Zhou Enlai

After graduating from Nankai Middle School in 1917, Zhou Enlai went to Japan and enrolled at the East Asian Higher Preparatory School in Tokyo, but struggled with the language and failed his university entrance exams. Yet his time in Japan proved formative: he read Kawakami Hajime's works, Kōtoku Shūsui's Quintessence of Socialism, and John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World, awakening his interest in Marxism. In his diary he wrote that "militarism in the 20th century absolutely should not continuously be in existence." Disillusioned with Japanese culture, he returned to Tianjin in the spring of 1919.

Back in Tianjin, Zhou plunged into the student protests that followed the May Fourth Movement. He co-founded the Awakening Society, which invited Li Dazhao to lecture on Marxism, and edited the Tianjin Student Union Bulletin. In January 1920 he was arrested for leading a boycott of Japanese goods and spent over six months in jail, where he organized political discussions among the detainees. Expelled from Nankai University upon his release, he secured a government-subsidized place in the work-study program and a post as European correspondent for the Tianjin newspaper Yishi bao, sailing for France in November 1920.

Zhou arrived in Marseille in December 1920 and settled in a cheap hotel in the Latin Quarter in Paris. He worked briefly at the Renault factory, in a coal mine in Lille, and at a steel plant in Saint-Chamond near Lyon. In spring 1921, recruited by Zhang Shenfu, he joined the Paris communist cell, one of the groups that would merge into the Chinese Communist Party. He moved to Berlin in early 1922, founding the CCP's German branch, and shuttled between the two capitals. Zhou helped draft the charter of the Chinese Youth Communist Party in Europe, was elected its director of propaganda, and edited its journals Shaonian (Youth) and Chiguang (Red Light). It was here that he hired a seventeen-year-old Deng Xiaoping to run the mimeograph machine. He personally recommended Zhu De for party membership and, in November 1923, presided over the founding of the Kuomintang's European branch. In the summer of 1924, the CCP Central Committee summoned him back to China, where he was posted to the Political Department of the Whampoa Military Academy, launching his career as one of the party's most indispensable organizers.

On 12 December 1936, Zhang Xueliang, commander of the Northeast Army who had lost Manchuria to Japan, detained Chiang Kai-shek, who had flown to Xi'an to push for a final extermination campaign against the Communists. The Nanjing government was thrown into chaos, while in Yan'an the Communist leadership split sharply: Mao Zedong and Zhu De favored executing Chiang, while Zhou Enlai and Zhang Wentian argued for his release to forge an anti-Japanese united front. The debate ended when a long telegram from Stalin arrived, urging Chiang's release.

Zhou Enlai reached Xi'an on 16 December aboard a plane sent by Zhang Xueliang, serving as the chief Communist negotiator. Chiang at first refused to meet a CCP delegate, but once it became clear that his life depended on Communist goodwill, he received Zhou on 24 December, their first meeting since they had parted at the Whampoa Military Academy over a decade earlier. Zhou opened with: 'In the ten years since we last met, you seem to have aged very little.' Chiang replied: 'Enlai, you were my subordinate. You should do what I say.' Zhou answered that if Chiang would halt the civil war and resist Japan, the Red Army would willingly accept his command.

By the meeting's end, Chiang promised orally to end the civil war and form a united front against Japan. He was released on 25 December and returned to Nanjing. Zhang Xueliang, who accompanied him, was court-martialed and spent the next fifty years under house arrest; most officers who took part in the Xi'an Incident were executed. Yet although the KMT formally rejected collaboration with the CCP, it halted military operations against the Yan'an base. The Xi'an Incident was the turning point that rescued the Communist Party from near-annihilation and launched its ascent as a major force in the coming war against Japan. For Zhou Enlai, it was the political watershed at which he transformed from revolutionary operative into negotiator and public face of the Party.

Zhou Enlai was the architect of the PRC's basic framework of foreign policy. The Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence (mutual respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty, mutual non-aggression, non-interference in internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence) were first codified in the 1954 Sino-Indian Agreement and later became the core norms of the Non-Aligned Movement, serving as the common language of Third World diplomacy. Zhou mediated the end of the Franco-Vietnamese War at the 1954 Geneva Conference, and at the 1955 Bandung (Asian-African) Conference, he told delegates from 29 nations that 'we have come not to conceal our differences but to seek common ground,' laying the intellectual foundations of Cold War neutralism.

Zhou's diplomatic balancing extended to Soviet and American relations. He concluded the Sino-Soviet alliance with Stalin in 1950, yet after Khrushchev's 1956 denunciation of Stalin and amid the ensuing ideological rift, Zhou managed to avoid a complete rupture while securing China's independent position. Following the 1969 Damansky (Zhenbao) Island clashes, he arranged the Beijing airport talks with Kosygin to defuse the border crisis. His 1971 secret negotiations with Kissinger paved the way for Nixon's 1972 visit to China, fundamentally reordering the Cold War triangle. Zhou's diplomacy, combining the prudence of a weaker power with the self-assurance of a great one, is regarded as one of the most original diplomatic strategies of the Cold War era.

When the Cultural Revolution erupted in 1966, Mao immediately purged senior colleagues including Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. Zhou initially argued they should be allowed to return to work, but after Chen Boda threatened that Zhou himself could be branded a counter-revolutionary, he pivoted to cooperation with the Maoist line. Thereafter Zhou supported the creation of Red Guard organizations while working from inside the power structure to limit the spiral of anarchic violence. He blocked the renaming of Beijing as "Dongfanghong Shi" (The East Is Red City), prevented the replacement of the stone guardian lions in front of Tiananmen with Mao statues, and deployed a PLA battalion to protect the Forbidden City from vandalism.

Still, Zhou's political survival came at a brutal price. Sun Weishi (孫維世), an adopted daughter he raised with Deng Yingchao, was tortured, imprisoned, and raped by Red Guards for seven months before dying in 1968; Zhou could not save her. The 1973–74 "Criticize Lin Biao, Criticize Confucius" campaign was in reality a veiled attack on Zhou, and the 1975 campaign to "Criticize Song Jiang and appraise Water Margin" sought to cast him as a political failure. Zhou explained his strategy to visiting Japanese LDP parliamentarians as "to advance or retreat according to the majority's instructions," and privately called the period his "hell."

After Zhou's death in January 1976, hundreds of thousands of Beijing residents spontaneously gathered at Tiananmen Square on the Qingming Festival (April 5) to mourn him. The authorities dispersed them with military and police force and carried out mass arrests. This "Tiananmen Incident" revealed both the depth of popular reverence for Zhou and the repressive character of the regime he had served.