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24 August 2024

The Dictator’s Enabler Searching for the Real Zhou Enlai

Orville Schell

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.

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