He was born about 1903 in Hunan, according to one report he comes from Liu-yang, a rural community in Hunan about 100 miles cast of Changsha, which has produced such notable CCP leaders as Sung Jen-ch’iung, Wang Shao-tao, Wang Chen, Chang Ch’i-lung, and Yang Yung, all-of whom are members of the Party Central Committee.
Very little is known about T'an Cheng before he became a Communist Party member in 1927. He graduated from a middle school (probably in Changsha, the provincial capital). T'an's career is better documented by the mid-1920's when he joined the Independent Regiment of Ych Ting. T’an was said to have joined the regiment in a clerical capacity. The history of this Independent Regiment is contained in the biography of Yeh Ting, who was its commander when it left south China during the Northern Expedition, he continued to head this military force upon its arrival in the Wuhan area, when it was redesignated the 24th Division of Chang Fa-k’uei's forces.
Yeh’s regiment was well staffed with Communist military cadets and by the time of the Nanchang Uprising in August 1927, when it mutinied and joined the Communists, it became a nucleus of the Communist military forces. T'an joined the CCP while he was with Yeh's troops, but it is not clear what role, if any, he may have played at Nanchang. After joining Yeh's regiment he is lost from sight until after the Nanchang Uprising, when, in October 1927, he was a member of Mao Tse-tung's military forces. This significant association with Mao is described in an article by Tan, in which he told of the meeting of Mao’s loyal followers at San-wan village in Yung-hsin, in western Kiangsi very near to the Chingkang Mountain stronghold on the Kiangsi-Hunan border, which Mao was soon to make his headquarters. The meeting at San-wan has now become a historic incident in Red Army annals because there Mao exerted his authority over the small band of guerrillas he had led from their recent defeat at Plng-chiang during the campaigns of the Autumn Harvest Uprisings. It was also at San-wan that Mao succeeded in purging some of the less enthusiastic followers before making his way to Chingkangshan. Tan remained with Mao’s forces when they reached Chingkangshan and may have been a special secretary to Mao for a time before he was dispatched to do political work with the Red Army.
There are few references to T’an’s activities in the next decade, but those available place him among the Red forces that supported the Chinese Soviet Republic, which was formally established at Juichin, Kiangsi, in November 1931, and thus among the military group that followed Mao and Chu Te on the Long March in the fall of 1934. In 1930 T’an was identified as the director of the Political Department of the 12th Red Army, a military force commanded by Lo Ping-hui, whose biography contains a brief description of the army. It belonged to the military contingents that Li Li-san dispatched toward Nanchang in the summer of 1930 for the unsuccessful attack upon the Kiangsi capital. By 1932 Tan had risen to head the Political Department of the larger force, the First Army Corps, commanded by Lin Piao and Nieh Jung-chen. He probably made the Long March with this group in 1934-35.
Arriving in north Shensi in the fall of 1935, T’an. continued to do political work with the Red Army. With the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in the summer of 1937 and the creation of the Communist Eighth Route Army in north China, he assumed more important posts. By 1938 he was identified as the deputy director of the Eighth Route Army's Political Department, serving under Wang Chia-hsiang. Tan held this post until the end of hostilities in 1945, but because Wang, his superior, had to undergo medical treatment for wounds during these years, much of the work of the department probably fell to Tan. From 1943 to 1945 he also served as the deputy political commissar and concurrently as director of the Political Department of the joint military command, created about 1941 to combine the defenses of the Shansi-Suiyuan and the Shensi-Kansu-Ninghsia (Shen-Kan-Ning) Border Regions into one military headquarters. The joint command was headed by Ho Lung, but T’an’s immediate superior in political work, Kao Kang, was political commissar for the command’s military district and secretary of the Northwest Bureau of the CCP. (Kao’s subsequent purge from the CCP is dealt with in his biography.) In April 1946, when the Third Assembly for the Shen-Kan-Ning Border Region Government met in Yenan, Tan attended as a deputy to the assembly representing the army. In the previous year, when the Party held its Seventh National Congress in Yenan, T’an had been elected an alternate member of the Central Committee, thus marking his rise into the highest ranks of the CCP.
Over the winter of 1948-49, as Lin Piao's forces pushed southward from Manchuria into China proper, his army was redesignated the Fourth Field. Its first targets were the capture of the two key north China cities of Tientsin and Peking. After a brief fight, Tientsin fell in mid-January 1949. Tan was then named as the vice-chairman under Huang K'o-ch'eng of the Tientsin Military Control Commission to administer the city. However, when Peking surrendered just two weeks later, T’an was transferred to a comparable post there under Yeh Chien-ying, chairman of the Peking Military Control Commission. Lin Piao's forces continued to push southward and by mid-May 1949 had captured the key Yangtze River port of Wuhan, it is not clear if T’an was with Lin’s forces during the spring drive southward, but within hours of the capture of Wuhan he had been named as chairman of the Wuhan Military Control Commission and at about the same time was also named as the director of the Central China Military Districts Political Department.
Although Wuhan was the official capital of the Party, military, and government organizations of central-south China from 1949 to 1954, Canton was virtually an alternate capital. Thus, a number of top officials, such as T’an Cheng, divided their time in the 1949-1954 period between these two major cities. It appears that he spent the period from 1949 to 1952 in Wuhan, but most of the time from late 1952 to 1954 in Canton. Although he was an important Party and government official, major contribution in central-south China was as a political officer in the PLA. In 1949-50 he was deputy political commissar and director of the Political Department of the Fourth Field Army and held identical posts in the area controlled by this army, the Central-South Military Region (CSMR). In 1950 he relinquished the directorship of the Political Department to T'ao Chu, to assume the more important post of third political commissar of the Fourth Field Army and the CSMR. His superiors at this time were Commander Lin Piao, First Political Commissar Lo Jung-huan, and Second Political Commissar Teng Tzu-hui. However, because Lin was ill for much of this period in the early fifties, because Lo was busy with important tasks in Peking, and because Teng devoted most of his time to economic problems, it appears that Tan was de facto head of political work in the region between 1949 and 1954, when the administrative areas were abolished. This was illustrated, for example, in September 1950 when it fell to T'an to deliver a major report before a government organization on the military situation in the central-south region. By mid-1952 (and until 1954) T’an’s senior position in political work was formalized when he became political commissar for both the Fourth Field Army and the CSMR.
At the turn of the year 1949-50, the Communists established governmental organizations to provide civil rule for the areas now under their control. Thus, the Central-South Military and Administrative Committee (CSMAC) came into existence in February under the chairmanship of Lin Piao. T'an was named to membership on the CSMAC and was appointed one month later as chairman of one of its more important subordinate organs, the People's Supervision Committee. When the CSMAC was reorganized into the CSAC in January 1953, he retained his membership, but in May of that year he relinquished the chairmanship of the Supervisory Committee. In the early fifties Tan also held important Party posts in the central-south region. From 1951 to 1954 he was first deputy secretary of the Central-South Party Bureau, a post that placed Tan below the following top leaders at one time or another in the period from 1951 to 1954: Secretary Lin Piao, Acting Secretary Yeh Chien-ying, and Second Secretaries Lo Jung-huan and Teng Tzu-hui.
In a situation unique to the central-south region, the Party also had a South China Subbureau, an organ responsible for the two provinces of Kwangtung and Kwangsi. Here T’an was the Third Secretary from late 1952, a position placing him (at varying periods) under Secretary Yeh Chien-ying, Acting Secretary T'ao Chu, and Second Secretary Chang Yun-i. Unlike the Central-South Bureau, which was abolished in November 1954, the South China Sub-bureau existed until July 1955, but by that date Tan had already been transferred to Peking.
Like so many regional leaders, Tan was transferred to Peking at the time the constitutional government was inaugurated at the initial session of the First NPC in September 1954. He was a deputy to the First NPC from the Central-South Military Region, and four years later was elected to represent the Canton Military Region to the Second NPC (1959-1964). He was not, however, re-elected to the Third NPC, which opened in late 1964, having by that time suffered a serious political decline (see below). He also served as an NPC Standing Committee member under the First NPC (1954-1958), but not under the Second NPC. At the close of the NPC session in September 1954, T'an was named to membership on the newly created National Defense Council, an organization with very limited power and authority, but one with considerable prestige. He continued to hold this post until the end of 1964. More important, in October 1954 he was appointed as one of the vice-ministers of National Defense under P'ang Te-huai until September 1959 and was thereafter subordinate to P’eng’s successor, Defense Minister Lin Piao. It was also in the latter part of 1954 that T'an was identified as a deputy-director of the important PLA Political Department, working here under Director Lo Jung-huan.
In September 1955, when the PRC first awarded military decorations and personal military ranks, T’an received the three highest awards (the Orders of August First, Independence and Freedom, and Liberation) for his services in the Red armies from 1927 to 1950. At the same time he was made a senior general in the PLA, a rank subordinate only to the 10 marshals.
The postwar period brought T'an further advancement. In 1946 he was in Manchuria as part of the staff brought there by Lin Piao soon after the Sino-Japanese War ended. In 1946 he was a Communist representative to the Northeast Truce Team, a unit ordered into the field by the Peking Executive Headquarters, which was attempting to implement the terms of the Ceasefire Agreement signed in January 1946. He was soon identified also as a member of the staff of the Northeast Democratic Allied Army (NEDAA), the Communist army that Lin Piao organized after merging his own troops with some of the Communist local resistance forces led by Chou Pao-chung. It is not certain what post T'an held on Lin's staff, but presumably he continued to carry on the political work for which he had become known. By January 1948 he was identified as the deputy director of the Political Department of the NEDAA, serving there under a former associate from his days in Kiangsi, Lo Jung-huan, the Army’s political commissar.
Already an alternate Party Central Committee member, T'an was promoted to full membership at the Eighth Party Congress in September 1956. During the life of the Congress he served on both the Secretariat and the Credentials Committee, and also made a lengthy speech in which he stressed the need to subordinate the affairs of the PLA to political control. Finally, at the first plenum of the new Central Committee (held the day after the Congress closed), T’an was made a member of the Party's Secretariat, headed by Teng Hsiao-p'ing and charged with the task of carrying out Politburo policies on a day-to-day basis. As originally constituted, the Secretariat had seven full and three alternate members. Only two of the members were then connected with the PLA, Tan and another political officer, Huang K'o- ch’eng.
