Among the Huangpu students, Hu Zongnan was the fastest promoted, so he was called "the first person to be a protégé of Tianzi". There is also a person whose promotion speed is second only to Hu Zongnan, who has repeatedly taken over Hu Zongnan's position, so he is called "Hu Zongnan Second", this person is named Li Tiejun.
Li Tiejun was also a student of Huangpu I, and his best classmate at that time was Chen Geng, but after the "Zhongshan Ship" incident, Chen Geng was disheartened with Chiang Kai-shek, and Li Tiejun and Chen Geng slowly became strangers. When Chen Geng left, he invited his classmates to eat a casual meal, and Li Tiejun persuaded Chen Geng to continue to follow Chiang Kai-shek but was rejected by Chen Geng, and Li Tiejun was very angry about this, and raised a glass of wine to drink it all, saying that after drinking this cup of wine, he would cut chen geng in two, and then smashed the cup away.
After that, Li Tiejun and Chen Geng became enemies, and they also wanted to fight a war with Chen Geng. Twenty years later the two really became direct rivals. In 1947, Li Tiejun served as the commander of the Fifth Corps, stationed in the Luoyang area. At this time, Chen Geng was leading his troops into western Henan.
At that time, the gap between the combat effectiveness of the two troops was very large, and Li Tiejun had more than 70,000 people under his hands, and it was all beautiful weapons and equipment. Chen Geng only had more than 40,000 troops, and some of his troops had to undertake the task of covering Liu Deng's army. But Chen Geng's command talent made up for this part of the disadvantage.
Chen Geng used more than 5,000 people as bait to lead Li Tiejun's nose all the way, and finally took Li Tiejun's tired division to Funiu Mountain for siege and annihilation. In fact, Li Tiejun did not go to Chen Geng's pawn at the beginning, he was originally a very cautious person in the use of troops, but Chiang Kai-shek could not see that Li Tiejun's troops frequently suffered losses, because he was afraid of being reprimanded by Chiang Kai-shek, Li Tiejun had to attack, and finally won Chen Geng's plan.
After his plan, Chen Geng immediately launched a counterattack, and after more than ten days of fierce fighting, Chen Geng completely annihilated Li Tiejun's Fifth Corps, and because Li Tiejun fled, Hu Zongnan's Third Division was also implicated and finally completely annihilated. This made Hu Zongnan very angry, and he never trusted Li Tiejun again. Therefore, in the later period of the Liberation War, Li Tiejun basically remained idle at home.
It was not until November 1949 that Li Tiejun was reactivated and was responsible for guarding Hainan Island. However, at this time, the Kuomintang was already weakening day by day, and in the end, Deng Hua, Han Xianchu and others liberated the entire Hainan Island in only half a month. Li Tiejun's re-defeat also caused him to completely lose the trust of the Kuomintang, so Li Tiejun, who was depressed in Taiwan, eventually moved to the United States and spent the rest of his life in the United States. However, Li Tiejun is very long-lived, at the age of 101.