175-668: Ping-pong diplomacy ( Chinese : 乒乓外交 ; pinyin : Pīngpāng wàijiāo ) refers to the exchange of table tennis (ping-pong) players between the United States and the People's Republic of China in the early 1970s. Considered a turning point in relations between the United States and the People's Republic of China , it began during the 1971 World Table Tennis Championships in Nagoya, Japan, as
350-464: A nucleus that has a vowel (which can be a monophthong , diphthong , or even a triphthong in certain varieties), preceded by an onset (a single consonant , or consonant + glide ; a zero onset is also possible), and followed (optionally) by a coda consonant; a syllable also carries a tone . There are some instances where a vowel is not used as a nucleus. An example of this is in Cantonese, where
525-613: A people's commune , the Great Wall, Tiananmen Square , and the Summer Palace . On April 14, Zhou met with the American team. During the brief meeting, Zhou told the team that they were friends of China and that their visit was just the beginning of more Americans visiting China. He concluded the meeting by stating that the Chinese and American peoples used to have frequent exchanges and praising
700-457: A subject–verb–object word order , and like many other languages of East Asia, makes frequent use of the topic–comment construction to form sentences. Chinese also has an extensive system of classifiers and measure words , another trait shared with neighboring languages such as Japanese and Korean. Other notable grammatical features common to all the spoken varieties of Chinese include the use of serial verb construction , pronoun dropping , and
875-673: A Chinese Communist cell. Zhou was recruited by Zhang Shenfu , whom he had met in August of the previous year in connection with Li Dazhao . He also knew Zhang through Zhang's wife, Liu Qingyang, a member of the Awakening Society. Zhou has sometimes been portrayed at this time as uncertain in his politics, but his swift move to Communism suggests otherwise. The cell Zhou belonged to was based in Paris; in addition to Zhou, Zhang, and Liu it included two other students, Zhao Shiyan and Chen Gongpei. Over
1050-455: A Chinese character is the morpheme, as characters represent the smallest grammatical units with individual meanings in the Chinese language. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and lexicalized phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian , a compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including oracle bone versions. The Zhonghua Zihai (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions and
1225-595: A Shanghai resident may speak both Standard Chinese and Shanghainese ; if they grew up elsewhere, they are also likely fluent in the dialect of their home region. In addition to Standard Chinese, a majority of Taiwanese people also speak Taiwanese Hokkien (also called 台語 ; 'Taiwanese' ), Hakka , or an Austronesian language . A speaker in Taiwan may mix pronunciations and vocabulary from Standard Chinese and other languages of Taiwan in everyday speech. In part due to traditional cultural ties with Guangdong , Cantonese
1400-446: A T-shirt embroidered with a peace sign . When they exited the bus, journalists snapped photos of the two together. Two days later, the U.S. team received an official invitation to travel to China and play exhibition matches against the Chinese team with the United States accepting the invitation and everyone rushed to make arrangements. This exchange of gifts between Cowan and Zhuang became a powerful symbol of potential friendship between
1575-625: A T-shirt with a red, white and blue peace emblem flag and the words " Let It Be ," lyrics from a song by The Beatles , on the following day. Zhuang Zedong described the incident in a 2007 talk at the USC U.S.-China Institute. When a journalist asked Cowan, "Mr. Cowan, would you like to visit China?", he answered, "Well, I'd like to see any country I haven't seen before--Argentina, Australia, China, ... Any country I haven't seen before." "But what about China in particular? Would you like to go there?" "Of course," said Glenn Cowan. During an interview in 2002 with
1750-462: A central variety (i.e. prestige variety, such as Standard Mandarin), as the issue requires some careful handling when mutual intelligibility is inconsistent with language identity. The Chinese government's official Chinese designation for the major branches of Chinese is 方言 ; fāngyán ; 'regional speech', whereas the more closely related varieties within these are called 地点方言 ; 地點方言 ; dìdiǎn fāngyán ; 'local speech'. Because of
1925-549: A compromise between the pronunciations of different regions. The royal courts of the Ming and early Qing dynasties operated using a koiné language known as Guanhua , based on the Nanjing dialect of Mandarin. Standard Chinese is an official language of both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan), one of the four official languages of Singapore , and one of
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#17328590194832100-700: A corresponding increase in the number of homophones . As an example, the small Langenscheidt Pocket Chinese Dictionary lists six words that are commonly pronounced as shí in Standard Chinese: In modern spoken Mandarin, however, tremendous ambiguity would result if all of these words could be used as-is. The 20th century Yuen Ren Chao poem Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den exploits this, consisting of 92 characters all pronounced shi . As such, most of these words have been replaced in speech, if not in writing, with less ambiguous disyllabic compounds. Only
2275-587: A deep interest in politics and current events, in particular, the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Bolsheviks' new policies. He began to read avidly Chen Duxiu 's progressive and left-leaning magazine, New Youth . He read early Japanese works on Marx, and it has been claimed that he even attended Kawakami Hajime 's lectures at Kyoto University. Kawakami was an important figure in the early history of Japanese Marxism, and his translations and articles influenced
2450-598: A generation of Chinese communists. However, it now seems unlikely that Zhou met him or heard any of his lectures. Zhou's diaries also show his interest in Chinese student protests in opposition to the Sino-Japanese Joint Defense Agreement in May 1918, but he did not actively participate in them or return to China as part of the "Returning Home Movement". His active role in political movements began after his return to China. Zhou returned to Tianjin sometime in
2625-609: A great impression on him. His participation in debates and stage performances contributed to his eloquence and skills of persuasion. Zhou left Nankai with a great desire to pursue public service, and to acquire the skills required to do so. Following many of his classmates, Zhou went to Japan in July 1917 for further studies. During his two years in Japan, Zhou spent most of his time in the East Asian Higher Preparatory School,
2800-523: A gunboat with a mostly Communist crew moved from Whampoa to Guangzhou without Chiang's knowledge or approval. This event led to Chiang's exclusion of Communists from the academy by May 1926, and the removal of numerous Communists from high positions in the Nationalist Party. In his memoirs, Nie Rongzhen suggested that the gunboat had moved in protest of Zhou Enlai's (brief) arrest. Zhou's time in Whampoa
2975-605: A language school for Chinese students. Zhou's studies were supported by his uncles, and apparently Nankai founder Yan Xiu as well, but their funds were limited; during this period, Japan suffered from severe inflation. Zhou originally planned to win one of the scholarships offered by the Chinese government; these scholarships, however, required Chinese students to pass entrance examinations in Japanese universities. Zhou took entrance examinations for at least two schools but failed to gain admission. Zhou's reported anxieties were compounded by
3150-746: A leading role in the Communists' first major military action, the Nanchang Revolt . In July 1926, the Nationalists began the Northern Expedition , a massive military attempt to unify China. The Expedition was led by Chiang Kai-shek and the National Revolutionary Army (NRA), an amalgam of earlier military forces with significant guidance from Russian military advisors and numerous Communists as both commanding and political officers. With
3325-620: A member of the Provincial Committee's Military Section. Zhou vigorously extended Communist influence at the academy. He soon arranged for a number of other prominent Communists to join the Political Department, including Chen Yi , Nie Rongzhen , Yun Daiying , and Xiong Xiong. Zhou played an important role in establishing the Young Soldiers Association, a youth group which was dominated by the Communists, and Sparks,
3500-564: A millennium. The Four Commanderies of Han were established in northern Korea in the 1st century BCE but disintegrated in the following centuries. Chinese Buddhism spread over East Asia between the 2nd and 5th centuries CE, and with it the study of scriptures and literature in Literary Chinese. Later, strong central governments modeled on Chinese institutions were established in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, with Literary Chinese serving as
3675-602: A mistake. Fleeing Shanghai, Zhou made his way to Hankou (now part of Wuhan ) and was a participant at the CCP's 5th National Congress there from 27 April to 9 May. At the end of the Congress, Zhou was elected to the Party's Central Committee, again heading the military department. After Chiang Kai-shek's suppression of the Communists, the Nationalist Party split in two, with the Nationalist Party's "left-wing" (led by Wang Jingwei ) controlling
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#17328590194833850-518: A nationwide boycott of Japanese goods. As the boycott became more effective, the national government, under pressure from Japan, attempted to suppress it. On 23 January 1920, a confrontation over boycott activities in Tianjin led to the arrest of a number of people, including several Awakening Society members, and on 29 January Zhou led a march on the Governor's Office in Tianjin to present a petition calling for
4025-516: A number of essays and articles written by Zhou at this time, and these reflect the discipline, training, and concern for country that Nankai's founders attempted to instill in their students. At the school's tenth commencement in June 1917, Zhou was one of five graduating students honored at the ceremony, and one of the two valedictorians. By the time that he graduated from Nankai, Zhang Boling's teachings of gong (public spirit) and neng (ability) had made
4200-526: A result of an encounter between players Glenn Cowan (of the US) and Zhuang Zedong (of the PRC). These interactions sparked diplomatic breakthrough, by signaling that both sides were willing to interact and engage in dialogue. The exchange and its promotion helped people in each country to recognize the humanity in the people of the other country, and it paved the way for President Richard Nixon's visit to Beijing in 1972 and
4375-557: A result, Zhou was a prominent figure at most Academy meetings, often addressing the school immediately after commandant Chiang Kai-shek . He was extremely influential in establishing the political department/party representative (commissar) system which was adopted in Nationalist armed forces in 1925. Concurrent with his Whampoa appointment, Zhou became secretary of the Communist Party's Guangdong Provincial Committee, and at some point
4550-538: A secure reconstruction of Proto-Sino-Tibetan, the higher-level structure of the family remains unclear. A top-level branching into Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages is often assumed, but has not been convincingly demonstrated. The first written records appeared over 3,000 years ago during the Shang dynasty . As the language evolved over this period, the various local varieties became mutually unintelligible. In reaction, central governments have repeatedly sought to promulgate
4725-428: A short-lived Communist front group. He thus recruited numerous new Communist party members from cadet ranks, and eventually set up a covert Communist Party branch at the academy to direct the new members. When Nationalists concerned with the increasing number of Communist members and organizations at Whampoa set up a "Society for Sun Yat-senism ", Zhou attempted to squelch it; the conflict between these student groups set
4900-503: A similar way to the use of Latin and Ancient Greek roots in European languages. Many new compounds, or new meanings for old phrases, were created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to name Western concepts and artifacts. These coinages, written in shared Chinese characters, have then been borrowed freely between languages. They have even been accepted into Chinese, a language usually resistant to loanwords, because their foreign origin
5075-678: A single language. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered to be separate languages in a family . Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is ongoing. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups based on phonetic developments from Middle Chinese , of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin with 66%, or around 800 million speakers, followed by Min (75 million, e.g. Southern Min ), Wu (74 million, e.g. Shanghainese ), and Yue (68 million, e.g. Cantonese ). These branches are unintelligible to each other, and many of their subgroups are unintelligible with
5250-414: A six-year absence. When the Chinese team and Cowan walked off the bus, journalists who were following the Chinese team took photographs. In the political climate of the 1960s, the sight of an athlete of Communist China with an athlete of the United States was sure to garner attention. The next day, Cowan believed it was necessary to thank the Chinese, so, as a self-described hippie, Cowan presented Zhuang with
5425-477: A strategy that became more prominent in the following decades. Furthermore, the American player Leah "Miss Ping" Neuberger , the 1956 World Mixed Doubles Champion and nine-time U.S. Open Women's Singles Champion, was traveling at the time with the Canadian Table Tennis Team that had been invited by China to visit the country. China diplomatically extended its approval of Leah Neuberger's application for
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5600-610: A unified standard. The earliest examples of Old Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones dated to c. 1250 BCE , during the Late Shang . The next attested stage came from inscriptions on bronze artifacts dating to the Western Zhou period (1046–771 BCE), the Classic of Poetry and portions of the Book of Documents and I Ching . Scholars have attempted to reconstruct
5775-490: A university in August 1919, Zhou was in the first class, but was an activist full-time. His political activities continued to expand, and in September, he and several other students agreed to establish the "Awakening Society", a small group, never numbering more than 25. In explaining the goals and purpose of the Awakening Society, Zhou declared that "anything that is incompatible with progress in current times, such as militarism,
5950-563: A variety of Yue from a small coastal area around Taishan, Guangdong . In parts of South China, the dialect of a major city may be only marginally intelligible to its neighbors. For example, Wuzhou and Taishan are located approximately 260 km (160 mi) and 190 km (120 mi) away from Guangzhou respectively, but the Yue variety spoken in Wuzhou is more similar to the Guangzhou dialect than
6125-538: A visa to the entire American team. The third incident, perhaps the most likely trigger, was the unexpected but dramatic meeting between the American player Glenn Cowan and the Chinese team captain Zhuang Zedong , a three-time world champion and winner of many other table tennis events. On the morning of the 1971 World Table Tennis Championship in Nagoya , Japan, Glenn Cowan had slept in and missed U.S. national team's bus to
6300-641: A wall painted with the words “Down With the Yankee Oppressors and Their Running Dogs!” The meeting was facilitated by the National Committee on United States – China Relations . Prior to the visit by the American table tennis players, eleven Americans were admitted into the PRC for one week because they all professed affiliation with the Black Panther Party , which followed a Maoist political line. On
6475-596: Is Taishanese. Wuzhou is located directly upstream from Guangzhou on the Pearl River , whereas Taishan is to Guangzhou's southwest, with the two cities separated by several river valleys. In parts of Fujian , the speech of some neighbouring counties or villages is mutually unintelligible. Local varieties of Chinese are conventionally classified into seven dialect groups, largely based on the different evolution of Middle Chinese voiced initials: Proportions of first-language speakers The classification of Li Rong , which
6650-689: Is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in China , as well as by various communities of the Chinese diaspora . Approximately 1.35 billion people, or 17% of the global population, speak a variety of Chinese as their first language . Chinese languages form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be dialects of
6825-485: Is called either 华语 ; 華語 ; Huáyǔ or 汉语 ; 漢語 ; Hànyǔ ). Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. The governments of both China and Taiwan intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore, it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. Diglossia is common among Chinese speakers. For example,
7000-595: Is often described as a 'monosyllabic' language. However, this is only partially correct. It is largely accurate when describing Old and Middle Chinese; in Classical Chinese, around 90% of words consist of a single character that corresponds one-to-one with a morpheme , the smallest unit of meaning in a language. In modern varieties, it usually remains the case that morphemes are monosyllabic—in contrast, English has many multi-syllable morphemes, both bound and free , such as 'seven', 'elephant', 'para-' and '-able'. Some of
7175-445: Is only about an eighth as many as English. All varieties of spoken Chinese use tones to distinguish words. A few dialects of north China may have as few as three tones, while some dialects in south China have up to 6 or 12 tones, depending on how one counts. One exception from this is Shanghainese which has reduced the set of tones to a two-toned pitch accent system much like modern Japanese. A very common example used to illustrate
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7350-668: Is specifically meant. However, when one of the above words forms part of a compound, the disambiguating syllable is generally dropped and the resulting word is still disyllabic. For example, 石 ; shí alone, and not 石头 ; 石頭 ; shítou , appears in compounds as meaning 'stone' such as 石膏 ; shígāo ; 'plaster', 石灰 ; shíhuī ; 'lime', 石窟 ; shíkū ; 'grotto', 石英 ; 'quartz', and 石油 ; shíyóu ; 'petroleum'. Although many single-syllable morphemes ( 字 ; zì ) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllable compounds known as 词 ; 詞 ; cí , which more closely resembles
7525-484: Is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The CC-CEDICT project (2010) contains 97,404 contemporary entries including idioms, technology terms, and names of political figures, businesses, and products. The 2009 version of the Webster's Digital Chinese Dictionary (WDCD), based on CC-CEDICT, contains over 84,000 entries. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary,
7700-496: Is used as an everyday language in Hong Kong and Macau . The designation of various Chinese branches remains controversial. Some linguists and most ordinary Chinese people consider all the spoken varieties as one single language, as speakers share a common national identity and a common written form. Others instead argue that it is inappropriate to refer to major branches of Chinese such as Mandarin, Wu, and so on as "dialects" because
7875-497: Is used in education, media, formal speech, and everyday life—though Mandarin is increasingly taught in schools due to the mainland's growing influence. Historically, the Chinese language has spread to its neighbors through a variety of means. Northern Vietnam was incorporated into the Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE) in 111 BCE, marking the beginning of a period of Chinese control that ran almost continuously for
8050-540: Is used in the Language Atlas of China (1987), distinguishes three further groups: Some varieties remain unclassified, including the Danzhou dialect on Hainan , Waxianghua spoken in western Hunan , and Shaozhou Tuhua spoken in northern Guangdong . Standard Chinese is the standard language of China (where it is called 普通话 ; pǔtōnghuà ) and Taiwan, and one of the four official languages of Singapore (where it
8225-428: Is very complex, with a large number of consonants and vowels, but they are probably not all distinguished in any single dialect. Most linguists now believe it represents a diasystem encompassing 6th-century northern and southern standards for reading the classics. The complex relationship between spoken and written Chinese is an example of diglossia : as spoken, Chinese varieties have evolved at different rates, while
8400-684: The Qieyun rime dictionary (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by rhyme tables such as the Yunjing constructed by ancient Chinese philologists as a guide to the Qieyun system. These works define phonological categories but with little hint of what sounds they represent. Linguists have identified these sounds by comparing the categories with pronunciations in modern varieties of Chinese , borrowed Chinese words in Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean, and transcription evidence. The resulting system
8575-690: The Diligent Work-Frugal Study Movement . Zhou returned to Paris by June 1922, where he was one of the twenty two participants present at the organization of the Communist Youth League of China , established as the European Branch of the Chinese Communist Party. Zhou helped draft the party's charter and was elected to the three member executive committee as director of propaganda. He also wrote for and helped edit
8750-641: The Green Gang and soldiers under the command of Nationalist general Pai Ch'ung-hsi attacked the Communists and quickly overcame them. On the eve of the Nationalist attack, Wang Shouhua, who was both the head of the CCP Labor Committee and the Chairman of the General Labor Committee, accepted a dinner invitation from "Big-eared Du" (a Shanghai gangster) and was strangled after he arrived. Zhou himself
8925-589: The International Table Tennis Federation , claimed that he visited China prior to the 31st World Table Tennis Championship and suggested to non-Chinese sports authorities and Premier Zhou Enlai that China should take steps to get in contact with the world through international sport events after the Cultural Revolution . Evans' suggestion aligned with China's interest in using sports as a tool for spreading their socialist internationalism,
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#17328590194839100-525: The Korean , Japanese and Vietnamese languages, and today comprise over half of their vocabularies. This massive influx led to changes in the phonological structure of the languages, contributing to the development of moraic structure in Japanese and the disruption of vowel harmony in Korean. Borrowed Chinese morphemes have been used extensively in all these languages to coin compound words for new concepts, in
9275-680: The May Fourth Movement beginning in 1919. After the fall of the Northern Song dynasty and subsequent reign of the Jurchen Jin and Mongol Yuan dynasties in northern China, a common speech (now called Old Mandarin ) developed based on the dialects of the North China Plain around the capital. The 1324 Zhongyuan Yinyun was a dictionary that codified the rhyming conventions of new sanqu verse form in this language. Together with
9450-625: The Nanchang uprising . Zhou worked underground in Shanghai before being transferred to the Jiangxi Soviet , and after the soviet's defeat was a member of the party's top leadership during its Long March . Zhou came to support Mao Zedong , who became leader of the CCP in 1935. During the Xi'an Incident in 1936, Zhou successfully persuaded KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek to agree to form a Second United Front against
9625-497: The National Language Unification Commission finally settled on the Beijing dialect in 1932. The People's Republic founded in 1949 retained this standard but renamed it 普通话 ; 普通話 ; pǔtōnghuà ; 'common speech'. The national language is now used in education, the media, and formal situations in both mainland China and Taiwan. In Hong Kong and Macau , Cantonese is the dominant spoken language due to cultural influence from Guangdong immigrants and colonial-era policies, and
9800-525: The Red Guards ' damage and his efforts to protect others from their wrath made him immensely popular in its later stages. Mao's health began to decline in 1971, and Lin Biao fell into disgrace and later died in a plane crash . Amid these events, Zhou was designated as Mao's successor in 1973, but struggled internally against the Gang of Four . In 1975, he fell out of the public eye for medical treatment and died one year later. The outpouring of public grief which his death provoked in Beijing turned to anger at
9975-411: The Shanghai Communiqué . The Shanghai Communiqué was a pivotal diplomatic document issued on February 28, 1972, during President Richard Nixon's visit to China. It marked a significant shift in U.S.-China relations, as both countries acknowledged their differences while committing to improving their relationship, ultimately setting the stage for détente between the two nations. The United States viewed
10150-447: The Shanghai Communiqué was issued between the U.S. and the PRC. The Communiqué noted that both nations would work towards the normalization of their relations regarding economic and cultural contacts. Two months after Richard Nixon's visit, Zhuang Zedong visited the U.S. as the head of a Chinese table-tennis delegation, April 12–30, 1972. Notably, the Chinese delegation played a team of University of Maryland, College Park students at
10325-457: The Soviet Union , which had seen the outbreak of a series of bloody border incidents , while the U.S. sought closer relations with China as leverage in its peace negotiations with North Vietnam . "However, when Mao wanted to improve relations with the United States, he needed to prepare the Chinese public psychologically and politically." From the early years of the People's Republic, sports had played an important role in diplomacy, incorporating
10500-443: The University of the Toilers of the East in Moscow, and the establishment of the Chinese Nationalist Party ( Kuomintang or KMT) European branch. In June 1923, the Third Congress of the Chinese Communist Party accepted the Comintern's instructions to ally with the KMT, led at the time by Sun Yat-sen . These instructions called for CCP members to join the Nationalist Party as "individuals", while still retaining their association with
10675-434: The economy . Born in Jiangsu , as a student Zhou was involved in the 1919 May Fourth Movement , and in the early 1920s studied in France, where he joined the newly-founded CCP. During the party's alliance with the Kuomintang (KMT), he worked in the political department of the Whampoa Military Academy . In 1927, Zhou led the worker uprising which was crushed by the KMT in the Shanghai massacre , after which he helped lead
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#173285901948310850-423: The oracle bone inscriptions created during the Shang dynasty c. 1250 BCE . The phonetic categories of Old Chinese can be reconstructed from the rhymes of ancient poetry. During the Northern and Southern period , Middle Chinese went through several sound changes and split into several varieties following prolonged geographic and political separation. The Qieyun , a rime dictionary , recorded
11025-542: The phonology of Old Chinese by comparing later varieties of Chinese with the rhyming practice of the Classic of Poetry and the phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters. Although many of the finer details remain unclear, most scholars agree that Old Chinese differs from Middle Chinese in lacking retroflex and palatal obstruents but having initial consonant clusters of some sort, and in having voiceless nasals and liquids. Most recent reconstructions also describe an atonal language with consonant clusters at
11200-773: The 12-volume Hanyu Da Cidian , records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai , a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases, and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific, and technical terms. The 2016 edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian , an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 13,000 head characters and defines 70,000 words. Zhou Enlai Zhou Enlai ( Chinese : 周恩来 ; pinyin : Zhōu Ēnlái ; Wade–Giles : Chou Ên -lai ; 5 March 1898 – 8 January 1976)
11375-537: The 1954 Geneva Conference and 1955 Bandung Conference and helped orchestrate Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China . He helped devise policies regarding disputes with the United States, Taiwan, the Soviet Union ( after 1960 ), India, Korea, and Vietnam. Zhou survived the purges of other top officials during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, and was one of the main driving forces behind affairs of state as Mao dedicated much of his later years to political struggle and ideological work. Zhou's attempts at mitigating
11550-460: The 2018 World Team Table Tennis Championships, the two Koreas entered separate teams in the competition but, when they were paired against each other at the quarter-final of the women's event, they negotiated instead to field a joint team for the semi-final. In the 2024 Summer Olympics , the North and South Korean mixed ping-pong teams took a selfie together along with the Chinese team after the table tennis finals. Ping-pong diplomacy became one of
11725-425: The American players for "opening the door for the friendly exchange between the two nations." During the visit the U.S. relaxed currency controls on the People's Republic of China. During their April 1971 visit, the American team invited the Chinese team to visit the United States. In early 1972, Zhou told White House press secretary Ron Ziegler (who was in China preparing for President Richard Nixon's visit) that
11900-483: The American team, they could shake the hands of their American counterparts at matches. Once in Japan for the championships, the Chinese players engaged in conversations after they were greeted by their American counterparts. On March 30, 1971, American player Graham Steenhoven and the head of the Chinese delegation Song Zhong had two short conversations. Steenhoven told Song that the United States had just lifted its ban on travel to China. He also expressed his regret that
12075-504: The Awakening Society met with several Beijing organizations and agreed to form a "Reform Federation"; during these activities Zhou became more familiar with Li Dazhao and met Zhang Shenfu, who was the contact between Li in Beijing and Chen Duxiu in Shanghai. Both men were organizing underground Communist cells in cooperation with Grigori Voitinsky , a Comintern agent, but Zhou apparently did not meet Voitinsky at this point. Soon after his release, Zhou decided to go to Europe to study. (He
12250-632: The CCP. After joining the KMT, they would work to lead and direct it, transforming it into a vehicle of revolution. Within several years, this strategy would become the source of serious conflict between the KMT and the CCP. As well as joining the KMT, Zhou helped organize the founding of the Nationalist Party European branch in November 1923. Under Zhou's influence, most of the European branch's officers were in fact communists. Zhou's wide-ranging contacts and personal relationships formed during this period were central to his career. Important party leaders, such as Zhu De and Nie Rongzhen , were first admitted to
12425-464: The Chinese team could visit that spring. In February of 1972, Nixon visited the People's Republic, the first time in history that an American president had traveled to the Chinese mainland. The Chinese team came to the United States on April 12, 1972. They were the first group of official Chinese visitors to the United States since 1949. The Chinese team toured cities in Michigan, Williamsburg, Washington D.C., Memphis, and Los Angeles. During these visits,
12600-641: The Communist head in Shanghai, Chen Duxiu , the Party's general secretary, with a special committee of eight party officials coordinating Communist actions. The committee also consulted closely on decisions with the Comintern representatives in Shanghai, headed by Grigori Voitinsky . The partial documentation available for this period shows that Zhou headed the Communist Party Central Committee's Military Commission in Shanghai. He participated in both
12775-659: The February and March actions, but was not the guiding hand in either event, instead working with A. P. Appen, the Soviet military advisor to the Central Committee, training the pickets of the General Labor Union, the Communist controlled labor organization in Shanghai. He also worked to make union strong arm squads more effective when the Communists declared a "Red Terror" after the failed February uprising; this action resulted in
12950-635: The First Corps Political Department. Soon after, the Nationalist Party's Central Executive Committee appointed Zhou Nationalist Party party representative, making Zhou chief commissar of the First Corps. The first major battle of expedition saw the capture of Chen's base in Huizhou on 15 October. Shantou was taken on 6 November, and by the end of 1925, the Nationalists controlled all of Guangdong province. Zhou's appointment as chief commissar of
13125-650: The First Corps allowed him to appoint Communists as commissars in four of the Corps' five divisions. Following the conclusion of the Expedition, Zhou was appointed special commissioner for the East River District, which placed him in temporary administrative control of several counties; he apparently used this opportunity to establish a Communist party branch in Shantou and strengthen the CCP's control of local unions. This marked
13300-542: The Gang of Four, leading to the 1976 Tiananmen incident . Though Zhou was succeeded by Hua Guofeng as premier and designated successor, after Mao's death Zhou's ally Deng Xiaoping was able to secure his place as paramount leader by 1978. Zhou Enlai was born on 5 March 1898 in Huai'an , located in the province of Jiangsu , as the first son of his branch of the Zhou family. The Zhou family
13475-531: The Guangdong Army under Xu Chongzhix, and two training regiments of the Nationalist Party Army, led by Chiang Kai-shek and staffed by Academy officers and cadets. The fighting lasted through May 1925, with the defeat, but not destruction, of Chen's forces. Zhou accompanied the Whampoa cadets on the expedition as a political officer. When Chen regrouped and attacked Guangzhou again in September 1925,
13650-621: The Japanese. During the Second Sino-Japanese War , Zhou was the resident representative of the CCP in Chongqing , and during the renewed civil war from 1946 assisted Mao in commanding military campaigns. After the establishment of the PRC in 1949, Zhou was appointed head of government and foreign minister. Advocating peaceful coexistence with the West after the Korean War , he participated in
13825-555: The Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet . English words of Chinese origin include tea from Hokkien 茶 ( tê ), dim sum from Cantonese 點心 ( dim2 sam1 ), and kumquat from Cantonese 金橘 ( gam1 gwat1 ). The sinologist Jerry Norman has estimated that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese. These varieties form a dialect continuum , in which differences in speech generally become more pronounced as distances increase, though
14000-703: The May Fourth incident seem to have been crucial to his Communist career. Zhou's friends in the Awakening Society were similarly affected. 15 of the group's members became Communists for at least some time, and the group remained close later on. Zhou and six other group members travelled to Europe in the next two years, and Zhou eventually married Deng Yingchao , the group's youngest member. Zhou's group arrived in Marseille on 13 December 1920. Unlike most other Chinese students, who went to Europe on work-study programs, Zhou's scholarship and position with Yishi bao meant that he
14175-503: The NRA and defections from his army, Sun reduced his forces in Shanghai, and the Communists, whose party headquarters was located in Shanghai, made three attempts to seize control of the city, later called "the three Shanghai Uprisings", in October 1926, February 1927 and March 1927. Zhou was transferred to Shanghai to assist in these activities, probably in late 1926. It seems he was not present for
14350-435: The Nationalist party). Zhou's talents also attracted the attention of Yan Xiu and Zhang Boling. Yan in particular thought highly of Zhou, helping to pay for his studies in Japan and later France. Yan was so impressed with Zhou that he encouraged Zhou to marry his daughter, but Zhou declined. Zhou later expressed the reasons for his decision not to marry Yan's daughter to his classmate, Zhang Honghao. Zhou said that he declined
14525-405: The Nationalists launched a second expedition. Nationalist forces by this time had been reorganized into five corps (or armies) and adopted the commissar system with Political Departments and Nationalist party representatives in most divisions. The First Corps, made up of the Nationalist Party Army, was led by Whampoa graduates and commanded by Chiang Kai-shek, who personally appointed Zhou director of
14700-555: The PRC's reputation. Because neither Soviet athletes nor journalists appeared in China following the appearance of the American players and journalists, one speculation is that the act showed the equal scorn of both countries towards the USSR. Another example of Ping Pong Diplomacy occurred during the 1991 World Table Tennis Championships in Chiba , Japan, where a unified Korean team played together for
14875-446: The People's Republic of China as an aggressor nation and enforced an economic containment policy including an embargo on the PRC, following its entry into the Korean War in 1950. After approximately 20 years of neither diplomatic nor economic relations, both countries finally saw an advantage in opening up to each other: China viewed closer relations with the United States as a beneficial counter to its increasingly tense relationship with
15050-573: The Rostrum of Tiananmen on the National Day in 1970 and said to Snow that China should now place its hope on American people. Zhuang looked in his bag and first went through some pins, badges with Mao's head , silk handkerchiefs, and fans. But he felt these were not decent enough to be a good gift. He finally picked the silk portrait of Huangshan Mountains. On the following day, many Japanese newspapers carried photographs of Zhuang Zedong and Glenn Cowan. In
15225-642: The Russian or the British way... I would prefer something in-between, rather than one of these two extremes". Still interested in academic programs, Zhou traveled to Britain in January 1921 to visit Edinburgh University . Concerned by financial problems and language requirements, he did not enroll, returning to France at the end of January. There are no records of Zhou entering any academic program in France. In spring 1921, he joined
15400-569: The Shanghai Communists were highly secretive at the time, and that his execution would have been noticed as a violation of the cooperation agreement between the CCP and the KMT (which was technically still in effect). Zhou was finally only released after the intervention of a representative of the Twenty-sixth Army, Zhao Shu, who was able to convince his commanders that the arrest of Zhou had been
15575-560: The TV personality Chen Luyu , Zhuang Zedong told more of the story: "The trip on the bus took 15 minutes, and I hesitated for 10 minutes. I grew up with the slogan 'Down with the American imperialism !' And during the Cultural Revolution , the string of class struggle was tightened unprecedentedly, and I was asking myself, 'Is it okay to have anything to do with your No. 1 enemy?'" Zhuang recalled remembering that Chairman Mao Zedong met Edgar Snow on
15750-429: The United States, one of the American players, Glenn Cowan, told reporters that the Chinese were very similar to people in the U.S. He said: The people are just like us. They are real, they're genuine, they got feeling. I made friends, I made genuine friends, you see. The country is similar to America, but still very different. It's beautiful. They got the Great Wall, they got plains over there. They got an ancient palace,
15925-531: The adoption was arranged because the family feared Yigan would die without an heir. Zhou Yigan died soon after the adoption, and Zhou Enlai was raised by Yigan's widow, whose surname was Chen. Madame Chen was also from a scholarly family and received a traditional literary education. According to Zhou's own account, he was very close to his adoptive mother and acquired his lasting interest in Chinese literature and opera from her. Madame Chen taught Zhou to read and write at an early age, and Zhou later claimed to have read
16100-416: The arrestees' release. Zhou and three other leaders were themselves arrested. The arrestees were held for over six months; during their detention, Zhou supposedly organized discussions on Marxism. At their trial in July, Zhou and six others were sentenced to two months; the rest were found not guilty. All were immediately released since they had already been held over six months. After Zhou's release, he and
16275-447: The background for Zhou's removal from the academy. Zhou participated in two military operations conducted by the Nationalist regime in 1925, later known as the first and second Eastern Expeditions. The first was in January 1925 when Chen Jiongming , an important Cantonese military leader previously driven out of Guangzhou by Sun Yat-sen, attempted to retake Guangzhou. The Nationalist regime's campaign against Chen consisted of forces from
16450-803: The ban meant that the American team did not attend the 1961 World Table Tennis Championships (which were held in China) and stated that he hoped the U.S. team could compete in China in the future. The Chinese delegation relayed this interaction to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the National Sports Commission, requesting instructions on how to respond. The MFA and the Commission did not respond positively, viewing it as inappropriate to invite American athletes to China before inviting American leftists. Zhou Enlai agreed, but requested that Chinese officials with
16625-521: The bourgeoisie, partylords, bureaucrats, inequality between men and women, obstinate ideas, obsolete morals, old ethics... should be abolished or reformed", and affirmed that it was the purpose of the Society to spread this awareness among the Chinese people. It was in this society that Zhou first met his future wife, Deng Yingchao . In some ways, the Awakening Society resembled the clandestine Marxist study group at Peking University headed by Li Dazhao , with
16800-422: The bus, shook his hand, and spoke to him through an interpreter. He presented him with a silk-screen portrait of Huangshan Mountains , a famous product from Hangzhou. Cowan wanted to give something back, but all he could find from his bag was a comb. The American hesitantly replied, "I can't give you a comb. I wish I could give you something, but I can't." Cowan would later reciprocate Zhuang's gesture by gifting him
16975-624: The cities of Nagano, Nagaoka and Chiba, and secured agreement from the ITTF for North Korea and South Korea to compete under the unified name of “Korea”. The Korean team played under a white flag depicting the Korean peninsula in blue and used the Korean folksong , Arirang , rather than the national anthem of either the North or the South. The competition saw the Korean team win one gold medal, one silver and two bronze medals. This action has since been repeated. At
17150-527: The country would send a team to the 1971 World Table Tennis Championships . The more radical among China's leadership opposed sending a team. Many of the players believed that China should not send a team due to political considerations. Ultimately, Mao Zedong strongly supported the idea of sending the team. He reviewed and approved the plan submitted by the team. Before the team left, Zhou Enlai instructed its members not to conduct propaganda to foreigners and that while they should not initiate conversations with
17325-598: The days following the tournament, Zedong once again surprised the world by inviting the American table tennis team to visit China and participate in a regional table tennis competition. On April 10, 1971, the American team, consisting of men and woman of all ages from high-schoolers to professors, and accompanying journalists became the first official American delegation to set foot in the Chinese capital since 1949. The U.S. team spent 10-days traveling to Tianjin, Guangzhou, Beijing, and Shanghai, visiting national monuments, attending banquets, playing exhibition matches, and observing
17500-519: The death of his uncle, Zhou Yikui, his inability to master Japanese, and the acute Japanese cultural chauvinism that discriminated against Chinese. By the time that Zhou returned to China in the spring of 1919, he had become deeply disenchanted with Japanese culture, rejecting the idea that the Japanese political model was relevant to China and disdaining the values of elitism and militarism that he observed. Zhou's diaries and letters from his time in Tokyo show
17675-399: The different spoken dialects varies, but in general, there has been a tendency to a reduction in sounds from Middle Chinese. The Mandarin dialects in particular have experienced a dramatic decrease in sounds and so have far more polysyllabic words than most other spoken varieties. The total number of syllables in some varieties is therefore only about a thousand, including tonal variation, which
17850-484: The difficulties involved in determining the difference between language and dialect, other terms have been proposed. These include topolect , lect , vernacular , regional , and variety . Syllables in the Chinese languages have some unique characteristics. They are tightly related to the morphology and also to the characters of the writing system, and phonologically they are structured according to fixed rules. The structure of each syllable consists of
18025-415: The drastic cultural differences. Upon arrival, the U.S. team was greeted by Premier Zhou Enlai and in the proceeding days, several exhibition matches took place, and those in Beijing hosted 20,000 in attendance. The American team was initially shocked by how different everything was in China. A member of the team, Tim Boggan, said "Everything is different from anything I'd ever seen. The streets were different,
18200-498: The early successes of the Expedition, there was soon a race between Chiang Kai-shek leading the "right-wing" of the Nationalist Party and the Communists, running inside the "left-wing" of the Nationalists, for control of major southern cities such as Nanjing and Shanghai. At this point the Chinese portion of Shanghai was controlled by Sun Chuanfang , one of the militarists targeted by the North Expedition. Distracted by fighting with
18375-566: The end of the syllable, developing into tone distinctions in Middle Chinese. Several derivational affixes have also been identified, but the language lacks inflection , and indicated grammatical relationships using word order and grammatical particles . Middle Chinese was the language used during Northern and Southern dynasties and the Sui , Tang , and Song dynasties (6th–10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by
18550-806: The famous Nankai Middle School . Nankai Middle School was founded by Yan Xiu , a prominent scholar and philanthropist, and headed by Zhang Boling , one of the most important Chinese educators of the 20th century. Nankai's teaching methods were unusual by contemporary Chinese standards. By the time Zhou began attending, it had adopted the educational model used at the Phillips Academy in the United States. The school's reputation, with its "highly disciplined" daily routine and "strict moral code", attracted many students who later became prominent in public life. Zhou's friends and classmates there ranged from Ma Jun (an early communist leader executed in 1927) to K. C. Wu (later mayor of Shanghai and governor of Taiwan under
18725-742: The famous vernacular novel Journey to the West at the age of six. By the age of eight, he was reading other traditional Chinese novels, including the Water Margin , Romance of the Three Kingdoms , and Dream of the Red Chamber . Zhou's birth mother Wan died in 1907 when Zhou was 9, and his adoptive mother Chen in 1908 when Zhou was 10. Zhou's father was working in Hubei, far from Jiangsu, so Zhou and his two younger brothers returned to Huai'an and lived with his father's remaining younger brother Yikui for
18900-631: The final separation of the Nationalist and Communist parties and the end of the Soviet-Nationalist alliance in 1927. Zhou's activities immediately after his removal from his positions at Whampoa are uncertain. An earlier biographer claims that Chiang Kai-shek put Zhou in charge of "an advanced training center for the CCP members and commissars withdrawn from the army". More recent Chinese Communist sources claim that Zhou had an important role at this time in securing Communist control of Ye Ting 's Independent Regiment. The regiment and Ye Ting later played
19075-514: The first American scientists to visit China since 1949. Galston and Singer had sent visa applications to Chinese embassy in Ottawa, Canada, and these applications were approved while they were visiting North Vietnam . Galston and Singer immediately traveled to China, where they met with Zhou on May 19, 1971. Zhou sought to address American concerns about China by telling them that while the Pacific Ocean
19250-495: The first day of the American team's visit, Zhou arranged for them to watch a performance of The Red Detachment of Women , a popular model play . The American and Chinese teams played exhibition matches on the second day. Based on the principle of "friendship first, competition second," Zhou instructed that the Chinese team should not win all the games. It won four of the seven matches. The American team visited significant sites, including Tsinghua University , an industrial museum,
19425-413: The first one, 十 , normally appears in monosyllabic form in spoken Mandarin; the rest are normally used in the polysyllabic forms of respectively. In each, the homophone was disambiguated by the addition of another morpheme, typically either a near-synonym or some sort of generic word (e.g. 'head', 'thing'), the purpose of which is to indicate which of the possible meanings of the other, homophonic syllable
19600-502: The first time since the Korean War. The diplomatic efforts leading to the formation of this unified team were led by then- International Table Tennis Federation President , Ichiro Ogimura . Prior to the championships, Ogimura visited South Korea 20 times and traveled to North Korea 15 times to plead for a unified team from the Korean peninsula . Ogimura also worked with local Japanese government heads to create joint training camps in
19775-485: The first uprising on 23–24 October, but he was certainly in Shanghai by December 1926. Early accounts credit Zhou with labor organizing activities in Shanghai after his arrival, or, more credibly, working to "strengthen the indoctrination of political workers in labor unions and smuggle arms for the strikers." Reports that Zhou "organized" or "ordered" the second and third uprisings on 20 February and 21 March exaggerate his role. Major decisions during this period were made by
19950-449: The food was different." The trip also marked the return of American journalism to China, American reporters having been ousted shortly after the founding of the PRC and a prior effort to invite American reporters having been rebuffed by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Nonetheless, cracks in the Chinese facade showed as "during one stopover, team president Graham Steenhoven noticed that a “Welcome American Team” banner had been hung over
20125-491: The form of a word), to indicate a word's function within a sentence. In other words, Chinese has very few grammatical inflections —it possesses no tenses , no voices , no grammatical number , and only a few articles . They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood . In Mandarin, this involves the use of particles such as 了 ; le ; ' PFV ', 还 ; 還 ; hái ; 'still', and 已经 ; 已經 ; yǐjīng ; 'already'. Chinese has
20300-632: The government in Hankou, and the party "right-wing" (led by Chiang Kai-shek) establishing a rival government in Nanjing. Still following Comintern instructions, the Communists remained as a "bloc inside" the Nationalist Party, hoping to continue expanding their influence through the Nationalists. After being attacked by a warlord friendly to Chiang, Wang's leftist government disintegrated later in May 1927, and Chiang's troops began an organized purge of Communists in territories formerly controlled by Wang. In mid-July Zhou
20475-550: The government of the People's Republic of China, with Singapore officially adopting them in 1976. Traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and among Chinese-speaking communities overseas . Linguists classify all varieties of Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family , together with Burmese , Tibetan and many other languages spoken in the Himalayas and the Southeast Asian Massif . Although
20650-402: The group members using numbers instead of names for "secrecy". (Zhou was "Number Five", a pseudonym which he continued to use in later years.) Indeed, immediately after the group was established, it invited Li Dazhao to give a lecture on Marxism. Zhou assumed a more prominent active role in political activities over the next few months. The largest of these activities were rallies in support of
20825-526: The high point of Zhou's time at Whampoa. In personal terms, 1925 was also an important year for Zhou. Zhou had kept in touch with Deng Yingchao , whom he had met in the Awakening Society while in Tianjin; and, in January 1925, Zhou asked for and received permission from CCP authorities to marry Deng. The two married in Guangzhou on 8 August 1925. Zhou's work at Whampoa came to an end with the Zhongshan Warship Incident of 20 March 1926, in which
21000-491: The influence of Zhang Shenfu, who had previously worked there. Zhou was Whampoa's chief political officer. While he was serving in Whampoa, Zhou was also made the secretary of the Communist Party of Guangdong-Guangxi, and served as the CCP representative with the rank of major-general. The island of Whampoa, ten miles downriver from Guangzhou, was at the heart of the Soviet-Nationalist Party alliance. Conceived as
21175-463: The insurrectionists were under strict orders not to harm foreigners, which they obeyed. The forces of Sun Chuanfang withdrew and the uprising was successful, despite the small number of armed forces available. The first Nationalist troops entered the city the next day. As the Communists attempted to install a soviet municipal government, conflict began between the Nationalists and Communists, and on 12 April Nationalist forces, including both members of
21350-581: The language of administration and scholarship, a position it would retain until the late 19th century in Korea and (to a lesser extent) Japan, and the early 20th century in Vietnam. Scholars from different lands could communicate, albeit only in writing, using Literary Chinese. Although they used Chinese solely for written communication, each country had its own tradition of reading texts aloud using what are known as Sino-Xenic pronunciations . Chinese words with these pronunciations were also extensively imported into
21525-516: The late 19th century. Today Japanese is written with a composite script using both Chinese characters called kanji , and kana. Korean is written exclusively with hangul in North Korea, although knowledge of the supplementary Chinese characters called hanja is still required, and hanja are increasingly rarely used in South Korea. As a result of its historical colonization by France, Vietnamese now uses
21700-509: The marriage because he feared that his financial prospects would not be promising, and that Yan would, as his father-in-law, later dominate his life. Zhou did well in his studies at Nankai; he excelled in Chinese, won several awards in the school speech club, and became editor of the school newspaper in his final year. Zhou was also very active in acting and producing dramas and plays at Nankai; many students who were not otherwise acquainted with him knew of him through his acting. Nankai preserves
21875-605: The miners) examining the conflict between workers and employers, and the conflict's resolution. After five weeks in London he moved to Paris, where interest in Russia's 1917 October Revolution was high. In a letter to his cousin, Zhou identified two broad paths of reform for China: "gradual reform" (as in England) or "violent means" (as in Russia). Zhou wrote that "I do not have a preference for either
22050-455: The more conservative modern varieties, usually found in the south, have largely monosyllabic words , especially with basic vocabulary. However, most nouns, adjectives, and verbs in modern Mandarin are disyllabic. A significant cause of this is phonetic erosion : sound changes over time have steadily reduced the number of possible syllables in the language's inventory. In modern Mandarin, there are only around 1,200 possible syllables, including
22225-499: The most prominent examples of people's diplomacy in the context of China-United States relations. Tone, S. (2021, June 10). How ping-pong turned the tables of the Cold War. #SixthTone. https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1007688 Chinese language Chinese ( simplified Chinese : 汉语 ; traditional Chinese : 漢語 ; pinyin : Hànyǔ ; lit. ' Han language' or 中文 ; Zhōngwén ; 'Chinese writing')
22400-459: The move, however, the family continued to view Shaoxing as its ancestral home. Zhou's grandfather, Zhou Panlong, and his granduncle, Zhou Jun'ang, were the first members of the family to move to Huai'an. Panlong apparently passed the provincial examinations, and Zhou Enlai later claimed that Panlong served as magistrate governing Huai'an county. Zhou's father, Zhou Yineng, was the second of Zhou Panlong's four sons. Zhou's birth mother, surnamed Wan,
22575-409: The murder of twenty "anti-union" figures, and the kidnapping, beating, and intimidation of others associated with anti-union activities. The third Communist uprising in Shanghai took place from 20 to 21 March. Approximately 600,000 rioting workers cut power and telephone lines and seized the city's post office, police headquarters, and railway stations, often after heavy fighting. During this uprising,
22750-425: The mutual unintelligibility between them is too great. However, calling major Chinese branches "languages" would also be wrong under the same criterion, since a branch such as Wu, itself contains many mutually unintelligible varieties, and could not be properly called a single language. There are also viewpoints pointing out that linguists often ignore mutual intelligibility when varieties share intelligibility with
22925-583: The nasal sonorant consonants /m/ and /ŋ/ can stand alone as their own syllable. In Mandarin much more than in other spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meaning they have no coda (assuming that a final glide is not analyzed as a coda), but syllables that do have codas are restricted to nasals /m/ , /n/ , /ŋ/ , the retroflex approximant /ɻ/ , and voiceless stops /p/ , /t/ , /k/ , or /ʔ/ . Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as Standard Chinese, are limited to only /n/ , /ŋ/ , and /ɻ/ . The number of sounds in
23100-471: The next several months, this group eventually formed a united organization with a group of Chinese radicals from Hunan, who were living in Montargis south of Paris. This group included such later prominent figures as Cai Hesen , Li Lisan , Chen Yi , Nie Rongzhen , Deng Xiaoping , and also Guo Longzhen, another member of the Awakening Society. Unlike Zhou, most of the students in this group were participants in
23275-634: The next two years. In 1910, Zhou's uncle Yigeng, his father's older brother, offered to care for Zhou. The family in Huai'an agreed, and Zhou was sent to stay with his uncle in Manchuria at Fengtian (now Shenyang ), where Zhou Yigeng worked in a government office. In Fengtian, Zhou attended the Dongguan Model Academy, a modern-style school. His previous education consisted entirely of homeschooling. In addition to new subjects such as English and science, Zhou
23450-538: The other varieties within the same branch (e.g. Southern Min). There are, however, transitional areas where varieties from different branches share enough features for some limited intelligibility, including New Xiang with Southwestern Mandarin , Xuanzhou Wu Chinese with Lower Yangtze Mandarin , Jin with Central Plains Mandarin and certain divergent dialects of Hakka with Gan . All varieties of Chinese are tonal at least to some degree, and are largely analytic . The earliest attested written Chinese consists of
23625-457: The parks, there's streams, and they got ghosts that haunt; there's all kinds of, you know, animals. The country changes from the south to the north. The people, they have a, a unity. They really believe in their Maoism. After the American team's visit, China welcomed Americans from diverse backgrounds to visit China, beginning with the biologists Arthur Galston (Yale University) and Ethan Singer ( Massachusetts Institute of Technology ).They became
23800-535: The party by Zhou. By 1924, the Soviet-Nationalist alliance was expanding rapidly and Zhou was summoned back to China for further work. He left Europe probably in late July 1924, returning to China as one of the most senior Chinese Communist Party members in Europe. Zhou returned to China in late August or early September 1924 to join the Political Department of the Whampoa Military Academy , probably through
23975-490: The party magazine, Shaonian (Youth), later renamed Chiguang (Red Light). It was in Zhou's capacity as general editor of this magazine that Zhou first met Deng Xiaoping , only seventeen years old, whom Zhou hired to operate a mimeograph (copy) machine. The party went through several reorganizations and name changes, but Zhou remained a key member of the group throughout his stay in Europe. Other important activities Zhou undertook included recruiting and transporting students for
24150-466: The people of the United States and the people of the People's Republic of China." The meeting with Nixon had nearly been canceled following the United States bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong on April 16 . Although Zhou sought to cancel the meeting between the team and Nixon, Mao concluded that the visit was unofficial and to cancel the meeting would be undiplomatic given that the previous year the American team had met with Chinese leaders. Upon his return to
24325-611: The period. In July 1919, however, Zhou became editor of the Tianjin Student Union Bulletin, apparently at the request of his Nankai classmate, Ma Jun, a founder of the Union. During its brief existence from July 1919 to early 1920, the Bulletin was widely read by student groups around the country and suppressed on at least one occasion by the national government as "harmful to public safety and social order." When Nankai became
24500-404: The rate of change varies immensely. Generally, mountainous South China exhibits more linguistic diversity than the North China Plain . Until the late 20th century, Chinese emigrants to Southeast Asia and North America came from southeast coastal areas, where Min, Hakka, and Yue dialects were spoken. Specifically, most Chinese immigrants to North America until the mid-20th century spoke Taishanese ,
24675-552: The related subject dropping . Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess differences. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 50,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are in use and only about 3,000 are frequently used in Chinese media and newspapers. However, Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words. Because most Chinese words are made up of two or more characters, there are many more Chinese words than characters. A more accurate equivalent for
24850-509: The relationship was first proposed in the early 19th century and is now broadly accepted, reconstruction of Sino-Tibetan is much less developed than that of families such as Indo-European or Austroasiatic . Difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages, the lack of inflection in many of them, and the effects of language contact. In addition, many of the smaller languages are spoken in mountainous areas that are difficult to reach and are often also sensitive border zones. Without
25025-465: The revolt was a disaster, with the Communists' forces decimated and scattered. Zhou himself contracted malaria during the campaign and was secretly sent to Hong Kong for medical treatment by Nie Rongzhen and Ye Ting. After reaching Hong Kong, Zhou was disguised as a businessman named "Li" and entrusted to the care of local Communists. In a subsequent meeting of the CCP Central Committee, Zhou
25200-465: The same letter, Zhou told his cousin that, regarding his adoption of a specific ideology, "I still have to make up my mind." While in Europe, Zhou, also named as John Knight, studied the differing approaches to resolving class conflict adopted by various European nations. In London in January 1921, Zhou witnessed a large miners' strike and wrote a series of articles for the Yishi bao (generally sympathetic to
25375-505: The six official languages of the United Nations . Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin and was first officially adopted in the 1930s. The language is written primarily using a logography of Chinese characters , largely shared by readers who may otherwise speak mutually unintelligible varieties. Since the 1950s, the use of simplified characters has been promoted by
25550-557: The slightly later Menggu Ziyun , this dictionary describes a language with many of the features characteristic of modern Mandarin dialects. Up to the early 20th century, most Chinese people only spoke their local variety. Thus, as a practical measure, officials of the Ming and Qing dynasties carried out the administration of the empire using a common language based on Mandarin varieties , known as 官话 ; 官話 ; Guānhuà ; 'language of officials'. For most of this period, this language
25725-435: The slogan "Friendship First, Competition Second". Xu Yinsheng , the coach for the Chinese national team, stated "The Premier [Zhou Enlai] constantly reminded us that we were going out not just to compete, but to make friends...to further the peace of humanity" During the isolationist years, athletes were among the few PRC nationals who were allowed to travel overseas. There were political questions in China regarding whether
25900-403: The spring of 1919. Historians disagree over his participation in the May Fourth Movement (May to June 1919). Zhou's "official" Chinese biography states that he was a leader of the Tianjin student protests in the May Fourth movement, but many modern scholars believe that it is highly unlikely that Zhou participated at all, based on the total lack of direct evidence among the surviving records from
26075-528: The team in Japan obtain the American delegation's address and inform them of China's position on the Taiwan issue . Mao Zedong initially approved the resulting report, but two days later instructed the MFA to invite the American team to visit China. According to History of U.S. Table Tennis by Tim Boggan , who went to China along with the U.S. Table Tennis Team, three incidents may have triggered their invitation from China. Welshman H. Roy Evans , then President of
26250-585: The team played ping-pong with students at schools and colleges. The Chinese believed an alliance with the United States would mitigate any threat from Soviet Union, yet Nixon had a different agenda. Nixon aimed to relieve tensions between the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union by eliminating the divide between the two communist powers. Nixon met the team on April 18, telling them that "the big winner, because of this people-to-people contact you are initiating between our two peoples, will be friendship between
26425-609: The tonal distinctions, compared with about 5,000 in Vietnamese (still a largely monosyllabic language), and over 8,000 in English. Most modern varieties tend to form new words through polysyllabic compounds . In some cases, monosyllabic words have become disyllabic formed from different characters without the use of compounding, as in 窟窿 ; kūlong from 孔 ; kǒng ; this is especially common in Jin varieties. This phonological collapse has led to
26600-442: The tournament. Determined to still make the tournament, Cowan hopped on the next bus to the stadium, which just so happened to belong to China's national team. Many of the Chinese players were initially suspicious of Cowan, however, Zhuang Zedong had recently read that Mao Zedong had given interview to an American reporter, so he figured if Chairman Mao could do that, he could also go talk to an American. So, Zedong approached Cowan on
26775-547: The traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí can consist of more than one character–morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. Examples of Chinese words of more than two syllables include 汉堡包 ; 漢堡包 ; hànbǎobāo ; 'hamburger', 守门员 ; 守門員 ; shǒuményuán ; 'goalkeeper', and 电子邮件 ; 電子郵件 ; diànzǐyóujiàn ; 'e-mail'. All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages : they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure), rather than inflectional morphology (changes in
26950-455: The training center of the Nationalist Party Army, it was to provide the military base from which the Nationalists would launch their campaign to unify China, which was split into dozens of military satrapies . From its beginning, the school was funded, armed, and partly staffed by the Soviets. The Political Department, where Zhou worked, was responsible for political indoctrination and control. As
27125-469: The two nations, capturing the imagination of both the Chinese and American public. The publicity surrounding this chance encounter and the subsequent invitation of the U.S. team to China paved the way for President Nixon's historic visit to China in 1972, marking a significant turning point in Sino-American rapprochement. This World Table Tennis Championships marked the return of China's participation after
27300-486: The university's Cole Field House on April 17, 1972. The president's daughter Tricia Nixon Cox was in the stands. Also on the itinerary were Canada , Mexico and Peru . Efforts to employ "ping-pong diplomacy" were not always successful, such as when the All Indonesia Table Tennis Association (PTMSI) refused China's invitation in October 1971, claiming that accepting the PRC's offer would improve
27475-512: The use of tones in Chinese is the application of the four tones of Standard Chinese, along with the neutral tone, to the syllable ma . The tones are exemplified by the following five Chinese words: In contrast, Standard Cantonese has six tones. Historically, finals that end in a stop consonant were considered to be " checked tones " and thus counted separately for a total of nine tones. However, they are considered to be duplicates in modern linguistics and are no longer counted as such: Chinese
27650-452: The words in newspapers, and 60% of the words in science magazines. Vietnam, Korea, and Japan each developed writing systems for their own languages, initially based on Chinese characters , but later replaced with the hangul alphabet for Korean and supplemented with kana syllabaries for Japanese, while Vietnamese continued to be written with the complex chữ Nôm script. However, these were limited to popular literature until
27825-645: The work-study program. A series of conflicts with the Chinese administrators of the program over low pay and poor working conditions resulted in over a hundred students occupying the program's offices at the Sino-French Institute in Lyon in September 1921. The students, including several people from the Montargis group, were arrested and deported. Zhou was apparently not one of the occupying students and remained in France until February or March 1922, when he moved with Zhang and Liu from Paris to Berlin. Zhou's move to Berlin
28000-408: The written language used throughout China changed comparatively little, crystallizing into a prestige form known as Classical or Literary Chinese . Literature written distinctly in the Classical form began to emerge during the Spring and Autumn period . Its use in writing remained nearly universal until the late 19th century, culminating with the widespread adoption of written vernacular Chinese with
28175-444: Was a Chinese statesman, diplomat, and revolutionary who served as the inaugural premier of the People's Republic of China (PRC) from 1949 until his death in 1976, and concurrently as the inaugural Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1949 to 1958. Zhou was a key figure in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and ally of Mao Zedong during the Chinese Civil War , later helping consolidate its control, form its foreign policy , and develop
28350-453: Was a koiné based on dialects spoken in the Nanjing area, though not identical to any single dialect. By the middle of the 19th century, the Beijing dialect had become dominant and was essential for any business with the imperial court. In the 1930s, a standard national language ( 国语 ; 國語 ; Guóyǔ ), was adopted. After much dispute between proponents of northern and southern dialects and an abortive attempt at an artificial pronunciation,
28525-433: Was a significant period in his career. His pioneering work as a political officer in the military made him an important Communist Party expert in this key area; much of his later career centered on the military. Zhou's work in the CCP Guangdong Regional Committee Military Section was typical of his covert activities in the period. The Section was a secret group consisting of three members of the Provincial Central Committee, and
28700-419: Was a small pond for the United States, it "was still a huge ocean for the Chinese to cross." Zhou stated that China had no desire to be a superpower or send soldiers abroad. Galston and Singer conveyed these messages to the American public through a report written by The New York Times a few days after their meeting with Zhou. On February 28, 1972, during President Nixon and Henry Kissinger's visit to Shanghai,
28875-401: Was also exposed to the writings of reformers and radicals such as Liang Qichao , Kang Youwei , Chen Tianhua , Zou Rong , and Zhang Binglin . At the age of fourteen, Zhou declared that his motivation for pursuing education was to "become a great man who will take up the heavy responsibilities of the country in the future." In 1913, Zhou's uncle was transferred to Tianjin, where Zhou entered
29050-474: Was expelled from Nankai University during his detention.) Although money was a problem, he received a scholarship from Yan Xiu . In order to gain greater funding, he successfully approached a Tianjin newspaper, Yishi bao (literally, Current Events Newspaper), for work as a "special correspondent" in Europe. Zhou left Shanghai for Europe on 7 November 1920 with a group of 196 work study students, including friends from Nankai and Tianjin. Zhou's experiences after
29225-437: Was first responsible for organizing and directing CCP nuclei in the army itself. These nuclei, organized at the regimental level and above, were "illegal", meaning they were formed without Nationalist knowledge or authorization. The Section was also responsible for organizing similar nuclei in other armed groups, including secret societies and key services such as railroads and waterways. Zhou did extensive work in these areas until
29400-443: Was forced to go underground. Pressured by their Comintern advisors, and themselves convinced that the "revolutionary high tide" had arrived, the Communists decided to launch a series of military revolts. The first of these was the Nanchang Revolt . Zhou was sent to oversee the event, but the moving figures seem to have been Tan Pingshan and Li Lisan , while the main military figures were Ye Ting and He Long . In military terms,
29575-433: Was hidden by their written form. Often different compounds for the same concept were in circulation for some time before a winner emerged, and sometimes the final choice differed between countries. The proportion of vocabulary of Chinese origin thus tends to be greater in technical, abstract, or formal language. For example, in Japan, Sino-Japanese words account for about 35% of the words in entertainment magazines, over half
29750-438: Was nearly killed in a similar trap, when he was arrested after arriving at a dinner held at the headquarters of Si Lie, a Nationalist commander of Chiang's Twenty-sixth Army. Despite rumors that Chiang had put a high price on Zhou's head, he was quickly released by Pai Ch'ung-hsi's forces. The reasons for Zhou's sudden release may have been that Zhou was then the most senior Communist in Shanghai, that Chiang's efforts to exterminate
29925-410: Was originally from Shaoxing in Zhejiang . During the late Qing dynasty , Shaoxing was famous as the home of families such as Zhou's, whose members worked as government clerks generation after generation. To move up the ladder in civil service, the men in these families often had to be transferred, and in the late years of the Qing dynasty, Zhou Enlai's branch of the family moved to Huai'an. Even after
30100-442: Was perhaps because the relatively "lenient" political atmosphere in Berlin made it more favorable as a base for overall European organizing. In addition, the Western European Secretariat of the Comintern was located in Berlin and it is clear that Zhou had important Comintern connections, though the nature of these is disputed. After moving operations to Germany, Zhou regularly shuttled between Paris and Berlin. Zhou participated in
30275-399: Was the daughter of a prominent Jiangsu official. Like many others, the economic fortunes of Zhou's large family of scholar-officials were decimated by a great economic recession that China suffered in the late 19th century. Zhou Yineng had a reputation for honesty, gentleness, intelligence and concern for others, but was also considered "weak" and "lacking in discipline and determination". He
30450-424: Was unsuccessful in his personal life, and drifted across China doing various occupations, working in Beijing , Shandong , Anhui , Shenyang , Inner Mongolia and Sichuan . Zhou Enlai later remembered his father as being always away from home and generally unable to support his family. Soon after birth, Zhou Enlai was adopted by his father's youngest brother, Zhou Yigan, who was ill with tuberculosis. Apparently,
30625-421: Was well provided for and did not have to do any work during his stay. Because of his financial position, he was able to devote himself full-time to revolutionary activities. In a letter to his cousin on 30 January 1921, Zhou said that his goals in Europe were to survey the social conditions in foreign countries and their methods of resolving social issues, in order to apply such lessons in China after his return. In
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