Peng Zhen

Note: This article places the family name before the person's first name. This is the usual order in Chinese. Peng is the family name here, Zhen is the first name.

Peng Zhen, 1945

Peng Zhen ( Chinese  彭真 , Pinyin Peng Zhen , W.-G. P'eng Chen * 12. October 1902 in Quwo in the province of Shanxi , † 26. April 1997 in Beijing ) was mayor and first secretary of the City Party Committee Beijing as well as chairman of the so-called five-man group . Peng is considered one of the first members of the Chinese Communist Party's Politburo to be publicly humiliated in the 1966 Cultural Revolution . After his rehabilitation, he was chairman of the National People's Congress of the People's Republic of China . Like Deng Xiaoping , he was one of the so-called “ Eight Immortals ” who still had a great influence on politics in China in the 1990s.

Life and political career

Peng Zhen was born to farmers in Quwo in China's northern Shanxi Province . Despite his poor origins, he attended a middle school there and soon joined the communist underground organization of the Socialist Youth League. His underground political activities against the nationalist ruling party Kuomindang earned him his first prison sentence in 1923. In the same year, after his release, he became a member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In addition to his party activities, Peng was active in various unions and temporarily held the secretary post of the General Chinese Trade Union Confederation. In 1928 he became a member of the City Party Committee of the Communist Party of China in Beijing and the provincial Party Committee , Hebei , before he was convicted in 1929 for revolutionary activities again to six years in prison. Freed again, he was instrumental in organizing the guerrilla resistance against the invasion of Japanese troops in the north of the country and in 1936, after the Long March in Yunnan, joined the leadership of the party around Mao Zedong .

Initially, Peng remained independent of the party headquarters. Under Mao Zedong, however, after the Long March he was soon promoted to secretary in the North China Office of the Central Committee and was entrusted with regional party tasks in the border regions of Shanxi and Hebei. At the 7th Party Congress of the CCP in Yan'an in 1945 , Peng was elected to the Central Committee and rose to become Political Commissar under General Lin Biao in Manchuria after the end of the war . After the proclamation of the People's Republic of China on October 1, 1949, Peng became 1st Secretary of the Beijing City Party Committee and a member of the Central People's Council , the cabinet of the CCP. In March 1951, he was appointed mayor of the capital Beijing. In September 1954, Peng became vice chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress and its secretary general. From 1956 he acted behind Deng Xiaoping as 2nd secretary in the secretariat of the Central Committee.

The fall of Peng Zhen

The decline began in 1966 and coincided with the beginning of the Cultural Revolution . Two years earlier, Mao Zedong had set up the five-man group after the disastrous consequences of the great leap forward and the burgeoning criticism of his management style. This consisted of Peng and other long-serving party cadres who were supposed to initiate the cultural revolution to secure Mao Zedong's supremacy. With the appointment of Peng, however, other purposes were secretly pursued: The party chairman was primarily concerned with weakening the party leadership in Beijing and expanding his influence. His wife Jiang Qing also played a crucial role. The former Shanghai actress had a strong dislike for Peng since he used his influence to cancel one of her plays. Once again, Peng was now active because of a play. At the end of 1965 the five-man group had to deal with a play by Wu Hans . The Vice Mayor of Beijing, who was also Peng's deputy, had written the play Hai Rui is dismissed . In this story, it came to the official Hai Rui at the time of the Ming Dynasty . The piece was created on an initiative of the party and, after its first performances, was received accordingly favorably by the party leadership and Mao Zedong. Later, however, he saw the content as a targeted attack on himself and his leadership style. Since he did not want to accept the supposed criticism of Wu Hans, he commissioned Peng and his group with the analysis and subsequent statement on the play. At first Peng avoided any criticism and even backed Wu Han: As 1st Secretary of the Beijing City Party Committee and Mayor of the capital, Wu Han was under Peng's double protection. An exonerating report by the group prevented an initial campaign against Wu Han in Beijing. Because an attack could not be initiated by Beijing's political leadership, Jiang Qing was sent to Shanghai. With the help of her influence from her time as an actress, she ensured the distribution of a newspaper article in which the play was sharply attacked. The fact that Mao Zedong had personally checked the article and ultimately forced it to remain a secret for a long time.

The events in Shanghai were directed directly against the Beijing party leadership. At that time, Peng was increasingly caught between the front lines: as Mayor of Beijing, who also headed the group that had to conduct an investigation against Wu Han, Peng saw the attack on his deputy as an attack on himself. But at first he ignored the attack and banned further circulation of the newspaper article in Beijing and the rest of China. It was only after Peng found out about Mao's involvement that he approved a reprint of the article. With the majority of the five-man group behind him, Peng was able to prevent further negative-critical publications against the play. In doing so, however, he contradicted Mao's guidelines. While Peng's analysis of the play was merely an academic dispute, Mao stuck to his opinion that it criticized the removal of Peng Dehuai by Mao Zedong. This sparked a public debate about the play, which culminated in the five-man group's February guide . This report cleared Wu Han of all allegations. After the Politburo Standing Committee approved the content of the report, Mao was informed. Mao was largely in agreement with the results of the investigation group he had set up against Peng, but at this point he was already secretly preparing further steps against the Beijing leadership. With the supposed knowledge of Mao's support, Peng forwarded the report to the Central Committee and ensured that it was distributed nationwide.

Peng thus took a clear position in public in favor of Wu Hans and thus enabled Mao to attack. After a forum in Shanghai, Mao criticized both the party leadership in Beijing and Peng during two meetings of the Politburo Standing Committee in Hangzhou in March and April 1966 . Mao called Peng an opponent of the Cultural Revolution and branded him a revisionist and counterrevolutionary . After Mao's personal attacks, Peng realized his predicament. In a desperate attempt to defend himself, he sided with Mao and eventually turned against Wu Han. The chairman had already dropped Peng at this point. At a meeting of the party secretariat in April 1966, Peng was removed from office and the five-man group dissolved. At another meeting of the Politburo in May 1966, he was charged with opposing Mao and his thinking. At the 11th plenary session of the Central Committee, the decisions of the Politburo were all approved and Peng was dismissed from the Politburo. This was followed by the dismissal as mayor and 1st secretary of the Beijing City Party Committee.

After losing his political office, Peng was repeatedly targeted for violent attacks in the following years: he was brought before the Red Guards at radical mass events and denounced by them. He was subsequently thrown in prison without charge or trial. Eventually, Peng disappeared from the public eye as a rural worker for nearly a decade.

rehabilitation

After Mao's death in 1976, Deng Xiaoping ensured Peng's return to the Politburo. But only after the fall of the gang of four was talk of rehabilitation. In 1977, Peng was appointed second secretary on the Guangdong Province Party Committee. In 1979 he returned to Beijing. Peng did not get his previous post as mayor back, but he was reassigned to the Central Committee and the Politburo . In November 1979 he was appointed vice-chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, and the following month he was elected chairman of a newly created legal committee. As head of various “political and legal commissions” he again took control of the state security and gradually restored the apparatus of the secret services. At the urging of Deng Xiaoping, Peng was also elected chairman of the National People's Congress in 1983.

From the mid-1980s, Peng increasingly withdrew from active politics. After chairing the 5th session of the 6th National People's Congress in March 1987 and a member of the Standing Committee of the 13th Party Congress in October 1987, he resigned as a member of the Political Bureau and the CPC Central Committee in November 1987. Despite his withdrawal, Peng maintained his far-reaching influence and continued to speak out on topical issues. Among other things, he justified the Tian'anmen massacre in June 1989 for reasons of state reasons and the party's maintenance of power.

Peng was married to Zhang Jieping and had several children. He died in Beijing on April 26, 1997, at the age of 94.

Web links

Commons : Peng Zhen  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• OBITUARY: Peng Zhen . In: The Independent, May 1, 1997

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Guo, Jian; Song, Yongyi; Zhou, Yuan: Historical dictionary of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Lanham, Md. a.]: Scarecrow Press, 2006, p. 220
2. ↑ ^{a b} Wolfgang Bartke: The great Chinese of the present: a lexicon of 100 important personalities of China in the 20th century. 1st edition - Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1985, p. 199
3. ↑ ^{a b} Roderick MacFarquhar; Michael Schoenhals: Mao's Last Revolution. Cambridge, Mass. [u. a.]: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2006, p. 15.
4. ↑ Roderick MacFarquhar; Michael Schoenhals: Mao's Last Revolution. Cambridge, Mass. [u. a.]: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2006, p. 17
5. ^ Roderick MacFarquhar: The politics of China: the eras of Mao and Deng , 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1997, p. 167
6. ↑ Roderick MacFarquhar; Michael Schoenhals: Mao's Last Revolution. Cambridge, Mass. [u. a.]: Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 2006, p. 33
7. ↑ Wolfgang Bartke: The great Chinese of the present: a lexicon of 100 important personalities of China in the 20th century. 1st edition - Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​1985, p. 200
8. ↑ Guo, Jian; Song, Yongyi; Zhou, Yuan: Historical dictionary of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Lanham, Md. a.]: Scarecrow Press, 2006, p. 221