Chinese Leader Dead

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The ashes of Chu: Teh, veteran leader of the Chinese revolution, and 'father' of the week.

His death, at the age of ninety, leaves Mao Tse Tung as the only leading survivor of that generation of the Chinese Communist Party.

The meeting in Chingkanshan (South China) between Mao-Ise -Tung and Chu Teh in 1928 - so often romanticised by the Chinese Stalinists - was indeed a most important event in the development of the Chinese Revolution.

STALIN It followed on the massacres of workers and communists in Shanghai, Canton and Nanchang -made possible by Stalin's policy of liquidating the young Chinese CP into the bourgeois nationalist party, the Kuomintang.

Chu, in fact, organised the Nanchang rising and later fled with about a thousand men into the hills.

Here Mao and Chu set up a new type of regime, based on the peasants rather than the working class, with guerrilla warfare as its defence.

This regime established for the first time in China an alliance between a political commissar and a peasantry.

Chu was a brilliant military strategist. He has been called the Chinese Joffe', and the Red Napoleon'. • He perfected the method of guerrilla warfare and of tactical retreats, which was used so successfully from Yenan in 1947.

The defence and organisation of the 'Long March' of 1934-5 were under Chu's command.

In 1937 he headed the creation of the 8th Route Army and the 4th Army, which together finished off both the Japanese and Chiang's rump Kuomintang forces.

With the declaration of the People's Republic of China, Chu continued his military career, commanding the army during the position as vice-president of the defence council.

His positions as vice president of the People's Republic and president of the permanent committee of the National assembly were largely honorific:

They were a tribute to a man who played a vital role in the outcome of the revolution, who was admired by millions of workers and peasants for his courage, his determination and simplicity Chu did not, however, join the CP until late in his life. He was born in 1886, in Szechwan, into a rich peasant tamily and enjoyed the decadent fruits of a relatively wealthy background - nnilim The anti-Manchu revolution of 1911 and the corruption of the old dynasty had a profound effect on him.

He supported and fought with Sun Yat sen, broke with his old lifestyle and travelled to Europe. He joined the Communist Party in 1922 in Germany, at the age of 36.

He travelled to Paris and Moscow and returned to China in 1926.

Throughout his lite, however, ne was a supporter of stalinist policy - including Stalin's worst crimes against the Communist movement - and of Mao's leadership of the Chinese Communist Party.

His prestige and his achievement - rest on his genius for military leadership.

Even this, though, was disputed during the Cultural Kevolution. in 1968 Chu was attacked by Red Guard posters against the supposed opponents of Mao on the Party leadershin..

And Lin Piao - himself to be driven out as a 'Moscow agent' in 1971 - suggested that in reality it was Mao - not Chu - that led the Long March and the creation of the Eighth Route Army.

In his last years, however, Chu retained his senior though largely honorific positions, and at the beginning of this year his name appeared as the signatory of attacks no tha tearininmin

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People's Liberation Army, were interred in Peking last