Background
Born to an official family in Hunan province, Zhou displayed his talents and ambition early in his life.
Born to an official family in Hunan province, Zhou displayed his talents and ambition early in his life.
He went to Japan to study in 1917, enrolling first in high school and then in Kyoto Imperial University. While in Japan, Zhou became interested in Marxism and politics. He wrote extensively on Socialist ideas and became known among radical Chinese intellectuals. In 1921 he returned to Shanghai to attend the founding meeting (i.e., the First National Congress) of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and was elected the Party’s deputy leader.
As his study came to a close in 1924, Zhou went to Guangzhou at the invitation of Dai Jitao to work for the recently reorganized Guomindang (GMD). It was the heyday of the United Front between the GMD and the CCP, but Zhou's new career in the GMD and his new ideological orientation soon alienated him from his fellow Communists. Later that year he withdrew from the CCP and, under the influence of Dai, became a fierce critic of the Communists. In late 1925, Zhou left Guangzhou in protest against the increasing Communist influence there. He then participated in the formation of the Western Hills Faction, an anti-CCP splinter group in the GMD, in Shanghai.
During the Northern Expedition, Zhou briefly served at the Wuhan branch of the GMD’s Central Military Academy, but returned to Shanghai when the GMD was divided between the Nanjing and the Wuhan camps in early 1927. He was quickly recruited by Jiang Jieshi into the Right-wing Nanjing regime, and from then on became a loyal supporter of Jiang. As the United Front collapsed and Jiang emerged victorious in the ensuing power struggle, Zhou's political fortune also rose. His influential treatise, The Theoretical System of the Three People's Principles, published in 1928, firmly established him as a leading theorist and propagandist in Jiang's entourage.
In the early years of the Nanjing government, Zhou served as a trusted and able assistant to Jiang as Jiang tackled a series of political and military challenges to his new leadership. For his service Zhou was rewarded with a membership in the GMD's Central Executive Committee in 1931. In the years that followed, he was also given a number of important Party and governmental posts in Nanjing and in the province of Jiangsu. He developed dose ties with the Chen brothers, Guofu and Lifu, who controlled the Party machine on behalf of Jiang, and was generally regarded as a member of the CC clique.
When the Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1937, Zhou was deputy head of the GMD's Department of Propaganda. While his official responsibility was to promote China's war effort, in private he was extremely pessimistic about the possible outcome of the war. In early 1938, with Jiang's approval, Zhou sent Gao Zongwu, an official in the Foreign Ministry, to Hong Kong in search of opportunities for negotiating peace with Japan. Progress was made during Gao’s mission, but Jiang’s hesitation as well as policy shifts in the Japanese government led Zhou to believe that Wang Jingwei, Jiang's deputy and arch rival in the GMD, was the ideal person to lead the peace effort. Wang welcomed Zhou's proposal. Later that year Zhou arranged and accompanied Wang's secret departure from Chongqing. Wang then announced his peace plan in Hanoi in December, and in April 1939 he and Zhou moved to Shanghai for further negotiations with the Japanese.
During the following months, Zhou was Wang's principal adviser and key representative in the peace negotiations. He also strongly supported the organization of a collaborationist regime by Wang in the occupied areas. When that regime was established in Nanjing in March 1940, Zhou served concurrently as its deputy premier (vice-head of the Administrative Yuan), finance minister, police minister, and president of its Central Reserve Bank. From 1940 to 1945, Zhou was probably the most powerful person, other than Wang himself, in the Nanjing regime. Aside from gathering a significant personal following, he organized an armed force, the MTax Police Corps,” and placed it under his own command. After the outbreak of the Pacific War, however, Zhou lost faith in the collaboration effort and began to seek understanding from his old boss, Jiang Jieshi. He secretly reestablished contacts with Chongqing through Jiang's chief of intelligence, Dai Li.
In 1944, following Wang’s death, Zhou became the regime’s mayor of Shanghai but continued to work for the Chongqing government. Zhou was arrested and sentenced to death on charges of high treason after Japan’s surrender. His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by Jiang in 1947, but he died of illness in a Nanjing prison several months later.