Peng Dehuai
Illustration, not an archive object
Marshal of the People's Republic; commander of the Chinese People's Volunteers in Korea; Minister of National Defence (1954-1959), dismissed after the Lushan Meeting · China
On the regime page: People's Republic of China under Mao Zedong
6 quotes, oldest first. Filter with other speakers.
“You can expel me from the Party and have me shot! If there are members of the ‘military club’ among you people, you can step forward to say so yourselves.”
English: Foreign Languages Press, Beijing (Memoirs of a Chinese Marshal, 1984). Original-language text not found.
Peng's own later account of a remark made at the enlarged Military Commission meeting held in Beijing from late August to early September 1959, when he was pressed to confess to leading a "military club". The remark is quoted from his written recollection, not from a transcript of the meeting.
Peng Dehuai, autobiographical notes, chapter XV 'The Lushan Meeting (1959)', in Memoirs of a Chinese Marshal (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1984), p. 508 Source
“The exaggeration trend has become so common in various areas and departments that reports of unbelievable miracles have appeared in newspapers and magazines to bring a great loss of prestige to the Party.”
English: Foreign Languages Press, Beijing (Memoirs of a Chinese Marshal, 1984). Original-language text not found.
Letter handed to Mao during the Lushan Politburo meeting, criticising the way the Great Leap Forward had been carried out. Mao had it printed and circulated, and the Eighth Plenum then condemned Peng and others as an anti-Party clique.
Letter to Chairman Mao, 14 July 1959, in Memoirs of a Chinese Marshal: The Autobiographical Notes of Peng Dehuai (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1984), appendix, p. 516 Source
“What is particularly serious in all this is that it was very hard for us to get to know the real situation for a fairly long period.”
English: Foreign Languages Press, Beijing (Memoirs of a Chinese Marshal, 1984). Original-language text not found.
Same letter, in the passage on inflated harvest and steel reports, which follows the sentence on "unbelievable miracles" in newspapers.
Letter to Chairman Mao, 14 July 1959, in Memoirs of a Chinese Marshal (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1984), appendix, p. 516 Source
“In the Great Leap Forward of 1958, I, like many other comrades, was misled by the achievements of the Great Leap Forward and the zeal of the mass movement. As a result, some “Left” tendencies developed in our heads. We were thinking of entering a communist society in one stride, and the idea of trying to be the first to do this gained an upper hand in our minds for a time.”
English: Foreign Languages Press, Beijing (Memoirs of a Chinese Marshal, 1984). Original-language text not found.
From the part of the letter headed "Petty-bourgeois fanaticism which makes us vulnerable to 'Left' errors", in which Peng includes himself among those misled by the movement.
Letter to Chairman Mao, 14 July 1959, in Memoirs of a Chinese Marshal (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1984), appendix, p. 517 Source
“Putting politics in command cannot replace economic laws, let alone concrete measures in economic work.”
English: Foreign Languages Press, Beijing (Memoirs of a Chinese Marshal, 1984). Original-language text not found.
From the same letter, arguing that "putting politics in command", a Great Leap slogan, had been used as a substitute for economic planning.
Letter to Chairman Mao, 14 July 1959, in Memoirs of a Chinese Marshal (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1984), appendix, p. 518 Source
“I wouldn’t be a counter-revolutionary under any circumstances; I wouldn’t commit suicide under any circumstances; and I would do productive labour to earn my own living because it would be difficult for me to continue to do my present work.”
English: Foreign Languages Press, Beijing (Memoirs of a Chinese Marshal, 1984). Original-language text not found.
Peng recalls to Mao, in a meeting shortly before he was sent to the Southwest to work on the Third Front, the three undertakings he says he made at Lushan in 1959 after the resolution against him.
Chairman Mao's Conversation with Comrade Peng Dehuai (excerpts), 23 September 1965, recorded by Peng Dehuai afterwards, in Memoirs of a Chinese Marshal (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1984), appendix, p. 522 Source