Showing posts with label Zhou Enlai. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Zhou Enlai. Show all posts

2024-09-07

Zhou Enlai: A Life Chen Jian WoodrowWilsonCenter



Zhou Enlai: A Life


WoodrowWilsonCenter



8,221 views Jun 12, 2024

Chen Jian authors 

Zhou Enlai: A Life, the first archive-records-based and comprehensive biography in English of China’s premier for twenty-seven years. He offers a nuanced portrait of Zhou’s dilemmas-ridden life as a revolutionary, an eminent and pragmatic statesman, a diplomatic giant, and, in the final analysis, a person with his own vision and aspiration who did much to make China, as well as the larger world, what it is today. Chen Jian is Distinguished Global Network Professor of History at NYU Shanghai/NYU, Hu Shih Professor of History Emeritus at Cornell, and leading scholar of the Cold War and modern Chinese history. Among his many publications are Mao’s China and the Cold War, China’s Road to the Korean War, Critical Notes on the Political History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (in Chinese), and The Great Transformation: China’s Road from Revolution to Reform (co-authored with Odd Arne Westad).
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Zhou Enlai: A Life - Chen, Distinguished Global Network Professor of History Nyu and Nyu-Shanghai Hu Shih Professor of History Emeritus Cornell University Jian | 9780674659582 | Amazon.com.au | Books

Zhou Enlai: A Life - Chen, Distinguished Global Network Professor of History Nyu and Nyu-Shanghai Hu Shih Professor of History Emeritus Cornell University Jian | 9780674659582 | Amazon.com.au | Books

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Zhou Enlai: A Life Hardcover – 7 May 2024
by Distinguished Global Network Professor of History Nyu and Nyu-Shanghai Hu Shih Professor of History Emeritus Cornell University Jian Chen (Author)
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 14 ratings



The definitive biography of Zhou Enlai, the first premier and preeminent diplomat of the People's Republic of China, who protected his country against the excesses of his boss--Chairman Mao.

Zhou Enlai spent twenty-seven years as premier of the People's Republic of China and ten as its foreign minister. He was the architect of the country's administrative apparatus and its relationship to the world, as well as its legendary spymaster. Richard Nixon proclaimed him "the greatest statesman of our era." Yet Zhou has always been overshadowed by Chairman Mao. Chen Jian brings Zhou into the light, offering a nuanced portrait of his complex life as a revolutionary, a master diplomat, and a man with his own vision and aspirations who did much to make China, as well as the larger world, what it is today.

Born to a declining mandarin family in 1898, Zhou received a classical education and as a teenager spent time in Japan. As a young man, driven by the desire for China's development, Zhou embraced the communist revolution as a vehicle of China's salvation. He helped Mao govern through a series of transformations, including the disastrous Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. Yet, as Chen shows, Zhou was never a committed Maoist. His extraordinary political and bureaucratic skill, combined with his centrist approaches, enabled him to mitigate the enormous damage caused by Mao's radicalism.

When Zhou died in 1976, the PRC that we know of was not yet visible on the horizon; he never saw glistening twenty-first-century Shanghai or the broader emergence of Chinese capitalism. But it was Zhou's work that shaped the nation whose influence and power are today felt in every corner of the globe.


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Review
Chen Jian has published a monumental biography of Zhou Enlai that makes him the pre-eminent scholar of the contemporary Chinese diaspora. [This] book, a comprehensive portrait of Zhou that took twenty years to research and write, will change [the way Zhou is perceived in the West]. Rather than merely applauding or attacking Zhou, it sets out to understand him at a level no previous work has approached...a compelling narrative.--Perry Anderson "London Review of Books" (9/12/2024 12:00:00 AM)

Vividly stages [the enigma of Zhou Enlai] 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, [this] biography brings twentieth-century Chinese history alive in new and very personal ways.--Orville Schell "Foreign Affairs" (8/20/2024 12:00:00 AM)

A life of Zhou Enlai...can be nothing less than an exploration of China's history during the greater part of the 20th century. Chen Jian has drawn on such an astonishing wealth of sources in Chinese archives and elsewhere that it is difficult to see how his biography could ever be bettered.--Philip Snow "Literary Review" (6/1/2024 12:00:00 AM)

Enlightening and moves along briskly...describes [Zhou's] initiatives with clarity and detail.--Lucy Hornby "Los Angeles Review of Books" (5/8/2024 12:00:00 AM)

A lucid, well-researched narrative...a satisfyingly fine-grained account of an influential figure often lost in Maoʼs shadow.-- "Publishers Weekly" (3/22/2024 12:00:00 AM)

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.-- "Kirkus Reviews (starred review)" (2/29/2024 12:00:00 AM)

A must-read. Chen Jian's book illuminates Zhou Enlai's life from the earliest years to his final days with nuance, empathy, and scholarly depth. Along the way, he also tells the breathtaking story of Zhou's China. This is a rare work of history shot through with the lived experience, and even occasional pensiveness, of an eminent authority on twentieth-century China.--Sergey Radchenko, author of Two Suns in the Heavens: The Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy, 1962-1967

At last, Zhou Enlai has the full-dress biography he deserves, one that uses rich documentary evidence to make an objective assessment of his enduring influence on twentieth-century China as well as the world. This is a profoundly important work of history.--Rana Mitter, author of China's Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism

Chen Jian's Zhou Enlai compellingly documents the whims, illusions, and eccentricities of Mao Zedong. I know of no better account of the arbitrary nature--but also the consequent waste--of authoritarian rule.--John Lewis Gaddis, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning George F. Kennan: An American Life

Communist China resembles a labyrinth. This brilliant study of Zhou Enlai's life has given us a key and a map to understand it. A masterpiece and a must-read for anyone who cares about China and its impact on the world.--Xu Guoqi, author of Chinese and Americans: A Shared History

About the Author
A leading scholar of the Cold War and the history of modern China, Chen Jian is Distinguished Global Network Professor of History at New York University and NYU Shanghai; Hu Shih Professor of History Emeritus at Cornell University; and Zijiang Distinguished Visiting Professor at East China Normal University.

Product details
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Belknap Press (7 May 2024)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 840 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0674659589



From other countries

MLB
5.0 out of 5 stars A monumental achievementReviewed in the United States on 20 July 2024
Verified Purchase
Few people played as significant a role as Zhou Enlai did in the history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the history of the People’s Republic of China. And yet, we did not have a complete and thorough understanding of Zhou Enlai, who spent twenty-seven years as premier of the People’s Republic of China and ten as its foreign minister, until the publication of this comprehensive and definitive biography.

Chen Jian shows that absolute allegiance and loyalty to Mao Zedong and Mao’s utopian vision were essential for survival under the CCP regime for high-ranking officials such as Zhou Enlai. As one would expect, a key aspect of Zhou’s life was his relationship with Mao. Zhou and Mao had held different views from time to time, which helps explain why Zhou became a principal target of the CCP Ratification Campaign during the early 1940s. Owing perhaps to that experience, Zhou was determined to subject himself to Mao’s authority and power. During the Cultural Revolution, Zhou demonstrated his loyalty to Mao by signing an official document condemning Liu Shaoqi, then president of the People’s Republic of China, as a renegade, traitor, and scab. Still, Zhou became the target of another campaign during the early 1970s known as the Campaign to Criticize Lin Biao and Confucius. As late as the summer of 1975, a few months before he died, Zhou still felt the need to admit his mistakes and declare his loyalty to Mao.

However, this book is more than a comprehensive and definitive biography of Zhou Enlai; it is, among other things, a meticulous and painstaking examination of the evolution of authority structure at the top of the hierarchy of the CCP party-state, a structure that defines the boundary of acceptable behavior for CCP leaders. Chen Jian explains how Mao became the ultimate decision maker during the Ratification Campaign during the early 1940s and how Mao consolidated his absolute authority and power as the ultimate decision maker during the early 1950s. Chen Jian argues convincingly that Mao’s absolute authority and power and the inability of other CCP leaders to develop an alternative grand legitimacy narrative for the Chinese Revolution and the so-called “continuous revolution” after 1949 made it impossible for the CCP to prevent Mao from launching the Cultural Revolution.

In short, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in studying the evolution of CCP intraparty politics, CCP authority structure, and the CCP party-state under Mao.
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Amber W.
5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding and Thought-provokingReviewed in the United States on 25 May 2024
Verified Purchase
No doubt, it’s the best biography of Zhou Enlai and one of the richest histories of the founding fathers of Communist China that scholarship has ever seen. For a long time, Zhou has been buried in the shadow of Mao in historiography, but Zhou’s life story is much more than what the Mao-centric approach has stereotypically presented to us. Chen’s long-durée perspective (more than 40% of the book is about Zhou’s life before 1949) makes the book an incredible presentation of modern China, spanning the irredeemable late Qing Dynasty, the chaotic and war-torn Republican era, and the first decades of Communist China. It vividly shows what made Zhou so important to the history he lived through, to the historiography of modern China in which he became a historical figure, and to many people today who attempt to understand what happened to him, his party, and his nation.

Readers of this book should bear in mind a basic fact that many people outside China are often unaware of: China after 1949 has termed its history between the Opium War of 1839-1842 and the founding of the PRC in 1949 as “a century of humiliations.” Zhou was born during a period when his nation needed to be salvaged from the invasions of colonialism and imperialism. This was true in history when thousands of Chinese were starving to death, and the Chinese state was a victim of various foreign powers. Why did Zhou join the Communist Party? Why did he never give up the road of revolution? Why did he enthusiastically join Mao’s various campaigns of state-building? The ultimate question for him, as well as for Mao and other top rulers of the Communist regime, was what kind of state China should and could become. This book addresses all these questions and beyond. It’s amazing to see how the author has presented the complicated political and social histories through Zhou.

In the book, one can see a series of sea changes in Chinese society and state-building throughout the long 20th century. Many of those changes still play a crucial role in shaping our perceptions of the twentieth-century Chinese Communist revolution and its legacy, Chinese Westernization/modernization, the triumph of Communism, and the disasters of Communist state-building experiments in the second half of the twentieth century.

This extraordinary book engages with much more than just Zhou’s life.

7 people found this helpfulReport

Lawrence D. Ink
5.0 out of 5 stars Thorough biographyReviewed in the United States on 22 June 2024
Verified Purchase
This book throughly researches Zhou's life. It shows his tremendous skill as a diplomat and survivor, but also portrays a man who sold out his principles. He was too weak to stand up to Mao even when realizing what Mao did was disastrous.

One person found this helpfulReport

Christian Schlect
3.0 out of 5 stars Comrade EnlaiReviewed in the United States on 21 May 2024
Verified Purchase
A highly favorable account of the public life of one of the top officials in Mao's China. Zhou Enlai was a polished diplomat, a key party leader, and, above all, a survivor from the very beginnings of the PRC to his death by cancer in in 1976.

Quite a bit of his early career is of little interest to a modern nonexpert Western reader. Incidents, cliques, and intraparty turmoil are described in slow detail.

However, there are many areas of this history that will serve to benefit one's understanding of the modern world. The role of Chiang Kai-shek; the never ending quest to recover Taiwan for the PRC; Stalin's and the USSR's interactions with the PRC; the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution; Nixon's visit to China; and above all and throughout--Mao.

To me a large problem is the author's lack of placing Mao's irrational actions, especially his concept of continual revolution into its true murderous context. Millions upon millions of people died, but here this largely goes unstated or underplayed. And Zhou Enlai was always there, helping to support Mao.

I came into this book admiring Zhou Enlai. I closed it thinking he should have either quit and retired to the countryside, or committed suicide, or killed Mao. Instead, near death, he still was writing such things as : "Since the Zunyi Conference, forty years have elapsed. Despite the chairman's endless teaching, I have still made mistakes or even committed crimes. About all this, I feel tremendous shame and regret. ..."

8 people found this helpfulReport

Whoever
5.0 out of 5 stars Well sourced and engagingReviewed in the United States on 9 June 2024
Verified Purchase
Great detail & anecdotes based on original archival research
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MIN S. Katner
5.0 out of 5 stars Engaging, intelligent, and InformativeReviewed in the United States on 19 May 2024
Verified Purchase
This biography of Zhou Enlai by Professor Chen Jian is thoroughly researched and well written. It is a wonderful read for anyone who are interested in modern Chinese history and a must-have reference book for anyone who teach Modern Chinese history!

3 people found this helpfulReport



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저우언라이 - 나무위키

저우언라이 - 나무위키




저우언라이
최근 수정 시각: 2024-07-27 13:34:26

76
편집토론역사


분류
청말의 인물
국민혁명군/군인
국공내전/군인
중화인민공화국 국무원 총리
중화인민공화국 외교부장
중국공산당 중앙위원회 부주석
중국공산당 5기 중앙정치국 위원
중국공산당 5기 중앙정치국 후보위원
중국공산당 6기 중앙정치국 상무위원
중국공산당 6기 중앙서기처 서기
중국공산당 7기 중앙서기처 서기
중국공산당 8기 중앙정치국 상무위원
중국공산당 9기 중앙정치국 상무위원
중국공산당 10기 중앙정치국 상무위원
중국공산당 조직부장
중국공산당 통일전선공작부장
1898년 출생
1976년 사망
화이안시 출신 인물
호세이대학 출신
메이지대학 출신
방광암으로 죽은 인물
더 보기



중화인민공화국 초대 국무원 총리
중화인민공화국 초대 외교부장
저우언라이
周Zhōu恩Ēn来Lái(周恩來, 주은래) | Zhou Enlai



출생
1898년 3월 5일

청 강소성 회안현
(現 중국 장쑤성 화이안시)

사망
1976년 1월 8일 (향년 77세)

베이징시 시청구 중국 인민해방군 제305의원

재임 기간
초대 중화인민공화국 국무원 총리

1949년 10월 1일 ~ 1976년 1월 8일

초대 중앙인민정부 외교부장

1949년 10월 1일 ~ 1958년 2월 11일

제8기 중화인민공화국 부주석

1956년 9월 28일 ~ 1966년 8월 1일

제10기 중화인민공화국 부주석

1973년 8월 30일 ~ 1976년 1월 8일

서명


[ 펼치기 · 접기 ]




군인 시절 사진



1. 개요2. 생애3. 평가
3.1. 긍정적 평가3.2. 부정적 평가4. 한국과의 관계5. 가족관계6. 기타7. 주요 경력8. 참고문헌9. 관련 문서
9.1. 인물
9.1.1. 중국 공산당9.1.2. 중국 국민당9.1.3. 외국9.2. 사건





1. 개요[편집]


중화인민공화국의 정치인. 초대 국무원 총리 겸 외교부장을 지냈다.

국내에서는 오랜 기간 한국식 한자독음인 "주은래"로 표기했기에 지금도 주은래 총리라고 표현하는 경우가 많은데, 사실 국립국어원에 의하면 신해혁명 이전 출생 중국인은 한국식 한자독음으로 부르는 게 타당하므로 틀린 표현은 아니다. 저우언라이와 주은래 모두 표준 표기로 정착되었다.

1917년 도일하여 호세이대학, 메이지대학 등에서 수학하기도 하였으며 학위취득 낙방후 톈진 난카이대학 재학 중 5·4운동에 참가해 투옥, 퇴학당하였고 1920년 프랑스로 건너가 파리대학에서 정치학을 공부하였다. 1922년 중국공산당 파리지부를 창설했고 런던, 베를린, 모스크바를 거쳐 귀국하였다. 1920년대부터 중국공산당의 핵심으로 1949년 중화인민공화국 정권 수립 이후 죽을 때까지 초대 국무원 총리를 지냈으며 외교, 정치, 경제 다방면에 걸쳐 활동했다.

카리스마만큼 똘기도 있던 마오쩌둥과 달리 학자 스타일로 국내외 문제에서도 꽤 유연한 사고를 보여줘 오늘날 중국에서도 고평가받는 총리이다. 2인자로 평생을 마오쩌둥과 함께 한 동지이자 파트너였기 때문에, 대중매체에서도 마오쩌둥과는 한 세트로 묶여서 나오는 경우가 많다.[2]




2. 생애[편집]


 자세한 내용은 저우언라이/생애 문서
를 참고하십시오.








3. 평가[편집]




3.1. 긍정적 평가[편집]



마오는 어떤 모임에서도 주도적인 역할을 했지만, 저우는 서서히 하나가 되어갔다. 마오의 열정은 반대파를 압도하기 위해 노력했지만, 저우의 지성은 그들을 설득하거나 이용하려 했다. 마오가 냉소적인 사람이었다면, 저우는 냉철한 인물이었다. 마오는 스스로를 철학자라고 생각했고, 저우는 행정가나 협상가로서의 역할을 하였다. 마오는 역사를 가속화하기를 열망했지만, 저우는 그것의 흐름을 이용하는 것에 만족했다.
헨리 키신저, 헨리 키신저의 중국 이야기 #

현대 중국인들이 가장 존경하는 인물 중 한 명이다. 오래 전에 세상을 떠났음에도 흔히들 "저우 총리"라 부르고 시진핑조차도 저우언라이에 대한 칭송을 규제하지 않을 정도. 성격도 원만하고 관계를 조정하는 데 뛰어나서 동료들이 저지른 실책들을 훈훈하게 마무리하는 미담들이 많이 들려온다. 막장 사건들이 많이 벌어진 격동의 6,70년대 중국 현대사의 중심에 권력을 쥐고 이를 막지 못한 책임에서 자유로울 수 없기에 마오쩌둥에 붙어 일신의 안녕이나 꾀하며 이미지 관리에 집착한 위선자라는 평도 있다. 허나 적군이던 장제스의 여자 문제를 훈훈하게 마무리해주고, 문화대혁명 시기에 전 왕조의 유산이자 소중한 문화유산인 자금성, 포탈라궁 등을 지켜내는 등, 양면적인 평가가 공존하는 인물이다.

그의 청렴성에 관한 일화가 하나 있는데, 저우언라이가 총리로 재임하던 당시 파키스탄의 관료였던 사람이 증언에 따르면 파키스탄 탁구 국가대표팀이 중국을 방문했을 때 국빈 대접 차원에서 저우언라이가 자신의 집에서 그들과 함께 저녁식사를 하게 되었다고 한다. 그런데 그 자리에서 저우언라이가 무언가 걱정하는 듯 보이자 파키스탄 국가대표팀 선수가 저우언라이에게 "뭔가 문제라도 있으시냐"고 물었는데 저우언라이가 대답하길, "우리 집에 식기가 부족해서 말입니다. 이웃들에게 좀 빌려달라고 얘기해 뒀었는데, 늦어져서 걱정입니다." 즉 일국의 총리 사저에 기껏해야 수십 명 정도를 대접하는 데 필요한 식기조차 없었던 것.

정치가로서는 평생 마오쩌둥과 함께 한 일생일대의 동지였다. 위에도 나왔지만 저우언라이는 대약진운동과 문화대혁명을 초기에는 적극 찬성했으나 후에 돌아섰고, 이후에도 계속 이런 정책적 과오들을 자신의 권한 내에서 또는 마오쩌둥이 노여워 하지 않는 안에서 최대한 완화시키려고 했다. 마오쩌둥의 카리스마가 화려한 언변과 날카로운 필력에 원천을 둔 것이었다면, 저우언라이는 조용하면서도 유연하고 포용력 있는 성품으로 좀처럼 적을 만들지 않는 카리스마를 가졌다.

내전 당시에도 중국국민당과 중국공산당 양 쪽으로부터 폭넓은 존경을 받았으며, 아직까지도 중국인들이 가장 존경하는 현대 중국 지도자 가운데 한 명이다. 심지어는 명재상의 대명사인 소하나 제갈량과 비교되기도 한다. 과연 저우는 제갈량의 후출사표에 나온 '국궁진췌 사이후이'를 좌우명으로 삼았다.

최근에는 중국에서도 이런저런 잘못들을 갖고 마오쩌둥을 비판하는 사람들은 굉장히 많지만, 저우언라이를 비판하는 사람은 정말 잘 없다. 일각에서는 사당에 신의 한 명으로 모실 정도라고 하니 그 위상을 짐작할 만하다.

위에서 볼 수 있듯이 마오쩌둥의 급진적인 잘못을 노여움을 사지 않는 선에서 자신의 권한으로 최대한 완화시키려고 노력했다. 다만 그 당시 대약진운동과 문화대혁명의 피해가 너무 크다 보니 생사를 함께한 혁명 동지들이 별의별 이유로 숙청당하는데도 총리로서 적극적으로 개입하지 못하고 지켜만 보거나, 일이 망할 것을 뻔히 알면서도 마오의 일에 적극 동참하던 그를 일부에선 고의적 방관자였다고 비판하기도 한다. 이것이 저우언라이의 몇 안되는 비판점이다. 대약진운동 문서에도 다뤄지듯이, 저우언라이의 바짝 엎드리는 비굴한 행태, 경제가 망해가고 있는 걸 알면서도 무리한 계획을 열심히 독려하는 모습을 보면 아무리 숙청이 두렵다지만 이렇게까지 일조해야 했나 싶을 정도다.

물론 저우언라이라고 해서 이런 점을 후회하지 않은 것은 아니었다. 2007년에 저우언라이의 부인 덩잉차오가 보관하던 저우언라이 개인의 일기가 공개되었었는데 거기에는 저우 본인이 사망 직전 마오쩌둥을 국가 주석으로 세운것을 후회하는 내용이 적혀 있었다. 사실 따지고보면 마오쩌둥이 급진적인 경제정책에 집착하지 않고 차근차근 경제성장이 진행되었으면 훨씬 이전에 세계 수위권의 경제대국이 되어, 국제적인 입지도 단단해졌을터였다.

또한 저우언라이 자신도 대약진운동과 문화대혁명을 완화시킬려고 고생을 사서 했고, 거기에다가 문화대혁명 직후로 동료들이 숙청되는 건 물론 본인도 죽는 그 순간까지도 4인방과 홍위병들의 공격을 받아야했다. 자신의 수양딸인 쑨유스도 장칭에 의해 죽임을 당했으며 사위도 정신적인 후유증에 시달려야 했으니 당연히 마오쩌둥에 대해서 좋은 감정이 들 수만은 없기는 했다.

게다가 마오쩌둥은 꼭 동지를 출당하거나 혹은 벌을 내릴 때 저우언라이를 통해 발표하도록 하여 책임을 떠밀었고, 저우언라이는 본의 아니게 이런 숙청 명령서에 가장 많이 사인을 하게 되었다. 류사오치의 경우도 출당 발표를 저우언라이가 했을 정도. 허나 역설적이게도 그가 적극적으로 개입했다면 그 역시 숙청의 굴레에서 무사하지 못했을 것이며, 그가 없었으면 홍위병은 중국의 모든 문화재를 박살내고 자금성은 잿더미가 되어 있었을 것이다.

하루는 황하가 범람해 현장에 긴급방문했는데 일하던 인부들이 중화인민공화국 국무원 총리가 지시를 어떻게 내릴지 궁금해하고 있었다. 이때 저우언라이가 한 말은 "여러분, 아무쪼록 의견을 내주세요." 인부들이 깜짝 놀라 아무 말도 못하고 있다 "우리들은 주 총리를 진심으로 환영합니다."라고 판에 박힌 인사를 하자 총리는 "우리는 모두 일가친척입니다. 환영할 필요는 없습니다. 곧바로 본론으로 들어갑시다. 문제는 '다리를 어떻게 하는가'입니다. 모두 다리를 위해 노력한 사람이므로 경험도 풍부합니다. 나는 모두의 의견에 따라하고 싶은 것입니다."라고 말했다고 한다. 저우언라이의 평상시 인품이 어떠한지 보여주는 대목. 실제로 이런 점은 덩샤오핑이 상당 부분 본받기도 했다.

대외적으로도 대인의 면모를 많이 보였다. 중국공산당이 보통 옛 청나라 황족에게 매우 비판적이고 적대적이었던 데 반해 저우언라이는 그들에게 호의적까지는 아니더라도 매우 동정적이었다. 특히 청 왕조의 마지막 황제인 선통제의 남동생인 애신각라 부걸과 그의 일본인 아내 사가 히로가 같이 중국에서 머무는 것을 허락하였고, 그들의 장녀 혜생의 편지를 받고 사가 히로를 초청한 사람 또한 저우언라이 총리였다. 그러나 편지를 보낸 혜생은 어머니가 일본인과의 결혼을 반대하자 애인과 함께 자살했고, 사가 히로는 차녀 호세이(호생)의 결혼은 막지 않았다.

중국과 일본은 적대국이었으므로 편지를 읽고도 그냥 무시하는 것이 오히려 상식적인 일이었지만, 그는 관대하게도 한 소녀의 편지를 읽고 청을 들어준 것이다. 옛 순친왕부에 보금자리를 마련해 주고 최고의 대우를 해준 것도, 문화대혁명 때 부걸의 집이 홍위병들에게 습격당해 고초를 겪자 경비병을 파견하여 그들을 지켜준 것도 모두 저우언라이였다.

뿐만 아니라 중국공산당의 아버지였던 천두슈는 1930년대 공산당을 탈당했고, 당시 대세였던 스탈린주의자들에게는 불구대천의 원수였던 트로츠키주의로 전향했다가, 나중엔 아예 공산주의를 버렸다. 하지만 저우언라이는 국공합작 때 국민정부가 옮겨온 충칭에 머물 당시, 당시 중국 국민 감방에서 출소했던 천두슈가 병석에 눕자 병문안을 왔고, 거금을 치료비로 건내기도 했다(그러나 천두슈는 거절했다.). 당시에도 천두슈가 옌안에 있던 마오쩌둥에게 "트로츠키파 배신자이자 잘못된 지도로 당을 구렁텅이로 이끈 무능력자"로 취급을 받았던 것을 감안하면 저우언라이의 천두슈에 대한 대접은 상당히 대인의 그것이었다.

1957년 전국인민대표회의 민족위원회가 주최한 민족공작좌담회에선 "우리는 대민족주의, 특히 대한족주의와 지방민족주의에 모두 반대한다. 반드시 민족 구역의 자치를 실현해야 한다. 이것이 바로 중국 민족의 역사발전과 경제발전, 혁명발전에 가장 부합하는 정책이다. 각 민족들은 완벽한 평등을 누리고 그 어떤 차별을 받아서도 안 된다."라고 말하며 배타적 민족주의와 편협한 대국 쇼비니즘을 질타하기도 했다. 지금 중국의 소수민족 정책을 본다면 저우언라이가 저승에서 땅을 칠 것이다. 내몽골 인민혁명당 숙청 사건 때는 내몽골 자치구 정부주석을 맡고 있던 우란후를 지켜주기도 하였다.

리처드 닉슨 미국 대통령의 방중을 성사시킨 헨리 키신저는 2012년 출간된 책에서 "나 자신이 살아오며 저우언라이만큼 강렬한 인상을 받았던 인물은 없었다"고 그를 극찬했다. 닉슨 역시 자신이 방중했을 때 저우가 "내가 암에 걸려 언제 죽을지 알 수 없으니, 내가 살아있을 때 빨리 미중수교를 성사했으면 한다"는 말을 건네는 걸 보며 감동받았다고 한다.

북한에서도 인기가 많다. 황장엽의 회상에 따르면 정작 원조의 양은 소련이 중공을 앞섰지만, 레오니트 브레즈네프가 "이만큼 도움을 많이 해줬지 않느냐"라며 생색내고 툴툴거렸던 반면 저우언라이는 겸손하게 "더 필요한 것이 있으면 언제든지 말해라"라고 했다고 한다. 실제로 조중변계조약 때 북한에 양보를 해주기도 했다고 한다.




3.2. 부정적 평가[편집]



"마오쩌둥은 비전에 찬 공상가였고, 저우언라이는 바로 그 악몽을 현실로 탈바꿈시키는 산파였다. 언제나 근신 중이었던 그는 자신의 충성심을 입증하기 위해 대약진운동에 지칠 줄 모르고 전념하게 된다."
프랑크 디쾨터, 인민 3부작

그러나 중국공산당이 아직도 정권을 잡고 있는 와중 공정한 평가가 나오기 힘들다는 점은 감안해야 한다. 저우언라이에 대한 일반적인 인식과 반대로, 그에 대한 비판론은 상당히 크다. 저우언라이는 1950~1951년에 불어닥친 대규모 우파 숙청에 적극적으로 동조했으며, 당의 권력을 위해 '수백만 명' 정도는 기꺼이 바쳐야 한다고 주장했던 사람임을 잊으면 안된다는 논지다.

각 소수 민족들의 평등을 중시했다는 말 역시, 그것이 마오쩌둥 이하 중국공산당의 기조였기 때문이지[3] 저우언라이가 딱히 대인이여서는 아니다. 실제로 마오쩌둥은 대한족주의를 비판하며 소수민족의 인권을 두둔하는 언사를 하기도 했다. 무엇보다 저우언라이고 마오쩌둥이고, 입만 잘 털었지 결국 별다르게 한 건 없다는 것이다.

이례적으로, 달라이 라마는 "차라리 마오쩌둥은 투박한 시골 사람 같은 면이 있는데, 저우는 자신의 이득을 위해 적을 만들지 않는 것뿐이며 실상은 부드러운 위선자"라고 비판한 바 있다. 이는 마오쩌둥의 정책에 반대하기는 했지만 결정적인 순간에 꼬리를 내리며 마오의 뜻을 따랐기 때문이었다. 앞서 대약진운동에서도 처음에는 대약진 운동이 너무 과격한 발상이라며 반대했지만 허황된 고속성장의 꿈에 매달렸던 마오쩌둥의 뜻을 꺾지 못하고 결국 자아비판을 하며 꼬리를 내렸으며 이러한 모습은 문화대혁명때에도 반복되었다.

또한 달라이 라마는 오리아나 팔라치와의 인터뷰에서 마오쩌둥은 똑똑한 지도자였으며 자신에게 큰 애정을 보여주었다고 회고했지만, 저우언라이는 언제나 눈을 뒤룩뒤룩 굴리는 위험할 정도로 똑똑하고 간사한 인간이라면서 그와는 절대로 친구가 될 수 없을 것이라고 싸늘하게 논평했다.[4][5][6]

저우언라이는 뛰어난 능력을 발휘한다 한들 마오의 실책을 수습해주는 정도에 그치며 중국을 발전시킨 것은 아니었다.[7] 결과적으로 대약진 운동의 파국이나 홍위병과 4인방의 횡포도 막지 못했으니 기대가 큰 만큼 실망이 큰 것도 사실이었다. 달라이 라마 입장에서 말이 통한다면서 기대를 걸었다가도 대차게 실망을 한 경험이 있었으니 좋은 생각이 들리는 없었고, 그렇기 때문에 저우언라이에 대해 위선자라고 불렀을 가능성이 있다.

저우언라이는 '적어도 대외적으로는' 대인적 풍모를 보였고, 공산주의 중국에서는 청렴한 부류였지만 결국 개인의 면모에 그쳤다. 아돌프 히틀러를 비롯한 여러 독재 국가의 정치인들 중, 주변 사람들에게 친절했다거나 청렴했다거나 하는 사람들은 있지만 그것이 그들의 범죄행각을 감싸주는 것은 아니다.

결국, 저우언라이는 진실로 마오쩌둥의 (상호보완적) 동지였다는 것이 비판자들의 평가다.




4. 한국과의 관계[편집]


장제스와 마오쩌둥, 쑨원이 그렇듯이 한국 독립운동과 관련이 있는 인물이다.

1919년 3.1 운동을 지켜보면서 조선에 많은 관심을 가지기 시작했고, 난카이 대학에 진학하면서 안중근 의사에 대한 연극을 공연했으며, 황푸군관학교에 재직하면서 많은 조선인 독립운동가들과 친해졌고, 많은 조선인 제자를 두었다.

저우언라이의 대인적 풍모는 한국사에 대한 언급에서도 잘 드러난다. 발해-고구려사를 중국사라고 주장하던 중국사회과학원에 그만두라고 경고를 했으며, 그것에 대해 북한 파견단에게 공식적으로 사과했다. 이 문제를 다룬 신문기사 또한 1962년 북한측이 고조선의 발원지를 찾기 위해 만주 지역에서 발굴조사 허가를 요청했을 때 이를 승인하기도 했다. #

그러나 한국(남북한)을 소국, 중국을 대국으로 보는 중국 특유의 가치관에서 자유로운 인물은 아니었다. 작은 나라인 한국에 대국인 중국 같은 넓은 시각을 기대할 수 없으니 대국인 중국이 한국 같은 작은 나라들에 아량을 베풀어야 한다고 말한 적이 있다. 즉, 그가 한국(북한 포함)을 배려한 것은 진심으로 좋은 사람이어서라기보다는 이웃 사회주의 나라에 대한 배려와 대국으로서 소국을 품어준다는 전통적 중화 가치관에서 비롯된 것이라고 보아야 한다.

요즘 중국 어용학계들이 보이고 있는 역사왜곡과는 여러모로 대조적이다. 현재의 중국은 동북삼성의 고조선, 고구려, 발해, 부여 등 자국 땅에 있는 한민족의 역사 유적에 대해 발굴은 물론이고 참관도 못하게 하며 외국인이 발굴현장을 구경 하려고 하면 들어오지도 못하게 한다. 특히 한국인. 그래서 관련 전공인 한국 역사학자들은 일부러 옷도 패션센스 없게 입기도 한다. 외국인들이 한국인과 중국인을 구분하는 방법 중 하나가 패션 감각이라고 한다. 한국인들은 최소한 옷을 입는 데는 신경을 쓰는 편이지만 중국인들은 그런 거 없다고... 말투도 조선족으로 위장해서 중국을 드나든다는 이야기도 있다.

발해 - 고구려사 이외에도, 6.25 전쟁 초반 김일성이 승승장구하며 우쭐해있을 때 미국이 개입할 것을 예상하고 김일성에게 이를 경고했다. 그러나 근자감에 쩔어있던 김일성은 이를 듣지 않는다. 저우언라이는 혹시 모를 상황에 대비해 미리 중공군 26만을 국경에 배치시키고, 한반도 정찰을 명령해 베이징에서 있었던 전략회의에서 "더글러스 맥아더가 상륙한다면 군산이나 원산이 아닌 인천에 상륙할 가능성이 높다"고 정확히 예측한다. 실제 미 합참과 해군이 처음 제안한 상륙지는 군산이었지만 맥아더가 목표를 인천으로 바꿨다. 군사전략적 안목까지 갖췄었다는 소리. 저우언라이 본인도 대장정, 중일전쟁, 국공내전에 참여했으며 강서 소비에트 시절, 중국 국민당의 공세에 맞서 홍군의 총지도부를 운용해본 경험이 있으니 당연한 일이다.

이와 관련하여 당시 저우언라이는 9.28 수복 이후 유엔군과 한국군이 계속 북진하자 미국에 "이 전쟁은 내전이므로 남조선군이 홀로 북진하는 것은 무방하나(즉 중국이 개입하지 않겠다.), 미군이 38선을 넘어 북진하는 것은 중국에 대한 도발로 간주하겠고, 이후 모든 책임은 미국에 있다."고 여러 번 경고했다.[8] 허나 당시 중국의 참전 의사 혹은 중국군의 전력 자체를 경시한 UN군이 그대로 북진하자 중국은 항미원조전쟁이란 미명하에 참전을 개시하게 된다.

다만 본격적인 출병에 앞서 저우언라이는 마오쩌둥과는 달리 한반도 출병에 반대했다고 한다. 저우언라이는 국가를 재건해야 하는 입장이었는데 이 상황에서 출병을 해버리면 많은 자원이 그 쪽으로 전용되어 재건이 늦어지게 되고, 미국을 상대로 이긴다는 보장도 없을 뿐만 아니라 북한이 망하더라도 외교를 통해 미국의 중국 진공은 저지할 수 있다는 것을 근거로 들었다. 2022년 공개된 저우언라이가 스탈린에게 보낸 전보 전문을 보면, 저우언라이는 처음부터 개입에 소극적이었던 것으로 보인다.#

그러나 마오쩌둥과 펑더화이의 강경론이 득세했고, 결국 중공군 참전으로 이어진다. 이때 중국군 개입을 공식 회견으로 표명한 사람이 저우언라이였다. 당시 국무원 총리 겸 외교부장(외교부장관)이었기 때문에, 그의 직위에 따른 맡은 바 역할을 수행한 것이다. 그리고 그 결과는 중화인민공화국의 존속과 김씨왕조의 성립이었지만 중국 입장에서야 베이징 코앞에다 완충지대를 마련했다는 점에서 전략적으로 성공했다고 할 수 있다. 이후 전선이 교착상태에 빠지자, 휴전협정을 먼저 제기하였다.

어찌보면 정주영 회장과 현대자동차의 은인(?)이기도 하다. 1974년 최종 타결된 중국-일본 간 무역협정에서 "남조선이나 대만과 거래하는 일본 기업의 중국 진출을 불허한다"는 내용이 들어간 4가지 원칙(저우 4원칙)을 강력하게 주장해 이를 관철시켰는데, 때문에 토요타와 합작 관계가 끊긴 신진자동차가 도산하면서 현대자동차가 그 반사 이익을 누린 것. 현대자동차는 토요타와 합작하려 했으나, 이 원칙 때문에 합작을 포기하고 대신 미쓰비시와 합작하게 된다. 지금 와서는 합작을 애걸하던 현대자동차가 미쓰비시보다 커졌으니, 격세지감.

잘 알려지지 않지만, 북한과 중국의 국경을 확장하는 조중변계조약에서 많은 양보(?)를 하여 백두산 전체가 아닌 반만 가져갔다. 백두산까지 자기네 땅이라 주창하는 중국의 관점에선 넘겨주었다고 해도 어색한 표현은 아니다. 자세한 건 백두산 문서로. 그래서 중국에서 한동안 매국노 취급을 받았다고 한다. 홍위병도 이를 들어 저우언라이를 비난했다.

또한 '깐수 사건'으로 유명한 정수일 교수와 개인적인 인연이 있다. 본래 중국 조선족 출신인 정수일은 조선민족(한민족)으로서의 민족주의를 자각하고 북한 귀화를 결심하였다. 이 때 정수일은 그냥 망명하는 게 아니라 저우언라이에게 직접 탄원서를 제출하였다. 저우언라이는 정수일과 같은 인재가 중국을 떠나겠다고 하자 대단히 아쉬워하면서 "좋은 여성을 소개해 줄테니 중국에 남아 달라"고 권유했다. 하지만 정수일의 고집을 꺾지는 못하고 귀화를 허락해준 뒤 신원보증을 해 줬다. 이때 저우언라이가 신원을 직접 보증해준 덕에 정수일은 북한에서도 숙청을 당하지 않았다.

1963년 6월 28일, 저우언라이 총리가 북한의 조선과학원 대표단과의 공식만남에서 중국의 고조선, 고구려, 발해사를 중심으로 한 한반도 역사왜곡과 침탈을 시인하고 사과했던 적이 있다. “역사학의 일부 기록은 진실에 그다지 부합되지 않는다. 이것은 중국 역사학자나 많은 사람들이 대국주의, 대국쇼비니즘의 관점에서 역사를 서술한 것이 주요 원인이다”라고 고백했다. 이어, “우리는 당신들의 땅을 밀어붙여 작게 하고, 우리들이 살고 있는 땅이 커진 것에 대해 조상을 대신해서 당신들에게 사과해야 한다”고 사과의 뜻을 분명히 했다. 덧붙여 요하유역을 고구려와 고조선의 땅이었음을 인정했다. 만주지방과 요하지역이 과거에 중국 한족의 땅이 아니었음을 인정한 것이다.[9] 이어진 그의 발언은 감동적인 것이었다. “역사는 왜곡할 수 없다. 두만강, 압록강 서쪽은 역사 이래 중국 땅이었으며 심지어 예로부터 조선은 중국의 속국이었다고 하는 것은 터무니없는 말이고, 이것은 역사왜곡이다. 모두 역사학자의 붓끝에서 나온 오류이다”는 말로 질타했다.#




5. 가족관계[편집]



1925년


1928년

http://www.nen.com.cn/72340194296070144/20070712/879436.jpg
1960년


노년의 덩잉차오

저우언라이는 젊은 시절부터 동지이자 아내인 덩잉차오(邓颖超, 등영초. 1904.02.04.~1992.11.07.)와 백년해로하여 가정적으로도 모범적인 면모를 보여줬는데 여자 문제로 시끄러운 중국 지도층들 중에서 드문 순정파였다.[10] 물론 이것에는 아내 덩잉차오의 능력도 한 몫 했는데 덩잉차오 역시 중국 공산당 창당 시기부터 활동한 주요 인사로서 여성 운동을 지도하며 주요 요직을 역임했고 내전 이후 여권 신장과 특히 전족 폐지에 큰 역할을 하였으며[11] 이들은 대장정을 함께 완주해낸 부부이기도 하다. 저우언라이는 아내를 향한 극진한 애정의 감정을 가지고 있었고 두 사람은 상당히 사이가 좋은 것을 넘어 진정으로 사랑한 사이의 부부였던 것으로 보인다. 사진에서 보면 항상 붙어다니고 있고 서로에게 쓴 편지를 보면 낯간지러울 정도. 덩잉차오와 저우언라이 부부는 몇 차례 아이를 가졌으나 가족보다 혁명이 우선이라고 생각한 덩잉차오가 낙태술을 받았다. 이후 가진 아이도 출산 과정에서 잘못되어 몸이 상했고 덩잉차오 자신은 불임이 되었다. 때문에 죽을 때까지 자식을 하나도 얻지 못했으나 조카나 다른 아이들을 대단히 사랑했다고 한다. 특히 국공내전 과정에서 희생된 혁명열사의 유자녀들을 데려다가 사실상의 입양을 하여 친자식처럼 키웠다고 하는데 덩잉차오를 중심으로 한 여성 간부들이 이런 고아들을 돌보았다. 그들 중 공산당 주요 간부가 된 사람들도 많다는데 대표적인 인물이 3세대 지도부의 핵심이던 국무원 총리 리펑으로 그는 자신을 길러준 덩잉차오를 어머니, 저우언라이를 아버지라 평생 불렀다. 저우언라이는 문화대혁명 시절 양아들인 그를 보호했으며 결국 양부모가 나이들어 모두 죽고 덩샤오핑의 오른팔로 성장해버린 그는 저우언라이가 맡았던 자리와 같은 자리까지 올랐다. 다만, 리펑 본인은 자신이 저우언라이와 덩잉차오의 양자였다는 이야기를 여러 차례 부정한 바 있는데 양부모를 논할 정도로 한 집에서 한솥밥을 먹는 그런 사이가 아니었다는 것. 1980년대 덩잉차오가 자신의 은퇴를 조건으로 리펑이 자신의 자리였던 당 중앙정치국 위원을 차지해야 한다고 했다는 이야기가 있는 걸로 봐서 완전 남남인 사이도 아니었던 것으로 보인다. 근데 리펑은 존경받는 양아버지와는 달리 중국에서 욕을 바가지로 먹는 인물인데 천안문 사태 당시 계엄령을 선포한 사람이기 때문. 정책 결정은 덩샤오핑과 같은 원로들이 했지만 실제 수행은 이 사람이 했으며 당연히 인민에게 총부리를 겨눈 자 등과 같은 욕을 들으며 엄청난 비난을 들었고 지지율도 바닥쳤지만 장쩌민의 비호로 총리직에는 남아 있을 수 있었다.




6. 기타[편집]


막내동생의 딸 저우빙젠은 시린하오터시 부시장을 지냈다.
저우언라이의 발언 중 위중화지굴기이독서(为中华之崛起而读书)[12]는 중국의 거의 모든 학교 건물에 적혀 있는 유명한 문장이다.
저우언라이는 점잖은 성격과 굉장히 절제하는 삶을 살아서 술에 약하다는 이미지가 당, 군 간부들 사이에서 있었지만 실제로는 술을 마셔야 하는 상황이 오면 굉장히 잘마셨다. 그 중 유명한 사례로 술 잘마시기로 유명했던 쉬스유 장군의 안좋은 술 버릇을 고쳐주기 위해 그와 대작해서 술로 쓰러트린 사례가 유명하다. 그리고 저우언라이는 술 중에서 마오타이주를 가장 좋아했으며 또한 중국 4대명주로 꼽히는 백주의 일종인 서봉주를 좋아하여 생산량이 부족하다는 말에 증산을 지시했을 정도이다. 그의 지시로 만들어진 것이 현재도 주력품목으로 생산되고 있는 "서봉주 그린"이다.
국무원 총리로서 정부수반으로 외교를 전담하였는데 이에따라 국빈을 제대로 맞이하기 위해 음식에 대한 전반적인 식견이 굉장히 풍부했고 미식가였다. 그의 이러한 미식 능력은 얼어붙었던 키신저-저우언라이 회담에 분위기를 음식(서양인에게 중국적 특색이있는 북경 오리 구이 등을 제공)으로서 풀어버린 대표적인 사례가 있었다. 그리고 자신 또한 요리를 곧잘하며 맛을 내는 실력도 좋았다. 특히 그중에서 홍소육과 같은 강소 요리를 잘했다.




7. 주요 경력[편집]




중화인민공화국 역대 국무원 총리



중화인민공화국 수립
→
1대
→
2대

저우언라이
(1949년 10월 1일 ~ 1976년 1월 8일)
→
화궈펑




중화인민공화국 역대 외교부장



중화인민공화국 수립
→
1대
→
2대

저우언라이
(1949년 10월 1일 ~ 1958년 2월 11일)
→
천이





8. 참고문헌[편집]


저우언라이 평전, 바르바라 바르누앙, 위창건, 베리타스북스.
Zhou Enlai The Last Perfect Revolutionary, Gao Wenqian[13], Peter Rand, Lawrence R. Sullivan, PublicAffairs
마오쩌둥 평전, 알렉산드르 판초프, 스티븐 러빈, 민음사.
해방의 비극, 프랑크 디쾨터, 열린책들.
마오의 대기근, 프랑크 디쾨터, 열린책들.
문화대혁명, 프랑크 디쾨터, 열린책들.
덩샤오핑 시대의 중국 1권, 개혁과 개방, 조영남, 민음사.
장칭 평전, 로스 테릴, 교양인.
코민테른과 대장정, 오토 브라운, 일월서각.
중국 혁명사, 서진영, 한울 아카데미.




9. 관련 문서[편집]




9.1. 인물[편집]




9.1.1. 중국 공산당[편집]


천두슈
리다자오
취추바이
리리싼
마오쩌둥
주더
펑더화이
린뱌오
장칭
덩샤오핑
미하일 보로딘
오토 브라운




9.1.2. 중국 국민당[편집]


쑨원
장제스
쑹메이링
장쉐량
후한민
다이지타오
랴오중카이
허샹닝




9.1.3. 외국[편집]


이오시프 스탈린
니키타 흐루쇼프
리처드 닉슨
헨리 키신저
김일성
김구
성시백




9.2. 사건[편집]


5.4운동(1919)
1차 국공합작(1924)
광저우 상단 사건(1924)
국민당의 1차 동정(1925)
1925년 객군 반란(1925)
국민당의 2차 동정(1925)
중산함 사건(1926)
국민당의 1차 북벌(1926~1927)
상하이 폭동(1926~1927)
4.12 상하이 쿠데타(1927)
마일사변(1927)
국공결렬(1927)
난창 폭동(1927)
8.7 긴급회의(1927)
추수폭동(1927)
광저우 폭동(1927)
정강산 투쟁(1927 ~ 1929)
창사 폭동(1930)
부전사변(1930 ~ 1932)
초공작전(1930 ~ 1936)제1차 초공작전(1930 ~ 1931)
제2차 초공작전(1931)
제3차 초공작전(1931)
제4차 초공작전(1932 ~ 1933)
제5차 초공작전(1933 ~ 1934)
대장정(1934 ~ 1935)
서안 사건(1936)
2차 국공합작(1936)
중일전쟁(1937 ~ 1945)
쌍십협정(1945)
국공내전(1946 ~ 1949)
6.25 전쟁(1950 ~ 1953)
중소결렬(1959)
대약진 운동(1957 ~ 1961)
해서파관 사건(1965)
문화대혁명(1966 ~ 1976)
2월 역류(1967)
키신저-저우언라이 회담(1971)
9.13 사건(1971)
닉슨-마오쩌둥 회담(1972)




[1] 호세이대학의 부속학교[2] 다만 말년엔 4인방에게 견제받는 등 마오쩌둥과 항상 뜻을 같이 한 건 아니었다. 중국에선 덩샤오핑과 묶여 저우언라이-덩샤오핑 둘의 사이를 금란지교로 표현하는 경우도 꽤 있다. 이러나저러나 중국 근현대사의 거물 취급을 받고 있다는 것을 알 수 있다.[3] 사실 이러한 소수민족의 해방 등 민족주의에서 벗어난 연대는 공산주의의 기본적 입장이다. 다만 이러한 원칙이 공산주의 국가에서 잘 지켜졌냐 하면 그러지 않은 경우도 많았다. 물론 현실적으로 이러한 점이 잘 지켜지든 안 지켜지든 대부분의 공산주의 국가들은 명목상으로라도 '모든 민족의 평등과 해방'을 주장하긴 했다. 더군다나 저우언라이는 국가 수뇌부에 해당하는 인물인데 저우언라이가 일반적인 공산주의자였던 만큼 그가 유별나게 소수민족에 대한 존중을 한 건 아니다. 다만, 실질적으로 현대 중국이 이러한 원칙을 저버리는 경우가 많아졌으니 저우언라이의 말이 뒤늦게 조명받는 것 뿐이지...[4] 다만 달라이 라마 14세의 경우 중국을 방문했을 당시 만났던 니키타 흐루쇼프에 대해서도 '언행이 모두 돼지같았지만 똑똑한 사람'이라며 '저우언라이 같은 사람과는 친구가 될 수 없지만, 그와는 친구가 될 수 있었을 것이다' 라고 평가한 바 있다. 즉, 달라이 라마 14세 자신의 성격이 '남들에게 신사답다는 평가를 받더라도 노회하고 속을 알기 어려운 사람'보다는 '행동거지가 거칠고 투박하더라도 직설적인 사람'을 더 선호하는 편일 가능성이 높다. 그리고 이 문제는 달라이 라마 텐진 갸초의 연령과도 함께 생각해봐야 할 문제인데, 1935년생으로 4세에 달라이 라마가 된 그가 저우, 마오, 흐루쇼프등과 만났던 시기는 1950년대, 즉 겨우 10대 초중반에 불과했던 시기이다. 어린 나이에 정치판의 괴물들과 마주해야 했던 달라이 라마에게는 그나마 솔직하고 직설적인 상대가 대하기 편하고, 저우언라이와 같이 유들유들하고 속을 알기 어려운 상대는 말 그대로 괴물처럼 느껴졌을 가능성이 높은 것.[5] 다만 결국 달라이 라마가 말한 것은 '이미지'로 실제 행적을 놓고보면 마오쩌둥은 똑똑하고 투박한 면도 있을지언정 권력을 위해 국가에 큰 재앙을 내린 최악의 지도자고 저우언라이는 부드러운 위선자이마 간사할지라도 적어도 마오가 싸지른 실책을 어느정도 수습하는 식으로 최소한 공과를 따지고 보면 저우가 마오보다 낫다. 오히려 너무 단순하고 솔직하고 직설적인 사람보다는 그보다는 좀 더 사리는 사람이 좀 더 살필줄은 알 것이기에 실수를 저질러도 전자보단 나을 것이다. 실제로도 마오쩌둥은 대약진 운동과 관련해 일체의 비판이나 반대를 받아들이지 않았고 심지어는 그 실패가 뻔히 보인 상황에서 펑더화이가 올린 충언마저 무시, 오히려 펑더화이에게 정치보복까지 가하여 그가 비참하게 죽게 만들었다. 당초에 마오 말고도 독재자들은 적어도 개인으로 보면 좋은 사람도 많다는 점에서 결국 마오 개인이 좋은 면이 있다 한들 그에게 긍정적인 평가를 해줄 이유는 되지 못한다.[6] 티베트와 관련해서도 티베트의 절들을 때려부순 홍위병들을 일으킨건 마오였지만 그들이 포탈라궁까지 박살내려고 할 때 핑계를 대어 막은건 저우였다.[7] 물론 이는 꼭 저우언라이의 책임인지는 알 수 없다. 저우언라이의 실책이 많은건 사실이지만 저우의 문제는 노력이지 결과는 아니다. 결과로 책임을 묻자면 마오쩌둥이 심각한 고집불통임을 간과하면 안된다. 대약진 운동과 관련해서 의견을 개진한 펑더화이의 최후만 보더라도 마오는 충고듣기 싫어하는 사람이었다. 꼭 참담한 결과가 나와야지 겨우 철회할 정도.[8] 저우언라이는 1950년 10월 5일, 유엔군이 38선 이북으로 진격하면 개입할 것이라고 선언했는데, 사실 이때도 당시 중국군의 비루한 상황상 공산당 간부들은 유엔군이 평양을 점령하는 선에서 멈춘다면 그냥 개입을 포기하고 후퇴할 생각이었다고 한다. 허나 북한이 예상보다 더 빠르게 밀리면서 압록강 근처까지 다가오자 중공도 대만 점령을 포기하고 급하게 동북 지역으로 있는 병력 없는 병력 다 끌어모으게 된다.[9] 다만 오늘날 중국의 동북공정은 중국 내 소수민족 역사도 지들 역사라고 주장하는거라 한족 타령과는 조금 궤가 다르다.[10] 마오쩌둥은 말할 것도 없고 장쩌민 같은 경우는 자기가 눈에 둔 유부녀 가수를 강제로 이혼시키고 첩으로 삼았다고 한다. 보시라이는 관계 맺은 여자만 자그마치 100여 명에 달한다는 루머성 기사까지 보도됐을 정도이다.[11] 중국에서는 지금도 그녀를 "中国妇女的骄傲"(중국 여인들의 자랑)이라 부른다.[12] 국가를 위해 공부한다[13] 중국 공산당 중앙 문서고를 관리하던 역사가로, 저우언라이 관련 기밀자료들을 가지고 미국으로 망명했다. 가오원첸의 저우언라이 평전은 그런 기밀문서들을 바탕으로 나온 것.






이 저작물은 CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 KR에 따라 이용할 수 있습니다. (단, 라이선스가 명시된 일부 문서 및 삽화 제외)
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2024-09-06

Perry Anderson · Made by the Revolution: Mao’s Right Hand

Perry Anderson · Made by the Revolution: Mao’s Right Hand


Vol. 46 No. 17 · 12 September 2024


Made by the Revolution
Perry Anderson


Zhou Enlai: A Life
by Chen Jian.

Harvard, 817 pp., 

Every modern revolution​ of significance, from 1789 to the present, has produced a diaspora. The exodus from Russia after the end of its ancien régime scattered minds of exceptional brilliance in the arts, humanities and social sciences across the West. In China, where the old order had a history thousands of years longer, and civil war preceded rather than followed the revolution that finished it off, the pattern differed, for two reasons. The first was that whereas in Russia the intelligentsia, a relatively recent phenomenon going back no further than the 19th century, had been from the start essentially oppositional to the regime, in China it had been integral to the imperial system of rule, recruited to state service by a long-standing examination system. The mandarinate might supply intermittent, sometimes requested, mostly unavailing, voices of conscience to the official order but never revolted against it. The Chinese Revolution, moreover, had been made against predatory foreign domination as much as against domestic oppression; and beyond the inherited reflexes of obedience it could appeal to national pride in the recovery of independence. Adhesion to the new order came more naturally to the lettered.

On the other hand, while the People’s Republic, proclaimed in 1949, achieved a decisive national sovereignty, and within a few months proved capable of clearing American forces from half of Korea, it had not accomplished full territorial unity. After making the revolution, the Communists were in no hurry to reappropriate Hong Kong from Britain, which they could have done within a day or two, preferring to leave it under British control as a valuable economic outlet to the world at large, mitigating complete diplomatic isolation of the regime by the West. That was a voluntary sacrifice. Involuntary was the survival of Taiwan – to which, after rout on the mainland, the Nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek, had fled – as an American ward after the Korean War had begun. Each of these exclaves permitted Chinese thinkers either already or eventually averse to the new regime passage to the world beyond, in most cases to the United States – where scholarly links had existed since prewar times, allowing some to migrate from the mainland before the arrival of communism.

The first levy included Ho Ping-ti, C.T. Hsia, Yu Ying-shih, K.C. Chang, Lin Yu-sheng – respectively, China’s most distinguished social historian, literary critic, intellectual historian, archaeologist and political barometer of the generation born between 1917 and 1934 – not to speak of its perhaps leading novelist, Eileen Chang. With the exception of Ho, who came in 1945, all of them arrived in America during the Cold War. When Sino-American relations were restored, and China opened up in the 1980s, study abroad was allowed and then promoted by Beijing, becoming over time a mass phenomenon – before the pandemic there were more than 300,000 students in the US, by 2023 a million overseas. From the beginning, many of those who went to the States chose to stay, the number naturally increasing after the crackdown of 1989 on student revolt at home. The result is a diaspora stretching around the richer states of the world, from America to Europe, Japan to Australia, that is not principally the product of expulsion or flight, but of emigration. Especially in the US, its members occupy positions at all levels of academic life, as Russians in earlier periods rarely did; they include even writers of English-language fiction – Yiyun Li or Ha Jin – as once Nabokov, if more modestly. The diaspora continues to grow, with Hong Kong supplying the latest arrivals. China’s most original political philosopher, Ci Jiwei, now lives in Oxford.

In this setting, the historian Chen Jian has published a monumental biography of Zhou Enlai that makes him the pre-eminent scholar of the contemporary Chinese diaspora. Today Zhou occupies a generally benign, if increasingly blurred position in the public memory of the West as an urbane diplomat who hit it off with Henry Kissinger, and is remembered mostly for a misunderstood reply about France (1968 taken for 1789). Beyond these stock images, little further is associated with him. Chen’s new book, a comprehensive portrait of Zhou that took twenty years to research and write, will change that. Born in 1952 in Shanghai, Chen was fourteen when the Cultural Revolution broke out and was twice briefly imprisoned during it. He was in his early twenties when Zhou died. When campuses reopened in the late 1970s, he entered the universities of Fudan and East China Normal in his native city. In the mid-1980s he was awarded a scholarship to America, where he completed a PhD, got jobs successively in the SUNY system, at the universities of Southern Illinois, Virginia, Cornell, New York and NYU-Shanghai, with many visiting positions in Hong Kong, the UK and the PRC. When he began his research about Zhou in the new century, the field was not entirely empty. But earlier literature about him, overwhelmingly though not exclusively in Chinese, was for the most part highly polarised, presenting Zhou either as an admirably enlightened and progressive statesman, who helped to restore his country to its rightful place in the international community, or as an unconscionable (alternatively: guilt-stricken) servant of the blackest tyranny, accomplice of infamous crimes.1 Chen’s study supersedes these antithetical images. Rather than merely applauding or attacking Zhou, it sets out to understand him at a level no previous work has approached.

The central theme of the book is Zhou’s relationship to Mao, under whom he served as premier for almost a quarter of a century. At the beginning the contrasts between the two worked in Zhou’s favour. Four years older, Mao was the son of a barely literate, if relatively well-off, peasant in Hunan. Zhou, born in 1898, came from a once prominent gentry line in Zhejiang, the most developed part of the country, receiving a good education as a child. School-time in the treaty port of Tianjin, unsuccessful study in Japan, then political baptism in the May Fourth protests of 1919 led to four years spent in Europe. He was admitted to the University of Edinburgh but declined to take up his place, and on moving to London quickly decided that Paris was preferable as a base. In France he became a communist and began working for the Third International.

Equipped with this experience, in 1924 he returned to Guangzhou, where Sun Yat-sen had set up an insurgent regime at loggerheads with the warlords of northern and central China. There Zhou almost immediately acquired a role as political instructor and later director of the department of political affairs at the Whampoa Military Academy, whose commandant in 1926 was Chiang Kai-shek. Communists and Nationalists were in alliance at the time, working with Soviet advisers to launch a joint attack on their adversaries to the north. The expedition set off in the summer of 1926. Reaching Shanghai in April of the next year, Zhou organised communist workers to take over the city. When Chiang arrived, he ordered a massacre of those workers, the starting gun of a civil war that would end with his flight to Taiwan twenty years later. Escaping the slaughter, Zhou was elected to the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and went underground, running its clandestine network from Wuhan and Shanghai. Three months later the Nationalists staged a similar coup in Wuhan, where Mao, a founding member of the CCP, had been working with the Nationalist party, the Guomindang (GMD). He too hid and escaped, and by October had reached the massif on the Hunan-Jiangxi border, where he created a guerrilla base that would develop into a soviet, nominally answerable to the party centre in Shanghai. Zhou made two trips to Moscow, each several months long, where he conferred with Stalin and acquired funds and coding skills for his intelligence work in China. He remained throughout Mao’s superior, with power of command over him.

In 1930 regional tensions in the Red Army base area, over-determined by factional conflicts in the CCP as the Comintern changed its line on China, triggered violent purges of party fighters and militants, ordered or covered by Mao without the consent of the party centre in Shanghai. At the end of 1931, Zhou was sent to Jiangxi to take charge. Arriving at a moment when Mao’s exactions made him vulnerable to severe punishment, Zhou endorsed criticism of them, but did not cast Mao into the wilderness. After GMD armies closed in on the soviet in 1934, forcing the Red Army to evacuate, Zhou retained his authority on the first stretch of the Long March. When they reached Guizhou, Otto Braun, the German emissary assigned to the Red Army by the Comintern, is said to have wanted to wheel back to refuge further east, while Mao proposed to elude the enemy by heading further to the west. Zhou, sensing, as Chen has it, that Mao could not be expected to give his full military gifts to the harassed and depleted Communist columns unless he was integrated into the leadership of the march, urged acceptance of Mao’s plan, and he was co-opted onto the politburo under Zhou as commander of the march. By the time the Red Army reached what would become its new base area in northwestern China nine months later, Mao’s prowess as a strategist was clear and the roles were reversed. Zhou became Mao’s deputy on the party’s military commission, which was now its effective power centre. Zhou neither resisted nor resented the change. Why not? For Chen, the two men were not made of the same material. Zhou had ideas of his own, but was more a man of action than of utopian vision and lacked Mao’s combination of ambition and will to be supreme leader of the revolution. He knew Mao to be subjective and suspicious, but had now witnessed his political skills and was convinced of his military genius.

In the summer of 1935, faced with the strengthening of the Nazi regime in Germany, the Comintern changed direction, calling for a broad anti-fascist front, to include not just social democratic but bourgeois democratic forces. In China, the Japanese army that had seized Manchuria in 1931 was encroaching south of the Great Wall. Rather than confront this threat, Chiang was determined to give priority to the destruction of the CCP, provoking Zhang Xueliang, a Chinese warlord ousted from Manchuria, to kidnap him in 1936 in an attempt to force him to fight Japan instead. In line with the new Comintern policy, Zhou was sent to reason with Chiang, who was then released. Back in Nanjing, Chiang duly announced a ceasefire in the civil war, pledging his commitment to national unity in the struggle against Japan, and Zhou was dispatched once again to negotiate the terms of another alliance between Communist and Nationalist forces. Chiang was set on merging these forces under his own political control and military command; Mao wanted to preserve the independence of the CCP and its armed forces so that they might carry out their own initiatives against Japan. Neither side had much trust in the other. Zhou displayed his diplomatic skills by defending the party’s positions in the wartime capital of Chongqing, while contending that Chiang was in his fashion a genuine nationalist and that joint action with his troops was in certain circumstances required.

In the spring of 1943, Stalin dissolved the Comintern as a hindrance to achieving a full-blown alliance with Britain and the United States – a ‘godsend’ to Mao, releasing him from invigilation by emissaries from Moscow. Zhou was immediately ordered back to CCP headquarters in Yan’an to discuss how the party should proceed. There he found himself a target of the Rectification campaigns launched by Mao to assert his absolute control of the party. Arraigned both for his reservations about Mao in Jiangxi, and his illusions about Chiang and the GMD, for five days he had to abase himself with abject self-criticism for every episode about which he was assailed, and extravagantly celebrate the wisdom of Mao. For Chen, this ordeal gave a foretaste of ‘how extraordinarily abusive a leader Mao would eventually be’ and the dangers to the party and country of failing to create ‘institutions to check and balance such power’. In his view, the experience must have come as an immense shock to Zhou, far exceeding anything he could have expected. ‘Zhou would live for the rest of his life in the enormous shadow of Mao’s thought and power, from which he would never escape.’ Saved from further disgrace by a telegram from Georgi Dimitrov, the former general secretary of the Comintern, protesting at Mao’s treatment of him, Zhou retained his positions in the leadership and went on to play a key role in co-ordinating the victory of what by 1947 had become the People’s Liberation Army in the civil war with the GMD.

Though humiliated by Mao at Yan’an, once the People’s Republic was established in 1949, and he became premier and foreign minister, Zhou did not automatically fall in with every opinion or position Mao adopted. Attentive to indications already of a more moderate disposition in Zhou’s dealings with the GMD, Chen traces a series of divergences from Mao. The first came in 1949 over Zhou’s draft of a ‘common programme’ for the forces scheduled to preside over the ‘new democracy’ under creation, which would serve in lieu of a constitution for the PRC until one was formally adopted in 1954. Zhou’s draft spoke of a coalition government for the new China and a republic that would be a federation of multiple nationalities. Mao deleted both formulations. The second occurred in early 1956, when Zhou warned against ‘a rash advance’ in economic planning, telling Mao that as premier he could not approve a call for accelerated investment in infrastructure: not only would it unbalance the budget, but light industry and agriculture were closer to the people’s immediate needs. The third divergence arose in 1957, after the anti-Soviet revolts in Poland and Hungary, when Mao briefly encouraged a ‘hundred schools of thought to blossom’ in China. Whereas Mao defined the goal of this opening as ‘a political atmosphere of liveliness in which there is both centralism and democracy, discipline and freedom, unity of will and personal ease of mind’, Zhou – whether pointedly or inadvertently – reversed the order of values, calling for ‘both democracy and centralism, freedom and discipline, development of individuality and unity of will’. The fourth, and in Chen’s tacit reckoning the most fateful, arrived in 1959, when the dire consequences of the Great Leap Forward moved Marshal Peng Dehuai, commander in the Korean War, to a – respectful – remonstration with Mao, which Zhou at first regarded as unexceptionable, until Mao raged at it; then, as excommunicable. Yet during an inspection tour of the countryside in the spring of that year, Zhou asked whether ‘six small freedoms’ couldn’t be granted to peasant families, in Chen’s view presaging the ‘household responsibility system’ used by Deng Xiaoping and others to deal with the Great Famine. Zhou’s explanation of his proposal, he suggests, was pregnant with meaning. ‘This is about maintaining small “selves” in a big “collective”, about walking with both legs. There should be space reserved for “self”. Without individuals, how can the “collective” come into being?’

When he said this, Zhou – ‘entranced with the Leap like all of us’, as Deng later confessed – no longer had much administrative power, and in common with the rest of the Communist leadership had failed to register that the policy was leading to famine that winter. It was the last time Zhou ever deviated from Mao’s course for the nation, though far from the last time he incurred Mao’s suspicion. Peng Dehuai was the first of the major veterans of the revolution to fall victim to Mao’s bouts of vengeful paranoia, requiring Zhou’s complicity in his fate. The Cultural Revolution produced many more. Prominent at the highest levels of the party and state were Liu Shaoqi, president of the republic; Deng Xiaoping, general secretary of the CCP; Peng Zhen, mayor of Beijing; He Long, vice-premier; Luo Ruiqing, chief of the joint staff. All were covered with calumnies and ousted from office, meeting varied degrees of retribution: death in prison, expulsion from the party, reduction to manual labour, denial of medical care, attempted suicide. Zhou signed off the verdicts on each of them, and many others. For Chen, these were actions taken with extreme reluctance and against Zhou’s conscience, conforming to the unconditional submission to Mao he had made twenty years earlier. Wherever he could, Chen argues, Zhou acted in the opposite way, to protect rather than strike down those at risk of destruction by the Cultural Revolution he publicly extolled. On her release from prison after Mao’s death, Liu Shaoqi’s widow refused to forgive him. ‘She was certainly entitled to do so,’ Chen writes. ‘Yet, although 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’ – for ‘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.’ Deng, who suffered less than most in the elite, held much the same view, telling Oriana Fallaci that his ‘elder brother’ did ‘many things he would have wished not to. But the people forgave him because, had he not done and said these things, he himself would not have been able to survive and play the neutralising role he did.’

In 1971 Lin Biao, Mao’s designated successor, became the next target of his suspicion. His ensuing flight and death in Mongolia, tracked by Zhou, dealt a heavy blow to Mao’s aura, and checked the impetus of the Cultural Revolution. Soon afterwards, Kissinger was sent on a secret mission to Beijing to prepare for an official visit by President Nixon, who was received by Mao in 1972. At its conclusion, a communiqué was released announcing a new era in Sino-American relations. Within another year, Mao had made up his mind to stabilise his regime by recalling some of those he had disgraced. In March 1973, Deng became vice-premier and by late 1974 he had taken over much of the administration, working closely with Zhou, who lent him every support he could, as he did other veterans of the revolution restored to official positions. The worst seemed to be over. One day shortly after Lin’s death, however, on saying as much to Zhou, subordinates were astonished to see him, a man of iron self-control, break down in tears, sobbing louder and louder. ‘Finally, he calmed down. After quite a while, he said: “You do not understand, it is not so simple. It is not finished yet.” He stopped and did not utter another word.’ The ultras of the Cultural Revolution, who detested him, had not given up or lost all favour with Mao. They still controlled the media, and a campaign denouncing Lin and Confucius was soon under way, implying Zhou was a modern Confucius. To the end – he died in January 1976 – he was not out of danger.

In describing​ his last few years, Chen gives voice to his admiration for Zhou as a person and a politician, a figure gifted not only with a singular charm and intelligence, but exceptional diligence and stamina, good manners and lack of conceit, and when not forced publicly to their opposite, kindness and consideration for others. That his reputation for these qualities, perceived as the antithesis of the ambience of the Cultural Revolution, was not confined to those who knew him, but had become widespread, was shown by the mass mourning at his death. Spontaneously, hundreds of thousands bade farewell as his coffin passed through Beijing, and three months later large crowds expressed their grief and anger at the condition of the country in Tiananmen Square, rioting when police attacked them – turbulence that led to the second fall of Deng, who had pronounced the official eulogy after Zhou’s death. Describing these scenes in the opening pages of his book, Chen’s verdict is categorical. ‘This was the funeral of China’s revolutionary era. At that moment, the curtain was lifted on the post-revolutionary age.’

Chen’s biography draws on a breadth of sources that is not just a tribute to his decades of research, but a revelation of the extent of materials – documents from party and state archives, personal memoirs, monographs, interviews with participants or witnesses – about its recent past available or discoverable in China during the Reform Era, which might surprise any Western reader given to the idea that the PRC was a wasteland of amnesia and censorship. Endnote references – there are three thousand of them – are frustratingly bald, since beyond once-only translation of Chinese titles into English, they rarely contain any comment either describing or situating the sources they cite; as Jonathan Spence once pointed out, not all report or reminiscence of the period in China is necessarily reliable. Chen’s usage has to be taken on trust, which his judgment otherwise earns. The formidable scholarship on which the book is based yields a compelling narrative, free of any trace of pedantry, plainly designed by author and publisher for a general readership. But though eminently readable, the modicum of background knowledge required to make the narrative fully understandable is for the most part taken for granted – sensibly enough from the point of view of fluent composition, but potentially disconcerting to readers without it.

Intellectually, a more serious problem is that the focus of the book is the actions and tensions of the inner elite of the CCP, principally as they affected just two of its members, Zhou and Mao. The vast drama of the Chinese Revolution itself, involving huge social forces, is for the most part missing, as if a context too generic and abstract to affect unduly the judgment of individuals, however prominent, involved in it. Though a limitation of this kind is normal enough in the biography of major political actors in any country, here the result can be too narrow a lens. Mao and Zhou, as Chen points out elsewhere, were not just makers of the Chinese Revolution; they were made by it. But the implications of that dictum are insufficiently reflected in this book. Zhou was a leading figure in the Chinese Communist Party for fifty years, half of them spent in fighting to make the revolution, half in ruling the country. The space devoted by Chen to the second is double that given to the first.2 This is in large part a natural consequence of the greater volume of evidence extant for the period when the party enjoyed power. But whether the same asymmetry holds good for the relative weight of years in the character and life of a revolutionary such as Zhou, who turned fifty before the People’s Republic was declared, is not so clear. Some degree of skew seems likely.

With this necessary qualification, Chen’s portrait of Zhou is persuasive and moving. Drawn with critical empathy, it is difficult to fault its declaratory judgment of either the overall trajectory or the principal phases of his career. As with all major works of history, there is more to be said about some of them than could be contained in one book, as Chen himself has made clear, beginning with his quite terse account of the civil war of 1945-49, abridged in two significant ways in this biography. The first is the change in the roles of which Zhou proved capable. Hitherto never a military star, his forte after the Long March had been diplomacy, for which he had shown an outstanding talent in Chongqing. When fighting displaced negotiating after 1945, he showed his organisational ability to the full, co-ordinating Communist forces widely separated across huge spaces as chief of staff under Mao: surely the reason he became premier when victory was won. Yet the civil war had also demonstrated one of the reasons the CCP triumphed so decisively over the GMD: it possessed an exceptionally rich array of military and political talent which had no counterpart on the other side. At the level where it counted, the human quality of counter-revolution, the assorted helpmeets and servitors of Chiang, not to speak of the hopelessly over-rated generalissimo himself, was far lower than that of revolution, whose galaxy of cadres – Lin Biao, Peng Dehuai, Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, Chen Yun, Li Xiannian, Chen Yi, Bo Yibo, Peng Zhen, Yang Shangkun and others – showed their mettle in the civil war, and some of whom saw the country through to its recovery in the Reform Era. Zhou needs to be seen as a member of this company. In Chen’s story they figure as extras more than as fellow players, with the exception of Lin, whose character and fall are treated with a cool delicacy and detachment.

As premier and foreign minister, Zhou combined administrative energy and diplomatic ingenuity to impressive effect, and Chen teases out a series of occasions when his positions departed significantly from Mao’s, in the direction of greater flexibility towards potential allies and sensitivity to popular needs. If the textual evidence for such differences seems in some cases rather slight, the pattern they form is clear and coherent enough. But how they came to an end is not given due weight. At later points, Chen raises the question of when it was that Mao took such a decisively wrong turn that thereafter it was too late for the leaders around him to resist him, picking out as the answer the spring of 1966 when he readied the Cultural Revolution to go full bore. For others, it was the madness of the Great Leap Forward that marked the dividing line in the history of Maoism. It can be argued, however, that it was the abrupt recision of the Hundred Flowers in the summer of 1957 that sent the revolution off the rails: when the CCP snuffed out the free expression of opinion to which it had invited the Chinese people and launched an Anti-Rightist Campaign to punish those guilty or suspected of having criticised the party as they had been asked to do. Around 400,000 individuals were dispatched to penal camps or prisons, where some died of starvation or were executed. Deng was in charge of the campaign, from which no party leader dissented. Chen does not speak of that.

By contrast, when the Great Leap Forward followed a year later, succeeded by the Cultural Revolution, there was dissent within the party, at first limited but open, then general but repressed, for fear of the consequences of expressing it. Chen recounts Zhou’s part in both stages, and his description and explanation of Zhou’s conduct during the Cultural Revolution, in particular, is more eloquent and effective than any other to date. Is there anything to be added? Perhaps this. Zhou certainly acted as he did partly from fear of what would happen to him and others if he did not. He was under orders, and there could be lethal sanctions. But that he was himself perfectly capable of ruthless measures, without compulsion from above, is clear. In China, revolution and counter-revolution had waged war to the death for decades. After the GMD unleashed political slaughter on the CCP in 1927, life was cheap on both sides. In his early thirties, when Zhou ran the party’s underground organisation in Shanghai, where Chiang had wiped out most of the membership, its survival was threatened by the capture and confessions of a key operative. Zhou destroyed virtually the entire family of the man as a deterrent. One of his subordinates at the time was Kang Sheng, possibly later trained by the NKVD in Russia, who on his return to China became Mao’s lieutenant in the Rectification campaigns that reshaped Zhou in his forties, when the two renewed what seems to have been a close relationship.

In his fifties, Zhou became one of the leaders – Liu Shaoqi was another – who drove the capable economic planner Gao Gang to suicide on fabricated charges, not on Mao’s orders but to his discomfort. When the Cultural Revolution broke out, Kang resurfaced as the sinister professional inquisitor of the Central Case Examination Group, on which Zhou also served, rising to the summit of the party in 1969 as one of five members of the Standing Committee of the Politburo. So notorious became his role as a lesser Chinese version of the NKVD leader Nikolai Yezhov in the repressions of the time that after Mao died he was posthumously expelled from the party. Yet Chen describes him as still a close friend of Zhou’s, whose last words to his doctors, in 1976, believing Kang to be dying in the same hospital, were: ‘There is nothing left here. You may go to take care of Comrade Kang Sheng. He needs you more.’ This is where the imbalance between the two halves of Zhou’s life in this biography shows that it matters. Not that it cancels anything in Chen’s account of his closing years, but it complicates it.

In contradiction​ to the part that Zhou took in the Cultural Revolution, Chen can legitimately point to interventions he also made at variance with it, and the widespread popular confidence at his death that he represented moral and political values that were its diametric opposite. The evidence on both counts is incontestable. It is also true that he adumbrated notions that would be critical to the Reform Era long before anyone else in a leading position in the party did so. However, in suggesting that without Zhou the hundreds of millions of passengers in the ship called China might have sunk beneath the waves in the tempest of the Cultural Revolution, Chen yields to a poetic rather than a historical impulse. Not just because when Zhou died the gale had not passed, but for a simpler and more decisive reason. Within a month of Mao’s death in September 1976, the quartet driving it – dubbed by him the ‘Gang of Four’ – had fallen, removed with ease and zero repercussions. They were paltry figures, without any popular or official support, disposable prostheses of the chairman, jettisoned as soon as he was gone. Realistically, there was little if any danger of a general shipwreck.

Nevertheless, Chen can argue – making a clear distinction between what happened, a matter of evidence for the historian, and what might have happened, a matter of conjecture for the citizen – that had Zhou lived longer, a potentially happier outcome was imaginable. Younger than Mao, if he had lived to the same age or longer he would have occupied the position that came to be Deng’s, steering China towards economic reform and opening to the world, but with the crucial difference of promoting political reform. Acting on the conviction, foreign to Deng, that without individuals there could be no collective, Zhou would have protected civil rights and freedom of expression in ways that the CCP of the Reform Era, when student and popular protest arrived, did not. On this view, biological contingency issued eventually into political tragedy for China.

Is such a counterfactual plausible? Attractive though it looks, there are reasons to doubt it. How credibly could Zhou have put the Gang of Four on trial? For all its limitations, the Reform Era required a clear-cut repudiation of the Cultural Revolution and a critique of the personal tyranny of Mao which Zhou, who had so conspicuously served both, would have been ill-placed to make, as Deng was not, though even he had to wait two years. Chen observes that no one can know exactly why Zhou wept, but considers some of the possible reasons. Among them, he writes, could have been the stress of conflicting emotions over his success with Kissinger and grief at the fate of so many compatriots, or apprehension that now, as Mao’s second in command, he might in turn suffer the fate of Lin Biao. ‘It is also likely that Zhou believed Mao’s Cultural Revolution was a catastrophe,’ Chen then adds, ‘and understanding that he could be seen as an accomplice of Mao’s, he foresaw the difficulty he would encounter in facing the judgment of the Chinese people and of history,’ a reflection that qualifies the optimism of his conjecture as to what might have happened if Zhou had survived Mao. Had he lived to lead the inception of the Reform Era, he would have had to explain why he fanned the cult of Mao and shared in his repressions, an issue the party’s official verdict of June 1981 on the Cultural Revolution could sidestep.

What is Chen’s explanation of Zhou’s record after 1966? One factor was not specific to him. Party discipline was internalised by communists of his generation as a moral condition of collective efficacy, which in Yan’an became submission to the ordeal of Rectification demanded by Mao. The same compulsions were at work a quarter of a century later. But by then the party was in command of a big state, whose sanctions for dissent – rustication, imprisonment, brutalisation, execution – were more draconian, increasing the quotient of fear at the expense of conviction in the mechanisms of compliance. The Cultural Revolution involved all of these punishments, though rarely the last for senior party officials, where death was mostly the result of medical neglect rather than a bullet. There is no evidence Zhou had much fear of the more drastic measures in this repertoire. The risk to him if he fell out of favour would have been calumny and disgrace – not only dishonoured, but deprived of the ability to protect those closest to him. Mao might well have inflicted the loss of that power on him; but knowing his own prestige would be harmed by public denigration of Zhou, as it was by the fall of Lin Biao, was it ever likely he would have gone further?

Zhou’s relationship to Mao was never reducible to reflexes either of party loyalty or personal fear. Chen believes he was under Mao’s spell, even towards the end so stricken with alarm when Mao nearly died in 1972, nine days before Nixon was due to arrive in Beijing, that he lost bodily control. At the outset, Chen remarks that Mao possessed two qualities Zhou lacked: utopian idealism and charisma. Today charisma is typically associated with a public ability to captivate large audiences, verbally or visually. Though he could be memorably pithy and engaging in private conversation, Mao’s high-pitched voice did not make for good platform speaking. Zhou had natural eloquence and charm, a personality often described as magnetic. But power in China had often radiated from what was hidden, not what was seen; authority from what was written, not what was spoken. The hold Mao acquired on his party derived less from personal charisma, as ordinarily understood, than from a more unusual quality. The secret of his sway, for Chen, lay in his command of a ‘master narrative’ that no other figure in the CCP could rival. What was that? A discourse of ‘continuous revolution’ that fused the utopian goals of communism with the patriotic recovery of China’s traditional position as the Central – not, Chen emphasises, Middle – Kingdom of its world, in an insurgent modern nationalism which took ‘we, the Chinese, have stood up’ as its motto. Why was the party so powerless against Mao when he launched the Cultural Revolution? Largely, Chen maintains, because of ‘the inability of either Liu, Zhou, Deng or any other CCP leader to come up with an alternative grand legitimacy narrative of the Chinese Revolution’. Having earlier reported Zhou’s respect for Mao’s political skills, admiration for his military abilities and fear of his autocratic temperament, what else does this suggest about his attitude to Mao? That there was another side to it: fascination with his mind, as a thinker about their country’s past and its possible futures, in the absolute commitment they shared to the revolution that had made them.

If Chen’s portrait of Zhou, weaving together all these and other strands, is largely convincing, the qualification has less to do with anything he says about Zhou than with the absence of any comparable portrait of Mao. Chen has a good deal to say about Mao, nearly all of it acute and much of it extremely sharp, yet – perhaps inevitably – its sum is an outline, thinner than the thick description of Zhou: an asymmetry that comes at a certain cost. By the end of the 1950s, Mao was effectively a despot. But the now familiar comparisons of him to Stalin or Hitler miss the mark. His style of rule combined three forms of lawless power, each sharing some features with tyrannies elsewhere, but whose combination produced an autocracy fundamentally sui generis. The first lay in millennial traditions of imperial sovereignty in China, more or less unbroken until the 20th century: an absolutism utterly ruthless in quelling revolts against it, but from Han times onwards governing without a vast bureaucratic apparatus, depending rather on a limited mandarin elite recruited by an examination system and gentry co-operation, in a carapace of Confucian ideology extolling right conduct and benevolence (backed when necessary by its brutal complement, Legalism). Overlaying this was the impact of Stalinist organisation and doctrine, the only sort known to the CCP, as they hardened during the 1920s, generating a party designed to perform like an army, and which in China became one. Lastly, came the temperament of Mao himself, cast in these two moulds, but adding a bent for continuous mass upheaval – ‘there is great disorder under the heavens, the situation is excellent’ – entirely foreign to them.

The result was a compound like no other. Mao’s repressions mixed Stalinist methods of mass propaganda and coercion to achieve Confucian goals of changing ideas, and therefore conduct, in the service of a ceaseless revolution taxed by critics early on as more anarchist than Marxist in conception. Chen’s indictment of the cruelties and casualties of Mao’s rule in the last decade of his life is unwavering.3 However, in launching the Cultural Revolution, he was not in Chen’s view simply a villain. Victims were many, if far fewer than in the Great Leap Forward, but in neither case were most deaths deliberate. They were closer, as Mao’s biographer Philip Short put it, to what is legally defined as manslaughter.4 Conversion and mobilisation were the aims, not extermination. Of course, over time Mao’s gifts degenerated. His last significant essay, ‘On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People’, the text that licensed the Hundred Flowers, appeared in 1957. Thereafter, no longer brooking dissent, he had decreasing need to argue or persuade: an order would be enough. Though he kept his wits and their pungency to the end, he ceased to be the thinker he had been. But at the height of his career, it was not just a master narrative of the sort with which Chen credits him that gave Mao hegemony. It was a multiform set of ideas, delivered in a prose of classical vivacity, economy and clarity, which captured Zhou and his generation. For all the faults that came to disfigure him, the crimes he committed or enabled, no other ruler of last century possessed the same hand of trumps: capabilities at once military, political and intellectual.

The relationship between Mao and Zhou was not, as Chen shows, one-sided. Mao lacked the patience for consistent administration, and the experience of the world outside China (with the manners that came with it) for skilful diplomacy. He needed Zhou for these, and at no time more than when he launched the Cultural Revolution, pitching the country into political turmoil and international isolation, with violent clashes between disputing factions at home and escalating tensions with the USSR abroad – just as Zhou needed Mao as the one authority capable of containing, after stoking, these. The two were ensnared in a mutual dependence. Here, Chen writes, lay


the dilemma the chairman had always faced and was never able to resolve, even with his unlimited power. On the one hand, he absolutely did not want to hand power and his ‘grand revolutionary enterprise’ over to Zhou. But on the other hand, he had to rely on Zhou’s remarkable administrative talent to maintain the routine functioning of the party-state that he had founded.

It was a ‘dragnet’ that trapped him and which he begrudged.

In the same way, Mao knew he needed the diplomatic success of China’s victory over Western ostracism at the Geneva Conference of 1954, on the Indochina War, and the end of the American blockade that came with Nixon’s visit, but each time he was jealous of the prestige Zhou gained. Chen is much more expansive on Zhou’s triumphs in foreign affairs than on his running of the state. This is natural enough, given episodes of spectacular drama in the first, humdrum issues of management in the second; though for ordinary citizens, domestic administration mattered much more than diplomatic coups. In the former, Zhou’s achievement was relatively greater and more surprising, the economy registering steady rates of growth amid the chaotic scenes of the Cultural Revolution. As to the latter, Chen’s admiration for the agreement signed at Geneva and the communiqué at Shanghai, both in different ways transforming China’s standing in the world, is understandable. But he risks overstating what resulted from them. Obliging a reluctant Pham Van Dong to accept the terms for peace he negotiated at Geneva, Zhou failed to obtain enforceable guarantees that South Vietnam would hold the elections they stipulated – which the Communists would certainly have won: the reason that, with US backing, Saigon never held them – when he could all but certainly have wrested them from Paris, where the prime minister, Pierre Mendès France, was desperate to quit Indochina after the debacle of Dien Bien Phu.5 Vietnam would have been spared the millions of dead in the American war to prevent what should have occurred more peacefully in the mid-1950s.

To this the objection can be made that there was no practicable way of ensuring free elections in South Vietnam once the US mantle covered it, given that by 1954 there was already discussion in the administration of whether or not to use atomic weapons to hold onto the North too. The same kind of reservation, and possible response, can be entered for the Shanghai communiqué Zhou signed in 1972, which didn’t contain a US pledge to cease interference in Taiwan. After initially rejecting the evasions to save American face on which Kissinger insisted, Zhou consented to them. Could more have been extracted from the US than Nixon was willing to concede, at a time when he was at the peak of his power? Whatever view is taken of that, the long-term consequences of the bland formula announced in Shanghai are clear enough: the danger of war between the two countries in the East China Sea, with the island further than ever from the reunification sought by Beijing. Encouraged by Zhou’s conciliation, Kissinger returned the next year for further talks, this time dangling the prospect of a military alliance against Russia. Uncharacteristically, Zhou did not immediately report this overture to Mao. Mao was so angered that he told the politburo that if the US were to invade the PRC, Zhou would prove a ‘lowly capitulationist’ – an absurd charge, typical of Mao’s late tirades. That Zhou could have had illusions about the potential of new-found amity with Washington is not impossible. But if so, they would not have been out of keeping with Mao’s own denunciations of the Soviet Union as a social-imperialist, indeed fascist regime that was a greater threat to the world than the United States.

One of the most striking themes in Chen’s work is that for Mao there was no strict separation between his external and internal policies because the former were often a contribution to the latter. Initiatives abroad were often held to be ways of galvanising action at home, foreign affairs deployed as a spur to domestic mobilisation. The Korean War, the Quemoy crisis, the Sino-Indian War and the Sino-Soviet conflict would each offer a vivid illustration of the connection, the last of them fuelling Mao’s campaigns against his opponents in the CCP, denounced for seeking to restore capitalism in China as Khrushchev had done in Russia. But while they might feel obliged to repeat the litanies of the period, the higher echelons of the party included people – Zhou and Lin among them – who had lived in the Soviet Union and may have been less tempted to think, as opposed to say, that China now had fascism on its northern doorstep; or to believe (corollaries at the time) that Pinochet and Mobutu were natural allies in the battle against it. Though an unconditional critic of the Cultural Revolution, Chen skirts this dimension of it.

Coming to the end​ of Chen’s book, a historically minded reader might ask: does the record of the past offer any precedent for the relationship between Mao and Zhou? Perhaps in some respects there is one, morally and psychologically, though much less consequentially. Napoleon usually opens the list of modern tyrants (particularly in England), as the first to display the lawless features of the species, if at a time when the enormities of an industrial epoch had yet to arrive. A greater general than Mao and, as Mao was not, a brilliant administrator, he too was by his own lights a man of ideas, if much lesser and more derivative ones, and though a poor politician, a natural leader of men. Many were dazzled by the combination, and around him emerged a group of devoted and often capable subordinates. He had conquered most of Europe when undoing came with his invasion of Russia in 1812: disintegration of the Grande Armée in the snows, defeat in Germany and fall in France.

To the end, Napoleon was served with unfailing loyalty by his grand equerry Armand de Caulaincourt, an aristocratic officer who rose from aide-de-camp to ambassador in St Petersburg to master of the horse; accompanied Napoleon on the Russian campaign and back from it; and as the Allies approached Paris, became his last foreign minister. Military by family background and vocation – a general at 32 – Caulaincourt became a diplomat on Napoleon’s orders after Talleyrand had ceased to be foreign minister. Without the latter’s exceptional gifts, he never had the same eminence. But unlike Talleyrand, notoriously venal and disloyal, he was a figure of unfailing probity and principle. Two misfortunes of imperial service scarred him. Used as a cover for the mission to kidnap and execute the Duc d’Enghien, a Bourbon exile in Germany accused of a conspiracy to overthrow Napoleon, he was held by royalists to be responsible for an outrage notorious across Europe of whose outcome he was innocent. Talleyrand was an instigator of the crime. Napoleon, its organiser, remarked cynically of the blame attached to Caulaincourt, which he knew to be unjust, ‘It will make him all the more faithful to me.’ Later, he refused to allow Caulaincourt to marry the woman he loved on the grounds that she was divorced. Caulaincourt suffered from each injury, but his loyalty did not waver.

Personally close to Napoleon, having commanded his armed entourage, when recalled from St Petersburg Caulaincourt warned him in seven hours of argument against the folly of invading Russia. After the fiasco he had predicted, escorting the emperor incognito back from Vilnius to Paris – thirteen days à deux by sledge and coach through the snows of Northern Europe, Napoleon talking to him throughout – Caulaincourt told him to his face that it was not Russia that Europeans feared but his own ‘universal monarchy’: its fiscal exactions, political inquisitions, military repressions. Napoleon did not hold it against him. In 1814, attempting suicide on being exiled to Elba, Napoleon summoned Caulaincourt at three in the morning to convey his last wishes. After the Hundred Days, when he was among those who rallied to Napoleon, Caulaincourt spent his final years in social and political ostracism in Picardy, composing memoirs that could not be published for a century. On St Helena the emperor remembered him as a ‘man of feeling and integrity’. There lay the differences separating the two men, and the times and classes that formed them, from the autocrat and diplomat in China. In Europe, the traditional reputation of diplomats – already in the 17th century ‘gentlemen sent abroad to lie for the good of their country’ – was the serpentine antithesis of the heroic. In the Central Kingdom, which could dispense with them, there were no diplomats. Perhaps that’s the reason, when they were finally needed in the 20th century, that the improbable synthesis of a revolutionary steeled in the intransigent practices of civil war and a grandmaster of the ductile arts of negotiation was possible.

Zhou Enlai: A Life​, a measured and very disciplined work, never strays far from its subject. Two earlier books, China’s Road to the Korean War (1994) and Mao’s China and the Cold War (2001), give a more direct sense of where Chen stands politically. Studies of a revolution written from the diaspora it produces tend, as one would expect, to be sharply critical of it and tacitly or vocally uncritical of the state that provides refuge for their composition. Chen, when he settled in the US, did not conform to this pattern. Mao was a contradictory figure, he wrote, because throughout his life he sought at once a revolutionary transformation of China and its restoration to the position of Central Kingdom that it had occupied for centuries, now lost to domination by foreign powers. In the 20th century every country under colonial or semi-colonial subjugation would develop a victim mentality, but its Chinese version was unique because it was surcharged by so stark a contrast between past eminence and present subjection. Mao’s aim was to change that with a revolution that would both bring a social equality China had never known, and give the country equality with the leading powers, of which, when the revolution was won, the United States was the greatest.

Such a vision, Chen observed, was unacceptable to a US imbued with a victor mentality after triumph in the Second World War, as a ‘traditional American sense of self-superiority’ swelled with a new sense of ‘world leadership responsibility’. Since China was not a significant military or industrial power, it posed no direct threat to US interests in the Far East. Its loss to communism was thus ‘undesirable, but not unendurable’. Chinese communists were viewed with a mixture of contempt and hostility. Since the new regime disregarded the universal principles of international law, to which everyone on earth owed allegiance, it was not entitled to recognition – an attitude displaying the typical ‘mentality of a dominant Western power in the face of a rising revolutionary country’. For his part, Mao had no intention of passively accepting American requirements for entry into the ranks of respectable states, as he showed in Korea. In the atomic age all states were insecure, and for Mao the insecurity was especially acute because of the huge gap between his ambitions for his country to play a leading part in the tide of revolution worldwide and the weakness of China as a fledgling great power. But he was not intimidated. The PRC would be ‘a new type of international actor’, a revolutionary nation resolved to break the existing norms and rules of international relations – which were a product of Western domination.

But at home the revolution against China’s past could not escape the contradiction that it had to be articulated through discourse, symbols and identities derived from that past, not least the memory of its standing as the Central Kingdom of the known world, and the political traditions associated with this. Nor could it defeat the passage of time. In Mao’s eyes, the revolution ceased to be one if it fell short of continuous momentum. After the failure of the Great Leap Forward, he decided that it was losing support even among the party elite, and to renew it unleashed the Cultural Revolution against the leadership of the party and the state itself. But despite the enormous, unchecked power he had accumulated, he often found himself unable to achieve his goals and by the end was more or less aware of the Cultural Revolution’s failure. After his death his master narrative collapsed, and under Deng another replaced it. Dispensing with appeals to equality, it banked on prosperity and modernity, dismissing all other considerations with the dictum: ‘Development is the irrefutable argument.’ The new course raised living standards, but also widened divisions between rich and poor. This meant that emphasis had increasingly to fall on national rather than social goals, on the restoration of China through wealth and power to its role as the Central Kingdom. That supplied a solution to the legitimacy crisis of the CCP after Mao. But in the absence of any higher ideological vision offering a mission to the Chinese people, a ‘lingering moral crisis’ set in, especially among the young. Chen contends that this vacuum paradoxically enhanced the grip of the party on the country, leaving the population prey to the fear that without the party things could get worse and China could even break up.

What is to be done? As a historian, Chen is sparing of prescriptions, but not to the point of avoiding them altogether. At the outset of his biography, he explains that critical to its intention has been the ‘challenge of correctly placing the Chinese Communist Revolution within the annals of history’. He goes on:


Revolution is no sin, I believe. Revolutions happen for a reason. A revolution would not have erupted if the old regime that nurtured it had not deteriorated beyond repair. This is also the case of the Chinese Communist Revolution, which came as a dramatic response to the total failure of the Chinese old regime in the face of the daunting internal and external crises engulfing China’s state, society and even civilisation. Therefore the coming of a revolutionary era in China was not in any way an accident; rather, there must have been historically justifiable factors for its occurrence.

That said, ‘all revolutions have their downsides’, especially those as radically transformative as the Chinese one, which was ‘inevitably destructive, cruel and bloody’, and whose enterprise of liberation became its negation in Mao’s last years. But if we want ‘to prevent such tragedies in future, we cannot merely reject revolution’. Mao and Zhou were human beings made by the revolution, and even someone like himself, born after 1949, should be self-critically aware that he too was in some fashion formed by it. Rather than simply extolling or rejecting revolution, what is needed is to understand the reason revolutions occur and, when they go wrong, to find the right path to a better future. In the case of China, that should mean a process of ‘derevolutionisation’, beyond the changes of the Reform Era, towards the interrelated goals of a more equal economic prosperity, more truthful social stability and more authentic political democracy at home; and abroad for the country to emerge from the shadow of the Cold War, to become ‘a genuine “insider” of the international community and consistently play the role as a co-ordinator and promoter of regional and global peace and stability’.

Writing in Mao’s China and the Cold War in 2001, Chen thought that could happen only when the last generation that grew up in the revolutionary era had passed from the scene, as it would within fifteen to twenty years: a schedule to reflect on. What of the US, the other side of the Cold War? His fear was of a further round of that war, one lacking any justification. Although China under Mao used force to protect its borders, it was not an expansionist power. Pursuit of centrality was not the same as pursuit of dominance in international affairs. The PRC aimed at the former, not the latter. The West should make a serious, sustained effort to understand China’s perspectives and problems in the new century, without reverting to the stance it had taken in the 1950s and 1960s. ‘Under no circumstances should a “second Cold War” be waged against China.’ What if China failed to develop in the right direction? ‘We should never be frustrated by China’s lack of sufficient change in the short run; we should never surrender an attitude of goodwill towards China.’

That was written more than twenty years ago, in the time of Jiang Zemin. In China, as in the West and the world at large, the scene has darkened since. Would Chen say the same today? There seems little doubt that he would. The second Cold War he feared, not a simple or straightforward reproduction of the first, but not better than it, has come to pass. Amid a pervasive deterioration of the inter-state system, Chen’s forebodings can be surmised from the near despair with which he recently asked: where is a counterpart to Zhou to be found anywhere today?

In a wider intellectual setting, Chen’s outlook most resembles that of two Russian historians. Both sought a balanced assessment of Mikhail Gorbachev, who in character and career was quite unlike Zhou, but who was another communist with ideals visibly higher than the exercise of hard power, whose end was tragic too. Dmitri Furman, who came to admire him, could see his weaknesses, but judged them with sympathy, holding Gorbachev the only ruler in Russian history who voluntarily limited his own power, to give his people freedoms they had never known before. The verdict of Vladislav Zubok, a decade younger, is more stringent. His masterpiece, Collapse (2021), is a devastating analysis of the reasons Gorbachev’s reforms failed. If he could be so unceremoniously ejected from office, amid popular indifference, by a rival of far lower and cruder calibre, the fault lay in Gorbachev himself, in the limitations of his culture and the delusions induced in him by the flattery of the West. With better sense and less vanity he could have avoided his fall, for which the Russian people – already suffering under the fiasco of his economic management – would pay dearly under his successors. Though their assessments of Gorbachev are antithetical, Furman and Zubok share much the same values, which resemble those of Chen, as also, in their own way, those of Ci Jiwei: a temperate, humane realism, expressive of a sensibility not easily classifiable, somewhere between liberal and socialist. Zubok is closer to Chen as a scholar: both historians at universities in a West to which they emigrated without compulsion or loss of contact with their homeland, each producing works on it of an intimacy and depth no Western colleague can match. As the two continental states about which they write become steadily more feared and vituperated in the West, it would be good to see them in dialogue.