P'eng Te-huai (1898-), Chinese Communist general who served as minister of national defense at Peking from mid- 1954 to mid- 1959, when he was removed from office and replaced by Lin Piao.
Hsiangt'an hsien, Hunan, the native district of Mao Tse-tung, was the birthplace of P'eng Te-huai. His mother died when he was six, and, after several unhappy years in the care of a stepmother, P'eng left home. He undertook a variety of occupations: helper to a cowherd, bunker boy in a coal mine, and apprentice to a shoemaker. After supporting himself for five years, he went to live with a maternal uncle. Two years later, he left his uncle's prosperous household to join the Hunan provincial forces, in which he soon became a platoon commander. About 1916, he was imprisoned after participating in an attempt to assassinate Fu Liang-tso, the governor of Hunan. After his release, he enrolled in the provincial officers' training school. He received a commission in the Hunan provincial army in 1918.
By the time the Northern Expedition began in 1926, P'eng Te-huai had become a major and the commander of the 1st Regiment in the 5th Division of the Thirty-fifth Army. When the army's commander, Ho Chien (q.v.), began to purge it of leftist elements at the time of the Kuomintang-Communist split in 1927, P'eng and his men were driven into Shih-shou-kung, a wild lowland area along the Yangtze north of Tung-t'ing Lake. By then, P'eng had become active in the Hunan peasant association of which the Chinese Communist T'eng Tai-yuan was chairman, and he had married a middle-school graduate who belonged to the Socialist Youth Corps. Through his wife's influence, he began reading Marxist literature, and he joined the Chinese Communist party in April 1928. By the beginning of 1928 P'eng and his guerrillas had retreated northward to P'ingchiang, an important junction on the Hankow- Changsha road. P'eng led attacks on the Nationalist troops in the area and forced the magistrate at P'ingchiang to release some imprisoned leaders of the Hunan peasant association. These actions were referred to as the P'ingchiang uprising by Chinese Communist historians. About this time, P'eng organized his men as the Fifth Army of the Chinese Workers and Peasants Red Army, with himself as commander and T'eng Tai-yuan as political commissar. Moving from P'ingchiang north to the Hupeh-Hunan-Kiangsi border, P'eng directed guerrilla activity in the area until the winter of 1928, when he and his men were driven south by Nationalist troops to the Ching-kang mountain refuge of Chu Teh (q.v.) and Mao Tse-tung. Soon after P'eng's arrival, Chu and Mao were forced to retreat into Fukien province, leaving P'eng to fight a rearguard action. He was driven out of the area in April 1929, and he spent the rest of that year rebuilding his army.
In the summer of 1930 Li Li-san (q.v.), who then dominated the Chinese Communist party organization, called for concentrated attacks on the industrial cities of central China. On 28 July 1930 P'eng Te-huai's forces, now known as the Third Army Group of the Chinese Workers and Peasants Red Army, took Changsha, the capital of Hunan. They held it for ten days, and they recaptured it in September only to lose it again a few days later. With the dismissal of Li Li-san and the failure of the Chinese Communist party to capture and hold any of the major industrial cities, P'eng Te-huai returned to his old headquarters at P'ingchiang. Beginning in September 1930 he served under Yang Yu-lin as the deputy chairman of a small Hunan soviet in the Hunan-Hupeh-Kiangsi border area. The Third Army Group was merged with the First Army Group of Chu Teh in October 1930 to form the First Front Army. Some of P'eng's men continued to support the policies of Li Li-san until December 1930, when Mao Tse-tung had them arrested at Fut'ien, Kiangsi. About this time, P'eng became a member of the People's Revolutionary Military Council, and in November 1931 he was named to the central committee of the newly established central soviet government at Juichin, Kiangsi. Some of P'eng's forces began to move eastward into Fukien after the Kuomintang undertook its fifth campaign against the Communists in September 1933. These troops offered their support to the leaders of the Nineteenth Route Army at the time of the Fukien revolt (see Ts'ai T'ing-k'ai, Ch'en Ming-shu), but the people's government at Foochow was suppressed by the National Government before any plans for cooperation could be discussed.
In October 1934 Chiang Kai-shek's troops forced the Chinese Communists to evacuate the central soviet base area and begin the Long March. The forces from Kiangsi met the Fourth Front Army of Chang Kuo-t'ao in western Szechwan at Moukung in June 1935, but here policy debates broke out which resulted in the separation of the Communist forces, with Chang Kuo-t'ao, Chu Teh, Liu Po-ch'eng, and Hsu Hsiang-ch'ien moving westward into Sikang. Mao Tse-tung, P'eng Te-huai, Lin Piao, and the First Front Army continued to advance toward Shensi, with P'eng serving as commander of the First Front Army. Before arriving at the Communist base in Shensi, this army fought bitterly with Kuomintang forces in Ninghsia and Kansu. P'eng retained command of the First Front Army until October 1936, when Chu Teh finally arrived in Shensi.
After the Sino-Japanese war began in July 1937, the Chinese Communist forces in northwest China were reorganized as the Eighth Route Army (later redesignated the Eighteenth Army Group), with Chu Teh as commander and P'eng Te-huai as deputy commander. Except for a brief period of activity on the Shansi front in the winter of 1937, Chu remained at Yenan, the Communist wartime capital, and P'eng served as field commander. In 1942 P'eng went to Yenan to assume charge of the movement to correct unorthodox tendencies in Red Army members. Also in 1942 he married P'u An-hsiu, a sister of the prominent leftist reporter P'u Hsi-hsiu.
In recognition of his military accomplishments during the Second World War, P'eng Te-huai received full membership in the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist party and alternate membership in the Political Bureau at the party's Seventh National Congress, held at Yenan in April-June 1945. He also served on the congress's presidum. In 1947 he commanded the Northwest People's Liberation Army; in 1948 he received command of its successor, the First Field Army. His forces soon won control of Ninghsia, Kansu, and Sinkiang. Although he held office as commander and political commissar of the Sinkiang Military District from 1949 to 1951, his vice commanders, Wang Chen and Saifudin (qq.v.), were more active in Sinkiang than he.
Of the four such armies created in 1948, the First Field Army was by far the smallest, poorest, and least important. Stationed in an economically backward area in which it met with little resistance from Nationalist forces, the army had few opportunities to capture valuable war material. For example, after it took control of Yenan from the Nationalists in April 1948, the First Front Army discovered that the Nationalists had not built up a strong and well-supplied garrison during the short time they had held the Communist wartime capital. The First Front Army also posed special command problems because its ranks included large numbers of non-Chinese troops—Kirghiz, Kazakhs, Tatars, Mongols and Muslims from northwest China. P'eng continued to hold command of the First Field Army until September 1954.
With the establishment of the People's Republic of China in October 1949, P'eng Te-huai assumed additional responsibilities as chairman of the Northwest Military and Administrative Committee, a member of the Central People's Government Council, and a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference. He also served on the executive board of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association. For a time after 1950 P'eng was chairman of the Northwest Military and Administrative Committee's finance committee, but the post must have been little more than titular, for he took charge of the Chinese People's Volunteers in Korea in October 1950. He signed the armistice agreement at Panmunjom on 27 July 1953, and he was given a triumphal reception in Peking on 12 August 1953. Throughout the Korean conflict, he had continued to hold such high civil posts as membership in the State Planning Commission. Upon his return to China in the summer of 1953 he resumed the chairmanship of the Northwest Military and Administrative Committee and became a member of the committee charged with drafting a constitution. He also retained his Korean command until September 1954, when he relinquished it to Teng Hua.
In the governmental reorganization of 1954 P'eng Te-huai became minister of national defense, a vice premier of the State Council, and a vice chairman of the National Defense Council. In May 1955 he led a delegation to East Germany and Poland. In September 1955 he was one of the ten military leaders who received the rank of Marshal of the People's Republic of China. He was a delegate to the First and Second National People's congresses, and in 1956 he served on both the presidium and the standing committee of the Eighth National Congress of the Chinese Communist party, at which he was reelected to the Central Committee and the Political Bureau. He led delegations to the Soviet Union in 1957, and during the latter trip he also visited Eastern European countries.
In September 1959 P'eng Te-huai suddenly was removed from office as minister of national defense and replaced by Lin Piao. Other high officials dismissed at this time were Huang K'och'eng and Chang Wen-t'ien (qq.v.). The reasons for P'eng's dismissal are not clear, and various explanations have been offered by Western observers. Some have stated that P'eng was purged because he advocated the creation of a professional army free from party control and non-military tasks, thereby opposing Mao Tse-tung's theory of people's warfare. Another explanation alleged that P'eng was dismissed because of his strong opposition to the "Great Leap Forward" and the creation of people's communes. Whatever the reason, it is interesting to note that when the historian WuHan (q.v.) was criticized during the so-called Cultural Revolution in 1966, he was accused of implying in his historical drama Hai Jui pa-kuan [the dismissal of Hai Jui] that P'eng Te-huai, like Hai Jui, was an upright official who had the courage to speak against the bad policies of a tyrant for the good of the people.
