General Xiao Ke, (萧克) who has died aged 101, was the last surviving commander of China’s Red Army that made the Long March. He never reached the heights promised by his ability but his life was notable for a commitment to principle at odds with political reality.Xiao was born in the Hunan province of southern China to a scholarly but poor family. Three of his eight brothers and sisters died in infancy, yet by rural Chinese standards, the family was relatively well off. They had a small land-holding which was often raided in the early 1920s. Xiao's brother and cousin blamed some of this thievery on a local landlord, and in 1923, the two men were judicially murdered by the landlord's local government allies.Such persecution inspired Xiao in 1926 to study at Guangzhou's military police academy before joining the nationalist Guomindang's National Revolutionary Army's northern expedition that July. During it, he fell under the influence of Communist officers led by regimental commander Ye Ting. He joined the party in June 1927. A month later, his regiment headed for Nanchang, capital of Jiangxi province. Ye Ting had committed his men to participate in the disastrous first armed Communist revolt that August. On October 3, Xiao was captured but then released. Back home, he organised a party cell with his elder brother, and in 1928 they resolved to join Zhu De's army operating around Yizhang in southern Hunan. En route, he became deputy commander of a 100-strong "peasant battalion", which, swollen to more than 600, united that April with Mao Zedong's Red Army at Longxidong.
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/27/general-xiao-ke-red-army/print
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