General Xiao Ke, who has died aged 101, was the last surviving commander of the Red Army that accomplished 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 southern China's Hunan province 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 Kuomintang 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 take part 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.
Mao had left Jinggangshan in Jiangxi to aid Zhu, and they then returned to Jinggangshan. Soon afterwards, Xiao became a company commander in the new Fourth Red Army and revealed his talent for choosing the wrong side. Mao and Zhu had fallen out. ''The party should control the gun,'' said Mao, while Zhu argued that in military matters the views of military men were paramount. The 21-year-old Xiao took Zhu's side, but Mao prevailed. More than 60 years on, Xiao was again the loser in a similar debate with Deng Xiaoping over the army's role in Tiananmen Square.
In 1928 the Communists were forced from Jinggangshan into southern Jiangxi, where they survived Chiang Kai-shek's attacks. Xiao became Sixth Red Army group commander. By 1934 the Long March was beginning and the Red Army and Communist leadership needed a safer location. Xiao's task was to find it.
He failed. The 9000-strong Sixth Army was almost destroyed at Ganxi in Guizhou when, that October, two-thirds of it was wiped out. A local hunter guided Xiao and other officers to safety up a forested mountain. What was left of the army met up with He Long's small force. In its ranks was 19-year old Jian Xianfo. She and Xiao married in December 1934.
Between November 1935 and October 1936 the armies marched to north-west China. Xiao's first son was born in the Tibetan grasslands of north-western Sichuan. The child, sent to live with his grandmother in Hunan, is thought to have died in a Japanese germ warfare attack in 1941. A captive with Xiao's army was Alfred Bosshardt, a British missionary who later wrote of his admiration for that ''cultured, educated man and born leader''. In June 1936 Xiao and He Long's forces united with Zhang Guotao's Fourth Red Front Army. Having split from Mao, Zhang was leading a rival ''party centre''. He seems to have believed that, if he could win support from He Long and Xiao, he could take control of the Communist party from Mao. He Long is said to have threatened to shoot Zhang, but Xiao was swayed. It was accepted that Xiao had supported Zhang, who appointed him a divisional commander. Later, relationships with Zhang proved to be a death sentence, yet Xiao fared well. His career merely stalled. Sent to the front line in the anti-Japanese war, he ended the civil war in 1949 as Lin Biao's Fourth Field Army chief of staff. After the establishment of the People's Republic, Xiao was assigned to the Beijing Military Academy, a backwater.
In 1958 he was caught up in a dispute over army policy, leading to his being denounced by Mao as a ''bad person, a member of the bourgeois team'', and was subjected to lengthy interrogation. Although he had taken part in a bloody purge himself in 1934, he was shocked to be the object of attack. After four months he made a ''confession'', writing later that the ''man can be struck down, but his history will stand''. In 1969 he was sent into rural exile.
In 1972 Xiao was restored to the Military Academy and appointed deputy defence minister. After Mao's death in 1976 the verdict on Xiao's ''anti-party activity'' was overturned. From 1982 he sat on the influential central consultative committee.
As the 1989 Tiananmen Square crisis intensified, he opposed Deng Xiaoping's decision to call in the army. With former defence minister Zhang Aiping he composed a letter to Deng signed by five other generals, telling him that if the army opened fire ''the common people will curse us for 10,000 years''.
Xiao and Zhang Aiping were co-founders of the Yanhuang Cultural Study Association, which in 1991 launched Yanhuang Chunqiu, one of mainland China's most progressive publications. Xiao became particularly concerned about the truthful telling of history. In 1996, during a Long March 60th anniversary commemoration, he lost patience with the endless speeches praising Mao.
The march was achieved through the efforts of every soldier, he proclaimed. ''We should not, as we did in the past, make a cult of personality.'' His wife and a son survive him. Guardian