P'eng P'ai (22 October 1896-30 August 1929), the first Chinese Communist leader to organize peasants for political purposes and the founder of the short-lived Hai-lu-feng soviet. He was executed by the Nationalists at Shanghai. Born into a well-to-do landlord family in Haifeng (Hoifung), Kwangtung, P'eng P'ai received a traditional primary education in the Chinese classics. After he had completed his middle-school education, he and several other local youths were encouraged to continue their studies in Japan by Ch'en Chiung-ming (q.v.), a prominent native of Haifeng and at that time the commander of the Kwangtung Army stationed at Swatow. In Japan, P'eng enrolled in the department of political economy of Waseda University in Tokyo in September 1918. His three years in Japan coincided with the rapid growth of the socialist movement among Japanese professors and students at Waseda, and P'eng himself became an active member of a socialist group primarily interested in problems of agrarian reform. His socialist connections and his participation in the Chinese student demonstration held in Tokyo on 7 May 1919 to protest the decision of the Paris Peace Conference regarding the Shantung question brought him to the attention of the Japanese authorities. After being graduated from Waseda in the summer of 1921, he returned to China. P'eng appears to have joined the nascent Chinese Communist organization in Shanghai (see Ch'en Tu-hsiu) before proceeding to Canton and Haifeng in the autumn of 1921. By that time, Ch'en Chiung-ming had gained control of the entire province of Kwangtung and had become its governor, under the nominal authority of Sun Yat-sen. Ch'en, who was favorably disposed to moderate reform, had taken steps to implement a new educational program for the province in 1920, when he had invited Ch'en Tu-hsiu (q.v.) to head the provincial department of education. On 1 October 1921 Ch'en Chiung-ming appointed P'eng P'ai superintendent of education in Haifeng hsien, where he had established several new schools. Utilizing the authority of his new position, P'eng began to propagate socialist ideas among the students and other local people. He and a colleague set up a radical paper, the Ch'ih-hsin chou-k'an [sincere mind weekly] , which advocated agrarian revolution among the peasants. With several Chinese students who had studied in Japan, he formed an association for the study of socialism. In 1922 he organized a student May Day parade in Haifeng. This overt demonstration of radicalism incensed the local gentry, at whose insistence Ch'en Chiung-ming removed P'eng P'ai from his educational post.

Shortly after his dismissal, P'eng began to organize Communist-led peasant associations in the East River area of Kwangtung. Donning peasant clothes, he started agitation among the peasants of his native town of Haifeng, many of whom were tenants of his own family. Although his activities resulted in his being ostracized by his outraged family, he continued his work. In January 1923 he formally opened the Haifeng Federation of Peasant Associations (Hai-feng tsung nung-hui) at a ceremony attended by some 20,000 people. The federation's central organization maintained departments of sanitation, education, general affairs, arbitration, agriculture, information, and external relations. It also sponsored free public schools and medical facilities for the peasants, made strenuous efforts to reduce agricultural rents in the area, and established contacts with ricksha coolies in Hong Kong, most of whom were former peasants from the East River area. The peasant associations movement soon spread to Lufeng, Huiyang, P'uning, Tzuchin, Huilai, and other neighboring hsien, and membership was said to have exceeded 130,000. Such was the success of the peasant movement that by May 1923 the Kwangtung Provincial Peasant Association was organized, with P'eng P'ai as its chairman.

As the peasant associations in the East River area became more powerful, they encountered growing opposition from the landlords and local authorities. Although Ch'en Chiung-ming, who had been ousted from Canton late in 1922 by supporters of Sun Yat-sen, appears to have been well disposed toward P'eng P'ai and to have tolerated the peasant associations, he eventually was persuaded that because of their connections with Sun Yat-sen's Kuomintang-Communist regime at Canton they represented a threat to his hold on the East River region. In March 1924, when Ch'en issued orders to break up the peasant associations, P'eng P'ai decided to depart from Canton, leaving his colleagues in Haifeng to carry on the peasant movement underground.

Two months previously, in January 1924, the Kuomintang had held its First National Congress at Canton and had carried out a full-scale reorganization, thereby inaugurating a policy of collaboration with the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist party. In February, the Central Executive Committee of the reorganized Kuomintang had set up a peasant department under the Communist Lin Po-ch'ü (q.v.). Soon after his arrival in Canton, P'eng P'ai was named secretary of this department. He held this post for almost a year, serving under a succession of department heads, and was chief of the department's training institute during the summer of 1 924. P'eng played a key role in the rapid expansion of the Communist-dominated peasant movement in the areas under Kuomintang control. In February 1925, during the Kuomintang's first so-called eastern expedition, members of the peasant underground in Haifeng cooperated with the Kuomintang troops in driving Ch'en Chiung-ming's forces from the area. P'eng returned to Haifeng in March, set up a local branch of the Chinese Communist party with himself as its secretary, and began to redevelop the peasant associations there and in other localities that had recently come under Kuomintang control. However, with the withdrawal of Kuomintang troops to Canton later in the spring and the reoccupation of the East River area by Ch'en Chiung-ming's troops, the renascent peasant movement was mercilessly crushed, and P'eng fled to Canton. Not until October 1925, when the triumphant second eastern expedition under Chiang Kai-shek had reestablished Kuomintang control over all of eastern Kwangtung, did P'eng return to Haifeng and resume the task of rebuilding the peasant associations. Although the top Chinese Communist leaders, anxious not to antagonize their Kuomintang allies, officially discouraged "excesses" among the peasants, the increasingly powerful peasant organization in the Haifeng area took over most of the functions of local government. Under P'eng's direction it pursued a radical policy of land expropriation, rent reduction, and execution of landlords. Meanwhile, in addition to his positions as head of the district committee of the Chinese Communist party and a member of the party's Kwangtung regional committee, P'eng had become a member of the Kuomintang's provincial executive committee and head of that party's provincial peasant department.

In the spring of 1927 P'eng P'ai went to Hankow and took part in a joint conference of leaders of the peasant movement in several provinces, including Fang Chih-min and Mao Tse-tung. At the Fifth National Congress of the Chinese Communist party, held in Wuhan in late April and early May, P'eng was elected to the Central Committee and was named a member of the temporary executive committee of the All-China Peasant Association, then headed by Mao Tse-tung.

With the collapse of the Kuomintang-Communist entente in the summer of 1927, P'eng P'ai went to Nanchang, where he joined the revolutionary committee organized by Chang Kuo-t'ao, Chou En-lai, Li Li-san (qq.v.), Lin Po-ch'u, and other Chinese Communist leaders immediately after the 1 August uprising led by the troops of Ho Lung and Yeh T'ing (qq.v.). A few days later, however, these troops were compelled to withdraw from the area by strong anti-Communist forces. P'eng accompanied Ho Lung and Yeh T'ing to Kwangtung, and after the defeat of their forces at Swatow, he made his way with some 800 of their troops to the Hai-lu-feng (Haifeng and Lufeng) area. As early as April 1927, while P'eng P'ai had been in Wuhan, the East River region had been occupied by anti-Communist troops of the Kuomintang. Peasant associations had been suppressed, and the local Communist organization had withdrawn with a few hundred peasant militia to an inaccessible mountain base. When P'eng reached the area in October, he combined his forces with the peasant militia to form the 2nd Division of the Worker-Peasant Revolutionary Army. Following the withdrawal of Kuomintang troops from Haifeng early in November, the 2nd Division recaptured most of the towns in the hsien of Haifeng and Lufeng. Two weeks later, a soviet government, known as the Hai-lu-feng soviet, was established with P'eng P'ai as its chairman. Immediately thereafter P'eng initiated a policy of land confiscation accompanied by violent retaliation by the peasants against "anti-revolutionary" landlords.

After the collapse of the Canton Commune in December 1927 (see Chang T'ai-lei) remnants of the Communist troops commanded by Yang Yin (d. 1929) escaped from Canton and made their way to the Hai-lu-feng soviet. P'eng P'ai incorporated them into his forces as the 4th Division of the Worker-Peasant Revolutionary Army and made Yang Yin deputy chairman of the soviet government. Ringed by hostile forces, the Hai-lu-feng soviet was able to maintain itself for only a few months. By February 1928 National Government forces under Yü Han-mou (q.v.) had defeated the troops of the Hai-lu-feng soviet and had occupied Haifeng. The soviet troops staged revolts in March and in May 1928, but they were crushed by the National Government forces.

With the fall of the Hai-lu-feng soviet, P'eng P'ai and Yang Yin fled to Shanghai. At the Sixth National Congress of the Chinese Communist party, held in Moscow in the summer of 1928, P'eng was elected (presumably in absentia) head of the Central Committee's peasant department. In 1929 the party appointed him to its Kiangsu provincial committee and assigned him to work in Shanghai. Betrayed by a fellow Communist, P'eng and a few of his comrades were arrested by the Shanghai concession police on 24 August and extradited to the National Government authorities. A few days later, on 30 August, P'eng P'ai was executed near Shanghai.

P'eng P'ai married Ts'ai Su-p'ing in 1912, and she bore him three sons. Ts'ai later was arrested and executed by Kuomintang military authorities.

While secretary of the Kuomintang peasant department in Canton, P'eng prepared at account of his experiences in organizing peasant associations in Haifeng from 1921 to 1924. Hai-feng nung-min yün-tung [the peasant movement in Haifeng] appeared serially in the department's official organ, Chung-kuo nung-min, between January and May 1926 and was published in book form later that year. After P'eng's death, Communist historians wrote of his martyrdom and praised his important contributions in mobilizing Chinese peasants. Through Russian-language accounts of his early activities in Kwangtung written by his friend Hsiao San (Emi Siao), P'eng's name became well known in the Soviet Union during the 1930's. Russian Communist sources of that period credited P'eng with establishing the first soviet government in China, while in China itself, that distinction was reserved for P'eng's more durable, and subsequently more famous, contemporary, Mao Tse-tung.