Lin Boqu

An early supporter of Sun Yat-sen and member of the Tongmenghui, as well as a later participant in the Nanchang Uprising and the Long March, Lin came to be seen as one of the elder statesmen of the Chinese Communist Party.

On October 1, 1949, Lin presided over the Communist Party's victory ceremony in Tiananmen Square, and stood on the right-hand side of Mao Zedong as he proclaimed the foundation of the People's Republic of China.

After the fall of the Qing dynasty, Lin found himself persecuted by the Yuan Shikai regime, and was forced to escape to Japan, where he joined Sun Yat-sen's newly formed Chinese Revolutionary Party (later to become the Kuomintang).

In 1936, he assisted Zhou Enlai in the negotiations with Chiang Kai-shek during the Xi'an Incident, and in the alliance that followed generally helped to facilitate the United Front against the Japanese.

[3] In February 1944, Lin traveled to Chongqing for negotiations with the Nationalist government, and in April 1949, he was again paired with Zhou Enlai for peace talks with Kuomintang general Zhang Zhizhong in Beijing.

In the years that followed, he undertook lengthy inspection tours of primarily rural provinces, beginning with his native Hunan and continuing to Guangxi, Jiangxi, Hubei, Shanxi, Inner Mongolia, and Ningxia.

"[7] Lin is buried at the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery in Beijing, along with other first-generation CCP leaders such as Zhu De, Ren Bishi, Peng Dehuai, and Chen Yun.

[8]: 464 His youngest son, Lin Yongsan (林用三), was elected to the Eleventh National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference in 2008, and has served in a variety of government posts.