Zhou Ziqi

Zhōu Zìqí (Wade-Giles Chou Tzu-ch'i) 周自齊 (1871–1923), was a Chinese politician in the late Qing dynasty and early republican period. He was a member of the Communications Clique.

Biography

He was born in Guangzhou and spoke Cantonese but he later moved back to his ancestral province of Shandong. He received higher education in the United States at Columbia University. He became superintendent of Tsinghua University in 1911.

The following year, he secured Shandong for Yuan Shikai and later became its military governor. He then served as communications minister and later finance minister in Yuan's cabinet. He helped leak information about Twenty-One Demands of the Empire of Japan to the media. Zhou may have invited Columbia University political scientist Frank Johnson Goodnow to justify monarchism for China.

During Yuan's monarchic attempt, he was sent to Japan as a special envoy. The Japanese government under Okuma Shigenobu rejected him and he returned to tell Yuan that his government lost foreign support. In 1916, Zhou fled to Japan after President Li Yuanhong ordered the arrest of Yuan's eight top monarchists. He returned to China after the charges were dropped in February 1918.

As Xu Shichang's finance minister, he lost in a power struggle against Premier Jin Yunpeng in 1921 and was compelled to resign. Seeking revenge, he convinced Zhang Zuolin to replace Jin with Liang Shiyi, the head of the civilian Communications Clique. He later served as acting premier and acting president briefly in 1922 after Xu resigned. His presidency, the shortest in Chinese history, was interim as the Zhili clique tried to woo Li Yuanhong back into office. Complaining of Zhili interference, he left for the US to study film-making and returned to China to start a studio. He died the following year.