P’eng Chen

Background

P’eng comes from Ch’ii-wu in southwest Shansi, where he was born into a poor peasant family.

Education

Rather little is known of his younger years, but he received a primary and middle school education in his native province, after which he joined the Socialist Youth League. According to a Soviet biography of P’eng he became a CCP member in 1923 and took an active part in the creation of the Party organization in Shansi. Party work in north China was then far less developed than in the south, and the difficulties in Shansi were compounded by the presence of the powerful warlord-governor Yen Hsi-shan. However, many of the youths in Shansi were strongly attracted to the anti-imperialist doctrines of both the KMT and the CCP. P'eng, for example, is said to have been a leader of student and labor movements in Taiyuan, the provincial capital, and in this capacity he organized a society in 1925 to boycott Japanese goods.

Career

P’eng went to Yenan by May 1937, but when the Sino-Japanese War broke out in the middle of that year he accompanied the Communist armies into Shansi to engage the rapidly advancing Japanese forces. In the fall of that year he was in Taiyuan, which fell to the Japanese in November, but by early 1938 he had been assigned as a key political officer with those portions of the Communists' 115th Division which were stationed in and around Wu-fai hsien in northeast Shansi. The Wu-fai area became the center for the Shansi-Chahar-Hopeh (Chin-Ch'a-Chi) Border Region, which was set up in the early days of 1938. The history of this important base is contained in the biographies of Nich Jung-chen, the top military commander, and Sung Shao-wen, the chairman of the Border Region. P5cng was a member of the Border Region Government Council from its establishment, and from that time or soon thereafter he was also the secretary of the CCP Chin-Ch'i-Chi Border Region Committee. U.S. military observer Evans Carlson visited Wu-t’ai in early 1938, where he interviewed P'eng, whom he described as director of the “People’s Movement.” The Communists were particularly dependent in the early stages of the war upon the support of the populace，and from Carlson’s interview it appears that P'eng^ major task was to mobilize this support. As he explained to Carlson, this meant attempting to “develop the political consciousness of the people.”

Concurrently with his duties in the Chin-Chi-Chi Border Region, P’cng reportedly headed the Party’s North China Bureau from 1938. Little else is known of his work in those years, but for the 55th issue of Chieh-fang (October 31, 1938) he wrote an article on political affairs in the border region and a book published in 1939 in Kweilin carried an article by him dealing with alleged Trotskyite activities in the border region. By 1941 he had been called back to Yenan. There, in 1941, he became vice-president of the important Central Party School, then headed by Teng Fa. In 1942 the school was one of the focal points for Mao Tse-tung’s famous (“rectification”) movement, and according to a 1961 Communist account, P’eng was one of the leading figures in organizing the movement within the school. Teng Fa relinquished the presidency in 1943, and then when journalist Gunther Stein visited Yenan in the spring of 1944, he identified P'eng as the president. Stein reported that the school had an enrollment of about 5,000.

In those early postwar days in Manchuria, P'eng quickly emerged as the top Party leader and political officer. He was made the secretary of the CCP Northeast Bureau, and for a period in 1946 he was concurrently director of the Bureau's Organization Department. In the military hierarchy he was political commissar of both the newly formed Northeast Democratic Allied Army (commanded by Lin Piao) and the Northeast Military and Political Academy. Although full details are lacking, it appears that P'eng came into conflict with military officers and administrators from the Soviet Union who had moved into Manchuria in the closing days of World War II. The Soviets have charged that P’eng and Lin Feng were at the head of a group which “slandered” the USSR and the Soviet Army in Manchuria. These accusations (first published in 1964) and the Chinese response to them are discussed in detail in the biography of Lin Feng.

P5eng relinquished the senior Party post in Manchuria to Lin Piao in mid-1946, and for the balance of that year and a part of 1947 it appears that he shuttled back and forth between Manchuria and the neighboring Chin-Ch'a-Chi Border Region. However, in the period from the latter part of 1947 to the winter of 1948-49 he seems to have spent most of his time in the Chin- Ch'a-Chi Border Region. To judge from his writings of this period, he apparently devoted much of his time to land reform measures, which the Communists were attempting to implement in areas long under their control, as well as those areas which they were capturing as the Nationalist armies were defeated in north China.

By the time P’eng had relinquished the top Party post in Manchuria to Lin Piao in mid-1946, he had also been replaced by An Tzu-wen as head of the CCP Organization Department. However, he reassumed the post about 1949 and continued to head the department until he in turn was replaced by Jao Shu-shih in 1952. In the meantime, in late January and early February 1949 the Communist armies marched into Peking, which had been surrendered to Lin Piao's troops by Nationalist General Fu Tso-i. P'eng was one of the first of the top Communists to arrive in the city, and he was immediately made the ranking secretary of the CCP Peking Committee. In September 1949 the Communists convened the CPPCC, the organization which set up the PRC. P'eng was elected a member of the First National Committee of the CPPCC and of the powerful Central People’s Government Council (CPGC), both of which were chaired by Mao Tse-tung. In addition, under Chou En-lai’s Government Administration Council (the cabinet), P'eng was made a vicechairman of the Political and Legal Affairs Committee. Many of Peng's public appearances during the next five years were in this capacity, the committee was headed by the elderly Tung Pi-wu, but it appears that P'eng was the dominant figure. Witiiin the “mass” organizations P’eng was a member of the First Executive Board of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association (1949-1954), as well as chairman of the association's Peking branch (1949-1958). In February 1950 he became chairman of the Peking Trade Union Council, in October 1950, when the China Peace Committee was reorganized, P'eng became one of the vice-chairmen (until July 1958), and in the next month he became a member of the committee's Peking chapter.

P’eng did not initially hold any posts of importance in the Peking municipal government, but then in November 1950 he was named chairman of its Finance and Economics Committee. More important, he succeeded Nieh Jung-chen as the mayor of Peking in February 1951. P'eng thus became the top man in both the CCP and governmental hierarchies in the national capital, a stature he was to enjoy for the next 15 years. Quite apart from the political responsibilities which he shouldered in this dual capacity, the requirements of protocol also necessitated countless public appearances, and this task was to become even more demanding in the mid-1950’s when hundreds of foreign delegations began to visit Peking. Some of P'eng's subordinates were able to relieve him of many of his protocol duties, but the fact remains that during the first 15 years of the PRC few other major Party leaders made as many public appearances.

After an initial period of consolidation, the Communists began to control or suppress various elements within the society which they regarded as inimical to their interests. P'eng had a major role in these campaigns. For example, after hearing his report the CPGC in February 1951 approved regulations for the “punishment of counterrevolutionary activities.” Similarly, he took an active part in the campaigns of 1951-52 to root out various forms of corruption within the CCP and the business community (the so-called three-anti and five-anti campaigns). In this connection, he was appointed a vice-chairman of an ad hoc committee in December 1951 to check up on the economy and to impose austerity measures and, as in the case of the alleged counterrevolutionaries, it was after hearing a report by P'eng that the CPCG adopted regulations in April 1952 on the punishment of corruption. His deep involvement in political and legal affairs was further illustrated in July 1951 when the Central Political and Legal Cadres’ Academy was established. From then until November 1956 he served as the academy president. Relatively little is known about this school, but when P'eng spoke at graduation exercises for the second class in July 1954, the Communist press reported that the 1,000-odd graduates would be assigned as responsible officials in administrative and legal organs at the hsien level. He received still another post in December 1951 when he became a member of the newly established North China Administrative Committee (see under Liu Lan-fao), a position he held until the committee was abolished in 1954.

At the Party's Eighth National Congress, held in September 1956, P'eng was re-elected a member of the Central Committee, which, at its First Plenum, held the day after the congress closed, re-elected him to the Politburo. In addition, he was elected the second-ranking secretary (under Tcng Hsiao-p’ing) of the Central Secretariat, which, under the terms of the newly revised Party Constitution, was given the task of implementing on a day-to-day basis the directives of the Politburo. The Secretariat, then regarded as one of the key organs of the CCP, initially consisted of only seven members, and only two of them Teng and P’eng were concurrently members of the Politburo. P'eng's prominence within the CCP elite was already evident in the years before 1956, but in the decade after the Eighth Congress he came to be regarded as one of the half-dozen most powerful men in China and was sometimes mentioned by Western analysts as a dark-horse contender to succeed Mao Tse-tung.

Politics

Both the KMT and the CCP gained considerable prestige in Shansi in the period after the Northern Expedition was launched from Kwang-tung in mid-1926. Governor Yen Hsi-shan was under considerable pressure to join with the rapidly advancing Northern Expeditionary forces, but he was fearful of the radicalism among the youths in Shansi. During this period, according to a detailed study of Yen’s career, P’eng was among the student leaders in Taiyuan who, in 1927, came to dominate the Taiyuan labor movement.2 After the KMT-CCP split in mid-1927, little is known of P’eng’s activities for the next decade. Reports are conflicting, but it appears that he was mainly engaged from 1927 to 1930 as a labor leader in Taiyuan and on the Cheng-fai (Taiyuan-Shih-chia-chuang) Railway, and that he worked as a Communist organizer in various north China cities, including Peking, Tientsin, and T'ang-shan. The Soviet biography of P'cng asserts that he was arrested three times by the “northern militarists” and the KMT, and that he spent a total of six years in prison before his release in 1935, a 1958 account published in Peking mentions his imprisonment, but neither the dates nor the locale is mentioned.

After P’eng’s release from jail he became one of the senior officials in the CCP North China Bureau. In the wake of the student-led December Ninth Movement (1935) in Peking (see under Li Ch'ang), a number of student organizations were formed in north China cities to agitate for more effective resistance against the steady Japanese incursions upon Chinese sovereignty. Among the more important of these organizations was the National Liberation Vanguards of China (NLVC). During the winter of 1936-37, P'eng was instructed to make direct contact with the NLVC, and it was allegedly under his personal guidance that the student organization held its inaugural congress in Peking in February 1937. Inferential evidence suggests that P’eng was working directly under Liu Shao-ch'i.

In the period immediately after the Japanese surrender in August 1945, the Communists began to move thousands of troops and many key Party leaders into Manchuria. P’eng was among this group, which included Ch’en Yun, Kao Kan Lin Piao，Li Fu-ch’un, Lo Jung-huan, and Lin Feng. Because Manchuria had been so completely dominated by the Japanese, these Communists leaders were virtually forced to start from scratch in building a viable Party structure and in recruiting more men for their armed forces. However, as they began their three-year test of strength with the Nationalists for this vital area, they were given a notable boost by the presence of the Communist-controlled Anti-Japanese Allied Army (see under Chou Pao-chung).

After the 20th CPSU Congress in 1956 and the subsequent erosion of solidarity within the Communist world, each of the major Communist nations began to play a far more active and direct role in inter-Party relations. In retrospect, it appears that P'eng's 1956-57 trip to Moscow, East Europe, and Italy was his initiation into a role in which he would become increasingly important namely, as one of Peking's leading negotiators with foreign Communist party leaders. Others who were similarly engaged in these liaison functions in the late 1950's and early 1960's included such key CCP members as Liu Shao-ch'i, Teng Hsiao-pMng, K'ang Sheng, Yang Shang- k'un, Liu Ning-i, and Wu Hsiu-ch'iian. P'eng received an important assignment in June 1960 when he led the Chinese delegation to the Third Congress of the Rumanian Workers' (Communist) Party in Bucharest. By this time Sino-Soviet relations had deteriorated rather markedly, particularly in regard to views held in Moscow and Peking about the appropriate strategy to deal with the non-Communist West. At the meetings in Bucharest the Russians purportedly circulated a letter sent to the CCP in which they “refuted” Chinese views, the situation was made all the more dramatic in view of the fact that Nikita Khrushchev was present for the CPSU. Khrushchev and P'eng engaged in a bitter verbal duel, the Soviet leader accused Mao of being another Stalin who was unrealistic and lacking in an understanding of the modern world. P'eng replied in acid terms that Khrushchev was confused on basic issues, that he could not be trusted to evaluate the world situation, and that he had deliberately set out to damage Chinese prestige.

Apart from his several trips abroad, P’eng was exceedingly active in the decade from the mid- 1950，s to the mid-1960’s in negotiations with the many foreign Communist leaders who visited Peking. More specifically, from 1957 through 1964 P’eng is known to have held talks with nearly 100 different Communist party delegations. (Some parties, such as those in Japan, North Korea, and North Vietnam, sent several delegations to Peking during those years). It is doubtful if any other top CCP official saw more important Communist party leaders than P’eng during that period. As already indicated, during these same years he was also deeply occupied with the work of the NPC, and he continued to make scores of ceremonial appearances in his capacity as mayor of Peking. On the other hand, his previous heavy involvement with the legal apparatus tapered off sharply after the late 1950's. Although it is always difficult to assess the role of any CCP figure in the policy-making procedures P’eng’s seat on the Politburo and his frequent public appearances with the top Communist leaders, including Mao Tse-tung, provide strong inferential evidence that he had a powerful voice in deciding basic policies through the mid-1960's. In this regard, in September 1964 Pseng was described (apparently for the first time) as a “close comrade-in-arms of Mao Tse-tung,” an accolade reserved for the select few. P’eng held his place as one of the top CCP leaders until the late spring of 1966 when he became the first Politburo-level victim of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The charges against him indicated that he had attempted to build an “empire” centering around the CCP Peking Committee.

Membership

When the CCP held its Seventh National Congress in Yenan from April to June 1945, P'eng was one of only 15 members of the congress presidium. He was elected a member of the Central Committee, and immediately afterwards, at the First Plenum of the new Central Committee, he was elected a member of the Politburo. The exact composition of the Politburo at that time is not known, but it appears that P’eng was the only member who had not spent the early years of his career in central-south China and who had not made the Long March. Moreover, according to an unconfirmed report, he was also elected an alternate member of the Party's Secretariat, then the most important CCP organ (serving as a kind of “inner” Politburo).

In early 1953 the initial steps were taken toward the establishment of a constitutional government. In January P’eng was appointed a member of the committee to draft an election law, and in the following month he became a member of the Central Election Committee. A year later he was elected a deputy from Peking to the first NPC, and at its inaugural session in September 1954 (which adopted the national constitution), P'eng was elected one of the vicechairmen of the NPC Standing Committee, the organ which controls NPC affairs between sessions of the congress. More important, he was also elected secretary-general of the Standing Committee, a position which apparently gave him day-to-day control of the work of this important body.

Connections

P'eng is married to Chang Chieh-ch'ing. Nothing is known of her career until the latter part of 1956 when she accompanied her husband on his trip to Moscow and East Europe. In 1964 Chang was elected a deputy from Hopeh to the Third NPC, which opened its first session at the end of that year.

Spouse:

Chang Chieh-ch'in