Word: chou
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This is a side of slick Chou En-lai that the world has never been permitted to see. His more familiar talent-the ability to bob, weave and pirouette-was developed in party intrigues. He sided or seemed to side with one faction (e.g., Li Lisan, once the party boss) only to wind up in the end, unhurt and at the elbow of the ultimate winner, Mao Tse-tung, sometime librarian at Peking University. With his Whampoa training, Chou shared command of Mao's peasant armies with Chu Teh, the wily soldier whom Chou had the wisdom to recruit...
...helped plot the fabulous Long March, in which 30,000 Communists trekked 6,000 miles in 368 days to the northwest to escape Chiang's armies. One writer described him in those days: "His chin veiled by a black beard, Chou would ride a bristle-maned Mongolian pony out through the stone arches of Yenan. His only badge of rank as he cantered through the yellow hills were the caps of two fountain pens peeping out of the breast pocket of his shirt...
Most of all, he served the cause with mental agility and glib tongue. In 1936, when Chiang was close to exterminating Communism as a serious threat to the Nationalist government, Chou En-lai bewitched the "Young Marshal" Chang Hsuch-liang over to the Communist cause, infiltrated his 150,000-man army and talked Chang into such a state of mutiny that he kidnaped Chiang. On Moscow's orders (the kidnaping did not fit the Kremlin's long-range plans for China), Chou reversed himself, glibly negotiated Chiang's release, leaving the Young Marshal high...
...mainland was beset by floods, drought, pests, wind and hail. In the cities there was rationing, and in isolated areas people starved. Peasants roamed into cities-20.000 into Mukden and Anshan in one month-to get jobs and food. In Peking, guards had to drive away 5,000 peasants. Chou En-lai himself unhappily gave the lie at home to the Communists' efforts to pretend to the outside world that the hunger had not come: "People in famine areas should be called upon ... to collect such substitute food as wild herbs for using as food during the period...
...Chou Enlai, 55, Premier, Foreign Minister (see cover...