Ye Ting

Ye Ting as commander of the New 4th Army

Ye Ting (born September 10, 1896 in Huiyang , Guangdong , † April 8, 1946 in Shanxi Province ) was a Chinese officer who first served in the Kuomintang and after his defection to the communist movement in the Chinese Civil War to general in the Chinese Red Army rise.

Life

Ye Ting was born to a peasant family in Huiyang in the province of Guangdong was born and entered the age of 16 years in a military primary school in Huangpu one. He then attended the Baoding Military Academy until 1916, but had to leave it again in 1918 due to financial problems in his family. According to other authors, he graduated in 1919. He returned to Guangdong and joined the army of warlord Chen Jiongming and fought in Fujian . In 1920 he became a member of the Kuomintang. In 1922 there was a falling out between Sun Yat-senand Chen Jiongming, whereupon Ye deserted Chen's army and joined forces controlled by Sun's Kuomintang. In the Battle of Huangpijing he managed to defeat an enemy whose troops were four times the size of his own. As part of Sun Yat-sen's plans to found the Whampoa Military Academy , Ye was sent to the Soviet Union by the Chinese National Army in 1924 and trained at the Communist University in Moscow for the workers of the east . There he met Nie Rongzhen and joined the CCP in Moscow .

Shortly before the start of the northern campaign , Ye was ordered back to China in 1925 and took command of the so-called Independent Regiment in the National Revolutionary Army in the 12th Division of the 4th Army Corps, commanded by Zhang Fakui . In this unit he concentrated communist party members and sympathizers. He emerged victorious from several battles and was quickly considered a good strategist, among other things he was involved in the conquest of the city of Wuhan ; in May 1927 his troops defeated the putschists around Xia Douyin . Shortly after the capture of Wuhan, Ye was appointed commander of the 24th Division and commander of the Wuhan Garrison, and in the summer of 1927 he moved to Jiujiang with his troops, which were now referred to as the 2nd Front Army . After the political cleansing within the National Revolutionary Army by Chiang Kai-shek , to which numerous communists fell victim, Ye played an important role in the preparation and implementation of the Nanchang uprising . The uprising, which was largely supported by He Long's 20th Army and Ye Ting's 2nd Front Army, is now considered to be the birth of the People's Liberation Army . After the uprising failed, Ye fled to Guangdong to find refuge in Peng Pai's Hailufeng Soviet . From there he moved on to Hong Kong with Zhou Enlai and Ye Jianying and in December 1927 took over the leadership of the communist troops in the Guangzhou uprising . After this uprising, too, failed, Li Lisan and Wang Ming held it responsible for the failures, and Ye went to the Soviet Union and later to Europe. There he temporarily lost contact with the Communist Party, so that he had no influence on developments such as the establishment of the Jiangxi Soviet or the Long March .

On the occasion of the Second Sino-Japanese War , Ye Ting returned to China in 1937 and again took over military leadership positions in the communist armed forces, which now fought against the Japanese together with the KMT. He took over the New Fourth Army , which consisted of communist guerrillas left behind in eastern China at the beginning of the Long March and led by Xiang Ying . The New 4th Army initially had a strength of 12,000 men and grew to 25,000 men by 1938. They fought under the banner of the KMT armed forces as part of the Second United Front . The army, which operated on the lower Yangtze , was a symbol of the cooperation between the former civil war parties. Ye set up his headquarters in Nanchang . The units commanded by Ye waged a successful guerrilla war against the Japanese. By 1940 cooperation in the Second United Front had deteriorated significantly. At the same time, the KMT leadership feared that the New 4th Army could create a communist base region. They therefore encouraged Ye to withdraw from the southern bank of the Yangtze River. By the end of 1940, Ye had complied with this request, only his headquarters and its guarding were still south of the river. In 1941 , KMT troops attacked headquarters , killing Xiang Ying and arresting Ye Ting. Ye was held in various prisons in southern China and was transferred to Chongqing immediately after the war against Japan ended . Ye was released on March 4 as part of negotiations between the Communist Party and the Kuomintang. Ye and his family were killed in a plane crash on the way from Chongqing to Yan'an just days later .

Web links

Commons : Ye Ting  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Law Yuk-fun: Ye Ting. in Xiaobing Li: China at War - An Encyclopedia. Oxford, 2012, pp. 517f
2. ↑ ^{a b c d} James Z. Gao: Historical dictionary of modern China (1800-1949) . Scarecrow Press, Lanham 2009, ISBN 978-0-8108-4930-3 , pp. 413-414 .
3. ↑ ^{a b c} Christopher R. Lew and Edwin Pak-wah Leung: Historical dictionary of the Chinese Civil War . 2nd Edition. Scarecrow Press, Lanham 2013, ISBN 978-0-8108-7874-7 , pp. 260-261 .
4. ↑ Dieter Kuhn : The Republic of China from 1912 to 1937 - Draft for a political history of events . 3. Edition. Edition Forum, Heidelberg 2007, ISBN 3-927943-25-8 , p. 346 .
5. ↑ Dieter Kuhn : The Republic of China from 1912 to 1937 - Draft for a political history of events . 3. Edition. Edition Forum, Heidelberg 2007, ISBN 3-927943-25-8 , p. 395 .
6. ↑ Dieter Kuhn : The Republic of China from 1912 to 1937 - Draft for a political history of events . 3. Edition. Edition Forum, Heidelberg 2007, ISBN 3-927943-25-8 , p. 543 .
7. ↑ Dieter Kuhn : The Republic of China from 1912 to 1937 - Draft for a political history of events . 3. Edition. Edition Forum, Heidelberg 2007, ISBN 3-927943-25-8 , p. 665 .