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 AsianβAfrican 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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Thanks very kindly for the comprehensive answer!
Stock price inflation is something I'd never considered. Are there even downsides to stoking that fire? I guess it might increase the scope of the inevitable crash?
This is exactly the problem, and part of what caused the 2008 crisis. Michael Hudson talks about all of this in his book Killing the Host, but essentially all this effectively free money allowed various banks and investment funds to keep writing enormous, low interest loans for real estate, secure in the knowledge that they were making money off 2% interest on money they borrowed for 1% AND that eventually someone else would write an even bigger loan to buy it off them again (because that second party in turn thinks they'll sell it to a third party for even more).
Thus the size of the loans - and more importantly, the monthly interest payments - grew hugely out of proportion to what the actual real people buying houses could afford to pay. These loans that could definitely never be repaid, so-called "sub-prime" mortgages, were then packaged up (obfuscated) as various 'financial instruments', given high security ratings by the privately owned, for-profit assessment companies, and bought up by various financial speculators who expected to be able to sell them on for even higher prices.
When it finally came out that these sub-prime mortgages were, in fact, worth FAR less than their wildly inflated market price, the government was faced with a choice - it could either demand the loans be written down to levels that could actually be afforded by the people who had taken them out, forcing the banks and funds to 'take a haircut' and lose money on their investment (like, the downside of risking your capital that supposedly gives capitalists their rightful place in society) OR it could pump out huge amounts of money straight into the banks to replace the lost value of the financial assets, while enforcing evictions and foreclosures on all the people unable to afford the mortgage payments. For obvious reasons, it chose the latter.