Wei Guoqing

Early life and the Red Army

Wei Guoqing, born Wei Bangkuan, was a Zhuang born on 2 September 1913 into a poor peasant family in Nongying village, Taiping township, Donglan county, Guangxi; he attended a traditional school and primary school. According to the Communist Party’s official biographical database of founding generals, he joined the peasant self-defence forces in summer 1928 and the Communist Youth League in 1929, took part in the Baise Uprising in December 1929 and was assigned to the Red Seventh Army; he joined the Communist Party in February 1931, entered the Central Soviet Area that July and fought in the third anti-encirclement campaign. He then studied at the Red Army school in Ruijin, served as a company commander and military instructor, and in 1934 entered the senior command course of the Red Army University. Early in the Long March he commanded the special-service battalion of the cadres’ regiment, taking part in bridging the Wu River and seizing the Jiaoping ferry on the Jinsha River.

The War of Resistance and the Civil War

After the war with Japan began, Wei headed the Eighth Route Army headquarters school and the 6th battalion of the Anti-Japanese Military and Political University, and at the end of 1938 led part of it east of the Yellow River with He Changgong to help found the university’s first branch, where he served as head of training, vice-president and dean. Sent to northern Jiangsu in 1940, he became political commissar and then commander of the New Fourth Army’s 9th Brigade, leading the main assault at Shanzitou in 1943; in September 1944 he became deputy commander of the 4th Division and, after its commander Peng Xuefeng was killed, organised the westward campaign that restored the Henan–Anhui–Jiangsu base area.

In the Civil War he commanded the 2nd Column of the Shandong and then the East China Field Army, fighting at Suqian and in southern Shandong; in February 1947 he directed the Baitabu battle, capturing the Nationalist 42nd Group Army commander Hao Pengju, and at Menglianggu his troops held off relief forces for three days. In 1948 he commanded the Northern Jiangsu Army Group, and in the Huaihai campaign his column outflanked Du Yuming’s forces to cut their line of retreat. In 1949 he became political commissar of the Third Field Army’s 10th Army Group, crossed the Yangtze and entered Fujian with Ye Fei, serving as head of Fuzhou’s military control commission, Party secretary and mayor.

Adviser in the war against France

In 1950 Wei led the Chinese Military Advisory Group to Vietnam to assist the People’s Army against France. According to his official biography, he and the Party’s representative Chen Geng proposed and helped direct the Border Campaign, regarded as a turning point in Vietnam’s war against France; he returned in July 1951 as deputy commander of the Public Security Forces, went back in October 1952 to help direct the Northwest Campaign, and in 1954, though ill, helped direct the decisive battle of Dien Bien Phu.

Ruling Guangxi

In 1955 Wei was appointed governor of Guangxi and deputy Party secretary of the province, taking up the post on his return in 1956; he was made a general (shangjiang) in 1955. After the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region was created in 1958 he became its chairman and later secretary, second secretary and first secretary of the regional Party committee; from 1962 he also chaired the regional political consultative conference, and in 1964 and 1966 became first political commissar of the Guangxi Military District and the Guangzhou Military Region. His official biography says that in his twenty years in charge of Guangxi its agriculture, industry, water conservancy, defence, culture and education “developed greatly.” The American historian Donald Sutton, citing the writer Zheng Yi, writes that during the Great Leap Forward Wei commandeered the entire 1959 harvest on orders from Beijing.

Guangxi in the Cultural Revolution

During the Cultural Revolution Guangxi’s mass organisations split over whether to support Wei in leading the movement, into the Allied Command, which backed him, and “4.22,” which opposed him, and fought each other with weapons. On 3 July 1968 the Party Central Committee and other bodies issued the “July 3 Proclamation,” branding the sabotage of railways and seizure of aid to Vietnam in Guangxi the counter-revolutionary crimes of “class enemies”; Sutton writes that Beijing “sided decisively with Wei Guoqing.” Mass killings followed until autumn 1968 (see “The Guangxi Massacres”). Yan Lebin, who took part in central investigations in the 1980s, records a 1984 regional count of 89,700 identified dead and says Wei once told the vice-president of the Supreme People’s Court, He Lankai, privately that 150,000 had died in Guangxi in the Cultural Revolution. Sutton counts Wei’s “uncompromising” policies among the reasons the violence in Guangxi was so severe.

According to Yan, after the Cultural Revolution Guangxi still upheld the rule that “whatever Comrade Wei Guoqing instructs must be resolutely carried out,” and after the 1981 central investigation team left Guangxi, Wei sent the centre a long complaint rebutting it. In 1983 the Party Central Committee reshuffled Guangxi’s leadership and sent a working group to deal with the Cultural Revolution’s legacy, but Wei himself was not publicly disciplined over the events in Guangxi.

Later years and after his death

Wei joined the Central Military Commission in 1969, became first Party secretary of Guangdong and chairman of its revolutionary committee in 1976, and from 1977 headed the PLA General Political Department and served on the Central Military Commission’s standing committee and as its deputy secretary-general. He was a member of the 10th to 12th Politburos, a vice-chairman of the Standing Committee of the 4th to 7th National People’s Congresses and a vice-chairman of the 4th and 5th CPPCC. He received the Order of August the First (second class), the Order of Independence and Freedom (first class) and the Order of Liberation (first class) in 1955, and the Red Star Medal of Merit (first class) in 1988. He died in Beijing on 14 June 1989.

According to Radio Free Asia, on 24 October 2024 his ashes were moved from the columbarium at Babaoshan and buried in Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery, in the presence of his widow Xu Qiqian, his son Wei Xiaoyi and officials of the Central Military Commission’s administrative bureau; the broadcaster quoted overseas scholars who criticised the move as playing down his responsibility for the Cultural Revolution in Guangxi.