[1] When Gong Zhenzhou died in 1942, Communist Party leaders Zhou Enlai and Dong Biwu sent messages of condolence, and Chiang Kai-shek sent an elegiac couplet.

[6] Snow and his wife, Nym Wales, encouraged and supported the students, who often met at their house, and became especially close to the Gong sisters.

After the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, as war broke out, Gong moved to Shanghai, where she taught at St. Maria's school from November 1937 to March 1938.

[1][2][4] In fall of 1938, Gong joined the exodus of young progressives to Mao Zedong's newly established wartime capital, Yan'an.

She was assigned to the Xinhua Daily North China edition, and got to know deputy commander of the Eighteenth Army Peng Dehuai.

In July 1944, she gave birth to their first son, who later served as People's Republic of China Ministry of Foreign Affairs Deputy Minister.

Time magazine correspondent, Theodore White called Gong "the most beautiful Chinese woman I ever encountered", and the historian John K. Fairbank, then an officer in the wartime O.S.S., wrote to his wife that Gong was the "official appointee for contact with barbarians", with a "taming effect on everybody I know", mentioning in particular Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times, and Joseph Alsop, an aide to Claire Chennault.

The journalist Eric Sevareid felt that Gong was less an object of sexual desire than a kind of unattainable beauty, inspiring a courtly devotion.

The foreign press corps and diplomats arranged for Gong Peng to see an American navy doctor when she came down with dysentery and planned to protest if the Nationalist secret police arrested her.

[13] She edited the English language China Digest (中国文摘 Zhongguo wen zhai), a weekly outlet for the Party, under the pseudonym Djoong Wai-Lo (鍾威洛), and was a member of the Hong Kong branch of several bureaus.

[14] Since Mao Zedong demanded control of all decisions concerning foreign affairs, even the smallest details, Zhou kept the most experienced senior diplomats in Beijing and did not appoint veterans from the days in Yan'an or Chongqing to be ambassadors.

Zhou trusted these senior aides with critical missions and running the Foreign Affairs Ministry with only a small central staff.

[2] At the 1954 Geneva Conference Gong and Huang Hua, another graduate of Yenching University, held a number of press conferences.,[4] but objected when a photographer took her picture lighting a cigarette.

She helped produce a film, "中印边界问题真相" (Sino-Indian boundary question: the truth) that won The Hundred Flowers Award for Best Long Documentary.

Red Guard student groups pillaged Gong's home, and many of her colleagues at the Foreign Ministry were pressured or sent to labor camps.