[1] In 1964, during the Socialist Education Movement, Zhu was expelled from the Communist Party and sent to perform manual labour.

[2] Zhu was politically rehabilitated in 1978, then became head of the party organization in Guiyang, then promoted to provincial First Secretary of Guizhou.

In August that year, he was transferred to Beijing to serve as head of the Propaganda Department, becoming one of the top deputies of party General Secretary Hu Yaobang.

Mirroring the fate of his patron Hu Yaobang, in February 1987 Zhu was dismissed from his propaganda post during the anti-bourgeois liberalization campaign.

However, in 1988, reformist general secretary Zhao Ziyang named Zhu the first-ranked vice chairman of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions.