Mao Zedong, the autodidact son of well-to-do peasants, was rough-spoken, ruthless, mercurial and volatile. Zhou Enlai, the well-educated scion of a fallen but patrician family, was suave, wily, self-possessed and attentive to detail. The charismatic and dictatorial Mao provided the unique vision for China’s revolution and gave it appeal; the industrious and cunning Zhou filled in the detail and made it work. Mao headed the Communist Party of China; Zhou became premier and foreign minister of the new People’s Republic in 1949. Together the two men oversaw some of the most violent and traumatic episodes of China’s modern history.
Their relationship is at the heart of Chen Jian’s 817-page biography Zhou Enlai: A Life. Drawing on a decade of research in archives in China, the United States and beyond, as well as interviews and a brace of memoirs, Chen fills in the details of an otherwise relatively well-known story. The book’s emphasis — around 60 per cent of the text — is on the post-1949 period, or the final twenty-seven years of Zhou’s life.
Chen begins with an evocative description of how, early one day in January 1976, days after Zhou’s death at the age of seventy-seven, the people of Beijing lined the streets of the capital, standing for hours in “bone-chilling cold” to farewell their beloved premier, weeping as the funeral cortege passed on its way to the cemetery.
Their grief was genuine, and yet mysterious. It was the tenth year of the Cultural Revolution. Mass hysteria, fanned by Mao, had helped turn a vindictive intra-party power struggle into a revolutionary churn that shredded Chinese society. Millions of people had been beaten, tortured, maimed and killed for spurious connections to imaginary conspiracies, alleged disloyalty to Mao or simply possessing a “bad class background.”
If Mao, “the Great Helmsman,” had steered China straight into the storm (and the deadly three-year famine before it), Zhou was in the engine room all the while, doing what was needed to stay the course while ensuring the machinery of state continued to function.
So how was it that when, by 1976, victims and not a few of their persecutors alike were feeling betrayed by Mao, socialism and the party, so many people continued to hold such affection for Zhou? True, he had conspicuously saved some people from persecution and certain death, and he had forbidden rampaging Red Guards from smashing up the Forbidden City, Shanghai’s Jade Buddha Temple and some of China’s other precious material heritage. But he threw many other people (including his own brother and adopted daughter) to the wolves when he might have saved them and allowed countless other temples and priceless artifacts to be destroyed.
The key was that Zhou managed to project an image of moderation to a people desperately in need of assurance and hope at a time of wholesale and destructive radicalism. Or as Chen puts it, the Chinese people’s “collective memory of Zhou as a nearly perfect individual served as an imaginary bridge linking people’s painful recollections of an excruciating past and their boundless hope for a bright future.”
That illusion perfectly illustrates something the great sinologist Pierre Ryckmans, writing as Simon Leys, once remarked about Zhou, that he was “the ultimate Zelig of politics.” Zhou was able to appear to be whatever people most wanted him to be — fiery with firebrands, cultured with artists, even “Kissingerian with Kissinger.” He was “elusive,” which is another word for slippery.
Chen, while acknowledging the enigma of Zhou, sadly does not quote Ryckmans. His own analysis is far more measured and sympathetic, although he makes no attempt to whitewash Zhou’s more brutal actions or moral failings.
Zhou Enlai usefully traces the evolution of Zhou’s radicalisation. He was born in 1898, in the final years of the failing Qing dynasty. As a schoolboy during the tumultuous early republican period that followed the 1911 overthrow of the Qing, his primary interests were in theatre, English and the thinkers of the European Enlightenment. He wasn’t a natural ideologue. But like other idealistic young people of his generation, he despaired as the new republic squandered the opportunity to transform China into a powerful, modern state and devolved into a morass of corruption, infighting and ineptitude.
In 1915, the year Zhou turned seventeen, Japan made twenty-one unreasonable and bullying demands of the republic’s weak and beleaguered government. It was this incident, as he wrote in an essay at the time, that caused his patriotism to reach “boiling point.” Patriotism led him to socialism. He joined the Communist Party of China while studying in Europe, several months before the party was officially founded in 1921.
Zhou spent the next two decades working for the party in various capacities, including running its intelligence network. During that time, as Chen relates, he authorised the murder of the family, including a two-year-old child, of an agent who had gone over to the government’s side.
His wiles and charm made Zhou a useful mediator and diplomat, a shrewd player in many complex and fraught dramas of a period of Chinese history that included a descent into warlordism, Japanese invasion and civil war. He managed relations at various points with the anti-communist president Chiang Kai-shek and with representatives from the Moscow-based Comintern eager to direct China’s revolution. Once, with an actor’s gift for persuasion, he even hilariously convinced an American delegation that the communists weren’t really into communism at all.
During these first decades, he met and worked with Mao numerous times, including as his superior, occasionally criticising him or siding with people Mao would later consider his enemies. None of this would work out well for him once Mao established himself as the party’s supreme leader and assumed an almost divine authority.
In 1943, Mao launched a brutal “rectification” campaign to “unify” the Party: code for eliminating all remaining factions and quashing dissent. Zhou, knowing he had a target on his back, prepared for the ordeal by composing an outline for a “self-criticism” that was itself 25,000 characters long (the equivalent of 17,500 words in English). To Mao’s palpable enjoyment, as Chen relates, Zhou spoke abjectly for five days straight about his “mistakes and crimes.”
Once he was certain that Zhou had been sufficiently debased, Chen writes, Mao extended a hand to pull him out of the “abyss that Mao himself had created.” And thus was formed the foundation of their working relationship for the rest of their lives. Zhou would forever labour on the edge of that abyss.
The likes of Kissinger and Nixon, with whom he had dealings in the 1970s, often came away with the impression that Zhou, whom they liked and admired, was China’s second-in-command. It wasn’t actually true, and as Chen shows, he never strove to be that. This lack of ambition (or abundance of caution) served him well: Mao’s first No. 2 and chosen successor, president Liu Shaoqi, ended up humiliated, tortured and dying in prison, the first major target of the Cultural Revolution. His second, Lin Biao, end up in charred bits scattered across the Mongolian steppes after his plane crashed during an alleged attempt to flee to the Soviet Union.
Liu’s demise was Mao’s doing. By contrast, Lin Biao’s death, in late 1971, shook Mao to his core. He took to his bed, and became increasingly ill.
Chen relates a story that illustrates the extraordinary psychological hold Mao had over Zhou. Early one morning, Zhou was told Mao had collapsed. Zhou rushed to the chairman’s bedside, where the sight of the unconscious Mao caused him to lose control of his bowels and bladder. Minutes later, when Mao came to, Zhou cried, “Chairman, the power is still in your full command!”
This story comes from three sources: accounts by Mao’s doctor, by Zhou’s doctor and by Mao’s nephew. Mao’s doctor’s account (Li Zhisui’s The Private Life of Chairman Mao), not quoted here, also relates that Zhou then rushed home to change his clothes before racing back to the chairman’s side. (Not all memoirs are equally reliable, so it’s useful when the endnotes reveal several sources.)
Chen relates another anecdote from the time that also hints at Zhou’s state of mind following Lin Biao’s shocking flight and death. Ji Dengkui, a Politburo member, recalled discovering Zhou sitting alone in his office as if in a dark trance. Ji tried to comfort him, saying that now Lin had “destroyed himself,” happy times were here, and they could focus on rebuilding the country’s broken economy. Zhou, renowned for his self-control and composure, began to cry. Then, in an outburst of emotion such as no one had ever seen, he began to sob and then wail. When he finally recovered, he spoke two sentences and went silent again: “You do not understand,” he told Ji, “it is not so simple. It has not finished yet.”
Earlier in the book, when Chen describes the crucial role that Zhou played in Mao’s ascent to power, he remarks that Zhou could not have foreseen that Mao would “drag China into… cataclysmic disasters” or that Zhou himself would “repeatedly fall victim to Mao’s psychological torture and political purges.” Chen wonders whether, if Zhou had foreseen all that, he would still have helped Mao achieve power.
The fact is that he did help him in multiple ways, and then helped him hold on to power once he had it. There were others who stood up to the chairman and paid the price. Zhou may have been a victim, but he was also a canny survivor.
All of this makes me curious about the logic behind a striking metaphor Chen uses to describe the relationship between Zhou and Mao. Mao often and famously likened himself to Sun Wukong, the Monkey King of the classic novel Journey to the West. Chen notes that in the novel, for all his vast mischief, Sun Wukong can never escape the giant palm of the Buddha, who ultimately controls him. If Mao was the Monkey King, Chen contends, then Zhou was the Buddha.
I believe that the evidence, including as presented by Chen himself, better supports the view that he was Mao’s enabler rather than his controller.
Given its heft and tight focus, Zhou Enlai will undoubtedly appeal most to readers with some background knowledge of modern Chinese history and politics. Specialists will no doubt debate its relatively sympathetic take on this enigmatic man. For all that, it’s a useful and engaging biography that turns the spotlight on events that in so many ways shape Chinese politics today.
And for all his trickiness, Zhou’s cosmopolitanism, diplomatic genius and charm also serve to remind us of how mediocre and drear are the grey men and sophomoric “wolf warriors” who are China’s face to the world in the era of Xi Jinping. Zhou, at least, was someone worth reading about. •
Zhou Enlai: A Life
By Chen Jian | Harvard University Press | $81.99 | 817 pages
