Zhou En Lai: Mao’s Man or His Own?

An epic life deserves an epic biography, and Chen Jian provides this for Zhou, who was probably the consummate diplomat of the twentieth century. Chen combs the vast literature on the Chinese revolution as well as primary sources in the archives of the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to give us a sympathetic but not uncritical portrait of the second most important figure in the struggle to free China from imperial domination and feudalism in the twentieth century, one that set the stage for its emergence as an economic superpower in the first quarter of twenty-first.

The world is most familiar with Zhou’s diplomatic performance, especially his role in bringing about the historic visit of President Richard Nixon to Beijing in 1972. But probably equally important was his debut on the world stage in 1954-55. He was the central figure in the Geneva Conference of 1954, where he crossed swords with a hostile American delegation led by the arch-anti-Communist John Foster Dulles in an effort to forge a diplomatic settlement of the Korean War. Although he was not able to break the stalemate in that front, he enjoyed success on the second issue at that historic meeting, critically contributing to the formal end of the First Indochina War that saw the political dismantling of the French empire in Southeast Asia after its defeat on the battlefield by the Viet Minh.

After Geneva, Zhou’s most important next stop was Indonesia, where he was key in planting the seeds of the Non-Aligned Movement of countries in the Global South during the historic Bandung Conference in April 1955. His personal warmth and flexibility won over personalities as diverse as the onion-skinned Indian prime minister Nehru, the mercurial Indonesian leader Sukarno, and the pro-American Filipino diplomat Carlos P. Romulo. As a middle school student, Zhou loved acting in plays, and Chen speculates that “if Zhou indeed deserved the accolade as ‘one of the world’s greatest actors’…his performance in stage plays must have enabled him to practice those performing arts that would benefit him tremendously in his political and diplomatic career.”

The French Connection

Like many in his generation, Zhou was radicalized by the efforts of the western powers and Japan to carve up China into spheres of influence in the early decades of the twentieth century. Japan especially was a source of fascination, admired for its successful effort to catch up with the West but hated for its brazen moves to colonize China. Zhou spent a year and a half in Japan, trying to get into a university. Exile politics, however, got in the way of academic commitments, along with difficulties in learning Japanese.

France was more congenial, and it was there that Zhou’s nationalism took a left turn. Indeed, France was a hothouse breeding Asian revolutionaries; it was there that Zhou met and formed lasting relationships with figures who would play a central role in the years to come, like Zhu De and Deng Xiaoping, as well as the Vietnamese revolutionary Ho Chi Minh. By the time he returned to China in 1924, after four years in Europe, Zhou had definitively and irrevocably become a Communist, one whose desire to raise his country from the dust was linked to a commitment to follow the lead of the Third International or Comintern formed in Moscow in 1921 to guide revolutions in China and other countries.

From Shanghai to Beijing

Back in China, Zhou’s first major task in the fledgling Communist Party of China, founded in 1921, was to serve as a key organizer in Shanghai while also liaising with the Guomindang (GMD), with which the CCP had a united front promoted by the Comintern. Testifying to his many abilities, Zhou also headed up the intelligence network that planted spies in the GMD. Though the network was badly burned when Chiang Kaishek turned against the Communists in 1927, a number of Zhou’s agents, including some high up in the GMD hierarchy, survived to provide invaluable information throughout the civil war period.

Forced out of the large cities of China’s seaboard, the CPP established “red zones” or base areas in the interior. By this time, Zhou had a leading political and military decision-making role. It was in this period of retreat that Zhou met and began to work with Mao Zedong. This was the beginning of a lifelong partnership that brought both glory and great distress to Zhou, in equal measure. Zhou had clashes with Mao when they worked to escape from entrapment by the Guomindang in rural Jiangxi and during the fabled Long March. But he also recognized that not only was Mao a “military genius,” but the latter thrived in confronting crises. As Chen writes, “Zhou witnessed Mao’s extraordinary capacity and skills in his handling of each and every crisis. This was something Zhou could not and would not do. Mao, on the other hand, could not only think about how to deal with the dilemmas he faced, but endeavor to solve them, and ultimately succeed. This inevitably led to the furthering deepening of Zhou’s internalized obedience to Mao.”

During the fabled sojourn of the CCP in distant Yan’an, Zhou followed Mao in ending the party’s obeisance to Moscow, with the rectification campaign against the Comintern agent Wang Ming. He also shuttled between Yan’an and the nationalist government’s capital of Chongqing as Mao’s emissary to the GMD, with which the Communists had a wartime “united front” against Japan. While there, he managed to create a positive image of the Communists among visiting American delegations that contrasted with the impression they had of Chiang Kaishek as recalcitrant, ineffectual, and corrupt. Zhou’s diplomacy undoubtedly contributed to Washington’s reluctance to intervene on Chiang’s side as the civil war entered its final stage following Japan’s defeat in 1945 and ended on Oct 1, 1949, with Mao’s proclamation of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing.

A Difficult Partnership

This biography cannot help to also be about Mao, given the two men’s intimate political relationship. Chen does an excellent job portraying the force of Mao’s personality. But he does not fall into the parody of giving us a distorted picture of Mao as an megalomaniac or a tyrant in the manner of Jung Chang, the author of Wild Swans, or Frank Dikötter, who documented the tragic consequences of the Great Leap Forward. He acknowledges the millions of victims of the social and economic policies Mao pushed, but he appears to see them not as pawns who were deliberately sacrificed but as unfortunate collateral damage of his impatience to hurry China to socialism.

After a disastrous campaign to root out “counterrevolutionaries” in Jiangxi prior to the Long March, Mao ceased favoring the physical elimination of his rivals, unlike Stalin. Although personal loyalty was critical, more important was their aligning their vision with his of where China should go through thorough self-criticism. And what was this vision? It was that of the country and eventually the world undergoing “continuing revolution.” Mao’s problem was that he did not know how to place the brakes on his revolutionary impatience. The party’s problem was that there was no one that had the legitimacy to challenge Mao. And China’s problem was that he enjoyed tremendous prestige as the supreme leader of an almost 30-year-long national liberation struggle, at the end of which the people could declare with him, “We, the Chinese, have stood up.”

Zhou was dazzled by Mao, but he was not blinded by him. One of the things he realized early on was that to continue to participate in the making of the revolution, he had to align his vision of China’s future with Mao’s, even if it took humiliating self-abnegation through periodic self- criticism to convince Mao he was sincere. Another thing he realized was that he never must put himself in the position of being anointed by Mao as his successor, for that would mean the Chairman would pay special attention to one’s willingness and capacity to carry on his “continuous revolution” after he left the scene. Failure to wholeheartedly exhibit the marks of ideological loyalty was what led to the downfall of two of Mao’s designated successors, Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao.

A third thing that both Zhou and Mao understood was that the basic services of the state had to be maintained even as Mao pursued his chaotic continuous revolution during the Great Leap Forward (1958-60) and the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). It was Mao’s realization that only Zhou could reconcile these contradictory objectives that, while uneasy with him, the Chairman kept him on as premier and fended off efforts to discredit him by Jiang Qing, his wife, and her “Gang of Four.” It was his ability and determination to keep public services and food distribution going even as opposing factions of Red Guards were smashing one another that gained him the respect and affection of ordinary citizens.

Zhou’s Dilemmas

Zhou tried to protect Liu Shaoqi, Lin Biao, and Deng Xiaoping because he valued  their commitment to socialism and managerial skills, but he was apparently unable to convince them to make the “sincere” and wholehearted self-criticism that would impress Mao, or perhaps they did not have the theatrical prowess he had brought from his student days. According to Chen, Zhou participated in the criticism of close comrades, but he did this to give him the credibility to persuade Mao not to treat them too harshly. To him, comrades should be criticized for making mistakes but they should also be given the space to correct those mistakes. He tried to save Liu Shaoqi politically, but in the end the pressure of vindicating the Cultural Revolution and Mao’s leadership got the upper hand. Chen clearly articulates Zhou’s dilemma, though one may not agree with his exoneration of the man:

“Although it was absolutely contradictory to his own conscience, he still sacrificed Liu in the end. Years later, after Liu’s widow Wang Guangmei was released from prison, she refused to forgive Zhou. She was entirely entitled to do so. Yet, although this was a dark moment in Zhou’s life and political career, there are reasons for history to forgive Zhou as a beleaguered politician and entrapped person. After all, this was a time when Zhou was very much like a small boat, caught in stormy weather, that could be capsized at any moment. Yet without Zhou, the big ship that was China carrying hundreds of millions of passengers, might have sunk.”

Not only was Zhou unable to ultimately protect comrades but he also failed to save people who were personally very close to him, like his stepdaughter, Sun Weishi, of whom both he and his wife were very fond, and his brother, Zhou Enshou. Sun died in prison and Enshou was placed in preventive detention, and neither would be rehabilitated until after the death of Zhou and the end of the Cultural Revolution. Chen writes, also eloquently, “In these two cases, Zhou Enlai, as China’s premier, still had to agree to put his loved ones into prison. This was Zhou Enlai’s tragedy. In a broad sense, this was also the tragedy of Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, as well as the tragedy of China’s whole revolutionary era.”

Mao had the memory of an elephant. He never entirely lost his apprehensions about Zhou stemming from their early clashes in the Jiangxi Red Zone in the early 1930s, and Zhou never entirely shed his worries about earning Mao’s disapproval. Shortly before he died, he was said to  be bothered by the Gang of Four’s charge, which was subtly directed at him, that he was a “bourgeois capitulationist.”

Legacy

But the feelings of the people for him were something that would probably have cheered him had he lived to experience them. With word travelling fast that he had passed away on January 11, 1976, they gathered spontaneously in Beijing and throughout China in mass rallies to express their love for “our beloved Premier.”

The Gang of Four were apparently bothered by these events and sought to discredit the late premier as a “capitalist roader.” They were probably not that worried, however, and looked forward to consolidate their hold on power once Mao himself left the scene. Little did they expect that they would instead be sent packing to jail, with death sentences that were later commuted to 20 years’ imprisonment, in a purge engineered by the twice-purged Deng Xiaoping, Zhou’s close comrade-in-arms since their days in Paris, in the dramatic showdown after Mao’s passing a few months after Zhou.

With the Gang of Four out of the way, Deng proceeded to implement the “Four Modernizations Program” that had been drawn up by Zhou even as China was in the throes of the Cultural Revolution. This program is now generally regarded as the blueprint that launched China in its ascent to become the world’s number two economic power (or number one, depending on the metric used) in a record time of 40 years.

At 800 pages and printed with Harvard-grade heavy sheets, this book may look forbidding. But don’t be deceived. The author knows how to spin an absorbing tale as he plots the twists and turns of Zhou’s life against the twists and turns of the great historical drama that was the Chinese Revolution, which continues to unfold today. I could not part with this book and took it with me to read on the bus, the metro, even on the swift boats that ply Bangkok’s canals, where one slip owing to a heavy load can send you to their inviting, translucent waters.

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