Word: en
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
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...
...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 of shortage...
...resources to educate one-Chu Teh. First a gym teacher, then a war lord's lieutenant, he learned to command troops, eventually fought himself to high fortune, a houseful of concubines and opium. About 1922 he suddenly abandoned the high life, went to Berlin to study, met Chou En-lai and enlisted in the Communist Party; in 1925 he went to Red Eastern Toilers' Institute in Moscow, went back to China to command a Kuomintang division (though a secret Communist), eventually slipped down to the Hunan-Kiangsi border to join with Mao and begin forming the Red army...
...four months starting last Dec. 31 these titans of Asia conferred in Peking. From the beginning little word leaked-out about the talks. Chou En-lai called the Indian delegates in for tea and gave them a list of instructions (e.g., you must not tell the Indian press what is going on). Red China haggled endlessly over details and often boycotted the talks without notice-particularly when India's truce-supervising General Thimayya made some decision in favor of the U.N. in Korea...