Peng Te-huai

In December 1978 the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party posthumously rehabilitated Marshal P'eng Te-huai, who had been the PRC's Minister of National Defence in 1954-9 and one of the most outspoken critics of Mao Tse-tung's mobilisatory concepts of development in 1958-9. While he was in office up till 1959, and since his rehabilitation, P'eng has been pictured by the official Chinese media as an old revolutionary who made great and important contributions to the cause of communism in China. However, he was accused in 1959 of being the head of an "anti-Party clique" and during the Cultural Revolution of being a "traitor", "ambitionist", "capitalist roader" and an "anti-Party element".

In this book an attempt is made to reconstruct P'eng's personal biography as accurately as possible, and each period of his life is described within the general framework of political and socio-economic developments in China. For the period since 1957-8, the author tests the typology of intra-party conflict which he has developed in previous publications, discussing the evolution of an anti-Maoist platform, which he believes P'eng came close to suggesting in 1959. A systematic analysis of methods of opposition in the China of the late 1950s and early 1960s is also propposed. The study compares the rather divergent official Chinese evaluations of P'eng, and concludes by examining the structures of manipulation of personal images in the PRC.