Zhou Enlai

• 1. Introduction

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  Zhou Enlai stood at the center of Chinese history for more than half a century, serving as the first Premier of the People's Republic of China from October 1949 until his death on the 8th of January 1976. He was born on the 5th of March 1898 in Huai'an, Jiangsu province, and died still holding office, one of the few figures in modern history to serve a single government post for more than twenty-six years. When he died, the public outpouring of grief in Beijing was so massive it turned to fury. That fury was directed at a faction called the Gang of Four, and it led directly to the 1976 Tiananmen Incident. The man who provoked such feeling was not a charismatic military commander who won great battles. He was something stranger and rarer: a spy master, a negotiator, a survivor who outlasted purges that killed everyone around him, and a diplomat who helped orchestrate Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China at the height of the Cold War. How did a boy from a family of government clerks in late Qing dynasty China become the indispensable man of the Communist revolution? And what does his survival tell us about the nature of power in one of the most turbulent political environments of the twentieth century?

• 2. Mothers and Scholars

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  Zhou Panlong, Zhou Enlai's grandfather, passed the provincial examinations and later served as magistrate governing Huai'an county. That accomplishment set a tone for the family: the Zhou clan traced its roots to Shaoxing in Zhejiang province, where generation after generation of men had worked as government clerks known as shiye. They were educated professionals who depended on official connections, and late 19th-century China's economic recession devastated families like theirs.

  Zhou Enlai's father, Zhou Yineng, had a reputation for honesty and gentleness but was also considered weak and unable to support his family. He drifted across China, working in Beijing, Shandong, Anhui, Shenyang, Inner Mongolia, and Sichuan. The boy he left behind was adopted almost immediately after birth. Zhou Yigan, his father's youngest brother, was dying of tuberculosis, and the family feared he would die without an heir. Zhou Yigan did die not long after the adoption, and the infant Zhou Enlai was raised by Yigan's widow, Madame Chen.

  Madame Chen came from a scholarly family and had received a traditional literary education. According to Zhou's own account, she was the person who shaped him most deeply. She taught him to read and write at an early age, and Zhou later claimed to have read Journey to the West at the age of six. By eight he was working through Water Margin, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and Dream of the Red Chamber. His birth mother, surnamed Wan, died in 1907 when he was nine. His adoptive mother Chen died the following year, when he was ten, leaving him effectively without the two women who had defined his childhood. His father was in Hubei, far away. Zhou and his two younger brothers returned to Huai'an to live with an uncle.

  In 1910 another uncle, Zhou Yigeng, offered to take Zhou north to Manchuria, to Fengtian, the city now called Shenyang. There Zhou attended the Dongguan Model Academy, a modern-style school that exposed him for the first time to English, science, and the writings of reformers including Liang Qichao and Kang Youwei. The boy who had once read classical novels by lamplight was now absorbing a very different vision of what China could become.

• 3. Nankai and the Making of a Public Man

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  Nankai Middle School in Tianjin was founded by Yan Xiu, a prominent scholar and philanthropist, and headed by Zhang Boling, whom the source describes as one of the most important Chinese educators of the twentieth century. Zhou entered it in 1913 when his uncle was transferred to Tianjin. By the time he arrived, Nankai had adopted the educational model used at Phillips Academy in the United States. Its daily routine was described as highly disciplined, its moral code strict.

  Zhou excelled in Chinese, won awards in the school speech club, and became editor of the school newspaper in his final year. He was also deeply involved in acting and producing plays. Many students who did not otherwise know him learned his name through his performances. At the school's tenth commencement in June 1917, Zhou was one of only two valedictorians from that graduating class.

  Yan Xiu was so impressed with Zhou that he helped pay for his studies in Japan and later France, and even encouraged Zhou to marry his daughter. Zhou declined, and he later explained his reasoning to a classmate named Zhang Honghao: he feared that his financial prospects would not be promising, and that Yan would dominate his life as a father-in-law. The refusal reveals a self-awareness that would mark his entire career. Zhou understood the difference between a patron and a master, and he consistently chose allies he could work beside rather than figures who would control him.

  His classmates at Nankai ranged widely. Ma Jun, who became an early Communist leader and was executed in 1927, sat beside K. C. Wu, who would later serve as mayor of Shanghai and governor of Taiwan under the Nationalist party. Zhang Boling's teachings of gong, meaning public spirit, and neng, meaning ability, stayed with Zhou after graduation. In July 1917 he left for Japan, following many of his classmates, with a deep desire to acquire the skills that public service required.

• 4. Disillusion Abroad

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  Japan sharpened Zhou's politics by disappointing him. He spent most of his time in Tokyo at the East Asian Higher Preparatory School, a language school for Chinese students. His uncles and apparently Nankai founder Yan Xiu supported him financially, but Japan was suffering from severe inflation and funds were tight. Zhou attempted to win a government scholarship, which required passing entrance examinations at Japanese universities. He took examinations for at least two schools and failed admission to both.

  His diaries and letters from this period show a mind moving rapidly toward the left. He read Chen Duxiu's progressive magazine New Youth avidly. He read early Japanese works on Marx. He developed a deep interest in the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Bolsheviks' policies. It has been claimed he attended lectures by Kawakami Hajime at Kyoto University, an important figure in early Japanese Marxism, though current scholarship considers that unlikely.

  What the diaries do record clearly is his growing contempt for Japanese elitism and militarism. By the time he returned to China in the spring of 1919, he had concluded that the Japanese political model had nothing to offer China. His failure to gain university admission, the acute discrimination against Chinese students he witnessed, and the death of his uncle Zhou Yikui during this period all reinforced a disenchantment that pushed him toward more radical conclusions.

  He arrived back in Tianjin with a clearer sense of what he opposed than of what he supported. The Awakening Society he helped found in September 1919 captured that uncertainty. The group never numbered more than 25 members and required them to use numbers instead of names for secrecy. Zhou was Number Five. In explaining the Society's goals, he declared that militarism, the bourgeoisie, partylords, bureaucrats, inequality between men and women, obstinate ideas, and old ethics should all be abolished or reformed. It was in this society that he first met Deng Yingchao, the woman he would eventually marry, and who would outlive him by fifteen years.

• 5. Paris and the Cell

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  Zhou left Shanghai for Europe on the 7th of November 1920 with a group of 196 work-study students. His scholarship from Yan Xiu and his position as a special correspondent for the Tianjin newspaper Yishi bao, meaning literally Current Events Newspaper, meant he did not have to work during his stay. His group arrived in Marseille on the 13th of December 1920. Most of the Chinese students around him were struggling to survive through the work-study program. Zhou was free to devote himself to observation and organizing.

  In a letter to his cousin on the 30th of January 1921, he described two broad paths of reform for China: gradual change as in England, or violent transformation as in Russia. He wrote that he had no preference for either the British or Russian way and would prefer something in between. But events moved faster than his ideological deliberation. By spring 1921 he had joined a Chinese Communist cell in Paris, recruited by Zhang Shenfu, whom he had met the previous year through Li Dazhao's network in Beijing.

  The cell included Zhao Shiyan and Chen Gongpei, as well as Zhang and his wife Liu Qingyang. Over the following months they united with a group of Chinese radicals from Hunan living in Montargis, south of Paris, a group that included Cai Hesen, Li Lisan, Chen Yi, Nie Rongzhen, and a seventeen-year-old named Deng Xiaoping. Zhou hired Deng to operate a mimeograph machine for the party magazine Shaonian, later renamed Chiguang or Red Light, which Zhou edited. That first encounter between Zhou and Deng in a Paris print shop prefigured one of the defining political partnerships of twentieth-century China.

  By June 1922 Zhou was one of twenty-two participants at the founding of the Chinese Youth Communist Party as the European Branch of the Chinese Communist Party. He helped draft its charter and was elected director of propaganda. He also organized the establishment of the Nationalist Party's European branch in November 1923, ensuring that most of its officers were in fact Communists. Important party leaders including Zhu De and Nie Rongzhen were first admitted to the party by Zhou during this period. He left Europe probably in late July 1924, returning to China as one of the most senior Chinese Communist Party members anywhere in the world.

• 6. Spy Master Underground

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  After the Nationalist-Communist alliance collapsed and Chiang Kai-shek's forces began massacring Communists in Shanghai in April 1927, Zhou Enlai went underground. Back in Shanghai by 1929, he oversaw a network of independent Communist cells operating in a city where the Nationalist secret police had been established in 1928 specifically to hunt down and eliminate Communists. Zhou and his wife changed residences at least once a month and used a variety of aliases. He never used public transportation. He restricted all meetings to before 7 am or after 7 pm. He made sure that CCP offices never shared the same building, and required all party members to use passwords to identify one another. Only two or three people ever knew where he was at any given time.

  In November 1928 the CCP had established its own intelligence agency, the Zhongyang Teke, which Zhou came to control. Teke had four sections: protection of party members, intelligence gathering, internal communications, and a fourth section that conducted assassinations. That fourth group became known as the Red Squad. Zhou's main goal with Teke was to plant moles inside the Nationalist secret police. The head of Teke's intelligence section, Chen Geng, succeeded in placing a large network of agents inside the Investigation Section of the Central Operations Department in Nanjing, the nerve center of KMT intelligence. Zhou referred to three agents, Qian Zhuangfei, Li Kenong, and Hu Di, as the three most distinguished intelligence workers of the Party in the 1930s.

  The system held until late April 1931, when Zhou's chief aide Gu Shunzhang was arrested by the KMT in Wuhan. Gu had ties to Chinese secret societies and weak loyalty to the CCP. Under threat of torture, he gave up accounts of underground organizations in Wuhan, leading to the arrest and execution of more than ten senior CCP leaders there. He offered to reveal the full Shanghai network, but only directly to Chiang Kai-shek. Zhou's agent Qian Zhuangfei intercepted a telegram about this arrangement and abandoned his cover to warn Zhou personally. The two days Zhou gained before Gu reached Nanjing allowed him to evacuate party members and change all communication codes. The Red Squad's response to Gu's betrayal was severe: more than fifteen members of Gu's family were murdered and buried in quiet residential areas of Shanghai. Zhou and his wife finally fled Shanghai for the Communist base in Jiangxi near the end of 1931. By then he was one of the most wanted men in China.

• 7. The Long March and the Zunyi Turn

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  When the decision came to abandon the Jiangxi base in 1934, Zhou was placed in charge of logistics for the entire Communist withdrawal. He worked in absolute secrecy, informing even senior leaders of movements only at the last moment. His objective was to break through Chiang's blockhouse encirclement with as few casualties as possible. Before the retreat began, 16,000 troops and major commanders including Xiang Ying and Chen Yi were left behind as a rear guard. The main withdrawal of 84,000 soldiers and civilians began in early October 1934.

  Zhou's intelligence networks proved decisive in the early stages. His agents identified a section of Chiang's encirclement manned by troops under General Chen Jitang, a Guangdong warlord who Zhou judged would prefer to preserve his forces rather than fight. Zhou sent Pan Hannian to negotiate with Chen, and Chen allowed the Red Army to pass through his territory without resistance. After breaking through three of the four blockhouse fortifications, the army was intercepted by regular Nationalist troops and suffered heavy casualties. Of the 86,000 who attempted the breakout, only 36,000 escaped. The survivors regrouped and continued what became known as the Long March.

  At the Zunyi Conference in January 1935, Bo Gu and Otto Braun were removed from senior positions after being blamed for the Red Army's defeats. Zhou retained his position partly because he had consistently backed Mao Zedong and had defended Mao at the October 1932 Ningdu Conference when Mao was demoted and most other leaders opposed him. After the Zunyi Conference, Mao became Zhou's assistant. When the Communists reached northern Shaanxi on the 20th of October 1935, arriving with only 8,000-9,000 remaining members, Mao officially took over Zhou's leading position in the CCP while Zhou moved to a secondary role as vice-chairman. The two men would hold their respective positions within the party until both died in 1976.

• 8. Diplomat at the Edge

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  On the 7th of April 1936, Zhou met Zhang Xueliang for the first time inside a church in Yan'an. Zhang commanded the Northeast Army and was deeply opposed to the Japanese who had seized his home territory of Manchuria. Zhou had been cultivating this relationship through a northeast working committee, deploying mock military units to create the false impression that the Red Army and Zhang's forces were fighting each other, while secretly working toward the opposite. Their aim was to force Chiang Kai-shek to direct China's military energy against Japan.

  On the 12th of December 1936, Zhang and his followers stormed Chiang's headquarters in Xi'an, killed most of his bodyguards, and seized the Generalissimo. When word reached Yan'an, reactions split. Mao Zedong and Zhu De saw an opportunity to have Chiang killed. Zhou and Zhang Wentian saw it differently: as a chance to force a united front against Japan. A long telegram from Joseph Stalin resolved the internal debate, urging the CCP to work toward Chiang's release. Zhou reached Xi'an on the 16th of December, flown there on a plane that Zhang had sent specifically for him.

  Chiang initially refused to negotiate with a CCP delegate. He changed his position when it became clear his life depended on Communist goodwill. On the 24th of December, Chiang received Zhou, their first meeting since Zhou had left Whampoa more than ten years earlier. Zhou opened by saying: "In the ten years since we have met, you seem to have aged very little." Chiang replied that Zhou had been his subordinate and should follow his commands. Zhou answered that if Chiang would halt the civil war and resist the Japanese, the Red Army would willingly accept Chiang's command. Chiang promised to end the civil war, resist Japan, and invite Zhou to Nanjing for further talks. On the 25th of December, Zhang released Chiang and accompanied him to Nanjing, where Zhang was court-martialed and sentenced to house arrest. While Zhou was still in Xi'an, he was surrounded at gunpoint by Zhang's officers who accused the Communists of betraying their commander. Zhou talked them down without conceding a word and was left unharmed. The Nationalist capital at Nanjing fell to the Japanese on the 13th of December 1937, and Zhou's next stage of maneuvering was about to begin inside the wartime coalition government, where he was the only Communist to hold a high-level position.