When it comes to the name of Zhang Pei, many people feel unfamiliar, but when it comes to Zhang Naiqi, an economist and one of the founders of the DAB, we still have some impressions, and Zhang Pei is the elder brother of Zhang Naiqi, whose contribution to the development of China’s armor mechanization research is unmatched, so he has the title of “father of Chinese armor” or Therefore, he has the title of “Father of Chinese Armored Soldiers” or “Father of Chinese Armored Mechanization”. Their third brother, Zhang Qiuyang, joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1922 and worked with Chen Yun for many years before being killed by the Kuomintang in 1940. However, both Zhang Pei and Zhang Naiqi chose to be with the CCP because of their misjudgment of the CCP, which led to their own misfortune in their later years and affected their families.
The bitter Life of Zhang Pei, whom Zhou Enlai called his elder brother
In 1926, he joined the KMT’s Northern Expedition, and in February 1927, he became the chief of the First General Bureau of the Shanghai Police Department, and in March, he became the head of the Sixth Regiment of the Zhejiang Provincial Defense Army.
In 1927, he was dismissed from his post for covering for Zhang Qiuyang’s revolutionary activities and releasing 12 CCP members, including Zhou Enlai, who were on the arrest list. 1930, he became the Major General Chief of Staff of Bai Chongxi’s 79th Division. 1932, during the fourth Kuomintang In 1932, during the fourth Kuomintang “siege” of the Central Soviet Union, he was again dismissed for allegedly delaying the war on the pretext of collaborating with the enemy, and was sent to study in a special class at the Kuomintang Army University.
In 1936, Zhang Pei once again rescued the left-leaning “Seven Gentlemen” who were in prison. Since then, he has also risked his life to rescue members of the Chinese Communist Party. As a result, members of the Communist Party, including Zhou Enlai and Chen Yun, called Zhang Pei “big brother” along with the Zhang brothers.
After graduating from the Army University, Zhang Pei stayed there as a major general instructor, and personally set up the Department of Mecha Tactics, and also served as the director of the general officers’ class (a one-and-a-half-year training for Kuomintang generals and above) of the second and fourth classes of the Army University. It can be said that almost all the general officers under Chiang Kai-shek above the corps were his classmates or students.
In 1941, Zhang Pei left LU to form China’s armored corps at the Army Mechanization School, and in 1943, he took the lead as a lieutenant general in dispatching a group to the U.S. Army base in India to personally convey 800 outstanding students of the school’s armored corps, and after receiving training from the U.S. Army, formed China’s first armored corps and joined the Chinese Expeditionary Force to participate in the Allied operations in northern Burma, achieving good results.
After the victory of the war, the pro-Communist Zhang Pei left the Army University for Hong Kong under the arrangement of the Chinese Communist Party, and persuaded the chairman of Zhejiang Province, Chen Yi, to join the Chinese Communist Party when he passed through Hangzhou. in February 1949, at the invitation of the Chinese Communist Party, he returned to the mainland from Hong Kong and prepared the first military academy of the Chinese Communist Party, serving as the head of the war affairs group and the first deputy director of the Armor Professorship Research Association. Due to his reputation at the Army University, Zhang Pei helped the CCP recruit at least 58 instructors above the rank of Major General of the Kuomintang, who trained a large number of armored mechanized personnel for the CCP.
In the first few years, Zhang Pei was indeed highly valued by the CCP. It is said that during an event after the establishment of the Chinese Communist Party, Zhou Enlai recognized Zhang Pei and took the initiative to greet him, thanking him in public for saving his life back then.
In 1954, Zhang Pei was transferred to Shandong and became a member of the Shandong Provincial Political Consultative Conference, and in 1958 he was branded as a “rightist” and was insulted and beaten during the Cultural Revolution.
According to the book “Our Confession”, in the early summer of 1967, the rebel faction of the Shandong CPPCC carried out a crackdown on him. “One evening, in the backyard of the organ, south of the high platform, we were playing when four or five rebels somehow drank Mr. Zhang Pei, who was about to go Home, and started beating him violently without saying a few words. Some people slapped him back and forth continuously, only to see his chest straight, did not move, did not say a word, his head was whipped back and forth swinging. Then someone kicked him in the calf from behind, he involuntarily grunted and fell to the ground, but immediately got up again and stood straight, allowing the rebels to continue to beat him, without moaning, not to mention begging for mercy. ……” Through this passage, people see the rebels’ The first thing you need to do is to get a good idea of what you are getting into.
After this brutal beating, Zhang Pei wrote a letter to Zhou Enlai to the effect: “I do not ask you to do what I did to you back then. I am already over 70 years old, so I only ask you to treat me according to your prisoner policy.” But it wasn’t long before Zhang Pei was brutally beaten once again. He probably didn’t realize the brutal nature of the CCP’s turning of hands into clouds and turning of hands into rain, nor did he understand Zhou Enlai’s two-faced style.
In 1973, at the age of 80, Zhang Pei was finally removed from his rightist label and transferred back to Hangzhou to live with his daughter’s Family. Because of his arrival, the door of his son-in-law’s house, who was already a “reactionary academic authority”, was again plastered with the words “The son-in-law of a Kuomintang lieutenant general”, and his grandson and granddaughter were often chased and abused by the children of the rebel faction. Under such circumstances, Zhang Pei lived in seclusion. During this period, he wrote a memoir, but it was later burned to the ground.
In 1979, Zhang Pei died. When a memorial service was held for him, a photo of him could not be found, and only his ID card photo was enlarged. According to his daughter’s recollection, her father was particularly fond of photography during his lifetime. Zhang Pei, who loved photography, did not leave many images, and his inner pain was extraordinary. Such an ending, the Zhang Pei certainly did not expect, I do not know in the moment of his death, whether it really figured out: his life has been a big trick.
Zhang Naiqi was tortured
Compared with his elder brother Zhang Pei, the fate of Zhang Naiqi, who was instrumental in the Communist Party’s united war effort, also took a sharp turn for the worse after the establishment of the Chinese government in 1949. Naturally, he was also first reappointed by the CCP, first as an advisor to the People’s Bank of China, and joined the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), where he continued to serve as a vice chairman of the DAB Central Committee, and later as Minister of Food. He was also responsible for the creation of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce with Li Weihan and others, serving as a deputy chairman.
In 1957, Zhang Naiqi, Zhang Bojun, Chu Anping and Luo Longji were classified as the four major rightists in the Communist Party of China, and Mao even classified Zhang Naiqi, Zhang Bojun and Luo Longji as the old ancestors of the rightists. Zhang Naiqi was completely beaten down and was regularly criticized.
In 1962, Zhang Naiji was expelled from the DAB because of his petition to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) for vindication, which was considered an act of “reversal”. After the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, Zhang Naiqi was tortured and deprived of almost all his property. In his son, Zhang Lifan, a contemporary scholar, wrote “The Book of Long Nights and Lonely Lights”, which records his tragic ordeal.
In the book, it is written that after the Red Guards raided his home, Zhang Naiqi wrote and posted a “Letter of Appeal for Wrongdoing”, describing his patriotic history, explaining that being classified as a rightist in 1957 was an unjust case, and talking to the head of the Red Guards who came to “break the Four Olds” in an attempt to ease the situation. This worked for a while, and the chief withdrew his men and instructed them to remove the artifacts from the living room so that they would not be destroyed.
But not long after, on August 24, 1966, the “revolutionary masses” from the State Council’s Administration of Institutional Affairs visited the house and started raiding it without further ado, and the Red Guards from several nearby high schools also gathered in the wind, and a family tragedy soon followed. They escorted Zhang Naiqi to the auspicious theater next to Dong’an Market to attend a “beating rally”. Those who were beaten were the “key targets” of the district, and once they entered this “ghost gate”, there was no return.
Under the belt whipping, blood and flesh flying, the surrounding sufferers all breathed their last. Only Zhang Naiqi, who was nearly 70 years old, relied on his years of qigong practice to hold on, but his life was in between breaths. At this Time, a police officer came to the meeting and asked the Red Guards for someone, saying that if this person was killed, it would not be good to explain to the central government, so they were allowed to send the injured Zhang Naiqi to the nearby Xiehe Hospital.
After Zhang Naiqi was sent home from the hospital, his ordeal did not end there, spending a total of eight days and nights in various kinds of torture and humiliation, during which time he remained on hunger strike. The Red Guards also dragged Zhang’s fifth wife, Wang Shixiang, who was seriously ill, back home barefoot from her hospital bed, and reamed her hair to criticize her together; and piled up his entire book collection in the courtyard, lit a huge fire, held his body, and pushed and beat him under the scorching flames ……
In 1967, Zhang Naiqi wrote “Seventy Autobiographies”, describing these inhumane days: “This was the greatest calamity I had ever encountered in my life, and it was the most severe exercise and test for me”; “The seven days after August 25, there were always several groups of people coming to torture and abuse me every day. I was tortured and abused by several groups of people every day. The door was open and unattended, so the freedom of torture and abuse was ample. It is worth remembering that I was beaten with a wire-wrapped rubber whip, which caused swelling that did not fade easily. I was also burned with matches and shot in the head with a steam gun. In addition, such as pouring cold water on my head, such as filling my nose with a water bottle, such as forcing me to eat dirty food, etc., even if it is mild. The scary thing was that someone actually advocated pouring chili pepper into my nasal passages. Probably because I couldn’t find cayenne pepper in my house, it didn’t happen. But in the end, before we had to move out, someone actually poured ammonia into my nostrils after smearing my face with oil paint, and I really don’t know how these bad people were educated.”
In addition, as a collector, Zhang Naiqi naturally had a large collection. Except for those looted by the raid, the rest were loaded onto six large trucks and shipped away by Kang Sheng’s order. After the end of the Cultural Revolution, Zhang Lifan received an incomplete list of cultural relics seized by the powerful, including Kang Sheng, Chen Baoda, Lin Biao, Cao Yi’ou, etc., especially Kang Sheng’s appetite is the largest. However, the list is not Zhang Naiqi important cultural relics, the whereabouts of many important collections are still unknown, and not included in the above list. According to the figures provided by the State Administration of Cultural Relics, the Zhang Naiqi relics surrendered by the Red Guards were 1464 pieces, while only 1134 pieces were returned by the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Cultural Relics in 1980.
On May 13, 1977, Zhang Naiqi passed away in the basement of a Beijing hospital. His wife, Wang Shixiang, died during the beating by the Red Guards in 1966.
Conclusion
The tragic experience of the Zhang brothers in their later years tells us once again how tragic the fate of those who believe in the Chinese Communist Party is!
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