Zhou Nan is a prominent Chinese politician and diplomat, and served as Director of the Xinhua News Agency in Hong Kong.
Background
Zhou Nan (born under the name of Gao Qinglian) was born on December 20, 1927 in Changchun, Jilin, China. He was the youngest of the five children born to Gao Guozhu, the magistrate of Anda County in Heilongjiang Province, and his second wife Wang Yunzhi. Just before the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, the family moved to the city of Tianjin.
Education
At age 14, Zhou Nan enrolled at Tianjin's Yaohua High School. Upon graduation, he attended Beijing University from 1944–1948, majoring in philosophy. In 1949, he was appointed Head of the English Department at Beijing Foreign Studies University.
Career
In April 1946, Zhou Nan formally entered the Communist Party of China under the nom de guerre (or Party name) "Zhou Nan". Party members at the time were advised to go by aliases or false names to protect themselves from KMT persecution. From then on, he made his name change official and became formally known as Zhou Nan.
During the Korean War, Zhou Nan served as the Chief of the Political Bureau of the People's Volunteer Army, and interrogated captured POW's. In 1951, he joined the Foreign Service and took up a post as the Third Secretary and later Second Secretary at the newly created Chinese Embassy in Pakistan. After serving in Pakistan for four years, he returned to Beijing in 1955 as Section Chief of the Department of West Asian and North African Affairs. During the Cultural Revolution, He was later appointed First Secretary at the Chinese Embassy in Tanzania, where he served until 1973.
In 1973, Zhou Nan became First Secretary and Counsellor of the People's Republic of China's first ever delegation to the United Nations. He was made the PRC's official ambassador to the U.N. in 1980. After serving twelve years on the Chinese delegation, he returned from New York in the 1983 to engage in preliminary talks with the British government regarding the return of the then British-administered Hong Kong to Chinese rule.
Zhou Nan was promoted to the office of Vice Minister of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1984. Replacing his former superior Yao Guang, whose lack of progress the PRC government had become disenchanted with, he remained in constant talks with the British delegation for 13 years until the official handover of Hong Kong in 1997. On September 26, 1984, Zhou Nan and British delegation head Sir Richard Evans initialed the important Sino-British Joint Declaration at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. It was later formally signed by the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang again in the Great Hall of the People on 19 December 1984. The Joint Declaration promised Hong Kong's status as a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of China after 1997, and allowed Hong Kong citizens to retain their rights and freedoms enjoyed under British rule.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Mark Roberti, Asiaweek correspondent: "Zhou was witty and urbane and liked to charm people by quoting classical Chinese poems. Although he wore old-fashioned glasses and drab Chinese-made suits, he spoke fluent English and was regarded as a sophisticated international diplomat. At the negotiating table, Zhou was tough, aggressive, even brutish. He was a ferocious negotiator who carried out instructions ruthlessly."
Sir Percy Cradock, British Ambassador to China (1978–1984): "Intelligent, cultivated, a great man for quotations, whether in Chinese or English, a great man for toasts in maotai, he had acquired some of the Western habits of transacting business: it was even possible to get authoritative answers out of him by telephone; and he accelerated the delicate manoeuvres on the agenda for the talks."