YE JIANYING

WadeGiles romanization Yeh Chien-ying born May 14, 1897, Mei-hsien, Kwangtung Province, China died Oct. 22, 1986, Peking Chinese Communist military officer, administrator, and statesman who held high posts in the Chinese government during the 1970s and '80s. Born of a middle-class family, Ye graduated from the Yunnan Military Academy in 1919 and joined Sun Yat-sen's Nationalist movement shortly thereafter. He established a lifelong friendship with Zhou Enlai when the two were on the faculty of the Whampoa Military Academy during the mid-1920s. He joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1927 and studied in Moscow from 1928 to 1931, subsequently joining Mao Zedong's Kiangsi Soviet. Ye helped to plan the Long March (193435), and by the late 1930s he had earned a reputation as an outstanding strategic planner. He was chief of staff of the (Communist) Eighth Route Army during much of World War II. He became a member of the Central Committee of the CCP in 1945. During the civil war between the Communists and Nationalists (194549), he was deputy chief of the general staff of the Communist armed forces. Ye was the chief political commissar in Kwangtung Province in the early 1950s and was also mayor of Canton at this time. In 1955 he was made a marshal of the People's Liberation Army, and in 1966 he was made a member of the ruling Politburo of the CCP. He became a member of the powerful Standing Committee of the Politburo in 1973. After Mao's death in 1976, Ye opposed the Gang of Four and supported Hua Guofeng. Ye served as defense minister from 1975 to 1978 but, having grown feeble from old age, was in the latter year made chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, thereby becoming nominal chief of state. He generally opposed Deng Xiaoping's reforms, and in 1985 he retired from his principal posts, including his membership in the Politburo.