Short answers, pulled from the story.
Zhou Enlai served as the first Premier of the People's Republic of China from October 1949 until his death on the 8th of January 1976, a tenure of more than twenty-six years. He was also China's foreign minister from 1949 to 1958.
Zhou Enlai helped orchestrate Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China. As a diplomat who advocated peaceful coexistence with the West after the Korean War, he also participated in the 1954 Geneva Conference and the 1955 Bandung Conference.
The massive public outpouring of grief that followed Zhou Enlai's death in Beijing turned to anger at the Gang of Four, leading to the 1976 Tiananmen Incident. Mao Zedong's designated successor was Hua Guofeng, but Zhou's ally Deng Xiaoping eventually outmaneuvered Hua and became paramount leader by 1978.
The Zhongyang Teke, established in November 1928, was the Chinese Communist Party's intelligence agency, which Zhou Enlai came to control. It had four sections covering party member protection, intelligence gathering, internal communications, and assassinations. Zhou used it to plant moles inside the Nationalist secret police, including a large network inside the Investigation Section of the Central Operations Department in Nanjing.
Zhou Enlai served as the chief Communist negotiator after Marshal Zhang Xueliang kidnapped Chiang Kai-shek on the 12th of December 1936. Zhou flew to Xi'an on the 16th of December and met Chiang on the 24th of December, persuading him to promise an end to the civil war and unified resistance to Japan. Chiang was released on the 25th of December 1936.
Zhou Enlai was born in Huai'an, Jiangsu province, on the 5th of March 1898. His family traced its ancestral roots to Shaoxing in Zhejiang province, where generations of Zhou men had worked as government clerks during the Qing dynasty.