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:
“Oh! mystery of man, from what a depth
Proceed thy honours. I am lost, but see
In simple childhood something of the base
On which thy greatness stands; but this I feel,
That from thyself it comes, that thou must give,
Else never canst receive. The days gone by
Return upon me almost from the dawn
Of life: the hiding-places of man’s power
Open; I would approach them, but they close.”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
“When we raise our children, we relive our childhood. Forgotten memories, painful and pleasurable, rise to the surface.... So each of us thinks, almost daily, of how our own childhood compares with our children’s, and of what our children’s future will hold.”
—Richard Louv (20th century)
“The fact remains that the human being in early childhood learns to consider one or the other aspect of bodily function as evil, shameful, or unsafe. There is not a culture which does not use a combination of these devils to develop, by way of counterpoint, its own style of faith, pride, certainty, and initiative.”
—Erik H. Erikson (1904–1994)