P'eng Chen (1899-), Chinese Communist official who held the top administrative and party posts in the Peking municipal government in the 1950's and early 1960's. He was one of the first high-ranking officials to be removed from office in the Cultural Revolution of 1966. Little is known about P'eng Chen's family background or early life except that he was born into a peasant family in Ch'uwu, Shansi, and that the necessity to work left him little time for study. At the age of2 1 , however, he managed to gain admittance to an old-style normal school in Taiyuan. He soon encountered such periodicals as Hsin cKing-nien [new youth] and the Chinese Communist party organ Hsiang-tao chou-pao, which introduced him to the precepts of Marxism-Leninism. After joining the Socialist (later Communist) Youth Corps, he worked to organize the students at Taiyuan. In 1925 he helped plan a boycott of Japanese goods at the time of the May Thirtieth Incident at Shanghai. P'eng Chen joined the Chinese Communist party about 1926 and became director of the labor union on the Taiyuan-Shihchiachuang railroad. The party later ordered him to attempt to increase its influence in north China by organizing miners at T'angshan and industrial workers at Tientsin and Peiping. These activities led to his arrest and imprisonment at Tientsin in 1929. After being released in 1935, he became an assistant to Liu Shao-ch'i (q.v.) at Peiping, organizing student demonstrations against the National Government. When the Sino-Japanese war began, he moved to Taiyuan and then to the Chinese Communist wartime capital, Yenan. He soon was assigned to return to Shansi and work with the 115th Division of the Eighth Route Army, commanded by Nieh Jung-chen (q.v.). P'eng remained in north China until 1942, serving as secretary of the Shansi- Chahar-Hopei border region committee of the Chinese Communist party and as a member of the regional Soviet's government council ; he also worked for a period in the Jehol-Liaoning area of southern Manchuria.

In 1942 P'eng was recalled to Yenan to become director of the Central Party School, the principal institution guiding the training and indoctrination of cadres during the war years. Thus, he played a key role in the cheng-feng [rectification] campaign of 1942-43 (for details, see Mao Tse-tung), which affirmed the Marxist- Leninist orthodoxy of the Chinese Communist party within its native environment and which helped tighten the party structure. P'eng Chen's prominent position in the Chinese Communist party was confirmed at the Seventh National Congress, held at Yenan in the late spring of 1945. He was elected to the congress's 15-man presidium and to the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist party.

From 1946 to 1948 P'eng Chen served in Manchuria with Lin Piao (q.v.) as senior political commissar. He also worked under Ch'en Yun (q.v.) in the Northeast bureau of the Chinese Communist party. In 1948 he became deputy director, under Liu Shao-ch'i, of the Chinese Communist party's organization department. Early in 1949 he also was made secretary of the party's Peking municipal committee, a post he held until June 1966.

With the establishment of the Central People's Government in October 1949, P'eng Chen assumed new and important responsibilities at the national level, becoming a member of the Central People's Government Council and vice chairman of the Government Administration Council's political and legal affairs committee. In 1951 he succeeded Nieh Jung-chen as mayor of Peking, thus coming to hold the top administrative as well as the top party position in the municipal government. Later that year, he was elected to the Political Bureau of the Chinese Communist party. From 1952 to 1954 he served on the State Planning Commission. He was a delegate from Peking to the National People's Congress in 1954, and he was elected a vice chairman of the congress and secretary general of its Standing Committee. Later that year, he was elected vice chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. His senior rank in the party was confirmed by the Eighth National Congress, held in September 1956, at which he was reelected to the Political Bureau and was elected to the party's Central Secretariat, in which he ranked just below Teng Hsiao-p'ing (q.v.). P'eng served as vice chairman and secretary general of the National People's Congress in 1959, and as vice chairman in 1965. P'eng Chen also played an increasingly important role in foreign affairs. He made his first trip abroad in 1956, when he led a delegation from the National People's Congress and the Peking municipal government. He also traveled to Italy as head of the Chinese delegation to the Eighth Congress of the Italian Communist party. In 1960 he led a delegation to the Rumanian Workers Party Congress in June and made a fiery statement denouncing President Tito of Yugoslavia as a revisionist. Sino-Soviet relations became strained in 1960. Although P'eng and other Chinese met with Soviet officials at Moscow later that year in an attempt to settle their differences, the Russians withdrew their technical aid and personnel from China at the year's end. P'eng returned to Moscow in October 1961 as a member of the Chinese delegation, led by Chou En-lai (q.v.), to the Twenty-second Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Chou left the congress abruptly to express dissatisfaction with Soviet Premier Khrushchev's policies, and P'eng became acting head of the Chinese delegation. P'eng went to Moscow with Teng Hsiao-p'ing in July 1963 to discuss the Sino-Soviet dispute, but they accomplished nothing. On their return to Peking, they were welcomed at the airport by Mao Tse-tung. In May 1965, at the fortyfifth anniversary celebrations of the Indonesian Communist party, P'eng gave a speech at Jakarta in which he strongly attacked Khrushchev's successors.

On 3 June 1966 P'eng Chen was removed from his official posts. He thus became one of the first high-ranking officials to be purged in the Cultural Revolution of 1966.