Peng Dehuai Quotes

Our goal was illegal (revolution), and legality was but a means of achieving that goal. Otherwise we would have been using legality for the sake of legality and would have become the will.

The experience I gained taught me that one must be good at making use of contradictions of all kinds to legalize the illegal such as the rules of the soldiers’ committees which, through our work, were adopted as the objectives of the division school.

Attack without delay the reactionary county government of Pingjiang, the “civil corps”, the village suppression units and the village suppression committees. Wipe them out resolutely. We are rising in arms! The day has come to serve the workers and peasants!

We are determined to overthrow imperialism and the Kuomintang government, form a government of workers, peasants and soldiers; confiscate the land of the landlords and give it to the peasants. We will establish a Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, in which officers and men are equal, the officers are elected by soldiers’ committees, and the accounts are kept open.

We were enlisted to make revolution; to overthrow warlords, corrupt officials, local despots and evil gentry; and to bring about a cut in land rent and interest. But now there is neither revolution nor pay while talk of a cut in land rent and interest is heard no more. Yet, we are ordered to “suppress Communists” and crack down on peasant associations. Who orders us to do such things? Chiang Kai-shek! A soldier earns 6.5 dollars a month. Paying 3.3 dollars for mess, he has only 3.2 dollars left — and this is withheld from us. What a miserable lot we have! We can’t even afford to wear straw sandals or smoke coarse tobacco, let alone provide for our parents, wives, children. The officers must consider the problems of the enlisted men!

Don’t believe the good words of a man uttered in ordinary times; his action in an emergency will tell what sort of a man he is.

The companies of my battalion had undergone training in the winter, and there were now members of the Save-the-Poor Committee in every company. After going through the discussions on the current situation conducted from the first to the third moon, the men and officers in my battalion had a better understanding of the Northern Expedition. They no longer feared it now, but were pleased to see it happen.

China could only resist foreign aggression and develop its industry by instituting democracy and unifying the country.

Born at a time when human history was moving forward by leaps and bounds, I was unable to keep pace with the tempo of this great epoch. The Communist Party of China was founded in 1921, but at that time I had not got in touch with Marxism and did not know the following fundamentals: the scientific laws of social development, analysing problems from the standpoint of class struggle, and revolution as the conscious action of the organized masses.

History is always moving ahead in a wavelike fashion, and the people of today outpace those of yesterday in their continuous forward advance.

I reached the age of 23 in 1921. Having been a cowherd, a child labourer, a dyke worker and a soldier, I had been through extreme poverty and experienced the hard life of workers, peasants and soldiers. In the process, I cultivated some simple class feelings for the oppressed.

When soldiers become conscious of what they are doing and are organized, they constitute a mighty force.

The Mandarin language lessons taught included such messages as cultivating self-confidence and valuing time. I was one of the trainees, and in less than two years made some progress in language study. Talks were also given on the dismemberment of China by the foreign powers and on building China as a prosperous nation with a mighty army.

As World War I was then going on, the European and American imperialists had slowed down their aggression against China, and China’s industry was growing at a relatively high speed. This gave rise to such deceptive bourgeois patriotic ideas as “a prosperous nation with a mighty army” and “save the nation through industrial development”. They had an influence on me. But my chief motive in joining the army was to earn money to help provide for my poor family.

The appalling poverty I experienced in my childhood and youth tempered me. In later years, I often recalled the plight of my childhood with a view to preventing myself from becoming corrupt and forgetting the hard life of the poor. That is why I can still vividly remember the ordeals I went through as a child.