Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary
by Gao Wenqian
PublicAffairs, £17.99
ZHOU ENLAI – Chou En-Lai in old money – was Prime Minister of China from the time the Communists took power in 1949 until his death in 1976. Reviled during his life by Mao Zedong and the Gang of Four, who would describe his posthumous ideological triumph as the victory of the capitalist roaders, he is now revered in today’s business-frenzy Beijing.
The story of this great survivor is celebrated in a new biography written by Gao Wenqian, a former insider in the Chinese Communist Party’s research department. Gao, a youthful veteran of the Cultural Revolution, fled to the USA after Tiananmen Square, but not until 1992. By then he had smuggled out reams of secrets from party archives, including hundreds of private letters between the leaders and speeches delivered behind closed doors.
Gao describes his account as “a book of betrayal†which is, presumably, how the CCP labels his work after unsuccessfully trying to buy him off. It is, in fact, nothing of the kind. Not to have written this book would have been an act of betrayal for, as Gao points out, the collapse of the former Soviet Union and East European Communist countries began with the demystification of official history and the re-evaluation of major historical events and people. This is his contribution to that process in his native country.
Zhou was born in 1898 in Jiangsu province, into a family of cultured gentility that had fallen on hard times. China was still ruled by the Qing dynasty, the last of the emperors who ruled for 2,000 years. He fell under the spell of revolutionary thinking while still at school, during the Japanese hegemony, and threw in his lot with the fledging revolutionary movement “so China can rise up.†He joined the Chinese Communist Party while working and studying in France in the 1920s, where he met Deng Xiaoping and Ho Chi Minh. Rising rapidly through the ranks of the party and its military structure, he distinguished himself in the Shanghai uprising in 1927.
Thereafter, his rise to the top was assured, but it was always blighted by his ambiguous relationship with Mao, his cultural opposite from a peasant family. Zhou was a classic Confucian, always seeking the middle way. Mao was utterly ruthless, desperate to forge a new imperial family through his son (killed in the Korean War) and later his wife Jing Qiang and nephew.
The Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s and the Great Proletarian Revolution a decade later – both utter disasters for China – were instruments of this ambition. Zhou led his nation out of the mire with his Four Modernisations.
The most brilliant diplomat of his generation, Zhou also brought China out of international isolation in 1972 with the visit of US President Richard Nixon to Beijing. This initiative accelerated the country on a new path towards industrial modernisation, education reform and economic growth, but at immense personal cost to the embattled premier.
Mao never ceased to plot his downfall, though Zhou, his great fixer and effusively loyal in public, refused to give him grounds for the fate that befell so many of his veteran comrades. Even when Zhou was dying of bladder cancer, Mao conspired to strip him of office, and Zhou was only prevented from posthumous disgrace by Mao’s own death a few months later.
The tumultuous and spontaneous outburst of grief that gripped China on Zhou’s death in January 1976 – the nation’s markets ran out of black mourning clothes – sent a powerful signal to Mao, and to Zhou’s followers, about where the people really wanted to go. They were sick of political movements and looked for improvements in their lives so long promised by the CCP but never actually delivered.
With the death of Mao, the arrest of the Gang of Four and the rehabilitation of Deng, China was set on Zhou’s course. In terms of the historical legacy, Zhou Enlai was the victor.
But what of the man? Gao argues that Zhou “intended to be a good person, but failed… his life story conveys the tragedy of the Chinese political system from which he ultimately emerged at the end of his life a victim.â€
In that sense, there will be no victory until the order changes utterly. As Gao points out, the political system in China is like a pot of traditional medicine to which water may be added while the herbs stay in the pot, never to be thrown out.
The herbs, I am afraid, are still in the pot. The recent Congress of the Chinese Communist Party concluded with a new line-up in the front ranks to secure an orderly transfer of power some time in the future. Er, where have we heard that before?
Perhaps there is scope for hope. Zhou’s best known aphorism could be read as the key to his personality. Asked once what he thought was the impact of the French Revolution he famously mused, two centuries after the event, that it was “too soon to tell.â€
The dichotomy between authoritarian revolution and peaceful development that Zhou embodied was resolved in his own mind, to his satisfaction at least. It has still to be resolved in China.
Paul Routledge
