Zhou En Lai: Mao’s Man or His Own? |
Zhou (far left) with Mao Zedong (center-left) and Bo Gu (far right) in Yan’an (1935) – Public Domain
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........