Zhou Enlai, born on this day in 1898, was a communist revolutionary, statesman, and military officer who served as the 1st Premier of the People's Republic of China from 1949 to 1976. "All diplomacy is a continuation of war by other means."
Zhou was educated in a missionary college in Tianjin before studying at a Japanese university. In Tianjin, he met his future wife, Deng Yingchao while participating in a radical political group known as the "Awakening Society". In 1920, Zhou moved to France, where he helped form the overseas branch of the Communist Party of China. He also lived in Britain and Germany before returning to China in 1924.
While working in the Political Department of the Whampoa Military Academy, Zhou was also made the secretary of the Communist Party of Guangdong-Guangxi, and served as the CPC representative with the rank of major-general.
After the Chinese Civil War broke out in 1927, Zhou served in the communist forces, helping establish and oversee a network of underground cells of communist resistance. Zhou played a leading role in the Long March of 1934-35, an arduous military retreat of communist forces over 8,000 miles.
Following the Zunyi Conference in 1935, Mao Zedong became Zhou's assistant. After the conclusion of the Long March, Mao officially took over Zhou Enlai's leading position in the CPC, while Zhou took a secondary position as vice-chairman. Both would hold their leadership positions until their deaths in 1976.
Zhou was a prominent participant in the 1955 Asian–African Conference, held in Indonesia. The conference produced a declaration in strongly in favor of peace, the abolition of nuclear arms, general arms reduction, and the principle of universal representation at the United Nations. Zhou was critical of American imperial aggression and stated "the population of Asia will never forget that the first atom bomb was exploded on Asian soil."
Zhou passed away from bladder cancer on January 8th, 1976, just nine months before Mao Zedong's death in September that year.
"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, from "Chinese People Will not Tolerate Aggression" (October 1950)
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want to vent about the intersection between angst abt my personal life & deteriorating material and political conditions somewhere but i'd just be repeating myself like a boring sack of shit so instead id like the world to provide me with a place to scream and throw something, plz and thank you
you can scream at this guy, he knows what it’s about, he can take it:
we'd scream in each other's faces in some sort of vaguely viking-coded bonding ritual
For it to truly be viking coded you'd need to be tied together, something has to be on fire and someone has to bleed. So I'm saying you need to make this more of a party.
thanks buddy! what sucks extra is i recognize that i have it way better than many/most - live in a walkable city w public transit, have a decent cluster of friends (though who see each other pretty infrequently), and a family i can lean on if $$$ got really dire. and yet the world still feels so lonely and connectionless and violently precarious, this shit was just built so completely wrong and there's only so much we as individuals can do :(
Definitely, I'm in a similar position as you, and recently I've been thinking that even though I'm incredibly privileged, capitalism still seems like absolute hell to me, which on one hand shows the absolute bleakness of capitalism and the necessity to get rid of it, and on the other hand it should be possible to radicalize almost everyone. The thought helps a bit :)
Depression sucks ass, much love to you
Anti-depressants helped me in this regard, but as far as I've read I'm also quite lucky that my SSRIs worked for me.
Organizing also helped me find new people to connect with and there have been days where I was really juts sitting around sad and brooding and people still were cool with me :)