Zhou Enlai, born on this day in 1898, was a communist revolutionary, statesman, and military officer who served as the 1st Premier of the People’s Republic of China from 1949 to 1976. “All diplomacy is a continuation of war by other means.”

Zhou was educated in a missionary college in Tianjin before studying at a Japanese university. In Tianjin, he met his future wife, Deng Yingchao while participating in a radical political group known as the “Awakening Society”. In 1920, Zhou moved to France, where he helped form the overseas branch of the Communist Party of China. He also lived in Britain and Germany before returning to China in 1924.

While working in the Political Department of the Whampoa Military Academy, Zhou was also made the secretary of the Communist Party of Guangdong-Guangxi, and served as the CPC representative with the rank of major-general.

After the Chinese Civil War broke out in 1927, Zhou served in the communist forces, helping establish and oversee a network of underground cells of communist resistance. Zhou played a leading role in the Long March of 1934-35, an arduous military retreat of communist forces over 8,000 miles.

Following the Zunyi Conference in 1935, Mao Zedong became Zhou’s assistant. After the conclusion of the Long March, Mao officially took over Zhou Enlai’s leading position in the CPC, while Zhou took a secondary position as vice-chairman. Both would hold their leadership positions until their deaths in 1976.

Zhou was a prominent participant in the 1955 Asian–African Conference, held in Indonesia. The conference produced a declaration in strongly in favor of peace, the abolition of nuclear arms, general arms reduction, and the principle of universal representation at the United Nations. Zhou was critical of American imperial aggression and stated “the population of Asia will never forget that the first atom bomb was exploded on Asian soil.”

Zhou passed away from bladder cancer on January 8th, 1976, just nine months before Mao Zedong’s death in September that year.

“Today the first unification of the Chinese people has emerged. The people themselves have become the masters of Chinese soil, and the rule of the reactionaries in China has been irrevocably overthrown.”

Zhou Enlai, from “Chinese People Will not Tolerate Aggression” (October 1950)

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    • the_itsb [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      6·
      8 months ago

      Idk, I think that dude is kinda on one.

      Nothing about living in obscene misery for several millennia forced the Gravettians to make radical changes to their society, or for that matter even modest changes, the kind that seem trivial to us in retrospect. They just endured. Why assume that we are going to react to the persisting miseries of capitalism any different?

      I understand the point he’s making, but I have an objection (that might be incredibly stupid) — how do we know that the Gravettians didn’t make changes in their society? We don’t have surviving evidence of it, sure, but lack of evidence is not necessarily evidence of lack.

      It just seems like such a leap to make. “It looks like these people just lived in exactly the same, miserable way for 9000 years, so what hope do we have for change?!?!” Uhhhhh, you don’t actually know they didn’t change, you just don’t yet have evidence of it. There’s no system involving biological components that doesn’t undergo change, so the idea of a human society that remained static for 9000 years seems ridiculous to me.

      But I concede that I’m poorly educated hillfolk and might be wildly off. Often, I’m also ridiculous and on one.