Person1886 – 1976

Zhu De

Also called: Chu Teh

Commander-in-chief of the Red Army and the People’s Liberation Army; he joined Mao Zedong at Jinggangshan in 1928 (“Zhu–Mao”) and was made a marshal in 1955

Born to a poor farming family at Yilong in Sichuan, he graduated from the Yunnan Military Academy and served as a warlord officer in the 1911 Revolution and the National Protection War. In 1922 he went to Germany, where Zhou Enlai sponsored him into the Communist Party, and he studied military affairs in the Soviet Union. After the Nanchang Uprising he led its remnants to join Mao at Jinggangshan in 1928 and became commander-in-chief of the Red Army. He commanded the Eighth Route Army in the war against Japan and the People’s Liberation Army in the civil war, and in 1955 was named first of the ten marshals. He chaired the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress from 1959 until his death in Beijing in July 1976.

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4 related events

1
1927Nanchang Uprisingcommander
On 1 August 1927, after the Shanghai coup and the collapse of the United Front, some 20,000 Communist-led troops of the National Revolutionary Army rose in Nanchang, Jiangxi. They gave up the city within days and were scattered in the south, but the uprising is commemorated as the birth of the Communists’ own army.
2
1927 – 1934Jinggangshan and the Jiangxi Sovietcommander
After the failed Autumn Harvest Uprising, Mao Zedong built a rural base in the Jinggang Mountains in 1927, and on 7 November 1931 the Chinese Soviet Republic was proclaimed at Ruijin in Jiangxi. After five Nationalist encirclement campaigns the base was abandoned in 1934 at the start of the Long March.
3
1935Zunyi Conferenceparticipant
During the Long March in January 1935, an enlarged Politburo meeting at Zunyi in Guizhou criticised the military leadership of Bo Gu and Otto Braun and raised Mao Zedong into the party’s leading core.
4
1937 – 1947The Yan’an Period and the Rectification Movementparticipant
After the Long March the Communist leadership made Yan’an in northern Shaanxi its capital for ten years from January 1937. There the Rectification Movement (1942–1945) bound the party to Mao Zedong, and the Seventh Party Congress of 1945 made “Mao Zedong Thought” its guiding ideology.

People who appear alongside

Mao Zedong1893 – 1976
Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party who won the civil war and founded the People’s Republic in 1949, and launched the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution
Zhou Enlai1898 – 1976
First premier of the People’s Republic of China (1949–1976), long in charge of diplomacy, who arranged Nixon’s 1972 visit
Chiang Kai-shek1887 – 1975
Leader of the Chinese Nationalist Party who unified China through the Northern Expedition and led the Nanjing government through the war with Japan; after losing the civil war he moved to Taiwan and ruled the Republic of China there
Liu Shaoqi1898 – 1969
Chairman of the People’s Republic (1959–1968) who led economic readjustment after the Great Leap Forward, but was branded a “capitalist roader” in the Cultural Revolution, expelled from the party and died in detention
Jiang Qing1914 – 1991
Wife of Mao Zedong, a former Shanghai actress who married him in Yan’an, led the Central Cultural Revolution Group and was arrested in 1976 as one of the “Gang of Four”

Themes this person appears in

From the Chinese Civil War to the Cultural Revolution1927 – 1976
From the collapse of the United Front in 1927, through rural bases, the Long March and Yan’an, to the Communists’ victory in the civil war and the founding of the People’s Republic — then land reform, the Great Leap Forward and famine, the Sino-Soviet split and the Cultural Revolution, up to Mao’s death and the arrest of the Gang of Four in 1976, while the Nationalist government withdrew to Taiwan