In , Zhou led the worker uprising which was crushed by the KMT in the Shanghai massacre , after which he helped lead the Nanchang uprising. Zhou worked underground in Shanghai before being transferred to the Jiangxi Soviet , and after the soviet's defeat was a member of the party's top leadership during its Long March. During the Second Sino-Japanese War , Zhou was the resident representative of the CCP in Chongqing , and during the renewed civil war from assisted Mao in commanding military campaigns.
After the establishment of the PRC in , Zhou was appointed head of government and foreign minister. Advocating peaceful coexistence with the West after the Korean War , he participated in the Geneva Conference and Bandung Conference and helped orchestrate Richard Nixon's visit to China.
Zhou survived the purges of other top officials during the Cultural Revolution from to , and was one of the main driving forces behind affairs of state as Mao dedicated much of his later years to political struggle and ideological work. Zhou's attempts at mitigating the Red Guards ' damage and his efforts to protect others from their wrath made him immensely popular in its later stages.
Mao's health began to decline in , and Lin Biao fell into disgrace and later died in a plane crash. Amid these events, Zhou was designated as Mao's successor in , but struggled internally against the Gang of Four. In , he fell out of the public eye for medical treatment and died one year later. The outpouring of public grief which his death provoked in Beijing turned to anger at the Gang of Four, leading to the Tiananmen incident.
Though Zhou was succeeded by Hua Guofeng as premier and designated successor, after Mao's death Zhou's ally Deng Xiaoping was able to secure his place as paramount leader by Zhou Enlai was born on 5 March in Huai'an , located in the province of Jiangsu , as the first son of his branch of the Zhou family. The Zhou family was originally from Shaoxing in Zhejiang. During the late Qing dynasty , Shaoxing was famous as the home of families such as Zhou's, whose members worked as government clerks generation after generation.
