ZHOU ENLAI

A comprehensive life of the key player in the Chinese Communist Revolution whose cautious political skills allowed him to survive the perilous chaos under Mao Zedong for five decades.

As Chen, a leading scholar on modern Chinese history and the Cold War, writes in this deeply researched biography, Zhou Enlai (1898-1976) embodied the “deep paradoxes and enduring complexities” of China’s revolutionary era. The author chronicles how the once-beloved premier is undergoing fresh consideration, and he offers an instructive portrait. Born into a “declining mandarin’s family” in Huai’an, in Jiangsu Province, young Zhou was sent to live with relatives when both his mother and his adopted mother died when he was 9. His uncles emphasized his education, and he excelled. After studying in Japan, he returned to China in 1919. Radicalized by the nationalist May Fourth Movement that year, Zhou was “genuinely ashamed of China’s backwardness and deeply worried that the very survival of China and the Chinese nation was imperiled,” and he “angrily condemned the imperialist aggression of the West and Japan against China.” Zhou joined the fledgling Communist Party in 1922 and toiled with future CCP leaders such as Mao and Deng Xiaoping, navigating the civil war against the nationalists while also expelling the Japanese invaders. With Mao’s ascendance, Zhou often had to perform self-criticism and avoid shining too brightly, suppressing his views about Mao’s “rash advance” during the Great Leap Forward. Sadly, Zhou failed to defend many who were “purged,” including his brother. Noting how many Chinese viewed Zhou as a “nearly perfect individual [who] served as an imaginary bridge linking people’s painful recollections of an excruciating past and their boundless hope for a bright ­future,” Chen delivers an authoritative, incisive look at an unquestionably significant historical figure.

An excellent biography and capable deconstruction of the labyrinthine mechanics behind the CCP’s development.