Editing Zhou Enlai (section)

===Early political activities===
[[File:Premier Zhou 1919.jpg|thumb|left|A young Zhou Enlai (1919)]]
Zhou returned to Tianjin sometime in 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,<ref name="Barnouin and Yu 22">Barnouin and Yu 22</ref> 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 the period.<ref name="Barnouin and Yu 22"/><ref>Lee 118–119</ref> In July 1919, however, Zhou became editor of the Tianjin Student Union Bulletin, apparently at the request of his Nankai classmate, [[Ma Jun (20th century Chinese communist leader)|Ma Jun]], a founder of the Union.<ref>Lee 125</ref> 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."<ref>Lee 127–8</ref>

When [[Nankai University|Nankai became 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.<ref>Lee 133.</ref> 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, 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]].<ref>Barnouin and Yu 23</ref> In some ways, the Awakening Society resembled the clandestine Marxist study group at [[Peking University]] headed by [[Li Dazhao]], with the group members using numbers instead of names for "secrecy". (Zhou was "Number Five", a pseudonym which he continued to use in later years.)<ref>Lee 137</ref> 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.<ref>Lee 138</ref> The largest of these activities were rallies in support of 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 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.<ref>Lee 139</ref> 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 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]],<ref>{{Cite news|url=http://www.cinaforum.net/july-1-1921-foundation-of-the-communist-party-of-china/|title=July 1, 1921, "Foundation of the Communist Party of China" – CINAFORUM|date=1 July 2014|work=CINAFORUM|access-date=20 May 2018|language=it-IT|archive-date=21 May 2018|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180521104334/http://www.cinaforum.net/july-1-1921-foundation-of-the-communist-party-of-china/|url-status=dead}}</ref> 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 was expelled from Nankai University during his detention.) Although money was a problem, he received a scholarship from [[Yan Xiu]].<ref>Lee 152</ref> 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.<ref name="Twentyfive1">Barnouin and Yu 25</ref>

Zhou's experiences after the May Fourth incident seem to have been crucial to his Communist career.{{clarify|date=April 2017}} 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.