What do Jiangxi–Fujian Soviet and Liu Bocheng have in...

Peng Dehuai

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Prominent Chinese Communist military leader, who served as China's Defense Minister from 1954 to 1959.

By his mid-thirties, Peng was one of the most senior generals in the Jiangxi Soviet (1934-1935).

Peng Dehuai commanded the largest communist offensive in the war against Japan.

A statue of Peng now stands on the Chinese border with Korea, on the place that Peng crossed into North Korea in 1950.

In 1953, Peng signed the armistice agreement which ended the Korean War.

After returning to China from the Korean War, Peng became engaged in a rivalry with Mao Zedong over the political future of China (photo: Hou Bo).

Following the Korean War, Peng rose in prominence and is here seen welcoming Kim Il-sung to Beijing in 1955.

During the Great Leap Forward, many farmers were forced to work in primitive backyard furnaces in order to produce poor-quality steel.

Peng Dehuai (1966) was brought to Beijing in chains by Red Guards, where he would be tortured and publicly humiliated for years.

Peng was one of the most senior generals who defended the Jiangxi Soviet from Chiang's attempts to capture it, and his successes were rivaled only by Lin Biao.

Mao opposed all of those initiatives but at first focused his dissatisfaction on other marshals, Liu Bocheng and Luo Ronghuan, whom Mao accused of "dogmatism" (uncritically assimilating methods borrowed from the Soviet Union).

A Hawker Siddeley Trident, similar to the aircraft involved.

Lin Biao

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Chinese politician and Marshal of the People's Republic of China who was pivotal in the Communist victory during the Chinese Civil War, especially in Northeast China from 1946 to 1949.

Lin Biao with wife Ye Qun and their children

Lin as commander-in-chief of the Manchurian Field Army (~1947–1948)

On 1 October 1959, Lin Biao, as defense minister, surveyed the honor guards at the military parade celebrating the 10th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China.

Lin Biao's calligraphy in the Summer Palace, 1966

Lin Biao (right), Mao Zedong (center) and Zhou Enlai, waving copies of the Little Red Book, at Tiananmen, during the Cultural Revolution (1967)

Lin Biao reading the Little Red Book. This is the last photo of him ever taken (1971)

Qinhuangdao Shanhaiguan Airport, provenance of the aircraft

Graffiti with Lin Biao's foreword to Mao's Little Red Book. Lin's name (lower right) was later scratched out, presumably after his death.

Zhu De and Peng Dehuai were considered senior to Lin, and Lin ranked directly ahead of He Long and Liu Bocheng.

Following the failure of the revolt, Lin escaped to the remote Communist base areas, and joined Mao Zedong and Zhu De in the Jiangxi–Fujian Soviet in 1928.

Zhu De

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Chinese general, military strategist, politician and revolutionary in the Chinese Communist Party.

Zhu (second from right) photographed with Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai (second from left) and Bo Gu (left) in 1937.

In 1927, following the collapse of the First United Front, Kuomintang authorities ordered Zhu to lead a force against Zhou Enlai and Liu Bocheng's Nanchang Uprising.

Here they formed the Jiangxi Soviet, which would eventually grow to cover some 30,000 square kilometers (11,584 square miles) and include some three million people.