Chou En-Lai

Chou En-lai: see Zhou Enlai.

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Zhou Enlai

 or Chou En-lai

(born March 5, 1898, Huai'an, Jiangsu province, China—died Jan. 8, 1976, Beijing) Chinese communist leader, premier from the founding of the People's Republic of China until his death (1949–76). Zhou became a communist during his studies abroad in France and was an organizer for the Chinese Communist Party in Europe. Like other communists, he worked with the Nationalists in the early 1920s and escaped capture when Chiang Kai-shek purged his former allies in 1927. He joined Zhu De and Mao Zedong in Jiangxi province and became political commissar of the Red Army. In the 1930s he negotiated a tactical alliance with the Nationalists to resist Japanese aggression. When the communists prevailed over the Nationalists in 1949, Zhou became premier of the new People's Republic of China. During the Cultural Revolution, Zhou helped restrain extremists; as the revolution waned in the early 1970s, he sought to restore Deng Xiaoping and other moderates to power. He is credited with arranging the historic meeting between U.S. Pres. Richard Nixon and Mao that paved the way for U.S. recognition of the communist government.

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Chou En-lai, Zhou En Lai

1898--1976, Chinese Communist statesman; foreign minister of the People's Republic of China (1949--58) and premier (1949--76)

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Chou En-Lai 

Born Mar. 5, 1898, in Shaohsing District, Chekiang Province; died Jan. 8, 1976, in Peking. Chinese state and political figure.

Chou En-lai was the son of a landowner. As a student at Nank’ai University in Tientsin he took part in the anti-imperialist May Fourth Movement in 1919. From 1920 to 1924 he worked and studied in France and Germany. In 1922 he joined the Communist Party of China (CPC). From 1924 to 1926 he was head of the political department of the Whampoa Military Academy and head of the political department of the I Corps of the National Revolutionary Army.

In 1927, Chou became a member of the Central Committee of the CPC and helped organize and lead the Nanch’ang Uprising. In August of that year he became a candidate member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPC, and in 1928, at the Sixth Congress of the Comintern, he was elected a candidate member of the Executive Committee of the Communist International. From 1927 to 1930, Chou was head of the organizational department of the Central Committee of the CPC, and from 1931 to 1934 he headed the Central Committee’s bureau for the Central Soviet Region. From 1934 to 1956 he was a secretary of the Central Committee.

In 1934 and 1935, Chou was a leader of the Long March. In 1935, at the Seventh Congress of the Comintern, he was elected a member of the Executive Committee of the Communist International. From 1937 to 1945 he was chairman of the Central Committee of the CPC in the Kuomintang Government, which was located first in Nanking and later in Chungking.

From 1949 to 1954, Chou was premier of the State Administrative Council of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and from 1949 to 1958 he served as foreign minister of the PRC. He became premier of the State Council of the PRC in 1954 and a member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPC in 1956. He was vice-chairman of the Central Committee of the CPC from 1956 to 1966 and from 1973 until his death.

Chou delivered the political report of the Central Committee of the CPC to the Tenth Congress of the CPC in 1973 and the report on the work of the government at the 1975 session of the National People’s Congress; on both occasions he called for Maoist principles in the domestic and foreign policy of the Chinese leadership.

V. I. ELIZAROV