Zhou Enlai
周恩来

‘Zhou Enlai –The Last Perfect Revolutionary’ is a book written by Gao Wenqian which focuses on the complicated, interweaving love-hate relationship between Chairman Mao Zedong[毛泽东] and Premier Zhou Enlai after the Communist Party assumed power in China in 1949. Zhou “lived those years in the shadow of Chairman Mao, performing tireless, like a compliant, docile daughter-in-law, the tasks that his master assigned to him.” [page 63]

Mao and Zhou led a complementary working relationship. Zhou was seen to be “a smooth operator who knew how to handle people; he also had a knack for organization and a good eye for detail.Whereas Mao was a man of immense talent, but he could not run the entire show by himself. He needed Zhou Enlai to perform the task”.[page 88]

Throughout the decades to come and until the waning days of Zhou, Mao was plagued by this paradoxical relationship. He had to keep Zhou at bay to prevent him from ever again gaining the upper hand; at the same time he had to depend on Zhou to run the day-to-day affair of governing the country.

Mao Zedong was a man known to be of jealous, unpredictable and vindictive in nature. He harboured bitter grudges against all those who had either criticized him or out-performed him.

Starting in the late 1950s, Mao launched his program of reform under the title of ‘Three Red Banners’, with the aim of transforming the Chinese society. But it turned into a mass starvation of an estimated twenty million Chinese peasants. Liu Shaoqi [刘少奇],Mao’s heir apparent, came to his rescue by devising an economic readjustment to remedy the blunders made by Mao. However,Mao himself would never admit it as a failure.

In the spring and summer of 1966, a huge tidal wave of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution[文化大革命] swept China under the pretext of preserving the purity of Chinese Socialism. In effect it was a social movement engineered by Mao to take revenge and purge Liu Shaoqi [刘少奇]，Deng Xiaoping [邓小平], Peng Zhen [彭真] and all the other old cadres who were closely associated with Liu.

Although Zhou concurred with the economic policy expounded by Liu, he took a different view to protect himself and safeguard his position as the premier of China. He had to toe the line and support Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution which had created “great chaos under heaven”[天下大乱].

By doing this, Zhou had perfected the art of walking the political tightrope. By avoiding direct confrontation with the Chairman, he could survive the political onslaught and rendered himself the means to protect the other victims of the Cultural Revolution.The following were the steps he took. ‘Some were allowed to leave their homes temporarily; others were sent to People’s Liberation Army hospital 301 on “sick leave”;others still were sent out of town to “recuperate”; and some were provided with public security guards, who were stationed in front of their homes with orders to persuade the marauding Red Guards to spare them.’[page 135]

In reality, Zhou Enlai was fully aware of the double role he was playing in the Cultural Revolution. On one hand, he knew Mao was dragging the country toward unprecedented chaos and disaster and yet he had to be submissive to the Chairman. On the other hand, his personal conscience urged him to do whatever he could to save the country and the people. Somehow he was trying to achieve a psychological balance between what was rapidly becoming two diametrically opposing commitments.

In later years, Zhou came under considerable fire for being too submissive and exhibiting an excessive desire to please Chairman Mao. His critics insisted that Zhou encouraged Mao in his madness by yielding to the Chairman time after time and that by following him, he too was responsible for the disaster that befell China.

When Deng Xiaoping was examining the role Zhou Enlai had played in the Cultural Revolution, he noted: “Without the premier, the Cultural Revolution would have been much worse. And without the premier the Cultural Revolution wouldn’t have dragged on for such a long time.”[ page162]

For Zhou Enlai, he had long realized that if he antagonized Chairman Mao, it would be a form of political suicide. He believed that as long as he remained in the inner circle of the power that be, his presence could make some difference. Someone had to hold the fort and maintain a semblance of order while turbulence spread throughout the country. As long as he remained as the premier, he still had the chance to chart the course which the country would be heading. Indeed, in January 1975, in a decisive speech to the Fourth National People’s Congress, Zhou outlined a new directive known as “Four Modernizations” as a blue print for Deng Xiaoping to implement. From 1978 onwards, Deng emerged as China’s paramount leader. He moved China towards the goals of wealth and power which were all along Zhou Enlai‘s dream and that of most of the China’s Communist Party leaders.

Today the world may remember Deng as the architect of Modern China but we may not be aware that it was Zhou who had lent Deng a helping hand.