Zhu De

Zhu De (; ; also Chu Teh; 1 December 1886 – 6 July 1976) was a Chinese general, military strategist, politician and revolutionary in the Chinese Communist Party. Born into poverty in 1886 in Sichuan, he was adopted by a wealthy uncle at age nine. His uncle provided him with a superior early education that led to his admission into a military academy. After graduating, he joined a rebel army and became a warlord. It was after this period that he adopted communism. Joining the Chinese Communist Party, he ascended through the ranks of the Chinese Red Army as it closed in on securing the nation in the Chinese Civil War. By the time the Communist Party won the Civil War, Zhu was a high-ranking official within the party. He served as commander-in-chief of the Eighth Route Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War and commander-in-chief of the Eighth Route Army during the Chinese Communist Revolution, and the People's Liberation Army after liberation. In 1955, he ranked first among the ten founding marshals of the People's Republic of China, of which he is regarded as one of the principal founders. Zhu remained a prominent political figure until his death in 1976. As the chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress from 1975 to 1976, Zhu was the head of state of the People's Republic of China. Biography Early life Zhu was born on 1 December 1886, to a poor tenant farmer's family in Hung, a town in Yilong County, Nanchong, a hilly and isolated part of northern Sichuan province. Of the 15 children born to the family only eight survived. His family relocated to Sichuan during the migration from Hunan province and Guangdong province. His origins are often given as Hakka, but Agnes Smedley's biography of him says his people came from Guangdong and speaks of Hakka as merely associates of his. She also says that older generations of his family had spoken the "Kwangtung dialect" (which would be close to but probably different from modern Cantonese) and that his generation also spoke Sichuanese, a distinct regional variant of Southwest Mandarin that is unintelligible to other speakers of Standard Chinese (Mandarin). Despite his family's poverty, by pooling resources Zhu was chosen to be sent to a regional private school in 1892. At age nine he was adopted by his prosperous uncle, whose political influence allowed him to gain access to Yunnan Military Academy. He enrolled in a Sichuan high school around 1907 and graduated in 1908.