Du Yuming
Du Yuming (py) or Tu Yü-ming (wg) (杜聿明) (November 28, 1903-May 7, 1981) was a Kuomintang field commander active in the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) theatre of World War II and in the Chinese civil war from 1945 to 1949.
A trusted protégé of Chiang Kai-shek, Tu was a graduate of the first cadet class at the Whampoa Military Academy. During WWII he commanded the Nationalist Fifth Army in the Burma Campaign under Lieutenant General Joseph Stilwell. Du was largely to blame for the disatrous failure of Chinese Expeditionary Army in the Burma-India theater at the early stage, for his blind obedience to Chiang. However, due to his blind obedience, he was viewed as an ardent loyalist of Chiang and thus was not punished for his failure.
After the war, Tu helped strengthen the Nationalist position in the Southwest by removing Long Yun, the local warlord of Yunnan Province in October 1945. Du was then transferred to the Northeast Theatre to consolidate Kuomintang control. For most of the Civil War, he served as a field commander in Manchuria and Northeast China.
Toward the end of the struggles against the communists following World War II, Du correctly guessed that one of Chiang's most trusted staff officer was a communist agent but the only solid evidence he came up was that unlike most nationalist cadres and officers who were corrupted, the suspected communist spy was clean. Obviously, this was not a good reason and Chiang was of course enraged when Du presented his view, because Chiang interpreted such reason would imply that all of the nationalists were corrupted, and only the communists were clean, not mentiong the fact Du's wife was once a communist herself.
Du was captured during the Huai Hai Campaign and held in Communist prisons until his pardon in 1959, after which he was rewarded a high ranking position in the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, reported because the Chinese government wanted to convince his son-in-law, the Nobel Prize in Physics winner Chen Ning Yang to return to China. Ironically, the communist agent Du correctly suspected was also in the same political organization and the two became friends.