Childhood
Li was born in Shanghai, but with ancestral roots in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province. He is a Hakka, the son of writer Li Shuoxun, one of the earliest CPC revolutionaries, who was the political commissar of the Twentieth Division during the Nanchang Uprising. In 1931 Li was orphaned at age three when his father was executed by the Kuomintang for treason and for support of armed splittism. He became the adopted son of Zhou Enlai, famed in China as the strong supporter of Mao Zedong.
In 1938 Zhou adopted Li in Wuhan, during the Second Sino-Japanese War. When the Kuomintang government abandoned Wuhan in 1939, Zhou brought Li to Chongqing, where Li was enrolled in middle school. In 1941, when Li was twelve, Zhou sent Li to Yan'an, where Li studied until 1945. As a seventeen year old, in 1945, Li joined the Communist Party of China.
Read more about this topic: Li Peng
Famous quotes containing the word childhood:
“[Children] do not yet lie to themselves and therefore have not entered upon that important tacit agreement which marks admission into the adult world, to wit, that I will respect your lies if you will agree to let mine alone. That unwritten contract is one of the clear dividing lines between the world of childhood and the world of adulthood.”
—Leontine Young (20th century)
“When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“Children who are pushed into adult experience do not become precociously mature. On the contrary, they cling to childhood longer, perhaps all their lives.”
—Peter Neubauer (20th century)