Ye Ting

Ye Ting was one of the ablest Chinese commanders of his generation and one of the most tragic figures of the Chinese revolution. In 1926 his regiment cleared the way for the Kuomintang’s Northern Expedition; in 1927 he commanded the troops in two communist uprisings that gave birth to the Chinese Red Army. He then broke with the party for almost ten years and lived in exile. In 1937, as a man acceptable both to Chiang Kai-shek and to the communists, he took command of the New Fourth Army, formed from communist guerrillas within the united front against Japan. In January 1941, when government troops destroyed the army’s headquarters in southern Anhui, he was taken prisoner and spent more than five years in prison. He was killed in an air crash a month after his release.

Youth and military school

He was born on 10 September 1896 (according to some sources on 10 April) in the village of Zhoutian in Guishan County – today Huiyang District of the city of Huizhou in Guangdong province – into a Hakka peasant family. His original name was Ye Weixun. He took the name Ting on the advice of a teacher, and in the revolutionary movement he also used the name Xiyi. His father had worked on plantations in Malaya as a young man, and after returning home rented land and grew fruit trees. In 1911, inspired by the uprising in Canton, Ye Ting persuaded his schoolmates in Huizhou to cut off their queues, the symbol of submission to the Manchu dynasty, and was expelled from school for it. After the revolution his father married him off so that he would settle down.

He chose the army instead. From 1912 he studied at a military school in Canton, then at a preparatory school in Wuchang, and in 1916–1918 at the military academy in Baoding, the most important officers’ school in China at the time. There he read New Youth, the magazine that shaped the views of a whole generation of future revolutionaries. After completing his studies he turned down an offer from the Guangxi warlords, who wanted to make him an official in his home county, and in 1919 he joined the Cantonese army of Sun Yat-sen and the Kuomintang.

At Sun Yat-sen’s side

In 1920, in the war against the Guangxi warlords, he defeated a force four times the size of his own and won his first fame. In 1921 he commanded a battalion of the regiment guarding Sun’s headquarters in Canton. When in June 1922 General Chen Jiongming rebelled against Sun and shelled his residence, Ye Ting’s unit covered the escape of Sun’s wife, Soong Ching-ling. During the First United Front he went to Moscow in 1924 to attend the Communist University of the Toilers of the East. There he embraced Marxism and in December 1924 became a candidate member of the Chinese Communist Party; he then studied the art of war at the Institute of Red Professors.

The Iron Army

In September 1925 he returned to Canton and took command of the 34th Regiment of the 12th Division, Fourth Army, of the National Revolutionary Army. The regiment, renamed the Independent Regiment, became the first unit in which the communists concentrated their officers and soldiers. Ye Ting introduced rigorous training and political instruction, and punished the beating of soldiers and theft severely. In May 1926 the Independent Regiment set out as the vanguard of the Northern Expedition against the warlord Wu Peifu. In June it took Youxian in Hunan. In August, in the battle for Tingsi Bridge in Hubei, Ye Ting found a path to the enemy’s rear and decided the fight with an attack from behind; a few days later his regiment was the first to assault Wu’s positions at Hesheng Bridge. In the autumn he took part in the siege of Wuchang, which fell on 10 October. The Fourth Army was then dubbed the “Iron Army”, and Ye Ting became one of the most famous commanders of the expedition.

In 1927 he commanded the 24th Division and then served as deputy commander of the Eleventh Army of the left-wing government in Wuhan. In May 1927 he routed the troops of Xia Douyin, who had rebelled against that government. After the Shanghai massacre, and once Wuhan too had broken with the communists, the communists decided to create an army of their own. On 1 August 1927 Ye Ting was the principal military commander of the Nanchang Uprising, alongside He Long, Zhu De and Liu Bocheng. The insurgents took the city but had to abandon it after a few days, and in October they were crushed in Guangdong. Ye Ting got the gravely ill Zhou Enlai away to Hong Kong. On 11 December 1927 he led the communist forces in the Canton Uprising. He advised withdrawing the units from the city after the first success, but the Comintern representative Heinz Neumann sharply criticised him for it. After three days the uprising was drowned in blood, and Ye Ting escaped to Hong Kong in disguise.

Ten years outside the party

The party made him one of the scapegoats for the defeat. In 1928 in Moscow, where he had gone for the party’s Sixth Congress, he was criticised by Li Lisan and Wang Ming, and the Comintern regarded him as unreliable. Ye Ting then broke with the party and left for Germany. He lived modestly in Berlin and Vienna, translating German texts, studied military engineering and drew close to the so-called Third Party of left-wing Kuomintang activists. After Japan occupied Manchuria in 1931 he returned to Asia and settled in Macau. In 1933 he helped the Fujian rebels who set up a government against Chiang, and after their defeat he belonged in Hong Kong to the anti-Japanese league of General Li Jishen. Chiang tried several times to win him over, but Ye Ting refused.

Commander of the New Fourth Army

After the outbreak of war with Japan in 1937, Zhou Enlai offered him command of the units formed from the communist guerrillas of the south, who had remained there in 1934 when the rest of the Red Army set out on the Long March. The name New Fourth Army, harking back to the “Iron Army” of 1926, was reportedly Ye Ting’s own idea. On 28 September 1937 the government announced his appointment before the communists had had time to express a view. In November Ye went to Yan’an, where Mao Zedong received him warmly, and he himself admitted that leaving the party had been a mistake. He agreed to command the army as a non-party man under the party’s leadership. The army, initially some 10,000 strong, was subordinate to the government’s Third War Zone and from 1938 had its headquarters at Yunling in southern Anhui.

Ye Ting, however, was a commander without full authority. As a non-member he did not attend the meetings of the army’s party leadership, which was dominated by his deputy, the communist Xiang Ying. The two men differed over strategy and over ordinary matters of daily life. Twice, in 1938 and 1939, Ye Ting resigned and went south, and each time Zhou Enlai persuaded him to return. In 1939, under his command, Gao Jingting, commander of the 4th Detachment north of the Yangtze, was executed on charges of insubordination. The assessment of this affair and of the part Ye Ting played in it remains disputed to this day. In the autumn of 1940 his troops in Anhui repulsed a Japanese operation against the army’s bases, for which he received congratulations from Chiang. In November 1940, after the Battle of Huangqiao, he became the nominal head of a joint command of the communist forces in central China, although in practice it was run by Chen Yi.

The Anhui Incident and prison

In the autumn of 1940 the government demanded that the communist armies move north of the Yellow River, and the communists agreed to transfer the headquarters of the New Fourth Army north of the Yangtze. Ye Ting conducted the talks on this with the command of the Third War Zone. The departure of the headquarters column, some 9,000 people, was delayed until 4 January 1941, however, and its route had been agreed with Yan’an rather than with the government. Near Maolin government troops surrounded the column. During the New Fourth Army Incident Ye Ting wanted to break out resolutely, but Xiang Ying hesitated and then left the column for a time. When, after a week of fighting, the army had been destroyed, Ye Ting went on 14 January to the headquarters of the government’s 108th Division to discuss terms and was detained. On 17 January Chiang Kai-shek disbanded the New Fourth Army and had him court-martialled.

The trial never took place. Ye Ting was held first at Shangrao in Jiangxi, and at the end of 1941 he was moved to Chongqing. He rejected inducements to go over to the government and wrote the poem “Song of a Prisoner”, in which he wrote that the door for people was locked and only a hole for dogs stood open, through which he would not crawl. In communist China generations of schoolchildren learned this poem by heart. In 1943, through the efforts of General Chen Cheng, he was moved to Enshi in Hubei, and then lived for several months with his family under surveillance in Guilin and Liuzhou. In every round of talks with the government the communists demanded his release. After Japan’s surrender he was taken back to Chongqing.

Release and death

Ye Ting was released on 4 March 1946, during the peace talks between the Kuomintang and the communists, in exchange for General Ma Fawu, deputy commander of the government’s Eleventh War Zone, who had been taken prisoner by the communists. The next day he asked to be readmitted to the Communist Party, and on 7 March the party leadership agreed. On 8 April 1946 he was flying from Chongqing to Yan’an in an American transport aircraft. Also on board were the communist leaders Wang Ruofei, Bo Gu and Deng Fa, Ye Ting’s wife Li Xiuwen, two of their children and the American crew. In thick cloud the aircraft struck Mount Heicha in Xing County, Shanxi province, and everyone on board was killed. The communists suspected sabotage, and Zhou Enlai later spoke of the involvement of the Kuomintang secret services, but the investigation conducted by the communists pointed to bad weather and low flying, and no evidence of an assassination was ever produced. The victims of the crash were buried in Yan’an.

Memory

In the People’s Republic of China Ye Ting is revered as one of the founders of the People’s Liberation Army. In 1946 Yancheng County, where the New Fourth Army had been rebuilt in 1941, was renamed after him for several years, and in 1989 the Central Military Commission included him among the party’s outstanding military commanders. Marshal Nie Rongzhen said that had Ye Ting lived, the New Fourth Army would have had two marshals in 1955. His son Ye Zhengda became a general and an aircraft designer. For the history of the Second World War in Asia his fate symbolises the collapse of the united front: the man whom both parties had accepted in 1937 as a bridge between them became in 1941 the prisoner of one of them, and his army fell victim to the war that the Chinese waged among themselves before the eyes of the Japanese invader.