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Li Lisan, chief of the Chinese Communist Party until the end of 1930 when he was replaced by Mao. Kept under wraps in Moscow for 15 years, he has now worked his way back, is head of all Chinese labor organizations. While Mao stood for organizing the peasant masses, Li stood for organizing the industrial worker; now that China needs industry, Li's importance is likely to increase.
Liu Shao-chi, party theoretician, is the man generally considered Premier Chou En-lai's rival for the No. 2 spot in the hierarchy. Sharp-faced Liu, a tireless writer, lecturer and polemicist, is believed to be the principal liaison officer between Moscow and Peking. A doctrinaire who apparently lives only for the party and the party line, is the chief author of the official Chinese party constitution promulgated in June 1945. His treatise "On the Education of a Communist" has become a definitive handbook for young & old party members. More & more, Liu is reported taking over aging and ailing Mao's party chores. Liu's orthodoxy is perhaps best typified by the fact that he always refers to Americans as "swine," while Premier Chou just calls them "imperialists."
Love In Jail. Perhaps more than any of his colleagues, Chou En-lai has shown an easy ability to weave and turn with the Moscow party line. His gift for bouncing back on those few occasions when he took the wrong turn has earned him a nickname among the Nationalists: Pu-tao-wong, the Chinese name for the weighted toy tumbler that always lands upright.
Chou's grandfather was a mandarin, i.e., a member of the potent imperial bureaucracy which was unseated by China's successful revolution of 1911. At 15, Chou entered a Western-style high school, went on to a year of college in Japan, and returned to China to enter Nankai University in Tientsin. There, like most young intellectuals of the day, 'he became immersed in China's revolutionary movement. He joined a radical group called "Awaken," delighted as much in endless arguments as in student riots. In 1919, he was tossed in Tientsin municipal jail for leading a student demonstration against the terms of the Versailles Treaty. In jail, so the story goes, Chou met and fell in love with another rioter, young Teng Yingchao, whom he later married.
At that time, Mao Tse-tung, working as a librarian at the University of Peking, was busy rounding up impecunious students to go to France on a "work and study" scheme conceived by a Peking professor to give Chinese students a chance to study abroad and at the same time ease France's tight manpower problem. After he got out of jail, young Chou En-lai jumped at the chance. Sweating it out with his fellow students in the coal mines of Lille and the Rhineland, he picked up little education but a great many ideas. In less than a year, he left the mines, went to work forthwith organizing fellow Chinese in France and Germany under the Communist banner.
By 1924, when the Communists were allied with Sun Yat-sen's nationalist Kuomintang, Chou became chief of the political department at the Nationalists' Whampoa Military Academy. He worked closely with a young Kuomintang stalwart named Chiang Kaishek. A year later, Chou became political commissar of Chiang's crack first Nationalist army.