People of the Revolution and the USSR

People’s Republic of China Chinese communism 1898–1975 ○ Natural causes

Mao’s inquisitor who ran party security and intelligence from the Yan’an “rescue” campaign to the Cultural Revolution

He died of bladder cancer in December 1975 and was buried with state honours as a “proletarian revolutionary”, but in October 1980, on the eve of the Gang of Four trial, he was posthumously expelled from the party and exhumed from Babaoshan.

From a Shandong landlord family, he worked in the Shanghai underground and in 1933 went to Moscow as Wang Ming’s deputy, where he studied the Soviet purges. Back at Yan’an in 1937 he sided with Mao and, as head of the Social Affairs Department, ran the rectification movement’s “rescue” campaign that branded thousands as enemy agents. Sidelined for a time after 1949, he returned in the Sino-Soviet polemics of the 1960s and as adviser to the Cultural Revolution Group directed the investigation and persecution of Liu Shaoqi, He Long and other veterans. He died of cancer in 1975 and was posthumously expelled from the party in 1980.

People’s Republic of China Chinese communism 1901–1972 ○ Natural causes

The poet-marshal who led the New Fourth Army and the Third Field Army and succeeded Zhou Enlai as foreign minister

Wounded and besieged on Meiling in the winter of 1936, Chen Yi wrote three poems as his dying words, hiding them in his clothes: "I go to the Springs to muster my old troops, a hundred thousand banners to behead the King of Hell."

From Sichuan, he joined the party after work-study in France and with Zhu De led the remnants of the Nanchang Uprising to Jinggangshan. He stayed behind on the Long March to fight three years of guerrilla war in the south and became acting commander of the New Fourth Army after the 1941 incident. In the civil war he commanded the East China (Third) Field Army at Huaihai and took Shanghai, becoming its first mayor. A marshal in 1955 and foreign minister from 1958, he ran China’s Bandung-era diplomacy in Asia and Africa. Attacked in the “February Countercurrent” of 1967, he died of cancer in 1972; Mao attended the funeral.