The Dictator’s Enabler

Is it possible for an intelligent, rational counterpart to work alongside an autocrat as ruthless as Mao Zedong without losing his soul? This is the Faustian question that hovers over Chen Jian’s new biography of China’s longtime premier, Zhou Enlai. Nearly 50 years after his death, Zhou still enjoys a reputation in China as a leader who valiantly constrained some of Mao’s worst excesses, managed to shield some colleagues from the most brutal aspects of his purges, and helped prevent the country from completely collapsing during his most tectonic revolutionary campaigns. Even some leaders outside China who worked with him remember Zhou as an important stabilizing presence: the American statesman Henry Kissinger, reminiscing about the role Zhou played in midwifing the 1970s rapprochement between China and the United States, described him not only as “one of the most intelligent people I have ever met” but also as “one of the most compassionate.” Such encomiums are hard to square, however, with the view of Zhou’s critics: that he was a sycophantic enabler who backed Mao even as Mao implemented some of the most irrational and savage political movements of the twentieth century.

In Zhou Enlai: A Life, Chen—an emeritus professor of history at Cornell who grew up in China—does not resolve this enigma. Instead, he vividly stages it in all its complexity so that readers are forced to wrestle with Zhou’s paradoxes on their own. Chen’s prodigious research using Chinese, English, and Russian sources helps him paint an old-fashioned but enthralling narrative. Free of the kind of jargon and theoretical gibberish that strangles much other academic writing, Chen’s biography brings twentieth-century Chinese history alive in new and very personal ways.

Born in 1898 at the tail end of China’s “century of humiliation,” Zhou was a young patriot drawn to the causes of both nationalism and communism. But as he became more deeply embedded in the Chinese Communist Party, he also became increasingly entwined in a lifelong joint venture with Mao, who—driven by arrogance, paranoia, hubris, and rivalry—set terms for the relationship: submit or be expunged from the CCP. Zhou did largely submit, thereby yielding to an unequal codependence that made his life resemble that of a character in a Shakespearean tragedy.

So Chen’s biography leaves the reader vexed: How could such an erudite and able man serve such a nihilistic and self-absorbed despot for so long? Did Zhou cravenly trade in his own principles just to keep his proximity to power? Or did he consciously decide to suffer personal abuse from Mao, recognizing that as the only way to temper his superior’s destructiveness and potentially help assure that China might become “unified, and rich and powerful,” as he dreamed? In short, was Zhou a shameless collaborator or a guileful hero who stealthily restrained Mao from committing even worse atrocities by staying engaged with him?

Just as there is no ready answer for why the Chinese people themselves put up for so long with the torments Mao heaped on them, Chen offers no simple answers to these questions about Zhou’s motivations. But his 800 pages on Zhou’s life are riveting precisely because they encourage readers to meditate on whether it is possible for a “good official”—a notion in which traditional Chinese statecraft is steeped—to moderate a dictator such as North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, Iran’s Ali Khamenei, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, or China’s Xi Jinping. Political analysts often hope that one-party dictatorships will change from the inside—that more liberal-minded officials can somehow maintain enough goodwill with a tyrant to stay in his inner circle while still preserving their personal commitments to a different political vision. Chen’s biography shows, however, just how problematic such efforts can be and how degrading they can become for the person who makes them. This book also raises the question of whether authoritarianism can become so baked into a political culture that it is destined to keep re-manifesting itself—just as now, after a hopeful interlude of reform, Xi seems to be taking China forward to the past.

GREAT EXPECTATIONS

Zhou was born into a declining mandarin family in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu. Like many young intellectuals of his time, he grew up yearning to see his country—which had fallen into disarray and warlordism after the collapse of the Qing dynasty, in 1911—restored to wealth and power. In 1919, at barely 20, Zhou wrote a friend, “Let us hope to meet at the time that China has risen high again in the world.”

After traveling to Japan, where he made a failed two-year effort to study, Zhou returned to China in 1919 and participated in the May Fourth Movement protesting the Versailles Conference decision to award Japan sovereignty over Germany’s surrendered holdings in China. As it did for many in his generation, that movement strengthened Zhou’s nationalism and his desire to see China “rejuvenated.” It also led to his arrest. During his six-month imprisonment, he began to become familiar with Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution, communism, and Lenin’s theories on imperialism, which limned a compelling new historical narrative for China in which the country was the victim of imperialism, colonialism, capitalist exploitation, and great-power condescension.

In late 1920, Zhou went to France, where he studied the conditions of European workers, wrote for Chinese language publications, and did organizational work for the CCP after its 1921 founding; his keen intelligence and willingness to work hard quickly marked him as an able political activist. In 1923, the CCP and its rival, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Party, formed a tenuous “united front” alliance facilitated by the Comintern, the organ the newly formed Soviet Union used to funnel support to communist movements abroad. After his 1924 return to China, Zhou began working closely with Chiang and his party as the chief political officer at the new Whampoa Military Academy, established to train a joint army capable of reunifying the country.

The fragile united front ruptured in 1927 when Chiang unleashed a terror campaign against the increasingly militant CCP. As Chinese communist leaders were forced to abandon the cities and go underground, the CCP became increasingly dependent on rural regions held by the young Mao. The two men were hardly kindred spirits. Mao was profoundly paranoid, had never lived abroad, spoke only heavily accented Hunanese, and was famously uncomfortable among urbane sophisticates such as Zhou. Indeed, Zhou once candidly remarked to another CCP leader that “as a person, Mao’s biggest problem is that he is very ambitious, suspicious, subjective, and does not listen to others.”

If Mao’s first inclination was to disrupt order, Zhou’s was to maintain it, a trait that as early as 1931 had caused several party colleagues to complain to Mao that Zhou “was not resolute in waging struggles.” But Mao needed someone with Zhou’s organizational skills to keep his “permanent revolution” from running completely off the rails. And although Zhou initially outranked Mao in the CCP’s hierarchy, he strove to mollify his mercurial counterpart: “Unwilling to use his power and authority to compel Mao’s obedience, he showed Mao patience and respect,” Chen writes. “Indeed, mixed with his prudence toward Mao was a subtle fearfulness” that was “probably an early manifestation of the unique and even mysterious chemical reaction that would characterize the relationship between the two men.”

But Mao “would never endow Zhou with his full trust,” Chen also notes. Instead, over the long course of the two men’s relationship, he repeatedly criticized and demeaned Zhou, keeping him in a constant state of uncertainty and insecurity. As Zhou learned “how extraordinarily abusive” Mao could be as a leader, he also came to understand that resisting Mao would lead to his downfall, especially after Mao consolidated his leadership of the CCP at a party conference in Zunyi in 1935.

Part of the problem was that while Zhou was a rationalist, Mao was a thin-skinned, erratic visionary seeking to realize a grand, revolutionary fantasy of creating a “new man” and a “new China.” Zhou’s decisions not to directly challenge Mao, even during his most extremist campaigns, did prevent an outright rupture between the two. But Chen notes that they also forced Zhou to live “the rest of his life in the enormous shadow of Mao’s thought and power, from which he would never escape.”

This odd couple nearly reached an impasse in the early 1940s, after China’s Communist and Nationalist Parties had once again joined forces to fight the Japanese in World War II. Zhou had been dispatched to the Nationalists’ headquarters in Chong­qing to serve as the CCP’s liaison officer with Chiang Kai-shek. But during the war Mao concluded, as Chen puts it, that he would “never, under any circumstances, allow his paramount power to slip away from him while he lived.” And so in 1942 he launched a “rectification campaign” to eliminate any remaining dissenting voices from the CCP. Although Zhou was not challenging Mao’s leadership, in 1943 he was summoned back to the CCP’s base in the remote Shaanxi Province, where for five days, he stood before the CCP’s Politburo and gave a humiliating “self-criticism” in which he not only expressed slavish support for Mao but admitted to challenging “correct policy lines,” embodying “rightist capitulationism” toward Moscow, and committing numerous other “mistakes and crimes.” He even delivered a mea culpa about his class background, confessing to his origins in “the family of a bankrupt feudal mandarin, which imparted me with such bad characteristics as vanity, favoritism, face-saving, selfishness, tactfulness, overcautiousness, egocentric perfectionism, and poor taste and ugly motivation.”

MASTER AND SERVANT

As it turned out, Mao’s rectification campaign was a test of methods that he would use again and again in future political struggles. At the heart of such exercises, Chen explains, was “physical and psychological torture” aimed at “assaulting and even destroying the basic rights, dignity, and decency of those involved.” And the campaign was traumatic for Zhou and other party leaders. His obsequiousness enabled him to survive, but the episode left him more aware than ever that when it came to intraparty politics, especially those involving Mao, he had to tread with extreme caution. In writing about the campaign, Chen lists the most important aspects of the CCP’s evolving party culture: “Individual party members must always obey the organization; the whole party must always obey the Central Committee; and the Central Committee must always obey the great leader, that is, Chairman Mao. Stemming from this was the absolute dominance of ‘Mao worship’ or ‘Mao cult’ in the party culture, which deprived all party members and cadres, including Zhou, of their individuality.”

During this harrowing rectification campaign, Zhou’s relationship with Mao verged on sadomasochism. Chen writes that Mao “seemed to enjoy each and every minute of Zhou’s tortured soul-searching.” And yet despite Mao’s abuse, Zhou labored on as his lieutenant throughout both World War II and the ensuing Chinese Civil War. After the 1949 founding of the People’s Republic of China, Mao appointed Zhou foreign minister and then, in 1958, premier, and Zhou did manage to give Mao’s new government a veneer of domestic order and standing abroad.

But the bitter reality was that where Zhou sought friends, Mao sought foes. In fact, Mao believed that without enemies to motivate its struggle, the CCP would have a difficult time even surviving. For Mao believed that Chinese society not only existed in an irreconcilable state of internal war, of Marxist class hostility, but also faced an equally adversarial conflict with the liberal, democratic, capitalist world order outside. Zhou was far more open-minded than Mao, even speaking idealistically in 1949 of creating a “society of new democracy” characterized by “freedom of thought, body, speech, publication, assembly, association . . . [and] religious belief.” But Zhou’s political survival demanded that he constantly defer to Mao, make tireless demonstrations of his fealty, and offer repeated paeans to Mao’s worldview. On one occasion, Zhou obligingly wrote: “The chairman has quoted Mencius and said that ‘a country without an enemy and outside threats will surely head toward destruction.’ One thrives by experiencing worries and suffering, and withers from enjoying pleasure and overly protecting himself.”

Was Zhou a shameless collaborator or a guileful hero?

As Mao launched one destructive mass movement after another—including the 1951–53 Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries, the 1956–57 Hundred Flowers Campaign, the 1957–59 Anti-Rightist Campaign, the 1958–60 Great Leap Forward, the 1963–65 Socialist Education Movement, and the 1966–76 Cultural Revolution, to name only a few—Zhou faced ever starker choices. He could continue being an apologist and enabler, perhaps protecting a few victims, saving some artworks from destruction by Red Guards, and sheltering a handful of imperiled institutions—or he could resist more openly and be purged. For better or worse, he decided to yield to Mao.

One of the most striking examples of such capitulationism occurred during the Great Leap Forward, which forced Chinese farmers into so-called people’s communes, where their homes, livestock, tools, and even meals were collectivized to give the impression that China was beating the Soviet Union in the race to attain the next stage of socialist development. Mao’s obsession with collectivization had catastrophic consequences: China’s economy crashed, and between 30 and 40 million people starved to death, yet Zhou did nothing significant to impede Mao’s recklessness. When the veteran revolutionary general Peng Dehuai dared criticize the Great Leap at a Central Committee meeting in 1959, Zhou backed Mao, even though his political sentiments were far closer to Peng’s than to Mao’s. A consummate demonstration of Zhou’s toadying came at a 1962 party conference, when Zhou told thousands of cadres that Mao should not be held responsible for the Great Leap Forward’s devastation. Instead, he claimed, lower-level CCP leaders should be blamed for their poor execution of Mao’s vision. “The chairman alone was not in a position to stop us,” he declared pusillanimously. “Now, the whole party should unite wholeheartedly in an enhanced and more centralized way, listening to the helmsman and to the Party Center, and the center should listen to Chairman Mao.”

By the early 1960s, most CCP leaders had long since become members of what the Chinese refer to as “the wind faction,” attuned to whatever direction political winds were blowing and trimming their jibs accordingly. During the Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966 and marked the apogee of Mao’s revolutionary extremism, over a million people perished, and hundreds of millions more saw their lives upended and families uprooted. After describing the purges of several highly ranked military figures, Chen observes that Mao’s underlings “had all by then realized that no space was left for them to speak out against any of Mao’s decisions.”

Although Zhou was able to cling to his premiership, he suffered. At a Foreign Ministry meeting in the mid-1960s, he appeared to momentarily lose his usual control, and he blurted out, “This movement we are now experiencing is the cruelest in our party’s history.” But he still declared himself ready to “follow the chairman’s instructions.” In a 1966 speech that Chen describes as “beyond extraordinary,” Zhou gave yet another pandering paean to Mao, this time mixing flattery with a bizarre reflection on personal political integrity: “We must follow Chairman Mao. Chairman Mao is our leader today, and he will remain our leader one hundred years later. If one fails to be loyal to him in one’s later years, all of one’s past contributions will be completely nullified. Even after one’s coffin is sealed or [one’s] corpse is cremated, one will still be doomed.”

In 1971, Zhou began probing the possibility of a rapprochement with the United States, an effort that would turn out to be his greatest diplomatic triumph. During all the meetings Mao held with U.S. President Richard Nixon and Kissinger, Nixon’s national security adviser and secretary of state, Zhou was the navigator in chief, finding ways around such difficult issues as the status of Taiwan, the Vietnam War, and the deep ideological divide between the two countries. In the end, he helped alter not just the course of U.S.-Chinese relations but world history.

In 1972, however, when Zhou was diagnosed with gallbladder cancer, Mao thanked him by prohibiting him from receiving a potentially lifesaving surgery. Despite this betrayal, one of Zhou’s last utterances was: “I have been loyal to Chairman Mao, to the party, and to the people. I have made many mistakes, but I am not a capitulationist.” He was referring to a charge leveled against him 30 years earlier. Evidently, Mao’s accusations about Zhou’s infidelity to the revolutionary cause still gnawed at his soul.

REDEMPTION SONG

After Zhou died, in January 1976, tens of thousands of grief-stricken mourners who believed he had effected a restraining influence on Mao spontaneously flooded into Tiananmen Square to memorialize him. It was a shame that Zhou died nine months before Mao did. Had he outlived Mao, Zhou might have assisted in neutralizing Mao’s toxic legacy and shoring up the efforts to reform and open up China, which Deng Xiaoping—who largely shared Zhou’s values—would begin in 1978 and continue to lead through the 1980s. (In fact, it was Deng who delivered the eulogy at Zhou’s memorial service when Mao failed to appear.)

By describing how the high tide of Maoist autocracy personally and politically warped even such a capable and sophisticated man as Zhou, Chen’s gripping biography prompts readers to reflect on the influences that Mao’s revolutions may continue to have on China today. The truth is that any nation’s past, especially one as traumatic as twentieth-century China’s, is not easily expunged by a reform movement or a new leader. And here, it is useful to recall that Xi came of age during the Cultural Revolution and was profoundly shaped by it; moreover, he was never administered any kind of antidote in the form of a meaningful period abroad as a young man or the experience of learning a foreign language. The reader finishes the epic narrative of Zhou’s life wondering what other elements of the horrific Mao era may still be left, pooled up beneath the surface of things and ready to cascade onto future generations of Chinese people. Indeed, it is amply evident that the past is reexpressing itself in today’s China, steeped as it now is in Xi’s increasingly rigid and ideological “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era.”

Zhou was hardly the first highly ranked official in history to become mired in an unequal and abusive relationship with a reigning despot. Chen does not conjecture whether he was motivated most by insecurity, an infatuation with submissiveness, an intoxication with power, or a love of country. Chen seems to understand that any such flirtation with pop psychology is a route to academic perdition. Instead, he excuses himself with the observation that “no one is able to enter Zhou’s innermost world.”

That statement is especially true in China, where gaining access to revealing information on party leaders has always been a parlous business. The state-managed archives that hold key documentary evidence about the CCP have been only partially accessible during short periods of political openness. This lacuna in the historical record has left researchers, especially those living abroad who can publish freely, largely reliant on sources outside these archives, which are incomplete and often subjective. Chen has indeed relied largely on such publicly available materials, including annual biographical records (nianpu) that can be purchased at select Chinese-language bookstores abroad, official biographies and autobiographies (zhuan) that tend to be scrubbed of sensitive detail, and memoirs and reflections (huiyilu), which can be very self-serving.

There is one other question hanging over Zhou Enlai: A Life that other scholars have raised but that Chen does not—and cannot—answer: might Zhou have been gay? Chen does cite a provocative early diary entry in which Zhou writes, “There exists no difference between male and female in free love; in life, it is not necessary to get married.” But Zhou did marry, and although he and his wife never had children of their own, they adopted two.

Given the limitations of the source material, however, Chen has done a remarkable job fleshing out Zhou’s character. He has gathered an impressive corpus of research that helps him puncture the aura of hagiography that has characterized so many previous accounts of Zhou. The result is a nuanced depiction of an able, dedicated leader who also allowed himself to become a deeply compromised, even somewhat tragic, figure. Whatever the motives behind Zhou’s accommodations toward Mao, Chen evinces a certain sympathy for his subject. “There are reasons for history to pardon Zhou as a beleaguered politician and an entrapped person,” he writes. “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.”

Perhaps.