top of page

Mao's Crucible

Review of Zhou Enlai: A Life by Chen Jian 


Cambridge, Massachusetts/London, England:

The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2024 
817 pp. 

 

Reviewer: Connor Swank

10 - 16 - 24

1

When Zhou Enlai ordered operatives under his command to carry out the brutal killing of a two-year-old child in 1931, Chen Jian informs us in his new biography Zhou Enlai: A Life, it was a decision that he did not take lightly. The boy’s father, one of Zhou’s subordinates in the Chinese Communist Party’s intelligence apparatus, had just betrayed his comrades to the enemy Guomindang, and Zhou seemed desperate to deter further defections from his camp. He therefore ordered his men to go to the man’s home and slaughter nine members of his family, including his wife and toddler son. Yet, atypically, Zhou demonstrated uncertainty about whether his decision was right. In conversation with his subordinates, he ultimately deferred the verdict to people like Chen and his readers. “Let history judge,” he said. 
 

A century after this decision, and half a century after Zhou’s death, history has yet to judge Zhou Enlai. Desperate to maintain a veneer of revolutionary legitimacy after its revolution brought disaster, the Chinese Communist Party has put Zhou on a pedestal, praising him for purportedly protecting the country from the same tyrant he enabled. In the West, in part due to Henry Kissinger’s near-infatuation with his Chinese counterpart, Zhou is widely seen as a statesman who conferred sanity on a maniacal regime. Still, as Chen points out in his all-too-brief prologue, these images are not settled. Multiple prominent Chinese historians, once supportive of Zhou, have turned harsh critics with the passage of time, disillusioned by events like the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. Conservatives outside China are quick to ridicule and denounce his servitude to Mao. Even by the standards of Communist historical figures, a consensus on Zhou’s place in history appears exceedingly remote. 
 

Any full-length work on Zhou Enlai, particularly so many eventful years after his death, should contribute to the building of such a consensus. It should also contribute something to our deeper understanding of Zhou, the most emotionally closed and work-consumed of men, as a person. Chen’s biography, the product of a quarter-century of research, proves disappointing on both fronts. Chen recounts Zhou’s career but relates essentially nothing about his personal life, particularly during his adulthood; draws no new conclusions about his career (to the extent that he engages in analysis at all, his points are well-worn); and reveals little about Zhou’s behavior or the political currents he swam in that readers familiar with the China field will find new or surprising. 

 

Still, as a scholarly work, Chen’s biography has utility. Its capable narration of the twists and turns of elite Chinese politics during Zhou’s life will enlighten newcomers hardy enough to make such a lengthy work one of their first reads on modern China. It will also refresh those better-read on key aspects of Zhou’s relationship with Mao and on several characteristics of Mao himself, whom it discusses at considerable length. Finally, at various points and in various ways, the book supplies food for thought about how we should continue to understand and contextualize Chinese politics. 

 

* * * * 

 

There is a famous Mao anecdote that remains highly relevant to assessments of the legacy of Maoist China. Speaking shortly before his death, Mao is reported to have said, “I have accomplished two things in my life. First, I fought Chiang Kai-shek for a few decades and drove him to a few islands. After eight years of war against the Japanese, they were sent home. We fought our way to Beijing, at last entering the Forbidden City…. The other matter you all know about. It was to launch the Cultural Revolution.”

 

Understanding Zhou Enlai requires understanding these “accomplishments.” Zhou’s defenders– Chen, a dignified and fair-minded chronicler of difficult events, both criticizes and defends his subject– often give him plaudits not only for aiding in Mao’s first achievement, but for undermining the second– that is, protecting the Chinese people from the worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution and like campaigns. Chen makes only limited forays into this brand of apologism, but where he does, his efforts raise questions about the strength of such reasoning. Noting that Zhou made a minor alteration, with Mao’s approval, to a 1963 central document on the Socialist Education Movement so that it deemed 95% rather than 90% of Chinese people suitable to be brought on board, Chen asserts that this “meant that, in practice, hundreds of thousands– or even millions– of people would not be targeted in the campaign.” Readers familiar with the nature of Maoist campaigns will find the notion of a strict mathematical correlation between a figure in a conceptual central document and persecution on the ground difficult to credit. Scarcely more persuasive is Chen’s exoneration of Zhou for greenlighting the purge of Liu Shaoqi, whose only real transgression was to trigger Mao’s paranoia as a potential rival, on fabricated charges: 

 

If one views Zhou in this light, it was not only morally permissible for him to heave a comrade over the rails in order to protect himself; it may well have been an act of national salvation. 

 

* * * * 

 

Chen is far from alone in regarding Zhou as the only thing standing between China and destruction. Still, an examination of Zhou’s life that takes this view should explore whether his presence was either an ameliorating factor or a necessary condition for China to survive so many self-inflicted crises, including crises beyond the Cultural Revolution. More broadly, it should consider what such “survival” actually entailed. 

 

Chen does not adequately engage with these questions, a fact made all the more disappointing by the fact that the events he chronicles offer ample fuel for such reflection. In the Great Leap Forward, to take one example, Chen tells us that Zhou became aware of food shortages resulting from the Leap no later than early 1959, but the ensuing year saw him make little effort to address them. In 1960, tasked with ensuring gargantuan levels of steel output, Zhou called provincial leaders “almost every day” to pressure them to meet their grain quotas. Thereafter, “[w]hen grain extraction in most provinces failed to pick up after the autumn harvest, the central leadership repeatedly pressed provincial leaders for more grain. Consequently, the flames of the Great Famine consumed an even wider swath of China’s vast land.” Only after the “Xinyang incident,” when lower-level officials submitted a report of widespread starvation in a district of Henan Province, did the Center– with Mao’s approval– allow peasants to keep small plots of land for their own cultivation and consumption. Zhou later helped implement Mao’s decision to import large quantities of grain to deal with the emergency and, with Mao’s tacit acceptance, successfully pushed his colleagues to close factories and end construction projects en masse. 

 

What do these events mean for our understanding of Zhou? Chen’s language is not always clear. He appears to suggest that Zhou and his colleagues “failed to… take powerful measures” over the initial wave of reported grain shortages in part because they mistakenly believed them to be localized and in line with normal harvest issues that had cropped up in previous years; he also states the idea more explicitly in an apparent reference to Zhou’s thinking in early 1960 (in both cases, he also notes Zhou’s distraction with issues farther afield, such as in Tibet and India). The persuasiveness of this interpretation– did Mao himself providing Zhou with two reports entitled “Twenty-Five Million People in Fifteen Provinces Are Facing the Big Problem of Not Being Able to Feed Themselves” really suggest an issue that was either localized or routine?– is for the reader to weigh. What is clear from the events Chen chronicles is that Zhou neither pushed Mao to rein in quotas nor took measures that his patron did not approve beforehand or at least tacitly greenlight, raising questions about the significance of his affinity for saner policy at all. As to Zhou’s actions in support of the Leap, although Chen says little about the famine situation on the ground, squeezing localities for grain to meet Mao’s fantastical steel production quotas would have done the millions, or even tens of millions, of starving Chinese in the countryside at that time no favors. Zhou’s order around this time for the destruction of internal records containing information about deaths resulting from the Great Leap, which Chen is correct to acknowledge but incorrect to call merely a “dubious decision,” is less serious, but it too should weigh in considerations of Zhou’s place in history. Whatever Chen may say, and whatever may have happened in other, milder crises, this episode makes it difficult to credit Chen’s portrayal of Zhou as a protector of the Chinese nation. 

 

What of Zhou’s work to protect the Chinese people from the depredations of the Cultural Revolution? Chen employs the ship analogy more than once to praise Zhou’s contributions, but the reader searches in vain for evidence of concrete measures on a scale sufficient to soften the movement’s blows. Zhou did try to curb the chaos early on, proposing that Mao’s new “revolutionaries” be made to abide by certain rules and regulations, but Mao overruled him. Zhou then exhibited uncharacteristic political courage in defending Marshal Chen Yi from public denunciation, but not so with other figures: he did nothing to help Tao Zhu, aside from offering ineffectual advice, and after promising to bring his purged friend He Long back to Beijing, he left him to die in isolation, deprived of medical care for his diabetes. Even one of Zhou’s few clear-cut successes, purging Central Cultural Revolution Group member and agent of chaos Wang Li, was not entirely his own doing: he organized a carefully-timed report to Mao, who then ordered Wang’s arrest himself. More independent accomplishments of Zhou’s, like purging the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of unruly rebels, were peripheral to the national disaster then unfolding. Perhaps most soberingly of all, Zhou not only failed to protect members of his own family from arbitrary arrest; he signed off on the arrests of his own brother and adopted daughter. His daughter would never be released; she died in prison under circumstances that Chen, perhaps mercifully, does not detail. 

 

But what of Zhou’s stewardship of China’s economy, protecting the Chinese people’s livelihoods if not their lives? Chen praises Zhou for dramatically increasing China’s industrial and agricultural production in 1969 and notes the strikingly high growth in the years that followed, and even critical readers will find no evidentiary basis on which to question Zhou’s extraordinary administrative acumen. There are caveats that deserve note, however. Zhou’s labor to right the ship took place within the political parameters established by his patron, and even with his undoubted talents, he was far from indispensable to China’s economic recovery. When Mao decided to make a change– Chen stresses the progression of Zhou’s protracted fatal illness rather than Mao’s capriciousness in Zhou’s ultimate replacement as acting, though not nominal, premier– he merely elevated a similarly focused, talented, and pliant revolutionary veteran to right a national economy that remained in dire straits. This veteran’s name was Deng Xiaoping; however talented his predecessor in the role, his stewardship of the Chinese economy would certainly prove no less successful than Zhou Enlai’s. 

 

Chen’s biography is not sycophantic: it criticizes its subject’s actions at multiple points and does not omit the uglier episodes of his life and career. Its narrative, however, is suffused with the hoary image of Zhou Enlai as a victim. Zhou does not merely sign the arrest warrant for his daughter; Jiang Qing “forc[es] him to sign” it, which is “Zhou Enlai’s tragedy” and “also the tragedy of Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, as well as the tragedy of China’s whole revolutionary era” (alongside his arrest of his own brother). Zhou and his peers were not only the “protagonists” of their revolution, but “also its prisoners.” Zhou was not just the executioner of his comrade Liu Shaoqi’s political career, as mentioned above, but also “a beleaguered politician and an entrapped person.” Likewise, “it would have been impossible and useless for Zhou to try to protect" He Long. In many cases, most poignantly that of his daughter’s arrest on his own orders, Zhou is shown as powerless to stop the unending series of disasters that roiled his country and his life. 

 

The inadequacy of Chen’s premise on this point becomes apparent when one considers what it leaves unsaid: Zhou could not have done anything to check these events without endangering his own position. As terrifying as it was to speak up against Mao about disasters of his own making, it was a consideration that did not paralyze everyone in the highest echelons of the political apparatus. Liu Shaoqi upbraided Mao to his face in 1962 over the starvation that resulted from the Great Leap Forward. Peng Dehuai also criticized Mao’s behavior in the Leap, more diplomatically but also more publicly, in 1959. Both Liu and Peng paid dearly for their actions; both presumably undertook them because they could no longer bear to be silent.
 

Everyone who is not an outright villain has a point where they will feel compelled to aid others even if it means no longer protecting themselves. Such a point might be expected to arise when it comes to one’s own family suffering grievous harm. For Zhou Enlai, to judge by Chen’s narrative, even this scenario was not enough. His life was a tragedy for China, but it was a triumph for the principle of self-preservation. No matter how abjectly Zhou might have failed when it came to looking out for his friends, his family, and the millions of ordinary people over whose lives he wielded such incredible power, he never failed when it came to looking out for number one. 

 

                                                                                       * * * * 

Looking beyond Zhou, what relevance do the lessons from his career hold for China today? Given the extraordinary transformations the country has undergone since 1976, does the Zhou Enlai era as related by Chen contain any analytically meaningful information for the observer of China in the present? 

 

Surprisingly for a biographical work, Zhou Enlai: A Life is arguably stronger and has greater contemporary relevance when discussing large-scale political trends than when evaluating its subject. In covering foreign controversies, to take one notable example, Chen makes valuable points about the regime’s ability to derive advantages at home from conflicts abroad, including ones with unambiguously negative consequences for the Chinese people. The reader pondering the political consequences of a potential future conflict under the present regime, for one, will find relevance in Chen’s conclusions about the benefits for the ruling party of the Korean War, regardless of its cost in lives:

 

 

 

 

Nor, of course, did the Communist regime’s penchant for exploiting international disputes for domestic political gain end with this controversy, as Chen makes clear of Mao’s decision to give the Soviet Union the cold shoulder in 1965:

 

 

No less relevant to the observer of today’s China is the way that Chen’s work, like all accounts of this interesting period, permits us to reflect on the nature of Zhou’s political relationship with his patron. One of the many fascinating aspects of the Zhou-Mao relationship is that in the crucible that was Maoist politics, incompetent high-ranking figures could and did flourish on the political left, but Mao’s instinctive leftist inclinations and hyper-suspicious mind allowed no room for them on the right. Under relentless pressure from unending leadership purges, only the shrewdest, most morally pliant, and most indispensably talented right-leaning officials were ultimately able to stay in the game, or return to it, in the final years of the Maoist era. The dynamics of this social Darwinist political selection process raise important questions for the era of Xi Jinping. If Mao’s crucible paradoxically elevated and honed his most talented policy opponents while diluting his favored faction with political neophytes and widely-reviled sycophants, could Xi Jinping’s repeated purges of the ranks during his time in power have done the same? Could some of the most talented officials in Xi’s apparatus be prepared to undo some of his most dearly-held yet dubious policies, as Zhou manifestly would have been inclined to do and as Deng Xiaoping, after taking the requisite time to consolidate power, actually did? The truth is, for now, unknowable, but one broader truth is clear: Chen’s coverage of the quandaries faced by the lieutenants of a supreme leader in the Mao Zedong era will remain relevant to readers so long as the intense concentration of power remains a feature of Chinese politics. 

 

* * * * 

 

It is unclear what Zhou Enlai would have thought of Chen Jian’s treatment of his life and career. He only rarely gave voice to his true feelings, especially after his subordination to Mao Zedong in the long years before their joint ascent to national power. In one outburst in or around 1972, which Chen believes may have been prompted by fear for his own legacy, Zhou expressed despair: 

 

 

Zhou may have merely been afraid for his own survival, a colleague at the top of the Party having just been targeted and died in disgrace (a hypothesis Chen airs). One wonders how deeply he feared the judgment of history for his service to Mao, however. Perhaps, like his critics, he would be surprised to know that even today, history has yet to make up its mind. 

 

As for judgment for one of Zhou’s earliest crimes, his murder of the two-year-old boy whose father betrayed his comrades to the Guomindang in 1931, Zhou himself at one point gave away the game. Incensed by the excesses of his radical subordinates in the Cultural Revolution, who at one point suggested attacking and killing police officers in British-ruled Hong Kong, he erupted with rage at the idea. “This is ridiculous!” he said. “As Communists we carry out political struggles, not assassinations.” He may have been unaware of the irony. If he was not, as judgment goes, it was not much, but perhaps it can be a start.

​​

​​​​​

          1    Frederick C. Teiwes and Warren Sun, The End of the Maoist Era: Chinese Politics During the Twilight of the
          Cultural Revolution, 1972-1976
(M.E. Sharpe, 2007; Routledge, 2014), 595.

[A]lthough this was a dark moment in Zhou’s life and political career, there are reasons for history to pardon Zhou as a beleaguered politician and an 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. 

During the war, the Communist regime penetrated into almost every facet of Chinese society through intensive mass mobilization campaigns under the banner of revolutionary nationalism. Three nationwide campaigns swept through China’s countryside and cities: the suppression of counterrevolutionaries; land reform; and the movements for disciplining corrupt Communist cadres and regulating “national capitalists.” Consequently, the CCP effectively enhanced its organizational control over Chinese society and dramatically strengthened its authority and reputation in the minds of everyday Chinese. 

In hindsight, it was not strange that Mao had been so hostile toward [Soviet prime minister Alexei] Kosygin. At the time, Mao was trying to push China toward the Cultural Revolution; the last thing he wanted was an improvement in Sino-Soviet relations. Otherwise, the legitimacy of his “continuous revolution,” which took opposition to Soviet revisionism as a central objective, would be compromised or even undermined.

[Ji Dengkui] said, “Lin Biao has destroyed himself. From now on we can give good attention to the country’s economic reconstruction. This is a happy moment.” These words were obviously too much for [Zhou Enlai’s] overburdened mind. His tears flew down, quickly turning into a cry. Louder and louder, he wailed, choked with sobs…. Finally, he calmed down. After quite a while, he said, “You do not understand, it is not so simple. It has not finished yet.” 

bottom of page