Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index Nie Rongzhen (Simplified Chinese: 聂荣臻, Traditional Chinese: 聶榮臻; 1899-1992) was a Chinese Communist military leader. Nie was the cosmopolitan and well-educated son of a wealthy Sichuanese family. In 1920 Nie joined the group of Chinese students in France, where he studied engineering and became a protégé of Zhou Enlai. A graduate of the Soviet Red Army Military College and Whampoa Academy, Nie spent his early career as a political officer in the Red Army, but in the late 1930s he was given field command close to Yen Hsi-shan's Shanxi stronghold. In the Chinese Civil War he commanded the North China Army Group that defeated Fu Tso-yi's forces near Beijing. Nie was made a Marshal of the PLA in 1955 and ran the Chinese Nuclear Weapons program. Reference US Naval War College This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.