Ji Chaozhu

Ji Chaozhu
Photo by Foster Winans
Born	(1929-07-30) July 30, 1929 (age 88) Taiyuan, Shanxi, China
Occupation	Diplomat, author

Ji Chaozhu (Chinese: 冀朝铸; born July 30, 1929) is a retired diplomat who held a number of important positions in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China (PRC), most notably as English interpreter for Chairman Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou Enlai; later as Ambassador to the Court of St. James's (United Kingdom); and lastly as an Undersecretary General of the United Nations, a post from which he retired in 1996. He played a central role in the talks leading up to and during President Richard M. Nixon's historic visit to China (1972 Nixon visit to China). His memoir, "The Man on Mao's Right", was published in July, 2008, by Random House.

The son of a wealthy landlord, lawyer, and provincial official in Shanxi Province, Ji and his family fled their home in Taiyuan, the provincial capital, in 1937, ahead of the advancing armies of Imperial Japan. Ji's eldest brother, Ji Chaoding, was a noted economist who earned a Ph.D. at Columbia University. He held a high position in the Nationalist (Kuomintang) government of Chiang Kai-shek, but was secretly supporting and spying for the rival Communist insurgency led by Zhou and Mao. At the urging of Zhou, Ji's family emigrated to New York City where they arrived in 1939 when Ji was nine years old. Ji attended the progressive City and Country School in Greenwich Village, earned his high school diploma from Horace Mann-Lincoln High School (now known as Horace Mann School) and attended Camp Rising Sun in 1944. He was a sophomore at Harvard University in 1950 when the Korean War broke out, pitting his native homeland against the country that had nurtured, educated, and embraced him for 12 years.