Zhou Enlai (1898-1976). Until their deaths in 1976, both Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai were among a handful of leaders of the People's Republic of China (PRC) who wielded immense political influence and did much to shape events in China. Whereas Mao has been publicly criticized for his political and policy errors in recent years, Zhou has become a new Communist saint and remains highly popular with Chinese people.

Zhou was born into a Mandarin family in Huaian, Jiangsu. After he graduated from the Nankai High School in Tianjin in 1917, Zhou went abroad and studied in Japan (1918-1919), in France (1920-1922), and in Germany (1923-1924) and joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in France in 1922. Zhou returned to Canton (Guangzhou) in 1924 at a time when the CCP and the Guomindang (Kuomintang, KMT, or Nationalist Party) had forged a united front, and he was appointed director of the Political Department of the Whompoa Military Academy under Commandant Chiang Kai-shek. Zhou received the same assignment in the First Army of the National Revolutionary Army, also under Chiang, when the Northern Expedition was launched in 1926. After the united front collapsed, Zhou organized and led the unsuccessful uprising in Nanchang on 1 August 1927 and quickly emerged as one of the top CCP leaders, engaging simultaneously in armed struggle, underground political work, and mobilization of mass support. Between 1936 and 1945 Zhou also assumed the task of negotiator and was in Nanjing, Wuhan, and Chongqing to deal with the KMT authorities.

After 1949, Zhou was the chief administrator and headed the huge bureaucracy as premier of the Government Administration Council (1949-1954) and of the State Council (1954-1976). He was responsible for running the national economy and implementing other domestic policies. As the chief diplomat of the PRC, he visited many capitals and attended numerous international conferences in the 1950s and 1960s. He was widely acclaimed as a skillful diplomat in the 1955 Afro-Asian Bandung Conference and played a crucial role in the Sino-US and Sino-Japanese rapprochement in the 1970s. Zhou was also a remarkably astute political infighter and survived each and every major leadership purge in the Party for four decades. He was elected to the CCP Politburo in 1927 and held the membership without interruption until his death; he was also a Party vice-chairman (1956-1966, 1973-1976). He was married to Deng Yingchao and had no children.