Zhu De

Chinese military leader

• Born: December 18, 1886
• Birthplace: Yilong County, Sichuan Province, China
• Died: July 6, 1976
• Place of death: Beijing, China

Zhu is one of the great military figures of the Communist Revolution in modern China. He is acclaimed as the founder of the Red Army. His service as commander of the Communist army in the 1930’s and 1940’s attests that he was respected for his military ability as well as for his unflagging commitment to the Communist movement. In addition to his military contributions, Zhu helped establish the Chinese soviets, and he served in the Politburo and was chair of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress.

Early Life

Zhu De (joo day) was the third son in a family of thirteen children born to an impoverished tenant farmer. Hoping to escape their dire circumstances, the family decided that Zhu should be educated to qualify for civil service in the Qing imperial government. Consequently, his formal education began in his fifth year in a private school in his village, but his lack of funds allowed him to attend only half of each day. His intellectual progress qualified him to pass the imperial examinations in 1906, but he decided to attend the Normal School at Chengdu and become a teacher. In 1908, he attended the School of Physical Training at Chengdu. After completing his studies, he and other graduates started their own school in Yilongshen, where Zhu taught physical education and acted as business manager. The new school was forced to close after the first year, however, because the townspeople considered the courses too revolutionary and the physical education courses indecent.

Having disappointed his family and with little recourse to any other profession, he chose to pursue a military career. He applied for admission to the Military Academy in Yunnan but was refused entry, largely because he came from outside Yunnan Province. Discouraged, he volunteered for military service in the Sichuan Regiment; his natural leadership ability and personal discipline won the attention of his superiors. They recommended him for officer training, and the Military Academy accepted him the second time he applied. While in the Military Academy, he was attracted to the teachings of Sun Yat-sen and soon joined Sun’s Revolutionary Alliance.

Life’s Work

Commissioned a second lieutenant in July, 1911, Zhu was attached to General Cai Ao’s brigade. After the Wuchang Uprising, the Tongmenghui (Sun’s secret society) requested that Zhu carry on political agitation against the Manchus within the Yunnan army; he succeeded in this dangerous assignment. On October 11, 1911, three weeks after the Wuchang Uprising, which set off the 1911 Revolution, Zhu took part as a company commander under Cai Ao in the revolt at Kunming, which overthrew the Manchu authorities of Yunnan Province. Zhu was commissioned captain and made commander of forces in both Sichaun and Yunnan provinces. In 1912, he returned to teaching as instructor at the Yunnan Military Academy. Zhu was one of the first men to transfer his Tongmenghui membership to the Kuomintang (nationalist party) when Yuan Shikai became China’s president. For the next two years, his troops guarded the Tibet-Yunnan frontier against French-instigated incursions from Indochina. He was promoted to full colonel in December, 1915, and placed in command of the Tenth Yunnan Regiment. In January, 1916, after Cai Ao’s campaign against Yuan Shikai in Szechwan, Zhu was promoted to brigadier general. In only five years, Zhu had risen from second lieutenant to brigadier general because of circumstances and his obvious ability to train and lead men.

In early 1922, Zhu sought a new life through communism. He determined to break an addiction to opium he had formed after the deaths of his father and two brothers, to leave the warlord Yang Sen, for whom he had been working, and to travel abroad to study in Europe. In Shanghai, with proper medical care, he broke his addiction. At this point, the only meeting between Zhu and Sun Yat-sen occurred. Sun requested that Zhu return to his military post in Yunnan, but Zhu refused. When he applied for membership in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), his application was rejected because of his affiliation with and aid to the warlords. In September, Zhu, then in his mid-thirties, left China intending to study in Germany or Russia. After a monthlong stay in Paris, he proceeded to Berlin, where he met Zhou Enlai. With Zhou’s sponsorship, he was able to join the CCP in Germany, where he was among the eldest of the members and the only one with military experience. In Berlin, he was converted wholly to communism, but difficulty with the German language caused him to end his formal studies. In 1924, he became editor of the political weekly Zhengji zhoubao, and that same year he was elected to alternate membership of the Central Executive Committee of the Berlin chapter of the Kuomintang.

When Zhu returned to China, the Kuomintang and CCP were cooperating in their struggle against the warlords. Both sides hoped to win the minor warlords over to their side or to neutralize them. Because of his previous connection with Yang Sen, Zhu was able to persuade Yang to join Chiang Kai-shek’s Northern Expedition in 1926, and Zhu served in the political department of Yang’s Twentieth Army. General Yang, however, became suspicious and resentful of the communist influence among his troops and placed all the blame on Zhu. Zhu learned of Yang’s plans to assassinate him, and he fled to Nanchang. There he was given command of an officer training regiment and made head of the military training school.

When the CCP voted to begin the Peasant Uprising against Chiang in July, 1927, it planned to rely heavily on the military school and its graduates. On the night of August 1, 1927, Zhu was able to persuade the Kuomintang troops to mutiny and overthrow Nanchang. Zhu was then voted deputy commander of the Chinese Workers and Peasant Revolutionary Army, still under the Kuomintang banner. Zhu and his Ninth Division, however, were forced to retreat from Nanchang to South Hunan. Following orders from the Communist Central Party to break with the Kuomintang, Zhu’s troops then openly proclaimed themselves to be a Communist unit.

In the spring of 1928, Mao Zedong joined with Zhu, and the two inaugurated the “base area,” where troops were stationed to support the local rebel leaders. This merger laid the groundwork for the Red Army. The Communists officially united the armies of Zhu and Mao and organized the Fourth Red Army with Zhu as commander and Mao as political commissar in charge of political indoctrination. The Communists officially date the birth of the Red Army from the 1927 Nanchang uprising, when Zhu induced the municipal garrison to defect to the CCP, but now the names of Zhu and Mao were linked together. Once the Red Army had been formed, the troops under Zhu waited for the Nationalist forces to attack. Using “mobile warfare,” the Zhu-Mao troops made daring strikes behind enemy lines and launched campaigns of disruption and surprise intended to weaken the enemy. Zhu built the Red Army into a formidable force, which at its peak totaled more than 200,000 soldiers.

In China’s remote hinterland, the Communists organized the peasants into soviets and parceled out the land on an equal basis. Mao and Zhu supported a rural-based peasant uprising in opposition to the Comintern, which favored a proletarian, urban revolution. When the Jiangxi Soviet was established in 1931, Zhu was elected to the Central Executive Committee, and his role as commander of the Red Army was confirmed. Two years later, he was elected to the Politburo, and then to the Presidium. From this time forward, Zhu served on committees, in congresses, in the Politburo, and on military and executive councils.

When the Nationalists began their so-called Fifth Extermination Campaign, German military advisers devised a new “blockhouse” strategy for which the Red Army had no defense. In July, 1934, Zhu and Mao announced a “northward march” for the ostensible purpose of defending China from the Japanese. By October, the Red Army was pared down to eighty thousand soldiers and twenty thousand administrative cadre and began the famed Long March with Zhu as commander. During this period, Mao assumed effective control of the CCP, and Zhu continued as commander of the Red Army.

China was eventually forced to form a united front against the Japanese, so Zhu and Mao flew to Nanjing to conclude an agreement that in theory placed the Red Army under the control of the National Government. Zhu was appointed commander of the Second War Zone, and the Red Army was renamed the Eighth Route Army. The winter of 1939-1940 saw the collapse of the Kuomintang-CCP alliance, and the United Front ceased to exist. Chiang alleged that the Eighth Route Army was merely playing “hide and seek” and not fighting the Japanese. As a result, supplies were withheld and a determined effort was made to starve Zhu’s forces. Isolated and pressed by the Japanese troops, the Eighth Route Army was forced to become self-sufficient. Crops were cultivated and other manual labor was performed collectively by the troops and leaders as well.

After Japan’s surrender in August, 1945, Zhu rushed his troops in to occupy those areas held by the Japanese and Chinese puppet troops to accept their surrender and disarm them. The Nationalists denounced this action as an attempt by the Communists to unite with Soviet troops. Chiang ordered the Japanese and Chinese troops to join together and fight if attacked by the Communists. A truce was finally arranged through the help of U.S. general George C. Marshall in January, 1946, but it lasted only a few months. The two Chinese sides fought again, and by mid-1946 civil war raged in many parts of China. The Eighth Route Army and other Communist fighting units assumed the new name of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), with Zhu and other leaders openly acknowledging a war of attrition against the Nationalists. The Nationalists were finally forced out of China in January, 1949.

After the fall of the Nationalists, Zhu participated in preparations for the establishment of the People’s Republic of China on October 1 and served on the special committee that drafted the Organic Law of the central government. In the new government, Zhu received top posts in three key organs, each chaired by Mao. In addition, he remained as commander in chief of the PLA. Although he is often depicted as being inactive after 1954, Zhu continued to serve in various political and military capacities.

From 1960 on, however, because of his age, Zhu played a different role in China. He made “inspection tours” of the country, and, while he hosted delegates to Politburo conferences, he no longer attended them. By his eightieth birthday, his role appears to have been largely ceremonial as one of the prestigious “grand old men” of the Communist Party. He did enter the debate over modernizing the military and developing nuclear weapons, but he usually assumed a hard-line Party position and argued that such expenditures as were needed for new technologies could not be to the detriment of the masses. He also argued against a career military and stated that China’s military operations should rely fully on the masses of the people and on the concerted efforts of the regular army, guerrillas, and militia to carry out a war by the whole people.

Zhu was among the army leaders severely criticized during the Cultural Revolution . He was characterized as a “big warlord and careerist who had wormed his way into the Party.” Zhu refused to write letters in support of the Cultural Revolution, and he also refused to write a self-criticism for failing to support it. Zhu must have retained considerable power during the revolution, because Mao could not have instigated it without the support of the armed forces. Whether or not he had power during the Cultural Revolution, Zhu nevertheless was elected only to the Politburo in 1969. By 1973, however, he was re-elected as a member of the Politburo’s standing committee.

When the Fourth National People’s Congress wrote a new constitution in 1975, ceremonial duties as China’s formal head of state fell to the aged Zhu in his capacity as chair of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress. Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, reportedly pushed Zhu forward in the party structure as a possible heir to Mao, or perhaps to use his prestige to win over the military and other influential people to her side. He was not to enjoy the new position long, however, nor did he serve Jiang’s purposes. Zhu, founder of the Red Army and a symbol of revolutionary legitimacy and unity, died on July 6, 1976, at the age of eighty-nine.

Significance

Zhu never forgot the grinding poverty and hardships of his early life. He developed a passionate concern for the Chinese peasants, who suffered similar deprivations. Angered by the actions of the wealthy and the government, which only worsened the plight of the peasants, he turned to the study of Marxism and espoused communism. He participated in the earliest stages of the Revolution and committed his life to the movement.

In 1940, Major Evan F. Carlson characterized Zhu as one who had “the kindliness of a Robert E. Lee, the tenacity of a [Ulysses S.] Grant, and the humility of [an Abraham] Lincoln.” His concern for his soldiers caused him to stop corporal punishment, while the Japanese and Nationalists beat their troops with rifle butts. His troops did not come before his countrymen: Zhu would not allow the Red Army to take from the peasants, even when Chiang attempted to starve the army into surrender. The Red Army soldiers went unfed rather than take food from the poor peasants. Zhu helped to establish China’s rural-based peasant armies, and he never abandoned the concept of a peasant conscript army. He taught his officers to respect the “armies of the masses.” Shortly before his death, he warned against replacing the peasant armies with “military careerists” and professionals, for he was convinced that only a war of the whole people could successfully defend China.

Bibliography

Houn, Franklin W. A Short History of Chinese Communism. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973. Presents the story of the first stages of the Chinese Communist Revolution and the emergence of the first Chinese guerrilla bases. Excellent general approach to the communist movement.

Hsüeh, Chün-tu, comp. Revolutionary Leaders of Modern China. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971. The article on Zhu is an excellent but brief profile and shows his relationship to many other revolutionary leaders.

Kampen, Thomas. Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and the Evolution of the Chinese Communist Leadership. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2000. Analyzes the power struggles within the Chinese Communist Party from 1931 through 1945, when Mao and Zhou had risen to positions of Party leadership. Includes information about Zhu’s role in the party’s development.

Klein, Donald W., and Anne B. Clark. Biographic Dictionary of Chinese Communism, 1921-1965. Vol. 1, Ai Szu-Ch’i-Lo I-Nung. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971. The article on Zhu contains the most comprehensive biographical information from his birth to 1957. The emphasis is on the chronological developments.

Smedley, Agnes. The Great Road: The Life and Times of Chu Teh. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1956. A comprehensive and intimate biography of Zhu. The author knew her subject personally and included their shared experiences. The work is thorough and includes a fine chronology of Zhu’s life.

Terrill, Ross. Mao: A Biography. New York: Harper & Row, 1980. Based on wide reading and filled with bold assertions in a firsthand style, the book is a good source for the relationship between Mao and Zhu.