First Field Army (China)

The First Field Army of the Chinese Communist Party was a Communist military formation in the last stages of the Chinese Civil War (1949-1950).

The Northwest Field Army was originally under the command of Peng Dehuai with He Long and Xi Zhongxun as political commissars, which originally operated in Shanxi, Shaanxi, and Ningxia.

On January 15, 1949, the Communist Party Central Military Commission decided to reorganise the regional armies of the PLA into four field armies.

On February 1, 1949, the joint defense military area command covering the Shaanxi, Gansu, Ningxia, Shanxi and Suiyuan provinces was renamed the Northwest Military Area Command and the Northwest Field Army was renamed the First Field Army of the PLA.

The forces in Northwest China were designated the First Field Army, with Peng Dehuai as commander and also serving as political commissar. The First Field Army was to comprise the 1st Corps Army and 2nd Corps Army, and totalled 134,000 men. After 1949, the First Field Army controlled five provinces - Shaanxi, Gansu, Qinghai, Ningxia, and Xinjiang.

Among forces associated with the Field Field Army were the First Army (1st, 2nd, and 7th Corps), Second Army (3rd, 4th, and 6th Corps), Nineteenth Army (63rd, 64th, and 65th Corps), Shaanxi Military Region, Ningxia Military Region, Qinghai Military Region, and forces in Xinjiang - the 5th Corps, and the Twenty-Second Army under Tao Zhiyue, with the 9th Corps and the 7th and 8th Cavalry Divisions.

Swaine, citing Witson, wrote in 1992 that '..most former units of the First FA were either deactivated after the Korean War, reassigned as replacements for Korean War units associated with other field armies, or redesignated..' (becoming units of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps). Swaine goes on to say that '..The few remaining First FA combat units were transferred out of the region, to areas such as Central China or Tibet.' The best elements of the 4th Corps were reorganised as the 11th Division, which entered Tibet in 1962 and has remained there ever since. In recent years this formation has been referred to as a Highland Motorised Infantry Division.

William Witson argued, in his pathbreaking work on PLA factions, The Chinese High Command (1972), that personal relationships within the five 'field army systems' '..served as the foundations for a geographically based pattern of factional affiliations within the overall structure of communist power.' Swaine, writing in 1992, noted that these relationships had deteriorated significantly. Swaine argued that few senior military leaders from the 'First Field Army system', as he put it, survived by 1992.