Background
Nothing is known about his background.
Nothing is known about his background.
He was educated locally.
From late 1928 to the spring of 1930, P’eng and T’eng campaigned in the Chingkangshan area, then in south Kiangsi, and then again in Chingkangshan. In the spring of 1930 they led the Fifth Red Army northward into south Hupeh. This maneuver was part of the strategy of the then predominant CCP leader, Li Li-san. Li’s grand design was to capture the major industrial cities in the Yangtze Valley, and in this connection the P'eng-T'eng Fifth Army (augmented by guerrilla units recruited in the Hupeh-Hunan- Kiangsi border area) was redesignated the Third Army Corps. From south Hupeh, the Third Corps turned southward to attack Changsha in Hunan, the city fell in late July 1930 to the Communists, but after a few days they were forced out. A second attack on Changsha in early September, in which the P’eng-T’eng army was joined by troops led by Chu Te and Mao, proved as unsuccessful as the first. The defeated forces then made their way back to southeast Kiangsi.
There are relatively few references to T'eng from the end of 1930 to 1934 when the Communists began the Long March. However, it is clear that he continued to serve with P'eng Te-huai as political commissar of the Third Army Corps. He is known to have taken part in repulsing the Nationalists' First and Second Annihilation Campaigns from the end of 1930 to the spring of 1931 when the Third Corps fought in the Hsing- kuo hsien area of central-south Kiangsi. At that time the important Communist Teng Hsiao-p'ing was chief-of-staff of the Third Corps. Moreover, in the late fall of 1933, T'eng Taiyuan was still the political commissar when the leading officers of the Third Corps were in Chien-ning hsien in west Fukien. In the meantime, at the First All-China Congress of Soviets, held in Juichin in November 1931 the Chinese Soviet Republic had been established under the chairmanship of Mao Tse-tung. T'eng was elected a member of the Central Executive Committee (CEC), the leading organ of the Republic, and he was re-elected to the CEC at the Second Congress, held in January-February 1934.
T’eng continued to be P’eng Te-huai’s chief political officer at least to the outset of the Long March, which began in October 1934. T’eng made the march to north Shensi, but his post with the Third Army Corps had been assumed by Yang Shang-k'un by early 1935, during the early part of the Long March. Soon after arriving in Shensi, T'eng was sent to the Soviet Union where he studied military affairs. He was back in China by 1937. Inferential evidence suggests that he returned home via Sinkiang province, because in the spring of that year he and Ch'en Yun were ordered by the Party Center to contact the remnant forces of the Long March column, originally led by Chang Kuo-fao, which in a disastrous campaign in late 1936 and early 1937 had moved up the Kansu Corridor toward the Sinkiang border. At the small town of Hsing-hsing- hsia on the Kansu-Sinkiang border, Ch'en and T'eng met these men and accompanied them back to Tihwa, the Sinkiang capital, and later that year made the long journey to Yenan.
After the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War in mid-1937, T’eng was assigned to the staff of the Eighth Route Army, which the Communists activated as soon as hostilities began. Under the army's command structure, Yeh Chien-ying was the chief-of-staff, but because Yeh spent most of the early war years in Nationalist-held areas serving as a liaison officer, his place was often taken by Tso Ch’Uan who served as acting chief-of-staff. According to one Communist account, T'eng was identified as chief-of-staff in 1938, but various other accounts mention him as acting chief-of-staff in the early war years. Still other reports suggest that he was chief-of- staff (by 1940) of the Party's Revolutionary Military Council. In any case, it is evident that T5eng was a top staff officer during the war years, part of which were spent in south Shansi where, about 1940, he headed a branch of the Anti-Japanese Military and Political Academy.
In January 1946, under the terms of a ceasefire agreement worked out by U.S. Special Envoy George C. Marshall, an Executive Headquarters was established in Peking. The Americans, Chinese Nationalists, and Chinese Communists each had a delegation assigned to the headquarters. In the early months of 1946 Teng served as a military adviser to Communist delegation chief Yeh Chicn-ying. However, it soon became apparent that the cease-fire was going to fail, and thus the Communists withdrew a number of their officers for reassignment elsewhere. T’eng went back to join Liu Po-ch'eng forces, and by September 1946 he was identified as a deputy commander of the Shansi-Hopeh-Shantung-Honan Military Region.10 Wang Hung-k'un was the other deputy commander, and both men served under Commander Liu Po-ch'eng and Political Commissar Teng Hsiao-p'ing. Concurrently, T'eng was also a deputy commander of the Shansi-Hopeh-Shantung-Honan PLA, the fighting arm of the Military Region, the exploits of this highly important army are reviewed in the biography of Liu Po-ch’eng.
When the constitutional government was inaugurated at the First NPC in September 1954, Teng was reappointed as minister of Railways and was also named to membership on the new, but largely impotent, military advisory organ, the National Defense Council. Not long after, when the Second National Committee of the CPPCC was formed (December 1954) T’eng was named to the committee as a representative of the CCP. He was subsequently named again as a Party representative to the Third CPPCC (1959-1964) and to the Fourth National Committee, and at the close of the latter's first session in January 1965 he was elevated to a vice-chairmanship. As already noted, T'eng was elected to the Eighth Central Committee at the Party's Eighth Congress in September 1956. Speaking before the congress on the developments of railways, the picture he painted was largely optimistic, although he admitted that his ministry had been guilty of certain shortcomings due to bureaucracy. T'eng made a few more appearances in the 1957-1959 period, for example, he attended the opening in Wuhan of the Yangtze River Bridge in May 1957 and two months later he spoke at a session of the First NPC. And, as already mentioned, he visited East Europe in mid-1958.
After this, however, his appearances became less and less frequent. Between his attendance at an October 1959 conference of “advanced” workers and September 1962 when he received a visiting Korean railway delegation, it appears that he was almost completely inactive. Moreover, during approximately this same period and extending through 1964 Vice-minister of Railways Lii Cheng-ts’ao served as the acting minister. It may also be significant that the lessening of T’eng’s activities coincided with the political fall of Marshal P'eng Te-huai in the early fall of 1959. (As described above P’eng and Teng had been close associates as early as 1928.) Further light was shed on T’eng’s status in the Party when the Third NPC and the Fourth CPPCC both met in December 1964-January 1965. At that time he was reappointed as a member of the rather unimportant National Defense Council and was also made (as already noted) a vice-chairman of the CPPCC. Far more important, however, he was replaced in the Railway Ministry by his long-time assistant, Lii Cheng-ts’ao. The fact that T'eng made an appearance at at least one session of the CPPCC at this time seems to eliminate the possibility that his political decline was due solely to poor health. The few times that he has been mentioned in the Party press since his removal as minister of Railways have been largely ceremonial such as his membership on funeral committees. In short, it seems that T'eng Tai-yuan career as an important Party leader came to a close in the late 1950's and that the positions he retains are largely nominal.
In view of T’eng’s stature as a military officer, there is a surprising lack of information about his work during the later war years. One explanation may be that he spent a portion of this period in Sinkiang where, from the beginning of the war until 1942, the Communists had a mission attached to the headquarters of Sheng Shih-ts'ai, the warlord governor of the province. (The details about this uneasy alliance with Sheng are given in the biographies of Teng Fa and Ch’en T’an-ch’iu.) Among Sheng’s papers is a letter dated February 4, 1942, allegedly written to him by Mao Tse-tung, which indicates that TJeng and Chou Hsiao-chou had been on some sort of liaison mission to Sheng’s headquarters and had brought back to Mao, in late 1941, a letter from Sheng.
T’eng had advanced to the higher echelons of the Party leadership by the time the CCP held its Seventh National Congress in Yenan from April to June 1945. He was elected to full membership on the Party Central Committee, he continues to hold this position, having been reelected at the Party’s Eighth Congress in 1956. By at least the close of the Sino-Japanese War he was assigned to the 129th Division (commanded by Liu Po-ch'eng) of the Eighth Route Army, the division that controlled the T’ai-yueh and the T’ai-hang mountain area of Shansi and the border area of Shansi, Hopeh, Shantung, and Honan provinces. T’eng’s military exploits in September 1945 at a small town near Ch'ang- chih, south Shansi, are described in a volume of Communist reminiscences, which refer to him as the deputy commander of the 129th Division.
Unlike many top Party leaders who had a number of diversified duties T’eng’s work in the first decade of the PRC was devoted almost exclusively to the tasks of railway reconstruction. Often in the company of Lii Cheng-tso, his most important assistant, T'eng attended virtually all the many conferences devoted to railway work in the 1950's and in most cases gave the keynote address. To cite two random but typical examples, he spoke at the National Railway Public Security Conference in March 1950 and the first National Railway Model Workers' Congress in September 1951. Similarly, he was often present when new rail lines were opened up or important administrative changes were made in railway administration, an example of the latter occurred in December 1952 when he accompanied Chou En-lai to Harbin to attend the ceremonies marking the transfer to China from the Soviet Union of exclusive rights to administer the important Chinese Changchun Railway (as provided for in a September 1952 agreement with the USSR signed in Moscow). Teng was also the chief spokesman regarding railway work before governmental organizations, particularly in the early and mid-fifties; from 1950 to 1954, for example, he gave six progress reports on railway construction before meetings of the GAC. He also served the interests of the Ministry of Railways when, in December 1951, he was named as a member of a committee headed by economic specialist Po I-po to enforce a nationwide economic austerity program.
