Peng Dehuai
Peng Dehuai commanded Chinese forces in Korea and was destroyed for telling Mao the truth. Born in Hunan in 1898 to a peasant family, he was sent out to beg at ten after his mother died and the family's land was lost, worked in a coal mine, and joined a warlord army at sixteen. He joined the Communist Party in 1928, led an uprising, and rose to command through the Jiangxi period, the Long March and the war against Japan, where he directed the Hundred Regiments Offensive of 1940 — a large conventional operation Mao afterwards criticised for exposing the party's strength. He was made commander of the Chinese People's Volunteers in Korea in October 1950, and directed the intervention that drove United Nations forces back from the Yalu to the parallel, and then the two years of attritional fighting that followed. He signed the armistice in 1953. He became defence minister and pressed for professionalisation, ranks and Soviet-style modernisation. In 1959, having toured his home province and found starvation, he wrote a private letter to Mao at the Lushan Conference. It was measured, it praised the Great Leap Forward's aims, and it said that the backyard steel furnaces were wasteful, that production figures were inflated, and that petty-bourgeois fanaticism had produced errors. Mao circulated it and denounced him. He was dismissed, and the Leap continued for three more years; estimates of the resulting famine deaths run from fifteen to forty-five million. He was beaten by Red Guards through the Cultural Revolution, held for years, and died untreated of cancer in 1974.
- Lived: 1898 CE – 1974 CE
- Nationality: Chinese
- Roles: general, military_leader, politician
