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:
“The real dividing line between early childhood and middle childhood is not between the fifth year and the sixth year—it is more nearly when children are about seven or eight, moving on toward nine. Building the barrier at six has no psychological basis. It has come about only from the historic-economic-political fact that the age of six is when we provide schools for all.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)
“If a child were kept in a place where he never saw any other but black and white till he were a man, he would have no more ideas of scarlet or green, than he that from his childhood never tasted an oyster, or a pineapple, has of those particular relishes.”
—John Locke (1632–1704)