Person1898 – 1974

Peng Dehuai

Also called: P’eng Te-huai

PLA marshal who commanded the Chinese People’s Volunteers in the Korean War and became defence minister, but was purged after criticising the Great Leap Forward at the Lushan Conference in 1959

Born to a poor farming family at Xiangtan in Hunan, he became an officer in the Hunan army and in 1928 led the Pingjiang Uprising, joining the Communist Red Army. He took part in the Long March, and as deputy commander of the Eighth Route Army led the Hundred Regiments Offensive of 1940. In the civil war he led the Northwest Field Army, and from October 1950 commanded the Chinese People’s Volunteers in Korea as commander and political commissar, signing the armistice in 1953. He became defence minister in 1954, but a letter pointing out the problems of the Great Leap at the Lushan Conference of 1959 got him condemned as leader of an “anti-party clique” and dismissed. Paraded and brutally persecuted by Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution, he died in Beijing in 1974 and was rehabilitated in 1978.

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1 related event

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1958 – 1962The Great Leap Forward and the Great Faminerelated figure
In 1958 Mao Zedong launched the Great Leap Forward, with people’s communes and backyard steel furnaces, vowing to overtake Britain within fifteen years. Grain was requisitioned on the basis of inflated harvest reports and farming was disrupted, causing the famine of 1959–1961, whose death toll is estimated by different studies at roughly 15 to 45 million.

People who appear alongside

Mao Zedong1893 – 1976
Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party who won the civil war and founded the People’s Republic in 1949, and launched the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution
Liu Shaoqi1898 – 1969
Chairman of the People’s Republic (1959–1968) who led economic readjustment after the Great Leap Forward, but was branded a “capitalist roader” in the Cultural Revolution, expelled from the party and died in detention

Themes this person appears in

From the Chinese Civil War to the Cultural Revolution1927 – 1976
From the collapse of the United Front in 1927, through rural bases, the Long March and Yan’an, to the Communists’ victory in the civil war and the founding of the People’s Republic — then land reform, the Great Leap Forward and famine, the Sino-Soviet split and the Cultural Revolution, up to Mao’s death and the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976, while the Nationalist government withdrew to Taiwan