King Hui of Zhou, ch.周惠王, py. zhōu hùi wáng, wg. King Hui of Chou was the seventeenth sovereign of the Chinese Zhou Dynasty and the fifth of Eastern Zhou Dynasty.
Zhou, a member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from the 1920s, was prime minister 1949–76 and foreign minister 1949–58.
Zhou, a moderator between the opposing camps of Liu Shaoqi and Mao Zedong, restored orderly progress after the Great Leap Forward (1958–60) and the Cultural Revolution (1966–69), and was the architect of the Four Modernizations programme in 1975.
Abroad, Zhou sought to foster unity in the developing world at the Bandung Conference in 1955, averted an outright border confrontation with the USSR by negotiation with Prime Minister Kosygin in 1969, and was the principal advocate of détente with the USA during the early 1970s.
In the Chinese historical tradition, the rulers of the Zhou displaced the Yin and legitimized their rule by invoking the Mandate of Heaven, the notion that the ruler (the "son of heaven") governed by divine right but that his dethronement would prove that he had lost the mandate.
The Zhou dynasty was founded by the Ji family and had its capital at Hao (near the present-day city of Xi'an).
In Western histories, the Zhou period is often described as feudal because the Zhou's early decentralized rule invites comparison with medieval rule in Europe.
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