On December 15, 1948, just after the Liaoshen Campaign in northeast China, in order to promote the victory of the Pingjin Campaign as soon as possible, our party and our army suddenly and solemnly announced the list of 43 first-class war criminals of the Nationalist army through xinhua news agency.
Among them, Li Zongren, the new warlord of the Gui clan who was then vice president of the National Government, ranked second in the list of 43 war criminals, second only to the reactionary leader Chiang Kai-shek, and it was clear that Li Zongren was to be held accountable for waging the civil war.
In desperation, Li Zongren had no choice but to flee the liberation war one step ahead of Chiang Kai-shek on the eve of the liberation of the whole country and take a special plane to the United States to avoid disaster.
But why, after only 17 years, in 1965, Li Zongren dared to return to China with his wife in a high profile? This seems very illogical, is Li Zongren not afraid that the state will re-hold him accountable for the civil war? What's going on here?
Li Zongren, whose ancestral home is Guilin, Guangxi, graduated from the Guangxi Army Primary School in his early years, just in time for the vigorous Xinhai Revolution, followed the footsteps of the revolutionary pioneer Dr. Sun Yat-sen, joined the Patriotic League, and in 1912 was recommended to enter the Guangxi Accelerated School for further study.
After graduating in 1913, he was transferred to Nanning, Guangxi as a probationary lieutenant and lieutenant, and since then he has embarked on the road of revolutionary conquest, successively participating in classic battles such as defending the country, protecting the law, and Guangdong and Guizhou, and conquering the north in the south, making outstanding military achievements.
In 1923, Under the introduction of Li Jishen and Chen Mingshu, two big men of the Nationalist army, Li Zongren officially joined the Kuomintang, and the following year he was appreciated by Sun Yat-sen and served as the superintendent of the Guangxi Appeasement Office and the commander of the Guangxi First Army.
In 1925, Li Zongren, assisted by Huang Shaozhen and Bai Chongxi, defeated the old warlord Shen Hongying in Guangxi, unified Guangxi, completely laid the dominant position of the new warlord of the Guangxi Gui clan, devoted himself to the reunification of the two provinces, and personally led 20,000 troops to respond to the Northern Expedition of the Great Revolution initiated by Chiang Kai-shek.
In the Battle of Longtan, after completely annihilating most of the main forces of the Beiyang warlord Sun Chuanfang, he quickly returned to the west to attack Wuhan in Hubei province and defeat the Hubei warlord Tang Shengzhibu.
In 1929, he returned to Guangxi in victory, and together with Zhuge Bai Chongxi, he worked hard to build Guangxi, punish the landlords and old money and other reactionary forces, and set up education.
In March 1929, Li Zongren broke out in armed conflict with Chiang Kai-shek's political views and launched the Battle of Chiang Kai-shek, and in the end Li Zongren was helplessly defeated and fled to Guangxi, and Chiang Kai-shek also expelled Li Zongren from the party on the charge of reactionary crimes and expelled him from all military posts, but Li Zongren was not reconciled, and he declared himself the commander-in-chief of the National Salvation Army, occupying Guangxi for a long time, and continuing to oppose Chiang Kai-shek.
Between 1930 and 1931, Li Zongren first formed an anti-Chiang alliance with the Shanxi warlord Yan Xishan and the northwestern warlord Feng Yuxiang, and then joined forces with the Guangdong Cantonese warlord Chen Jitang to overthrow Chiang Kai-shek, thus opening the curtain on the warlords in the Central Plains.
After the September 18 Incident in 1931, the three eastern provinces fell, and the Confluence of Ningbo and Guangdong provinces, Li Zongren put aside his previous suspicions and returned to the National Government in Nanjing, where he was awarded the rank of general of the first rank of the army and published the famous "Theory of Scorched Earth Resistance", proposing: The Chinese army should fight each other in a planned manner and pull the Japanese army into a protracted war of attrition.
In 1936, Li Zongren went north and south of Hunan to resist The Japanese, served as the commander of the Fifth Theater, stationed in Xuzhou, and the governor led East China and Shandong to respond to the important tasks of the War of Resistance, and successively fought large-scale classic battles such as the Battle of Xuzhou, the Bloody Battle of Taierzhuang, the Battle of Wuhan, the Battle of Suizao, and the Battle of Southern Henan, making indelible and outstanding contributions to the great cause of national independence and self-determination.
After the victory of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression in 1945, Chiang Kai-shek openly tore up the double-tenth agreement on a peaceful armistice signed with our party and our army in Chongqing, provoking the civil war, Li Zongren fully supported Chiang Kai-shek in launching a large-scale campaign, but Chiang Kai-shek was secretly demoted by Chiang Kai-shek, deprived of most of his military powers, and only gave him a false post as director of the Northern Parallel Yuan, which was firmly blocked out of the North China Theater, and the gap between Li Zongren and Chiang Kai-shek became wider and wider.
In April 1948, Li Zongren secretly instructed his wife Guo Dejie to launch a "Lady Offensive" to defeat Sun Ke, who was favored by Chiang Kai-shek, and win the vice presidency in the Election of the National Congress.
At the end of January 1949, with the end of the three major battles of Liaoshen, Huaihai, and Pingjin, and with almost all the elite troops of the Nationalist army destroyed north of the Yangtze River, Li Zongren resolutely seized the opportunity to force Chiang Kai-shek to step down and assume the post of acting president of the Republic of China, fantasizing about blocking the crossing of the Yangtze River by means of peace talks, but openly refusing to sign the "Peace Agreement" proposed by our party and our army, and dreaming of dividing the yangtze river and dividing the north and the south.
In the end, Chairman Mao and Zhu De jointly signed the order to "march to the whole country", and a million male divisions crossed the river to fight the enemy in a final decisive battle, liberating Nanjing within two days, and the reactionary rule of the Peugeot Nationalist army was completely overthrown.
In November, the elite of the Gui clan headquarters commanded by Bai Chongxi were defeated by Lin Biao and Chen Geng in the Guangxi Campaign, and the political conditions on which Li Zongren depended for survival were completely destroyed, in order to escape the responsibility for the civil war after the defeat, Li Zongren and his wife flew from Guangxi to Hong Kong on November 20 in the name of medical treatment, and then moved to the United States to avoid disasters, beginning a lifelong exile for more than ten years.
In 1965, 17 years after Li Zongren was listed on the list of 43 first-class war criminals in the Nationalist Army, his wife Guo Dejie was unfortunately suffering from terminal cancer, had no cure, and missed his homeland very much.
Prior to this, Wei Lihuang, former commander-in-chief of the Northeast Suppression Campaign, who was also on the list of top-class war criminals in the 43 major powers, and Weng Wenhao, chief executive of the Nationalist military government, had all returned to China one after the other and held important positions in the new Chinese government, and the state did not hold them accountable for the civil war.
Weng Wenhao is one of the best geologists in China, an academic civilian cadre, with little real power, and he did not directly participate in the civil war, but his rank and political status in the National Government were very high, and he once became the chief executive, so he naturally appeared on the list of 43 first-class war criminals.
At the end of the Liberation War, Weng Wenhao, fearing that our party would hold him responsible for the civil war, remained in seclusion in Hong Kong until 1951, when he returned to China.
Because Weng Wenhao himself did not have the intention of directly participating in the civil war and was a polymath professional, our party directly expressed to him the goodwill of the past and let him serve as a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and continue to engage in geological research work.
During the Liberation War, Wei Lihuang was a second-class general of the Nationalist army who led more than 500,000 troops, and was the commander-in-chief of the northeast bandits, which brought great trouble to our army in the Liaoshen Campaign, although in the end he lost more than 400,000 troops and was directly dismissed and investigated by Chiang Kai-shek, but he could not make up for the fact that he committed a heavy blood debt in the civil war.
However, Wei Lihuang was kind to people everywhere within the Nationalist army and had good popularity, so through mediation from many sides, he successfully fled to Hong Kong to avoid disasters, and in 1955, under the extradition of our party, he successfully returned to China, not only was he not held responsible for the civil war, but he was also cordially received by Chairman Mao, Premier Zhou, and Zhu De.
This was mainly because when Wei Lihuang was first united by the Kuomintang and the Communists on the anti-Japanese front, he was more sympathetic to the toiling masses ideologically, was unwilling to fight a civil war from the bottom of his heart, and consumed the country's strength in vain, so he often violated Chiang Kai-shek's orders and supplied a large amount of grain, ammunition and materials for the National Army in batches to fight with the Eighth Route Army, which in a certain sense was a major contributor to the Eighth Route Army's insistence on the War of Resistance.
What's more, Wei Lihuang faced lin Biao's bad performance in the Liaoshen Campaign against Lin Biao's Northeast Fourth Field Army, and suffered a big defeat and loss, which also alleviated his own responsibility for civil war to a certain extent.
Therefore, after Wei Lihuang returned to China in 1955, he was personally appointed by Chairman Mao as the vice chairman of the National Defense Commission, and became a deputy state-level cadre, with a very high status in the country.
Among the 43 war criminals of the first rank of the Nationalist army announced by our party and our army, only Du Yuming, former director of the Xuzhou Appeasement Office and commander-in-chief of the suppression campaign, was captured after the defeat in the Battle of Huaihai and was imprisoned in Beijing Gongdelin to participate in labor reform, but was also pardoned by the state in 1959.
It can be said that not a single person on this list of first-class war criminals was directly executed by our army, and because of this, Li Zongren did not worry at all about the issue of accountability and future, and began to very actively contact the Chinese government about returning to China.
At the same time, in order to test the attitude of the new China, Li Zongren also secretly contacted Premier Zhou and donated a large number of precious antiques to China's cultural relics institutions free of charge, expressing his patriotic heart of returning to the roots of the fallen leaves and returning to China for the elderly.
As for Li Zongren's sincere patriotic enthusiasm, Premier Zhou did not ask for anything in vain, but gave him a high degree of recognition and welcome support, and transferred him a fee of 130,000 US dollars, which also allowed Li Zongren to experience the full sincerity and tolerance of the new Chinese government, and since then he has faced it calmly and has no doubts.
In 1956, he and his wife Guo Dejie returned to China in a high profile by special plane, and Premier Zhou personally went to the airport to pick up and welcome him, and Li Zongren also took this opportunity to face the whole country at the airport and solemnly announced that he would make a modest contribution to the development and growth of New China and the great cause of national reunification.
However, unlike Weng Wenhao and Wei Lihuang, Li Zongren was 74 years old when he returned to China, he was very old, and his party, government, and military status within the nationalist military government was very high, second only to Chiang Kai-shek, so it was difficult for New China to find an absolute match for Li Zongren's position and related treatment within the government.
Although Li Zongren deliberated and repeatedly applied to the state for the post of vice chairman of the National People's Congress as a vice-state-level cadre, chairman Mao still politely refused, and after clarifying the causes and consequences, he only provided Li Zongren with living treatment and medical benefits beyond the standards.
Although Li Zongren has a little regret in his heart, he has passed the age of ancient, fame and fortune are like floating clouds, and he has long been indifferent to social status and politics, so he is also very considerate of the difficulties of the country, no longer continues to pursue fame and fortune, and for the rest of his life, he will live in Beijing's residence in Beijing and enjoy a carefree pension life.
In 1966, after his wife Guo Dejie died of illness, Li Zongren, under the personal arrangement of Premier Zhou, continued to marry the nurse Hu Yousong.
By 1969, the 78-year-old Li Zongren died of pneumonia in Beijing, the state held a grand public ceremony for him, after his death the ashes were buried in the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery in Beijing, Premier Zhou personally attended the memorial service, expressed deep condolences for Li Zongren's unfortunate death, and expressed high appreciation and admiration for Li Zongren's feat of overcoming all odds and dangers to return to the motherland.
After Li Zongren's death, his last wife, Hu Yousong, converted to Buddhism and was accompanied by green lanterns, without remarrying or leaving any descendants.