En-lai Chou (Enlai Zhou) is wildly recognized as the most influential
diplomat in the history of Communist China, but less commonly known as
the right-hand man of Zedong Mao.
He was born in rural Hwaian, China, in 1898 (the exact date is
unknown). The son of an imperial government bureaucrat, Chou was
disillusioned by the Manchu court's concessions to the West and became
a militant nationalist. He joined the socialist movement in 1917 while
he was a student studying in Japan. Two years later, upon his return to
China, he was arrested for being a leftist agitator. Upon his release
in 1920 he fled to France, where he became an active corresponding
member of the newly founded Communist Party. After finishing his
Marxist studies, Chou went back to China in 1922 to join
Yat-sen Sun, then cooperating with the
Communists.
In 1924 he taught at Whampoa Military Academy, which was then under
Communist control. In 1927, two years after Sun's death, fighting broke
out between the Communist rebels and Nationalist troops loyal to
Kuomintang leader Kai-Shek Chiang in
Shanghai. During that time Chou became one of the top commanders of the
Chinese People's Red Army, and by 1931 he became second-in-command with
the rank of general alongside Mao. Chou played a key part in the Red
Army's survival and took part in the "Long March" of 1934 when the Red
Army, after suffering a string of defeats at the hands of the
Nationalists, retreated across the country to rebuild their shattered
forces. In 1937, after Japan invaded China from occupied Manchuria,
Chou negotiated a truce between the warring Chinese armies to combat
the Japanese. Throught the Second World War in China (1937-1945) Chou
served as the Communists' chief liaison with Chiang Kai-shek, an
assignment that signaled his transition from field commander to
diplomat. As a result of his new role, Chou helped plan the overall
strategy during the second civil war that broke out once again between
the Communists and Nationalists after the defeat of Japan in late 1945,
but he personally did not lead troops into combat again, for that was
now solely Mao's job.
Following the Communist victory that resulted in the formation of the
People's Republic of China in 1949, Chou was named premier and foreign
minister. During his long political career, Chou played an important
role in the negotiations that ended the Korean War (1950-1953)--in
which China sent troops to fight alongside the Communist North Korean
army--as well as the French war in Indochina (1946-1954), the US
involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s and the normalization of relations
with the US in 1972. En-lai Chou died while in office in Peking
(Bejing) from cancer on January 8, 1976, at the age of 77 or 78, second
only to Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong in the Communist hierarchy,
who ironically later died in September that same year.
