Zhou Ziqi () (17 November 1869 – 21 October 1923) was a Chinese educator and politician in the late Qing dynasty and early republican period. During the early part of the Republic, he served multiple roles: first in multiple ministry positions (including Communication and Finance), as a diplomat, then as acting President of the Republic, and, for a time, as acting Premier in 1922, during Liang Shiyi's illness. He was a member of the Communications Clique. Biography Born in Guangdong, Zhou, who spoke both Cantonese and Mandarin, later moved back to his ancestral province of Shandong. He attended Columbia University in the United States, and upon returning to China, he helped found Tsinghua University to prepare Chinese students to study abroad in America; among the subjects he emphasized were English, mathematics, and science. During his time at Tsinghua, Zhou was in charge of sending students to study abroad, and from 1911 to 1912, he served as president of the university. As the governor of Shandong Province, he exerted significant influence, helping leak information about the Twenty-One Demands to the media. A supporter of Yuan Shikai, the provisional president, and his actions to revert China from a republic to a monarch-led empire, Zhou, during his tenure as governor of Shandong, believed that the Chinese people, with a literacy rate of 2%, were not ready to govern themselves. In his view, the people could only be manipulated by politicians, and their actions would bring instability and chaos to the country. (To further buttress his argument, Zhou may have invited Columbia University political scientist Frank Johnson Goodnow to justify monarchism for China.) In 1913, Yuan appointed him Minister of War, a post in which he served until the following year. Yuan attempted to re-establish the Empire of China in late 1915, sending Zhou to the Empire of Japan as a special envoy. The Japanese government under Okuma Shigenobu rejected him, and he returned to China to tell Yuan that his government had lost foreign support. After the failure of the restoration of the monarchy and Yuan's death in June 1916, Zhou found that his support for the Empire was not without personal cost: considered one of the eight top monarchists of the former regime, he was declared a traitor; and the new President, Li Yuanhong, ordered his arrest, causing Zhou to flee to Japan for asylum. After being pardoned by President Feng Guozhang