Marshal who commanded the Jin-Cha-Ji base and then ran the “two bombs, one satellite” nuclear and missile programme
From Sichuan, he studied in France, Belgium and the Soviet Union and was a political instructor at Whampoa. Political commissar of Lin Biao’s First Army Corps on the Long March, he founded and commanded the Jin-Cha-Ji base in north China during the war with Japan and was mayor of Beijing after the civil war. Made a marshal in 1955, from 1956 he was the vice-premier for science and technology and, after the Soviet advisers left, ran the defence-science programme that produced the atomic bomb in 1964, the hydrogen bomb in 1967 and a satellite in 1970. He was the last of the ten marshals to die, in 1992.
Career Timeline
- 1937–1945Commander of the Jin-Cha-Ji Military Region
- 1958–1975Chairman of the National Defence Science and Technology Commission