1965. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971. Volume 2 contains a richly detailed and largely factual account of Peng’s career, though information on the post-1959 years is scanty. Contains a good bibliography.

Peng, Dehuai. “My Story of the Korean War.” In Mao’s Generals Remember Korea, translated and edited by Xiaobing Li, Allan R. Millett, and Bin Yu. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2001. Peng’s recollections of the Korean War are included in this collection of memoirs by major Chinese commanders who were involved in the conflict. Peng provides personal accounts of the major battles and his communications with Mao during the war.

Snow, Helen Foster. The Chinese Communists: Sketches and Autobiographies of the Old Guard. Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1972. This is a highly personal account of the early years of Peng and other Communist leaders based on interviews conducted in Yan’an in 1937. Includes a glossary of terms and a chronology.