| isolated freak |
Posted
on 05-Mar-03 09:10 AM
Zhou and the CCP:
In 1924, Zhou returned to China and became an active member of the Chinese Communist Party. His dedication and loyalty towards the party, his education and his leadership skills soon elevated him to the top echelon of the party and that’s when he became friends with another brilliant strategist and party worker, Mao Zedong.
Things were taking interesting twists and turns inside the CCP. The CCP was established within the GuoMinDang Party headed by Sun Yatsen. Later, the Communists had formed their own party independent of GMD. The reason for this was the Communists didn’t agree with the land reform of the GuoMindang. The rift between the CCP and GMD seemed unbridgeable. The Soviet Government and Comintern forced the communists to be in good terms with the GMD and came up with the idea of a United Front—an alliance between the Communists and the GMD—to fight warlordism rampant in China. To produce fighters to curb warlodism, the United Front established a Military Academy, also known as the Huangpu Academy. During this entire episode, Zhou was in Europe, and when he came back to china, the Huangpu Military Academy was in its seventh month. Zhou, because of his excellent Party record was made the director of the Political Department of the academy.
It didn’t take much time for Zhou to realize that the United Front based on external influence/ interests would fall apart any time. Furthermore, the ideological differences between the GMD and the CCP were making it hard for the United Front to operate smoothly. He also realized that to bring about a revolution, they (the communists) needed an army of their own. Zhou started looking for the right people to create a possible Red Army at the Huangpu Academy and he came across Ye Jianning and Ye Ting with whom Zhou discussed about establishing a Red Army. At the Huangpu academy, the three of them started to look for the potential recruits for their won army. This was done openly without any objection from the Guomindang’s representatives. Zhou, in his class started lecturing about the importance of a revolutionary army.
On March 12, 1925, Sun Yatsen--the founder of the Guomindang Party and the brain/man behind the 1911 revolution that established the Republic of China by ousting the Manchu dynasty—died. Chiang Kaishek (Jiang Jieshi) now became the leader of the GMD. The Huangpu academy remained unaffected by the change in the GMD leadership. However, the Communist Party feared an attack on their cadres by the right wing of the GMD.
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| isolated freak |
Posted
on 05-Mar-03 09:10 AM
Today is the 105th birth anniversary of Zhou Enlai, one of the leaders who changed the world. The following piece is a tribute to him by a Nepali Chinese Studies major. Its *absolutely* not worth spending your time on this rather lengthy and dry post if you are not interested in History, Politics and the Cod War diplomacy.
This is a series wise presentation. Thanks to paschim for starting this new trend in Sajha. To ensure the clarity in presentation, I have divided the essay into 5 sub-headings: The Early years, Zhou and the CCP, The Communist Revolution, Zhou: The First PM of China and Tryst with Diplomacy.
I have relied heavily on Han Suyin's biography of Zhou, Eldest Son: Zhou Enlai and the Making of Modern China, 1898-1876 and Jonathan Spence's biogrphy of Mao Zedong, Mao Zedong.
Early Years: Education at home and abroad
A baby boy was born on March 5, 1898 to the Zhou Family of Huai An, China, but later that day his maternal grandfather died predicting that the newborn will have a great career. The newborn was the eldest grandson of the Zhou family and was named Zhou Enlai (En=grace, Lai=Come/arrival). The boy later became the first and probably the most popular Prime minister of the People’s Republic of China and a world-class diplomat, whose knowledge of International Affairs was admired by many world leaders, including Dr. Henry Kissinger.
Zhou’s childhood was not a very pleasant one. The family’s economic downturn started, several members died, his own mother died when he was 9. His aunt, whom he considered his second mother died when he was 10.. and his father was for the most part away in Shanghai because of his job. Because of all these reasons, Zhou, at the age of 10 went to live with his uncle in Manchuria, where he attended school. His uncle wanted to provide him with the best education available, so instead of enrolling him in the schools that taught the classics, he was enrolled in a “new-learning” school that had English, mathematics and science in the curriculum. There he learned about the French and American Revolutions, the exploitation of China by the foreign powers, the Opium war and the 1911 Revolution.
Zhou graduated in 1913 from the “new education” high school and applied to Qinghua University in Beijing, but he did not do well on the entrance test. Then he applied to Nankai University in Tianjin, another equally reputed University for its academic excellence, and he got in there at the age of 15. There Zhou along with some of his friends started a debate club, and he became the editor of the club’s journal. The club would also invite speakers to talk about the contemporary problems of new china and that’s when Zhou encountered the early reformists of China such as Liang Qichao and Wu Yizheng.
After graduating from Nankai at the age of 19, Zhou decided to go to Japan to learn about the impressive development, and how the ways to apply their development model in China. But he could not focus well. It is believed that, it was in Japan Zhou got his first REAL lesson of socialism reading a Social Sciences Journal of the Imperial University, Japan. After moving back and forth to Tokyo and Kyoto, Zhou finally enrolled in the Kyoto University to study social sciences. He had discovered that China needed not only scientists but also POLITICIANS and POLICY makers to regain its lost glory.
After returning to China in 1919, Zhang started to write for journals using pseudonyms. It is believed that he had altogether 17 pseudonyms, including a Russian one, which he used to write for the Comintern publications. This time around, China was going through an iconoclast movement, often known as the May 4th movement. Zhou pieces in support of the movement and his “activist” spirit got him into trouble and was behind the bars for a brief period. He, along with others locked up, sued the provincial government and won the lawsuit. After being released, he went to France on a Sino-French Work-Study program at the age of 22.
His got into troubles even in France because of his strong resentment to the bad treatment of the Chinese students by the factory owners. He spent the first two years traveling to cities in France and also to England, Germany and Belgium. At one point, he applied to study at Manchester University and Edinburgh University and was accepted at Edinburgh but he couldn’t get any scholarship to fund his education, so he returned back to France and started visiting universities, which had Chinese students and started lecturing to them about China and Socialism. By this time, he had already joined the newly established Chinese Communist Party. On one of his “talks” at the Socialist University (Universite de Travail) he came across and befriended Nie Rongzhen, the father of China’s Nuclear Bomb.
Zhou now made connections with the Commintern and started getting some allowance as well as money to support himself and other needy Chinese students. He became the leader of Chinese students in France and Europe and the CCP’s official representative in Europe.
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