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.

Posted to the Political Department of the Whampoa Military Academy in late 1924, Zhou Enlai became its chief political officer and concurrently Guangdong-Guangxi party secretary and CCP representative with the rank of major-general. He brought other Communists into the department, established the Young Soldiers Association and a covert party branch, and was influential in creating the political department and commissar system later adopted in the Nationalist armed forces. The Guangdong Provincial Committee Military Section was a secret three-member group that planted 'illegal' CCP nuclei in army units at regimental level and above and among armed groups, secret societies, railroads and waterways, work Zhou continued until the KMT-CCP split of 1927. In Shanghai he headed the Central Committee's Military Commission and took part in the February and March 1927 uprisings, though the source cautions that accounts crediting him with organizing or ordering them exaggerate his role, as key decisions were made by Chen Duxiu with Comintern representatives.

In late April 1931 Zhou's security chief Gu Shunzhang was arrested in Wuhan and, under threat of torture, disclosed underground organizations, leading to the arrest and execution of more than ten senior leaders there, and offered to give Shanghai details directly to Chiang Kai-shek. Agent Qian Zhuangfei intercepted the telegram and warned Zhou, who used two days to evacuate members and change codes. His reaction was extreme: more than fifteen members of Gu's family were murdered by the Red Squad and buried in Shanghai residential areas, and KMT secret police figure Wang Bing was assassinated. In June 1931 Xiang Zhongfa ignored Zhou's warnings and was arrested; Zhou obtained a copy of the interrogation records, which showed Xiang had revealed the location of his residence.

Moving to the Jiangxi base late in 1931, Zhou pushed to expand rather than merely defend it, replaced Mao as secretary of the First Front Army in December 1931 and made himself political commissar of the Red Army, and defended Mao at the October 1932 Ningdu Conference. Though he had supported purging counterrevolutionaries while in Shanghai, on arriving in Jiangxi he suppressed the campaign's excesses, condemning its 'excess, the panic, and the oversimplification' and torture, with his resolution adopted 7 January 1932. In 1933, with Bo Gu and Comintern adviser Otto Braun, he reorganized the Red Army, and when the CCP decided to abandon Jiangxi he prepared the withdrawal logistics in absolute secrecy and negotiated safe passage with the Guangdong warlord Chen Jitang. After the Zunyi Conference Mao became Zhou's assistant, and after the Long March reached Shaanxi Mao formally took over Zhou's leading position.

Chief CCP representative in Wuhan from late 1937 under the nominal cooperation agreement, Zhou headed the official liaison office and established the Central Committee's Yangtze Bureau, using its cover for clandestine operations in southern China. As the Party's main contact with the outside world he built contacts with over forty foreign journalists and writers and arranged for the Canadian medical team headed by Norman Bethune to reach Yan'an. In January 1938 the Nationalist government appointed him deputy director of the Political Department of the Military Committee under General Chen Cheng with the rank of lieutenant-general, the only Communist in a high-level Nationalist government position. On 4 May 1939 the Politburo accepted his assessment to create a network of secret long-term agents, and the secret Party member Yan Baohang informed him that Hitler planned to attack the USSR on 22 June 1941, information that under Zhou's signature reached Stalin two days before the attack.

In Chongqing he cultivated friendships with Nationalist officers, penetrated warlord armies, and received foreign visitors including Ernest Hemingway. Returning permanently to Yan'an in 1943, he was labelled an 'empiricist' in Mao's indoctrination campaign and survived through long public self-criticisms; Georgi Dimitrov wrote to Mao that Zhou 'must not be severed from the Party.' In the Chongqing negotiations after Japan's 1945 surrender, Yan'an feared Chiang's invitation was a trap and Zhou took control of Mao's security detail and inspected the plane and lodgings; during forty-three days Mao and Chiang met eleven times but resolved nothing. From his arrival in Chongqing on 22 December 1945 for the Marshall Mission, Zhou represented the CCP; in January 1946 both sides agreed to cease hostilities and reorganize their armies on the principle of separating army from party, agreements Zhou signed knowing neither side could implement them. As the talks collapsed, on 19 November 1946 Zhou and the entire CCP delegation left Nanjing for Yan'an. With civil war resumed he worked directly under Mao as vice chairman of the Military Commission and general chief of staff and headed the Central Committee's Urban Work Committee coordinating work inside KMT-controlled areas. When Nationalist troops captured Yan'an in March 1947, his agent Xiong Xianghui supplied Peng Dehuai with details of KMT troop strength and deployment, enabling a protracted guerrilla campaign and a series of major victories. On 1 April 1949 Zhou led the six-member CCP delegation in peace negotiations with the KMT delegation led by Zhang Zhizhong, and on 15 April produced a 'final version' draft agreement amounting to an ultimatum; the lack of a response within five days signaled rejection.

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.