Hunan party secretary and one-time secretary to Mao, branded “anti-party” for backing Peng Dehuai at Lushan
From a landlord family in Xiangtan, Hunan, he joined the Communist Party in 1935 as a student at Beijing Normal University. In 1936 he secretly negotiated an end to the civil war and joint resistance to Japan with T. V. Soong and Chen Lifu in Nanjing, and in Yan’an became a secretary to Mao Zedong. In the war against Japan he organised guerrilla warfare in the central Hebei base, and in the civil war he was deputy propaganda chief of the North China Bureau, and after 1949 party secretary of Hunan. At Lushan in 1959 he, Huang Kecheng and Zhang Wentian supported Peng Dehuai’s criticism of the Great Leap; branded an “anti-party clique”, he was sent to re-education through labour. Restored to an academic post in Guangzhou in 1962, he was attacked again in the Cultural Revolution and took his own life in December 1966. He was rehabilitated in 1979.
Also known as: Chou Hsiao-chou · Zhou Huaiqiu
Activities and affiliations
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1935–1966
Political and party leadership
- Party Secretary of Hunan1953–1959
- Propaganda chief, central Hebei party committee1938–1949Ideology and propaganda
Career Timeline
- 1935Joined the Communist Party at Beijing Normal University; leader of the December 9th Movement
- 1936Secret talks with the Kuomintang in Nanjing; secretary to Mao
- 1938Standing committee member and propaganda chief, central Hebei
- 1953–1959Party secretary of Hunan
- 1959Branded part of the “anti-party clique” at Lushan and dismissed
- 1962Restored to an academic post in Guangzhou
- 1966Suicide during the Cultural Revolution