Zhou Enlai

Zhou Enlai (simplified Chinese: 周恩来, traditional Chinese: 周恩來, pinyin: Zhōu Ēnlái, Wade-Giles: Chou En-lai) (Huai'an, March 5, 1898 – Beijing, January 8, 1976) was a prominent politician of the People's Republic of China, a member of the Chinese Communist Party since his youth and prime minister of China from the establishment of the socialist government in 1949 until his death.

Name

Although the correct transcription in the Wade-Giles system, used almost universally in the West until the 1980s, is "Chou En-lai", in the media In Spanish-speaking communication, the form Chu En-lai was frequently used, probably due to the erroneous idea that the spelling Chou was of French origin. Note that the diphthong ou is pronounced in Mandarin as it is read in Spanish.

Youth

Zhou Enlai was born in the town of Huai'an, Jiangsu Province, into a wealthy family of imperial officials and was adopted by his paternal uncle in Tianjin, where he studied at Nankai High School., to later continue his education in Japan, at Meiji University between 1915 and 1918. After his return to Nankai, he participated in the protests of May 4, 1919 and was briefly detained due to his revolutionary contacts. After being released in 1920, he traveled to Europe to study, residing successively in France, England and Germany. During his stay in Europe, like other Chinese students, he joined the Chinese Communist Party, founded in 1921 by Chen Duxiu. In 1924, Zhou returned to China.

Zhou's grandfather, Zhou Panlong, and his great-uncle, Zhou Jun'ang, were the first members of the family to move to Huai'an. Panlong apparently passed the provincial examinations, and Zhou Enlai later claimed that Panlong served as a magistrate ruling Huai'an County. Zhou's father, Zhou Yineng, was the second of Zhou Panlong's four sons. Zhou's biological mother, surnamed Wan, was the daughter of a prominent Jiangsu official.

During the Cultural Revolution, when the "red" (poor) family history became essential to everything, from university admission to government service, Zhou had to resort to his mother's mother, who according to him was the daughter of a farmer, to find a family member who qualified as "red."

Like many others, the economic fortunes of Zhou's large family of scholar-officials were decimated by a major economic recession in China at the turn of the century XIX. Zhou Yineng had a reputation for being honest, kind, intelligent and concerned about others, but he was also considered "weak"; and "lack of discipline and determination". He was not successful in his personal life and wandered around China in various occupations, working in Beijing, Shandong, Anhui, Shenyang, Inner Mongolia and Sichuan. Zhou Enlai later remembered his father as someone who was always away from home and generally unable to provide for his family.

Shortly after birth, Zhou Enlai was adopted by his father's younger brother, Zhou Yigan, who was ill with tuberculosis. The adoption was apparently arranged because the family feared that Yigan would die without an heir.

This is the reason for Gao's adoption (23). Lee (11) suggests that it was because of the belief that having a child could cure the disease of the father.

Zhou Yigan died shortly after the adoption, and Zhou Enlai was raised by Yigan's widow, whose surname was Chen. Madame Chen also belonged to a family of scholars and received a traditional literary education. By Zhou's own account, he was very close to her adoptive mother and from her he acquired her lasting interest in Chinese literature and opera. Madame Chen taught Zhou to read and write at a young age, and Zhou later claimed to have read the famous vernacular novel Journey to the West at the age of six. By the age of eight, he was reading other traditional Chinese novels, such as The Water Margin, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and The Dream of the Red Chamber.

Zhou's biological mother, Wan, died in 1907, when Zhou was 9 years old, and his adoptive mother, Chen, in 1908, when Zhou was 10 years old. Zhou's father was working in Hubei, far from Jiangsu, so Zhou and his two younger brothers returned to Huai'an and lived with their father's younger brother, Yikui, for the next two years. In 1910, Zhou's uncle Yigeng, his father's older brother, offered to take care of Zhou. Huai'an's family accepted, and Zhou was sent to stay with his uncle in Manchuria, in Shenyang, where Zhou Yigeng worked in a government office.

Zhou's father may also be in Manchuria at that time, and Zhou may live with him for a while. Subsequently, Zhou's contacts with his father decreased. He died in 1941.

On August 8, 1925, Zhou married Deng Yingchao, a student involved in political activities, in Tianjin. Deng Yingchao would also become a prominent member of the Communist party. The marriage had no children, but she adopted several orphans, children of "martyrs of the Revolution", among them the one who would become Prime Minister of China Li Peng.

Education

In Shenyang, Zhou attended the Dongguan Model Academy, a modern-style school. Her previous education consisted entirely of homeschooling. In addition to new subjects such as English and science, Zhou was also exposed to the writings of reformers and radicals such as Liang Qichao, Kang Youwei, Chen Tianhua, Zou Rong and Zhang Binglin. At the age of fourteen, Zhou stated that his motivation to continue studying was "to become a great man who would shoulder the heavy responsibilities of the country in the future." In 1913, Zhou's uncle was transferred to Tianjin, where Zhou entered the famous Nankai Middle School.

Nankai High School was founded by Yan Xiu, a prominent scholar and philanthropist, and led by Zhang Boling, one of the most important Chinese educators of the century XX. Nankai's teaching methods were unusual by contemporary Chinese standards. By the time Zhou began attending, he had adopted the educational model used at Phillips Academy in the U.S. The school's reputation, with its "highly disciplined" daily routine; and its "strict moral code" attracted many students who later stood out in public life. Zhou's friends and classmates ranged from Ma Jun (one of the first communist leaders executed in 1927) to K. C. Wu (later mayor of Shanghai and governor of Taiwan under the Nationalist Party). Zhou's talents also attracted the attention of Yan Xiu and Zhang Boling. Yan, in particular, held Zhou in high regard and helped pay for his studies in Japan and, later, France.

Yan was so impressed with Zhou that he encouraged him to marry his daughter, but Zhou refused. Zhou later expressed the reasons for his decision not to marry Yan's daughter to his classmate, Zhang Honghao. Zhou said he declined the marriage because he feared that his financial prospects were not promising and that Yan, as his father-in-law, would later dominate his life.

Zhou did well in his studies at Nankai; He excelled in Chinese, won several awards in the school's speech club, and became editor of the school newspaper in his senior year. Zhou was also very active in acting and producing plays in Nankai; many students who did not know him otherwise learned about him through his performance. Nankai preserves a series of essays and articles written by Zhou at this time, which reflect the discipline, training and concern for the country that the founders of Nankai tried to instill in their students. At the school's tenth graduation, in June 1917, Zhou was one of five students who graduated at the ceremony and one of the top two students.

When he graduated from Nankai, Zhang Boling's teachings on gong (public spirit) and neng (skill) had made a great impression on him. His participation in debates and stage performances contributed to his eloquence and persuasiveness. Zhou left Nankai with a great desire to dedicate himself to public service and to acquire the necessary skills to do so.

Following many of his classmates, Zhou went to Japan in July 1917 to continue his studies. During his two years in Japan, Zhou spent most of his time at the East Asian Higher Preparatory School, a language school for Chinese students. Zhou's studies were funded by his uncles and, apparently, also by Nankai's founder, Yan Xiu, but his funds were limited; During this period, Japan was suffering from severe inflation. Zhou originally planned to win one of the scholarships offered by the Chinese government; These scholarships, however, required Chinese students to pass entrance exams at Japanese universities. Zhou took the entrance examinations for at least two universities, but failed to gain admission. Zhou's anxieties were compounded by the death of his uncle, Zhou Yikui, his inability to master Japanese, and Japan's acute cultural chauvinism. that discriminated against the Chinese. By the time Zhou returned to China in the spring of 1919, he had become deeply disenchanted with Japanese culture, rejecting the idea that the Japanese political model was relevant to China and disdaining the values of elitism and militarism that he observed.

Zhou's diaries and letters from his stay in Tokyo show a deep interest in politics and current affairs, in particular the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the new policies of the Bolsheviks. He began to avidly read Chen Duxiu's progressive, leftist magazine, New Youth. He read early Japanese works on Marx, and it has been claimed that he even attended Kawakami Hajime's lectures at the University of Kyoto. Kawakami was an important figure in the early history of Japanese Marxism, and his translations and articles influenced a generation of Chinese communists. However, it now seems unlikely that Zhou knew him or heard any of his lectures. Zhou's diaries They also show interest in the Chinese student protests in opposition to the Sino-Japanese Joint Defense Agreement of May 1918, but he did not actively participate in them nor did he return to China as part of the 'Homecoming Movement'. His active role in political movements began after his return to China.

Political career

Zhou actively participated in the May Fourth Movement protests in 1919, in which many students demonstrated against the conditions of the Treaty of Versailles, which granted commercial privileges to Japan in China. During his stay in France, he participated in political activities, joining the French Communist Party.

After his return to China, as a member of the Communist Party, he held the position of director of the political department at the Whampoa Military Academy in Canton from its foundation in 1926. The Whampoa Academy had been founded by Sun Yat -sen, the founder of the Chinese nationalist Kuomintang party. At that time, the communists and the nationalists of the Kuomintang, both advised by the Comintern, maintained a collaborative relationship to fight against the warlords who controlled China. Zhou Enlai's position in Whampoa was supported by the Comintern, which wanted to counter the growing influence of the right wing of the Kuomintang represented by Chiang Kai-shek.

After the beginning of the Northern Expedition, the military offensive in which the revolutionary army formed in Whampoa began to expand the territory under its control, Zhou Enlai continued his political activism within the Communist Party, and was responsible for the organization of the Shanghai general strike in 1926, which opened the doors for the entry of Kuomintang troops. Following the breakup between the Communists and the Kuomintang, which, under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek, had begun to persecute the Communists, Zhou was able to escape from the Kuomintang-controlled area. Zhou moved to the communist base of Jiangxi, where Mao Zedong had established the Jiangxi Soviet, one of the rural bases under communist control and from which Mao began his rise to power. Zhou's Soviet-inspired urban communism came closer to Mao's ideas of rural revolution. At the beginning of the Long March, the Zunyi Meeting took place, a city in Guizhou province, where Zhou Enlai, who until then had a higher position than Mao in the party hierarchy, withdrew his support for Wang Ming's faction., the leader of the pro-Soviet faction of the 28 Bolsheviks, and supported Mao as the party's new strongman.

After the end of the Long March, when the communists settled in the northern city of Yan'an, Zhou was noted for his efforts in promoting an alliance with the Kuomintang to fight Japan in the Second Sino War. -Japanese. During the Xi'an Incident, in which Chiang Kai-shek was kidnapped and forced to establish a new united front against the Japanese invasion, Zhou played an important role in freeing Chiang. During the Japanese invasion, Zhou became the representative of the Chinese Communist Party in Chongqing, the provisional capital of the Republic of China under Kuomintang control. After the end of the war in 1945, Zhou participated in the failed negotiations with the Kuomintang, which ended in open civil war between the Communists and the Kuomintang.

Zhou as Prime Minister of China

In 1949, after the founding of the People's Republic, Zhou assumed the positions of prime minister and foreign minister of the new regime. He led the Chinese delegation to the Geneva Conference in 1954 and to the Bandung Conference in 1955. Zhou Enlai, emerged unscathed from the first air attack in history with a political objective, in 1955, when he was saved of sabotage on his plane. The bomb exploded on April 11, 1955, on an Air India plane flying from Hong Kong to Jakarta, in which Zhou ultimately did not travel to reach the Bandung Conference in Indonesia.

In 1958, he handed over the position of Foreign Minister to Chen Yi, maintaining the position of prime minister until his death.

The main issue that focused Zhou's attention after the communist victory in the civil war was the recovery of the Chinese economy, ruined by decades of war. He encouraged policies aimed at increasing agricultural production through agrarian reforms and sought industrial development through cooperation pacts with the Soviet Union.

In 1958, Mao Zedong launched the Great Leap Forward, a mass mobilization campaign that sought to dramatically increase China's levels of industrial production. Zhou survived the unreason of the failed economic policies of the Great Leap. His loyalty to Mao also allowed him to survive the Cultural Revolution, Mao's other great ideological campaign that resulted in criticism and attacks on numerous leaders and intellectuals accused of being reactionary and right-wing. Zhou attempted to defend some collaborators from Maoist attacks. In 1975, as the ideological impetus of the Cultural Revolution was losing steam, in his last public speech, he called for the 'Four Modernizations'. to put China back on the path of economic growth. Among these four modernizations, the importance of China opening its markets to the world was insisted on. These words of Zhou would be used years later by the reformists led by Deng Xiaoping.

Foreign relations

Known for his skills as a diplomat, Zhou was largely responsible for the resumption of diplomatic relations between China and Western powers in the 1970s. Henry Kissinger traveled to China in 1971 as US National Security Advisor and met with Zhou to discuss the powers of the Central Intelligence Agency among other matters. He received US President Richard Nixon on his visit to China in February 1972, and signed the Shanghai Communiqué, which established the bases for the normalization of relations between the two countries. Zhou's response is famous "Although we have no historical perspective" to Richard Nixon when he asked him about the impact of the French Revolution on history.

After reestablishing relations with Japan, also in 1972, the Japanese authorities gave the prime minister a thousand cherry trees and Zhou Enlai planted some at Wuhan University.

Zhou's influence on Chinese politics has been seen as moderate and dialogic, in contrast to the ideological excesses of Maoism. He is said to have been responsible for the preservation of numerous sites of historical and cultural interest during the Cultural Revolution, when the Red Guards, zealous defenders of Maoist orthodoxy, threatened to destroy any vestige of pre-communist China. Despite his different disposition, Zhou was always loyal to Mao's leadership.

In 1963 and 1964 he made three trips to African countries to establish a new vision in foreign relations between Africa and Asia. The principles that Zhou promoted and that guided China's relations with Arab and African countries were support in their struggle to oppose imperialism, old and new colonialism, to win and safeguard national independence.

Recognitions

In July 2022, the Zhou Enlai Pavilion was reopened in memory of Zhou Enlai's visit to Bagan in 1961 as Prime Minister of the People's Republic of China. Myanmar built a pavilion next to the pagoda with the donation made by the Chinese prime minister to "protect the Burmese who worship the pagoda and pay homage to the Buddhas from wind and rain." This pavilion has become a symbol of the “brotherly” friendship between China and Myanmar.

Death and reactions

Zhou was hospitalized in 1974 with prostate cancer, but continued to carry out his job as prime minister from the hospital, with Deng Xiaoping as first vice prime minister handling the most important affairs of the State Council.. Zhou died on the morning of January 8, 1976, just eight months before Mao himself died.

After his death, there were numerous scenes of popular mourning in Tian'anmen Square. These scenes of mourning turned into protests against the Gang of Four, the group of four communist leaders who led the Cultural Revolution. During the Qingming Festival in April of that year, riots broke out in the square, in what has become known as the Tian'anmen Incident, when police cordoned off the square and removed many of the wreaths honoring of Zhou Enlai on which messages against the Gang of Four had been written.