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:
“We find that even the parents who justify spanking to themselves are defensive and embarrassed about it....I suspect that deep in the memory of every parent are the feelings that had attended his own childhood spankings, the feelings of humiliation, of helplessness, of submission through fear. The parent who finds himself spanking his own child cannot dispel the ghosts of his own childhood.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime. A man at five and thirty should no more regret not having had a happier childhood than he should regret not having been born a prince of the blood.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“Having a child is the great divide between one’s own childhood and adulthood. All at once someone is totally dependent upon you. You are no longer the child of your mother but the mother of your child. Instead of being taken care of, you are responsible for taking care of someone else.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)