Wei Lihuang

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Wei Lihuang
General
Unit	14th corps
Commands held	Y-Force
Battles/wars	Northern Expedition Encirclement Campaigns Central Plains War Fujian Incident Second Sino-Japanese War Battle of Taiyuan Battle of Xinkou Battle of South Shanxi Battle of Northern Burma and Western Yunnan Chinese Civil War Liaoshen Campaign
Awards	Order of Blue Sky and White Sun
Other work	politician

Wei Lihuang (traditional Chinese: 衛立煌; simplified Chinese: 卫立煌; pinyin: Wèi Lìhuáng) (16 February 1897 – 17 January 1960) was a Chinese general who served the Nationalist government throughout the Chinese Civil War and Second Sino-Japanese War as one of China's most successful military commanders.

First joining the

, a two-year campaign to unify China.

Chinese Civil War

After the fourth and fifth encirclement campaigns forced the main Communist forces to withdraw from the Eyuwan Soviet area, the Nationalists began a series of extermination campaigns against the remaining Communist guerrillas.^[1] The Communists had strong peasant support in this region and were able to hold out against repeated attempts to wipe them out.^[2][3] In 1934, Chiang Kai-shek gave Wei Lihuang several hundred thousand troops to accomplish this task. Wei made use of concentration camps to deprive the Communists of peasant support.^[4] Despite occasional victories, the Communists were in the main defeated by this strategy. Most of the remaining guerrillas abandoned open warfare and began to operate undercover amongst the peasants. Until the Second United Front began in 1937, the Communists in Eyuwan remained underground.^[5] His success would earn him the nickname "Hundred Victories Wei".^{[citation needed]}

War with Japan

Sun Liren

at the Burmese-Chinese border, 1945

A general during the

. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Wei was able to work effectively with American commanders.

Beginning his offensive into southern

, the Ledo Road enabled overland transport of military supplies from Assam to Nationalist bases in China.

Postwar career

Chiang Kai-Shek

(left) with Wei Lihuang

Recalled to northern China to again replace General

in October 1948.

In spite of Wei's earlier success, his tenure in the northeast was remarkably unsuccessful. He defied orders for more than a year to withdraw, and lost 300,000 troops. Taylor (2009) writes that "Of those, 246,000 were captured, and many if not most were quickly incorporated into the PLA" (p. 389).

Chiang ordered Wei's house arrest. Wei made his way to

" (Taylor, 2009, p. 389). He would live in the PRC until his death in 1960.

References

Bibliography

• Dupuy, Trevor N. Harper Encyclopedia of Military Biography, New York, 1992
• http://www.generals.dk/general/Qiu_Qing-quan/_/China.html
• Ministry of National Defense R.O.C [1]
• US Naval War College Archived 2006-10-25 at the Wayback Machine
• Taylor, Jay. The Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-Shek and the Struggle for Modern China, New York, 2009
• http://cgsc.leavenworth.army.mil/carl/download/csipubs/bjorge_huai.pdf
• Rowe, William T (2007). Crimson Rain: Seven Centuries of Violence in a Chinese County. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
• Benton, Gregor (1992). Mountain Fires: The Red Army's Three-year War in South China, 1934-1938. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Archived 2009-03-26 at the Wayback Machine