20 Century

Created 1/24/1997
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Peng Dehaui

Peng (surname) Dehuai. Born 1899. Died 1974. Joined the Communist Party of China in 1927. Led an insurrection in the province of Hunan in 1928, and survived the "Long March" of 1934-36. A skillful and effective general, from 1937 on he was second in command (to Chu Teh) of the "Eighth Route Army" fighting an effective guerrilla war for the Communist Party agains the invading Japanese. Commanded the Chinese People's Liberation Army force sent to rescue North Korean tyrant Kim Il Sung in the Korean War after the destruction of his armies by Douglas MacArthur's U.N. forces in the Inchon campaign; and inflicted a major defeat on the U.N., driving them south in a rout and recapturing Seoul. He signed the armistice at Panmunjom ending the Korean War in July 1953.

In 1954 he became minister of defense and a member of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party.

In 1959 he challenged Mao Zedong at the party congress, calling the policies of the Great Leap Forward which exalted ideological purity and denigrated technical expertise "impractical" and "disastrous." He justified his frank and honest criticism of the party's leader by recalling their long past of common struggle and action together: "Did we not eat from the same rice bowl?" He was betrayed at the party congress by his hoped-for allies Liu Shaochi and Deng Xiaoping, who sided with Mao. Peng was deprived of office, banished from the party, and imprisoned.

An attempt to rehabilitate Peng--a play "Hai Jui Reprimands the Emperor" in which the historical bureaucrat Hai Jui served as a thinly-disguised Peng Dehaui--provoked a political counterattack by Mao: the "Cultural Revolution" which convulsed China for a decade. He died in 1974, still under house arrest.

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20 Century

Created 1/24/1997
Go to Brad DeLong's Home Page

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