Enlai Zhou

En-lai Chou (Enlai Zhou) is wildly recognized as the most influential diplomat in the history of Communist China, but less commonly known as the right-hand man of Zedong Mao. He was born in rural Hwaian, China, in 1898 (the exact date is unknown). The son of an imperial government bureaucrat, Chou was disillusioned by the Manchu court's concessions to the West and became a militant nationalist. He joined the socialist movement in 1917 while he was a student studying in Japan. Two years later, upon his return to China, he was arrested for being a leftist agitator. Upon his release in 1920 he fled to France, where he became an active corresponding member of the newly founded Communist Party. After finishing his Marxist studies, Chou went back to China in 1922 to join Yat-sen Sun, then cooperating with the Communists. In 1924 he taught at Whampoa Military Academy, which was then under Communist control. In 1927, two years after Sun's death, fighting broke out between the Communist rebel