Zhou Enlai was born in Huaian, Jiangsu Province. His family, although of the educated scholar class, was not well off. His grandfather, a minor civil servant of the Emperor, was poorly paid. His father repeatedly failed the Imperial examinations, and throughout his life would be employed in low-paying minor clerkships. Zhou Enlai was the eldest son and eldest grandson of the Zhou family. When Enlai was still less than one year old, he was adopted by his father's youngest brother who was dying of tuberculosis. This adoption took place so that the younger brother would not die childless. Lady Chen, his adoptive mother, began to teach him Chinese characters as soon as he could toddle. By the time he was four years old he could read and write several hundred words.

In 1907, Zhou’s birth mother and adopted mother both died, so it was arranged that he leave Huai'an and go to Manchuria to live with his Uncle. At the age of twelve, Zhou was enrolled in the Tung Guan model school that taught “new learning,” i.e. mathematics and natural science, as well as Chinese history, geography and literature. The students were also exposed to translations of western books, where Enlai learned about freedom, democracy and the American and French revolutions.

In 1913, Zhou enrolled at the prestigious Nankai High School in Tianjin. This was a time of great political turmoil in China. The Xinhai Revolution which overthrew the Qing Dynasty, and the establishment of the Republic of China by Sun Yat-sen, had taken place in 1911. The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 had diverted European influence away from China. But Japan quickly moved in and had replaced the European powers in the colonial exploitation of China.

After Zhou graduated from Nankai in 1917, his family sent him to Tokyo to continue his university education. He had intended to study as a teacher, but he became increasingly disillusioned with the militaristic Japanese society and their influence in China. At Nankai he had written and spoken against Japan’s military and political pressure upon China, and its inexorable slide into anarchy. He challenged his fellow students on what his generation could do to save China. In 1919 May 9, dejected and without completing his education, Zhou left Japan and returned to Tianjin. His decision was strongly influenced by his fellow classmate from Nankai and Japan. He would return in time to take part in the revolutionary May Fourth Movement that was taking place in China at that.

Zhou first came to national prominence as an activist during the May Fourth Movement. He had enrolled as a student in the literature department of Nankai University, which enabled him to visit the campus, but he never attended classes. He became one of the organizers of the Tianjin Students Union, whose avowed aim was “to struggle against the warlords and against imperialism, and to save China from extinction." Zhou became the editor of the student union’s newspaper, Tianjin Student. In September, he founded the Awareness Society with twelve men and eight women. Fifteen year old Deng Yingchao, Enlai’s future wife, was one of the founding female members. In January 1920, the police raided the printing press and arrested several members of the Awareness Society. Enlai led a group of students to protest the arrests, and was himself arrested along with 28 others. After the trial in July, they were found guilty of a minor offense and released. Instead of being selected to go to Moscow for training, he was chosen to go to France as a student organizer.

On November 7, 1920, Zhou Enlai and 196 other Chinese students sailed from Shanghai for Marseilles, France. At Marseilles they were met by a member of the Sino-French Education Committee and boarded a train to Paris. Almost as soon as he arrived Zhou became embroiled in a wrangle between the students and the education authorities running the “work and study” program. The students were supposed to work in factories part time and attend class part time. Because of corruption and graft in the Education Committee, however, the students were not paid. As a result they simply provided cheap labour for the French factory owners and received very little education in return. Zhou wrote to newspapers back in China denouncing the committee and the corrupt government officials.

Zhou moved in with Liu Tsingyang and Zhang Shenfu, who were setting up a Communist cell. Zhou joined the group and was entrusted with political and organizational work. There is some controversy over the date Zhou joined the Communist Party of China. For secrecy reasons members did not carry membership cards. Zhou himself wrote "autumn, 1922" at a verification carried out at the Party's Seventh Congress in 1945. There were 2,000 Chinese students in France, some 200 each in Belgium and England and between 300 and 400 in Germany. For the next four years Zhou was the chief recruiter, organizer and coordinator of activities of the Socialist Youth League. He traveled constantly between Belgium, Germany and France, safely conveying party members through Berlin to entrain for Moscow, to be taught the art of revolution. In 1923 the communists established a “united front” with Sun Yat-sen’s new Kuomintang (KMT or Nationalist Party). Zhou was now charged with the task of coordinating cooperation between the two vastly different political movements in Europe. He apparently did such a good job he was ordered back to China to take charge of the united front work in the Kuomintang stronghold in Guangzhou. He arrived in Hong Kong in July 1924.

In January, 1924, Sun Yat-sen had officially proclaimed an alliance between the Kuomintang and the Communists, and a plan for a military expedition to unify China and destroy the warlords. The Whampoa Military Academy was set up in March to train officers for the armies that would march against the warlords. Russian ships unloaded crates of weapons at the Guangzhou docks. Comintern advisers from Moscow joined Sun’s entourage. In October, shortly after he arrived back from Europe, Zhou Enlai was appointed deputy-director of the political department at the Whampoa Military Academy in Guangzhou.

Sun Yat-sen died on March 12, 1925. No sooner was Sun dead than trouble broke out in Guangzhou. A warlord named Chen Chiungming made a bid to take the city and province. The East Expedition, led by Zhou, was organized as a military offensive against Chen. Using the disciplined core of CCP cadets they met with resounding success. Zhou was promoted to head Whampoa’s martial law bureau. Zhou quickly crushed an attempted coup by another warlord within the city. Chen Chiungming once again took the field in October 1925. Once again Zhou defeated him and this time captured the important city of Shantou on the South China coast. Zhou was appointed special commissioner of Shantou and surrounding region. Zhou began to build up a party branch in Shantou whose membership he would keep secret. During this time Chiang Kai-shek began to take firm control of the KMT and prepare to betray his communist "united front" allies.

On August 8, 1925, he and Deng Yingchao were finally married after a long distance courtship of nearly five years. The couple remained childless, but adopted many orphaned children of "revolutionary martyrs"; one of the more famous was future Premier Li Peng. After being removed from the Whampoa Academy by Chiang Kai-shek, Zhou worked as a labor agitator. In 1926, he organized a general strike in Shanghai, opening the city to the Kuomintang. When the Kuomintang broke with the Communists, Zhou managed to escape the white terror. Zhou eventually made his way to the Jiangxi base area and gradually began to shift his loyalty away from the more orthodox, urban-focused branch of the CCP to Mao's new brand of rural revolution, and became one of the prominent members of the CCP. This transition was completed early in the Long March, when in January 1935 Zhou threw his total support to Mao in his power struggle with the Bolshevik Faction.

In the Yan'an years, Zhou was active in promoting a united anti-Japanese front. As a result, he played a major role in the Xi'an Incident, helped to secure Chiang Kai-shek's release, and negotiated the Second CCP-KMT United Front, and coining the famous phrase "Chinese should not fight Chinese but a common enemy: the invader". Zhou spent the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) as CCP ambassador to Chiang's wartime government and took part in the failed negotiations following World War II.

In 1949, with the establishment of the People's Republic of China, Zhou assumed the role of Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs. In June 1953, he made the five declarations for peace. He headed the Communist Chinese delegation to the Geneva Conference and to the Bandung Conference (1955). He survived a covert proxy assassination attempt by the nationalist Kuomintang under the government of Chiang Kai-shek on his way to Bandung. An American-made MK7 was planted on a charter plane Kashmir Princess scheduled for Zhou's trip. Zhou changed plane but the rest of his crew of 16 people died. A moderate force and a new influential voice for non-aligned states in the Cold War, Zhou's diplomacy strengthened regional ties with India, Burma, and many southeast Asian countries, as well as African states. In 1958, the post of Minister of Foreign Affairs was passed to Chen Yi but Zhou remained Prime Minister until his death in 1976.

Zhou's first major domestic focus after becoming premier was China's economy, in a poor state after decades of war. He aimed at increased agricultural production through the even re-distribution of land. Industrial progress was also on his to-do list. He additionally initiated the first environmental reforms in China. In 1958, Mao Zedong began the Great Leap Forward, aimed at increasing China's production levels in industry and agriculture with unrealistic targets. As a popular and practical administrator, Zhou maintained his position through the Leap. The Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) was a great blow to Zhou. At its late stages in 1975, he pushed for the "four modernizations" to undo the damage caused by the campaigns.

Known as an able diplomat, Zhou was largely responsible for the re-establishment of contacts with the West in the early 1970s. He welcomed US President Richard Nixon to China in February 1972, and signed the Shanghai Communiqué. After discovering he had cancer, he began to pass many of his responsibilities onto Deng Xiaoping. During the late stages of the Cultural Revolution, Zhou was the new target of Chairman Mao's and Gang of Four's political campaigns in 1975 by initiating "criticizing Song Jiang, evaluating the Water Margin", alluding to a Chinese literary work, using Zhou as an example of a political loser. In addition, the Criticize Lin, Criticize Confucius campaign was also directed at Premier Zhou because he was viewed as one of the Gang's primary political opponents.

Zhou was hospitalized in 1974 for bladder cancer, but continued to conduct work from the hospital, with Deng Xiaoping as the First Deputy Premier handling most of the important State Council matters. Zhou died on the morning of January 8, 1976, 8 months before Mao Zedong. Zhou's death brought messages of condolences from many states that he affected during his tenure as an effective diplomat and negotiator on the world stage, and many states saw his death as a terrible loss.

Because Zhou was very popular with the people, many rose in spontaneous expressions of mourning across China, which the Gang considered to be dangerous, as they feared people might use this opportunity to express hatred towards them. During the Tiananmen Incident in April 1976, the Gang of Four tried to suppress mourning for the "Beloved Premier", which resulted in rioting. Anti-Gang of Four poetry was found on some wreaths that were laid, and all wreaths were subsequently taken down at the Monument to the People's Heroes. Thousands of armed soldiers brutally crushed the people’s protest in Tiananmen Square, and hundreds of people were arrested. The Gang of Four blamed Deng Xiaoping for the movement and removed him from all positions.

Zhou Enlai is generally regarded as a skilled negotiator, a master of policy implementation, a devoted revolutionary, and a pragmatic statesman with infinite patience and an unusual attentiveness to detail and nuance. He was also known for his tireless and dedicated work ethic. He is reputedly the last Mandarin bureaucrat in the Confucian tradition. Zhou's political behavior should be viewed in light of his political philosophy as well as his personality. To a large extent, Zhou epitomized the paradox inherent in a communist politician with traditional Chinese upbringing: at once conservative and radical, pragmatic and ideological, possessed by a belief in order and harmony as well as a faith in the progressive power of rebellion and revolution.

Though a firm believer in the Communist ideal on which modern China was founded, Zhou is widely believed to have moderated the excesses of Mao's radical policies within the limits of his power. It has been assumed that he protected imperial and religious sites of cultural significance (such as the Potala palace in Lhasa, Tibet) from the Red Guards, as well as shielding top-level leaders from purges.

This article and images are under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Sun Yat-sen".