Ye Jianying

Ye Jianying was a Chinese communist revolutionary leader and politician, one of the founding Ten Marshals of the People's Republic of China. He was born into a peasant family in Mei County, Guangdong, and received a classical education. He joined the Tongmenghui in 1911, and participated in the Wuchang Uprising that overthrew the Qing dynasty. He then went to Japan in 1913 to study law at Nihon University. While there, he joined Sun Yat-sen's newly-formed Chinese Revolutionary Party, later to become the Kuomintang. He returned to China in 1915, organizing resistance against the Yuan Shikai regime in his native Guangdong, which landed him in prison for six months. Upon his release, he returned to Japan to complete his law studies. Between 1919 and 1920, he lived in Shanghai, where he was first exposed to Marxism through a group of Communist intellectuals centered around Li Hanjun. Returning to Guangdong, he set up a local Communist apparatus, and in 1921, he attended the 1st National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, representing Guangdong along with Chen Tanqiu. He was the only other person than Mao Zedong to be present at both the founding congress of the party and the proclamation ceremony of the People's Republic of China twenty-eight years later. Throughout the first half of the 1920s, Ye remained a member of both the Kuomintang and the Communist Party. However, with the tensions between the two parties increasing, he eventually chose to side with the Communists in the summer of 1927. After the Nanchang Uprising, he was forced into hiding, first seeking refuge in Kyoto for eight months, and then making his way to the Soviet Union. There, he attended the International Lenin School and the Moscow Sun Yat-sen University between 1928 and 1931. Upon his return to China in 1932, he became active in the Jiangxi Soviet, where he served as Political Director of the Red Army Academy and President of the Party School. He took part in the Long March, and later held various positions in the Communist government, such as the Minister of Justice, the Vice Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, and the Secretary of the Central Supervisory Commission. He was also one of the main drafters of the 1954 Constitution of the People's Republic of China, and advocated for the rule of law and the protection of human rights. He was elected as the Vice Chairman of the People's Republic of China in 1959, and served as the acting Chairman after Liu Shaoqi was purged during the Cultural Revolution. He was one of the few senior leaders who survived the political turmoil, and was re-elected as the Vice Chairman in 1975. He died of a heart attack in Beijing on 22 October 1986, at the age of 89. He was posthumously awarded the Order of the Republic, the highest state honor in China.