CHOU EN LAI 1898 MARCH 5-1976 JANUARY 8

CHOU EN LAI 

1898 MARCH 5-1976 JANUARY 8

Chou En-lai was born in Huaian, Kiangsu Province, into a landed family. Both of his parents died while he was a child, and Chou was sent to live with an uncle in Mukden, where he was given a traditional primary education.

Early Foreign Travels
In 1917 Chou went to Japan to continue his education. He joined in the activities of a nationalistic Chinese student organization and was introduced to Marxist thought through Japanese sources. When the May Fourth student movement broke out in 1919, he returned to Tientsin to join in the active political ferment among Chinese students. He enrolled at Nank'ai University, where he became editor of a radical student newspaper. Early in 1920 he was arrested with other students after a demonstration and imprisoned for 4 months.

After his release from prison, Chou went to France on a work-study program and soon came under the influence of French and Chinese socialists active in France. He became a member of the Chinese Socialist Youth Corps, a young Communist organization, and founded its Berlin branch in 1922. In the same year he was elected to the executive committee of the European branch of the Chinese Communist party (CCP). As the Communist party was at that time allied with Sun Yat-sen's Kuomintang (KMT), Chou also joined the KMT and served on the executive committee of its European headquarters. During these years he formed close attachments with many future leaders of the CCP, including Chu Teh and Ch'en Yi.

Work with the Kuomintang

Late in 1924 Chou returned to China and began working in Canton at the joint Communist-KMT revolutionary headquarters established there by Sun. Chou soon became deputy director (and in effect acting director) of the political department of the Whampoa Military Academy, just established with Chiang Kai-shek as its commander. In this capacity Chou formed connections with many cadets who were later to form the core officer group of the Red Army, among them Lin Piao.

In August 1925 Chou was made political commissar to the 1st Division of the 1st Army of the KMT, which was the chief military force under Chiang Kai-shek's control at the time. In the winter of 1925 he became special commissioner of the recently captured East River District of Kwangtung Province. Chou lost both these posts, however, after the Chung-shan gunboat incident of March 1926, when Chiang Kai-shek seized control of the KMT by a military coup.

When the Kuomintang armies began the Northern Expedition against the warlords in the summer of 1926, Chou went to Shanghai and worked to organize a labor revolt in the city. Chou then directed the general strike that captured Shanghai just before Chiang's troops entered the city. Chou, however, escaped the terror instituted by Chiang and fled to Wuhan, where the official leadership of the KMT still supported the Communist alliance. At the Fifth National Congress of the Communist party there in April, he was elected for the first time to the Central Committee and the Politburo and became head of the Military Committee. When the KMT at Wuhan also broke with the Communists in the summer of 1927, Chou fled again. He took charge of a small military force created by the defection of Communist officers and led the Nanchang uprising on August 1. After the failure of this insurrection Chou remained with the Communist forces through a series of abortive campaigns aimed at setting up a base in Kwangtung Province.

With the Communist party in disarray as a result of these events, Chou went to Moscow for the Sixth National Congress of the Communist party and was reelected to his positions. He returned to China in 1929 and created the Red Guards, a secret police that tried to protect the party leadership in Shanghai. In the spring of 1931 Chou was sent to Ch'ingkan Mountain Soviet, controlled by Mao Tse-tung and Chu Teh, to establish a closer connection with the party headquarters. There he became political commissar of Chu Teh's army. When this base had to be abandoned in 1934, Chou served as a military officer on the Long March to Yenan in the northwest.

In Yenan, Chou began to emerge as a major negotiator for the Communist party. He worked out cease-fire arrangements with Gen. Chang Hsüeh-liang that eventuated in Chang's kidnaping of Chiang Kai-shek at Sian in December 1936. As leader of the Communist delegation summoned to Sian, Chou is widely believed to have saved Chiang Kaishek's life. From this point to the end of the Sino-Japanese war, Chou was largely involved in negotiations with Chiang Kai-shek and his government over common anti-Japanese issues. Chou spent much of the war period in Chungking, the Nationalist capital, where his personal charm, intelligence, and tact made him an effective spokesman for the Communist position to the press, foreign diplomats, and uncommitted Chinese.

From November 1944 Chou was regularly involved in negotiations between U.S. ambassador Patrick J. Hurley, the Nationalist government, and the Communists. Early in 1946 he headed the Communist team in negotiations with Gen. George Marshall over the future of China. When these discussions broke down, Chou returned to Yenan.

People's Republic of China

After the Communist victory in 1949, Chou became premier of the People's Republic. He was largely responsible for the creation and guidance of the new governmental bureaucracy and until 1958 was also foreign minister. After 1949 he was also largely responsible for maintaining relations with the non-Communist political groups that supported the People's Republic.

Early in 1950 Chou negotiated in Moscow a treaty of alliance with the Soviet Union, and in 1952 he again went to Moscow, where he negotiated further agreements. In 1957 he played a significant role in negotiating settlements of issues arising from Polish and Hungarian conflicts with the Soviet Union. After Sino-Soviet relations deteriorated, he led the Chinese delegation that walked out of the Twenty-second Congress of the Soviet party in October 1961.

Chou also had to deal with acute crises in Sino-American relations that arose largely as a result of the Korean War. On Oct. 2, 1950, he delivered through the Indian ambassador a warning that China would intervene in the war if American troops crossed the 38th parallel. The American rejection of this warning brought a direct confrontation of American and Chinese troops in Korea. However, on Chou's initiative in 1955, Sino-American ambassadorial talks began in Warsaw.

Chou also was prominent in forming and implementing Chinese policy toward the Afro-Asian nations. He made extensive tours of Asia and Africa. In 1954 he led the Chinese delegation at the Geneva Conference and was instrumental in drawing up terms for the French evacuation of Indo-China. In 1960 he played a leading role in negotiating treaties delimiting Chinese frontiers with Burma, Nepal, Mongolia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan but failed to resolve the Indian frontier question despite a visit to New Delhi for talks with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

Domestically, Chou played an essential role both as head of the administrative system and as peacemaker in the party. He actively supported Mao Tse-tung during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that developed in 1965, the major objective being to reinfuse revolutionary enthusiasm into Chinese society. At the end of this movement in 1969, Chou was the third-ranking member of the Chinese leadership, and later, after Lin Piao disappeared, the second-ranking member.

In 1975, Chou was dying of cancer, but he continued to serve China. In January, his report to the Fourth National People's Congress justified the Cultural Revolution as a battle against bourgeois tendencies and at the same time proposed the Four Modernizations (of agriculture, industry, national defense and technology). Chou died on January 8, 1976.

His Family
In 1925 Chou married Teng Ying-ch'ao, whom he had met in 1919 when they were both active in student demonstrations in Tientsin. She remained an active revolutionary leader and was one of the few women who made the Long March. When she was trapped in Peking by the Japanese occupation of the city, she was smuggled through Japanese lines by Edgar Snow. She was deputy chairman of the All-China Federation of Women. They had no children.



After Zhou Enlai’s 1960 trip to India ended in acrimony, Beijing concluded that Nehru was not interested in resolving the border dispute
Three weeks ahead of Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai’s landmark 1960 visit to India, Chinese officials prepared an internal note discussing how they viewed the political and economic situation in India and its bearing on the boundary issue. The April 1, 1960 note, among documents from 1949-65 that were declassified recently by the Chinese government, was prepared to brief the Chinese leadership ahead of Zhou’s April 20 visit.

The note is revealing of how Beijing perceived — rightly or wrongly — the influence of the political climate in India on driving the tensions on the border. “Since the implementation of the Second Five-Year Plan in April 1956, India’s economy has been deteriorating and its economic policy has moved increasingly towards the right,” the note observed. “The gap between the rich and the poor is growing. The road of Indian bourgeois reformism has become narrower and narrower.”

“The U.S.-led Imperialist countries,” the note continued, “are taking advantage of India’s economic difficulties and tightening control over India through ‘aid’ and private investment. In early 1958, the United States provided for the first time a large number of loans to India to buy equipment. The U.S. also colluded with Britain, West Germany, Japan, Canada and other countries to ‘aid’ India.” The note concluded, “The strength of the Indian big bourgeoisie has increased and intensified collusion with foreign monopolies… and attempted to intervene in the arms industry to reap higher profits by taking advantage of the Sino-Indian border issue.”

“We came in vain”
Chinese officials saw the 1960 visit as a real opportunity to negotiate and reach a settlement. “In 1960, we first came to Delhi to negotiate, but it was in vain,” Zhou Enlai told the Soviet Union Ambassador on October 8, 1962, 12 days before the Chinese offensive. While Zhou never openly or formally declared that China would accept an “east west swap” deal where India would recognise Chinese claims on Aksai Chin and China would give up its claims on the eastern sector, he made it clear that Beijing was willing to negotiate. In a meeting with R.K. Nehru in New Delhi on April 21, 1960, Zhou said “in the east, a settlement can be found”. “Our aim,” he said, “is still to explore ways of a settlement”.

“The McMahon Line on the eastern section of the Sino-Indian border is illegal and has never been admitted by China’s governments. Nevertheless, in order to keep peace of the border and help peaceful negotiations, we suggested before negotiations that armed troops do not cross the line,” Zhou told the Soviet Ambassador. “India never surveyed the line and only after Indian border defence troops arrived did they know what it was. The topography is favourable for them and thus they drew it on the map.”

Zhou’s meetings with Jawaharlal Nehru on April 25, 1960, however, ended in bitter deadlock. Zhou recounted, according to the October 8 note, that Nehru had rejected out of hand all his proposals. “We suggested that bilateral armed forces respectively retreat for 20 kilometres on the borders and stop the patrols to escape conflicts. They did not accept the suggestion. Later, we unilaterally withdrew for 20 kilometres and did not appoint troops to patrol in the area in order to evade conflicts and help negotiations develop smoothly. However, India perhaps had a wrong sense that we were showing our weakness and feared conflicts… India is taking advantage that we withdrew for 20 kilometres and did not assign patrols, and has invaded as well as set up posts.”

Chinese thinking
Two revealing internal notes prepared shortly after Zhou’s trip shed light on Chinese thinking following the visit. One note prepared on May 31, 1960 alleged that the Indian government had “distorted the exact words of Premier Zhou” in the translations of the press conference held in New Delhi and in the official press releases subsequently circulated. The note listed 11 different ways in which Zhou’s words had been misconstrued. For instance, it said that Zhou had stated that the dispute in the middle sector was “relatively small”; the Indian government’s version read “very small”.

Zhou said “the eastern section of the disputed area has been China’s administrative jurisdiction area for long”. The Indian version, the note claimed, said China had administered the area “for once”. The Indian version, it further alleged, deleted Zhou’s statement that “the Chinese government has never accepted the McMahon line”. The note said Zhou had also wrongly been quoted as saying that “in the eastern section, we are willing to maintain the present status”, adding that the words “before the settlement of the border” had been deleted from the end of the sentence.

The sense of acrimony was clearly evident in Zhou’s meetings in New Delhi, particularly during his interaction with Morarji Desai, the then Finance Minister, on April 25, 1960. The bitterness of the visit is reflected in K. Natwar Singh’s detailed account of the meeting in My China Diary. “Discordance started at the very beginning,” Mr. Singh recounts. After trading barbs on Tibet, Desai accused Zhou “of being unjust”. Zhou told Desai he “had said enough”. “The Chinese Prime Minister said more than enough,” the Finance Minister retorted.

The bitterness of the exchange was further evident in a second internal Chinese government note, prepared on July 31, 1960, that reviewed Zhou’s visit and came to the conclusion that India was not interested in a settlement. The note concluded that “the Indian Establishment wanted to provoke the border event so as to oppose China”. The Chinese government ultimately linked the failure of the 1960 visit — perhaps based on questionable evidence — to Indian designs on Tibet. “After the Tibetan rebellion was put down, a series of progressive reforms would be carried out which would have great influence on India,” the note said.


“The Indian government,” it concluded, “was afraid of this because Indian people under such influence would complain more about their own government’s inability. In addition, the Indian government is facing up difficulties and resembles a mother who lacks milk… The Indian people hope to get on with China; troubles are made by the Establishment.” K. Natwar Singh, in his book, writes that by the time Zhou landed in India, the point of no return had almost been reached. By the time Zhou arrived back in Beijing, the two notes suggested, the Chinese came to believe that point had already been crossed.