With a great guffaw of delighted laughter, Jia Ke throws back his head in joy as he recounts the day that Beijing surrendered to his communist armies.

Sixty years have gone by, but Mr Jia’s memories of his fighting days remain as fresh as ever. Few are so vivid as the moment when the Nationalist troops of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek finally abandoned the ancient city of China’s emperors to Mao Zedong’s People’s Liberation Army.

The 91-year-old veteran soldier grips his walking stick firmly and leans forward on the leather sofa in his spacious Beijing apartment.

“You could say that the surrender was almost an anti-climax because I had been waiting outside Beiping for weeks before we finally entered,” he says, referring to the city by its name at the time: “Northern Peace”. China’s capital in those days was the southern city of Nanjing. “It was very strange. We basically simply changed over the security guards inside the city. The soldiers of the Nationalists sat on one side of the road and our PLA men sat opposite. And then they swapped places.”

The surrender by the Nationalist commander Fu Zuoyi ended weeks of negotiation — aided by the fact that Mr Fu’s daughter was a member of the Communist Party.

The peaceful handover avoided potentially appalling bloodshed, had the PLA been forced to fight its way into the city, and paved the way for Mao’s formal founding of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949.

Mr Jia was a commander of special forces and had been deployed to the south of the city in charge of a huge array of artillery, much of it US guns captured in battle from the Nationalists. He swells with pride as he counts the number of guns under this command.

“Can you imagine? Can you just imagine? We had 36 guns we had seized from the Americans and 76 we had captured from the Japanese. And in total I had 144. What a force, eh?

“The local people were so terrified when they saw us arriving with our artillery that they fled into Beijing because they thought they would be safer. But after a month with no fighting many came back to check on their homes.

“When they saw our huge guns they decided to stay. They thought to themselves, ‘If there’s a battle then we don’t want to be in the city on the other end of firing from such big guns’. People had never seen such equipment and they were pretty impressed.”

Mr Jia never had to fire his cannon. “Because Beijing was such an ancient city we wanted to try to liberate it peacefully. It was a city containing so many historic buildings and our main aim was to avoid damage.”

The negotiations were protracted. Indeed, it was in battle some weeks before the city fell, and not on the streets of Beijing, that Mr Jia first realised that victory was merely a matter of time.

His voice still carries a note of wonder as he recalls how, in January 1949, his Nationalist foes prepared to hold Tianjin, the port for Beijing, for a six-month siege. “But we captured the city in just 29 hours.”

He spent Chinese new year in Tianjin. By the time of the Lantern Festival on the 15th day of the year he was in position with his guns and men to the south of Beijing.

The formal handover of Beijing was agreed for February 3, 1949. “I remember how none of the city’s residents was interested in the Nationalists. Everyone crowded around our boys as they sat quietly on the ground. They wanted to get a good look at us. They were very curious. I felt so proud.”

Mr Jia had been at war for more than a decade. He left his home in Baoding, about two hours south of Beijing, when he was 19 to enter the Communist camp. His dream was to drive out the Japanese invaders who had taken Beijing in 1937 and occupied swaths of the rest of the country. He joined Mao at his revolutionary base of Yan’an, in northwest China.

“I was very proud. Perhaps I was too proud. I wanted to go at once to the army academy. But they turned me down. I had to go to school and study because they said I didn’t understand enough about Communism.” His first words to his new principal were an appeal to enter the army. The young Mr Jia was slapped down and ordered to do as he was told. He proved to be an outstanding student and was appointed as a teacher — “but I wanted to fight the Japanese!”

It took him two more years to fulfil his ambition. His days as a soldier were among the happiest of his life. He was fighting the Nationalists in southern China when, on October 1, 1949, Chairman Mao stood at the top of the Gate of Heavenly Peace — Tiananmen — at the southern end of the Forbidden City to make the formal declaration of Communist rule. Later Mr Jia was assigned to a military academy, but soon after moved with his commanding officer to what was then the equivalent of the ministry in charge of planning. From there he was moved into aeronautics and he was in a job as Communist Party secretary when the Cultural Revolution was instigated by Mao in 1966 and Mr Jia was purged.

He still relishes the opportunity to recount battlefield anecdotes and after three hours of talking and laughing he is showing no signs of flagging. “Let’s go out for lunch. I want to invite you. I have never in my life met a foreign woman. I won’t take no for an answer.”

Nor did he. Over dumplings, we talked of Britain and of battles. And then he ambled home, leaning slightly on his stick.

Road to the People's Republic

1911 Wuchang uprising sounds death knell of Qing dynasty, monarchs who had ruled China for more than 250 years

1916 Death of Yuan Shikai, who had taken over as Emperor, plunges country into chaos of battling warlords

1921 Chinese Communist Party founded; Mao Zedong, below, is delegate at founding meeting

1927 Mao leads a group of Hunan peasants to the mountains of Jiangxi province, where they create a Soviet-style government and start to build a guerrilla force, which will become the Red Army

1930 Jiangxi soviet controls several million people while Red Army numbers 200,000. Kuomintang (Nationalists) Government begins extermination campaigns against communists

1934 Nationalists force communists to flee, beginning the legendary Long March — a 6,000-mile fighting retreat from Jiangxi to remote Shaanxi Province in the north — 80,000 marchers start and only 8,000 arrive

1937 Japan invades China; Nationalists and communists form an alliance against the invasion and Mao’s area of control grows to 100 million people

1945 Chinese Civil War resumes

1949 Communists chase nationalists to island of Taiwan. Mao becomes chairman of the Communist Party and proclaims the People’s Republic of China

Source: Times database

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