Zhou Enlai

For more than a quarter of a century Zhou Enlai was the chief administrator and public face abroad of the People's Republic of China, serving as its premier from its founding in October 1949 until his death in January 1976. One of the earliest leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, he accepted Mao Zedong's supremacy in the 1930s and remained his indispensable second for four decades. Many Chinese remember him as a moderating influence on Mao, while some historians emphasise how far he went along with persecutions to survive.

Zhou was born on 5 March 1898 in Huai'an, Jiangsu, into a declining family of scholar-officials. He studied at the progressive Nankai Middle School in Tianjin, spent 1917–19 in Japan, and in late 1920 went to Europe. In Paris in the spring of 1921 he joined a Chinese communist cell, working among young radicals who included the future leader Deng Xiaoping.

Returning in 1924, Zhou became chief political officer at the Whampoa Military Academy near Guangzhou, the Nationalist army's school under Chiang Kai-shek, while quietly building Communist cells among the cadets. In 1927 he helped direct armed workers in Shanghai, but when Chiang turned on the Communists in April he was briefly arrested and narrowly escaped. He then oversaw the failed Nanchang uprising and from 1929 ran the party's underground and intelligence networks in Shanghai.

In December 1931 Zhou moved to the Communist base in Jiangxi, where he curbed a violent internal purge that Mao had driven and took over Mao's post as political commissar of the Red Army. When Chiang's fifth encirclement campaign made the base untenable, Zhou organised the breakout of October 1934 that began the Long March. During the march he backed Mao against the leaders blamed for the defeats, and after the Zunyi Conference of January 1935 he gradually ceded first place to Mao, settling into the role of deputy he would keep for the rest of his life.

In December 1936 the general Zhang Xueliang seized Chiang in the Xi'an Incident, and Zhou flew in as the Communists' chief negotiator. The settlement helped bring a united front against Japan. Zhou spent much of the war as the party's representative in the Nationalist capitals of Wuhan and Chongqing. Back in Yan'an in 1943, he was harshly criticised in Mao's rectification campaign and survived through repeated self-criticism and praise of Mao. After 1945 he took part in the failed negotiations with the Nationalists, with American mediation, before the Chinese Civil War resumed.

On the founding of the People's Republic, Zhou became both premier and foreign minister, the latter until 1958. Before North Korea invaded the South in 1950, he and Mao had urged Kim Il Sung to be cautious. At the Geneva Conference of 1954 he helped broker the settlement that divided Indochina, and at the Bandung Conference of Asian and African states in 1955 he won wide sympathy for China. On the way to Bandung a bomb destroyed an Air India airliner chartered for his delegation; Zhou was not aboard, and a recent study blames Nationalist agents, while one account claims he knew of the plot in advance. In 1971–72 he negotiated with Henry Kissinger the opening that brought President Richard Nixon to Beijing.

When Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Zhou kept the government and economy running. He shielded some officials, intellectuals and cultural sites, including the Forbidden City, from the Red Guards, but he also publicly endorsed the attacks on Liu Shaoqi and others and could not save many of those close to him.

Diagnosed with bladder cancer in 1972, Zhou died on 8 January 1976, aged 77. Restrictions on mourning him provoked mass demonstrations in Tiananmen Square that April, which were suppressed. He remains one of the most respected figures of the Communist era in China.

Our 1960 map shows the People's Republic of China during his premiership, and the 1938 map shows the divided country of the Nationalist years.