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Zhou Enlai Quotes

Zhou Enlai was the first Premier of the People's Republic of China, serving from October 1949 until his death in January 1976. Zhou served along with Chairman Mao Zedong and was instrumental in the Communist Party's rise to power, and later in consolidating its control, forming foreign policy, and developing the Chinese economy.

A skilled and able diplomat, Zhou served as the Chinese foreign minister from 1949 to 1958. Advocating peaceful coexistence with the West after the stalemated Korean War, he participated in the 1954 Geneva Conference and the 1955 Bandung Conference, and helped orchestrate Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China. He helped devise policies regarding the bitter disputes with the United States, Taiwan, the Soviet Union , India and Vietnam.

Zhou survived the purges of other top officials during the Cultural Revolution. While Mao dedicated most of his later years to political struggle and ideological work, Zhou was the main driving force behind the affairs of state during much of the Cultural Revolution. His attempts at mitigating the Red Guards' damage and his efforts to protect others from their wrath made him immensely popular in the Cultural Revolution's later stages.

As Mao's health began to decline in 1971 and 1972 and following the death of disgraced Lin Biao, Zhou was elected First Vice Chairman of the Communist Party by the 10th Central Committee in 1973 and thereby designated as Mao's successor, but still struggled against the Gang of Four internally over leadership of China. Zhou's health was also failing, however, and he died eight months before Mao on 8 January 1976. The massive public outpouring of grief in Beijing turned to anger at the Gang of Four, leading to the Tiananmen Incident. Although Zhou was succeeded by Hua Guofeng, Zhou's ally Deng Xiaoping was able to outmaneuver the Gang of Four politically and took Hua's place as paramount leader by 1978.

✵ 5. March 1898 – 8. January 1976
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Zhou Enlai: 8   quotes 5   likes

Famous Zhou Enlai Quotes

“The more troops they send to Vietnam, the happier we will be, for we feel that we shall have them in our power, we can have their blood. So if you want to help the Vietnamese you should encourage the Americans to throw more and more soldiers into Vietnam. We want them there. They will be close to China. And they will be in our grasp. They will be so close to us, they will be our hostages. … We are planting the best kind of opium especially for the American soldiers in Vietnam.”

Zhou Enlai

Reported in Christian Crusade Weekly (March 3, 1974) as having been said be Zhou to Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1965; reported as a likely misattribution in Paul F. Boller, Jr., and John George, They Never Said It: A Book of Fake Quotes, Misquotes, & Misleading Attributions (1989), p. 133.
Disputed

“All diplomacy is a continuation of war by other means.”

Zhou Enlai

As quoted in Saturday Evening Post (27 March 1954); this is a play upon the famous maxim of Clausewitz: "War is the continuation of politics by other means".

“China is an attractive piece of meat coveted by all … but very tough, and for years no one has been able to bite into it.”

Zhou Enlai

To the Chinese Communist Party Congress, as quoted in The New York Times (1 September 1973).

“We shall use only peaceful means and we shall not permit any other kind of method.”

Zhou Enlai

Concluding his summary of his government’s approach to boundary settlement at Bandung, with a pledge and a warning "How the Sino-Russian BoundaryConflict Was Finally Settled:From Nerchinsk 1689 to Vladivostok 2005 via Zhenbao Island 1969" by Neville Maxwell http://web.archive.org/web/20110607072751/http://src-h.slav.hokudai.ac.jp/coe21/publish/no16_2_ses/02_maxwell.pdf.

“For us, it is all right if the talks succeed, and it is all right if they fail.”

Zhou Enlai

On President Richard Nixon’s visit to China (5 October 1971), as quoted in Simpson's Contemporary Quotations (1988) edited by James Beasley Simpson.

“It is too soon to say.”

Zhou Enlai

Often, though disputedly, thought to refer to the significance of the French Revolution of 1789, it has been argued that he was actually indicating the French protests of 1968, in "Zhou’s cryptic caution lost in translation" by Richard McGregor in Financial Times (10 June 2011) http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/74916db6-938d-11e0-922e-00144feab49a.html#ixzz1PDuP8ZzG.

“Today the first unification of the Chinese people has emerged. The people themselves have become the masters of Chinese soil, and the rule of the reactionaries in China has been irrevocably overthrown.”

Zhou Enlai

"Chinese People Will not Tolerate Aggression" (October 1950)

“Now first of all I would like to talk about the question of different ideologies and social systems. We have to admit that among our Asian and African countries, we do have different ideologies and different social systems. But this does not prevent us from seeking common ground and being united.”

Zhou Enlai

Supplementary Speech at the Plenary Session of the Asian African-Conference (19 April 1955)

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