General Lu Zhengcao RIP

Adrian Roberts · Oct 27, 2009

Lu Zhengcao - Telegraph

Lu Zhengcao, who died on October 13 aged 104, was the last of China's revolutionary generals, a feared guerrilla fighter who latterly became the chairman of the country's Tennis Association.

In December 1936 Lu was at the right hand of Zhang Xueliang, the Young Marshal, when the warlord kidnapped Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, turning the tide of the civil war in the favour of the Communists.

In the preceding two years Chiang's Nationalist army had come close to extinguishing the threat of Mao Tse-tung and his forces. In a dramatic "extermination" campaign in the late summer of 1934, two million Nationalist soldiers encircled the Communist forces in southern China.

Faced with this ring of steel, 100,000 Communist soldiers broke through a weak spot in the Nationalist lines and launched the Long March to safety. By the time the troops arrived in Yan'an, in the northern province of Shaanxi, only a few thousand of them remained.

The only soldiers loyal to Chiang in the north, however, belonged to two warlords – the Young Marshal and Yang Hucheng. The Generalissimo ordered them to wipe out the Communists., but both were reluctant.

As Manchurians, they had been forced out of their homeland by the Japanese in 1931 and 1932. The Young Marshal's father, Zhang Zuolin, had been murdered by the Japanese and he was particularly seduced by the Communist promise of a "National Resistance" programme, under which Communist and Nationalist forces would unite to fight against Japan.

Worried about a weakening of their will to fight, Chiang flew to speak to the warlords on December 3 1936, but when he arrived they mutinied and placed him under arrest. Perceived as a coup, the event stunned the world. Lu, then aged 31, was Zhang Xueliang's personal aide at the time.

Born as Lu Zhengyan in the Manchurian province of Liaoning on January 4 1905, in the middle of the Russo-Japanese war, Lu harboured a deep hatred of the Japanese, who had torched his parents' house as they fought with the Russians for control of northern China. To save him, his mother hid him outside in a stack of firewood.

Both his parents were peasants, and Lu completed only four years of primary school before he had to return to the family farm. He later became an apprentice at a small silk store. After the Japanese conquest of Manchuria, Lu watched the occupation of his home town with increasing horror, eventually deciding to become a soldier and change his name to Zhengcao, which had a military air.

He joined the Guards' Brigade of Zhang's Northeastern Army, and was quickly singled out by the Young Marshal, who had been born in the same county. His manners and good handwriting earned him a recommendation to study at the Northeastern army school.

Upon graduation, he became Zhang's aide, and was in charge of administration when the mutiny against Chiang Kai-shek was hatched. Although several Communists, including Mao, pushed the warlords to execute Chiang, the plotters wanted to use the arrest to force Chiang to unite with the Communists and battle the Japanese.

During the negotiations Lu grew close to Zhou Enlai, who eventually became the first premier of the People's Republic of China. Early the following year, Lu secretly joined the Communist party even though he was technically in command of a regiment of the Nationalist army.

In the Sino-Japanese war from 1937, however, he remained a highly successful commander. His troops provided cover for retreating Chinese soldiers as the Japanese pushed forward into Hebei province. In one incident, the main battalion found itself heavily outnumbered and surrounded near Shijiazhuang. Lu was ordered to pull back, but instead launched an ambitious rescue operation with just a few hundred men. They succeeded in breaking through Japanese lines, although the battalion suffered heavy losses.

Pressing north, Lu waged a guerrilla campaign around Jinzhong for the next decade, organising local peasants to dig trenches and using the local sorghum and corn fields to mask his advances. He also founded a marine unit, whose members breathed through reeds in order to remain submerged.

More than 100,000 men joined his forces in blowing up Japanese railways, bridges and communication lines. Mao praised Lu's army as a "model of guerrilla warfare and of the fight of common people". While still in Jinzhong, Lu married Liu Sha on January 1 1942.

After the war ended, in October 1945 Mao appointed Lu deputy chief commander of the Northeastern forces in October 1945. The following year, he became the director of the Northeastern Railway Bureau, securing transportation lines as the civil war continued.

He became one of Communist China's first 57 generals in 1955 in recognition of his work, and 10 years later was promoted to minister of railways.

The Cultural Revolution, however, led to accusations of anti-revolutionary sympathies, and he spent seven years in a gulag before Mao interceded to rehabilitate him.

In 1982 Lu was appointed chairman of the China Tennis Association and remained an enthusiastic player well into his nineties. "What matters is not how long one can live, but how many things one can accomplish," he remarked. "I haven't done much my entire life, mainly three things, fight the Japs, build the railway and play tennis."

He is survived by his son and two daughters, and his funeral was attended by both Hu Jintao, the Chinese president, and Jiang Zemin, the former president.
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