Zhou Enlai

Premier of the People’s Republic of China (1949-1976)

• Born: March 5, 1898
• Birthplace: Huaian, Jiangsu Province, China
• Died: January 8, 1976
• Place of death: Beijing, China

Zhou guided the new China in solidifying the new order, led in domestic reform toward modernization, and was instrumental in having the new government accepted by the international community during trying times.

Early Life

Zhou Enlai (jhow ehn-li) was born into an aristocratic family that was in a state of decline. The increasingly impecunious position of the family made Zhou’s childhood most unstable and meandering. Before age one, he was taken by an uncle and aunt as a foster son to be nurtured and reared. His genteel and cultured foster mother was determined to prepare him for the civil service examination, passage of which was the ladder to success in imperial China. By age four, he was able to read; by age ten, he was devouring classical Chinese literature. Yet these days of security would end when his foster mother died. In 1910, at age twelve, Zhou was dispatched to live with another uncle in the far northeast of China. There he entered elementary school, which continued his learning of Chinese tradition but which also added some of the new learning of mathematics and science.

In 1913, Zhou was enrolled at Nangai Middle School in Tianjin. This school, founded only in 1906, emphasized a modern curriculum with the goal of training Chinese to lead the country into modernization. On his graduation from Nangai, Zhou left to study in Japan, being fascinated by, as were many other Chinese, Japan’s great success in developing a modern society. He did not, however, pass the entrance examination for study in a Japanese university.

In 1917, the revolution in Russia “shook the world” and stirred Zhou. He began to study Marxism. While Russia was in revolution, civil war, and tumult, China was to have its lesser, albeit societal, rattling upheaval as well, in May, 1919. Zhou rushed back to his homeland and to Tianjin to participate. Students at Beijing University demonstrated in the streets of their nation’s capital when they learned that China had gained nothing from its participation in World War I. Disillusioned and disappointed, they expressed condemnation of their government’s ineptitude and the continued presence of foreign imperialists on China’s soil. Zhou became a leader, organizer, and even editor of a newspaper.

In 1920, Zhou went on a work-study program to France, where he hoped to learn more about Marxism and about how it might be used to restore and reinvigorate China domestically and internationally. Zhou studied Marxism assiduously, and he helped form Marxist groups among the other Chinese who were working and studying in Western Europe at the same time.

Back in China, a small group met and formed the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in Shanghai in July, 1921. Chinese Marxists inside and outside the country were enlisted as full-fledged members of the party. Zhou was officially in the organization. Activities going on in China synchronized with his own activities, and so he returned home from France in 1924.

Life’s Work

Zhou returned to China to find his country divided. Yet he saw great hope for China’s future; the nationalistic spirit loosed by the May Fourth upheaval was still widespread. Sun Yat-sen and his Kuomintang had plans for the reunification of the Chinese homeland, and the fledgling CCP, small though it was, stood ready to contribute to the cause as best it could. Sun, although not a Marxist, could only receive the aid he needed for his plans for unifying China from the Soviet-dominated Comintern, and so he took it. The CCP would lend its support, and here Zhou was to contribute crucially. This twenty-six-year-old suave and articulate Chinese Communist brought his reputation for successful leadership in France home with him when he returned. Immediately, he was selected for the prominent post of working to develop an army for the Kuomintang. He was appointed the political adviser to Chiang Kai-shek, the commandant of the newly founded Whampoa Academy for the training of officers. Zhou gained great respect from many of the student officers during his tenure at Whampoa; many of these officers would defect to the Communists once the battle between the Kuomintang and the CCP reached decision-making proportions in the civil war, 1946-1949.

By 1926, the Kuomintang felt ready to tackle the warlords who were dividing China. Sun had died in 1925; Chiang had come to be the new leader, and he proclaimed a “northern expedition” from his southern base in moving militarily to restore China to a unified nation. Zhou moved from the military academy in Canton to Shanghai to aid the plan, and he was assigned the role of organizing the labor force in this largest of China’s cities and making it ready to accept the Kuomintang as the new leader of a unified China. Zhou did his work as assigned, but the outcome was not what he expected. Chiang had come to distrust the CCP totally, saw it as detrimental to China’s unity, and attempted to destroy it. The Kuomintang, instead of accepting Zhou’s delivery of Shanghai to its allegiance, tried to kill off all the Communists; most were massacred. Zhou escaped that fate and fled to a haven of safety at a Communist camp in the hills at a rural base. At this base, Zhou aided Communist military leader Zhu De in founding a Red Army for the party to survive. Chiang was determined to destroy the Communists and kept up the attack. The war went on for years, with the Communists mostly on the defensive, and culminated in the famous Long March.

During the Long March, Mao Zedong had been selected to be the main spokesman and leader of the Chinese Communist Party. He would hold the title of leader from that time until his death in September, 1976. Zhou accepted Mao’s leadership and would work hand-in-glove with the entitled chair for the rest of his existence. Both were strong Chinese nationalists; both were Marxists. Both were determined to push forward to the success of Chinese nationalism with a Marxist society. Zhou decided to work within the framework of the new society as an administrator and as a diplomat. He began his work almost immediately.

In 1936, Chiang reactivated his quest to rid China of what he viewed as the divisive Communists. He decided to attack them at their new base of Yan’an in Shaanxi Province. His generals, however, were more concerned about the presence of the Japanese in China. The Japanese had launched an attack on China’s northeastern section in Manchuria, were successful, and had established a puppet government. After intense negotiations between the Kuomintang and the Communists, the Communists decided it would be in everyone’s best interest for them to join forces with the Kuomintang to drive out the Japanese.

The united front came into full play when Japan launched an attack on China proper in July, 1937. Japan’s successful military surges in China forced Chiang to abandon much of his domain to foreign occupation and to flee to Chongqing. Zhou moved to Chongqing as the liaison of the CCP. Zhou worked during most of the war in Chongqing for the advantage of the Communists. Zhou’s many contacts with foreign diplomats and foreign journalists during the war allowed him to display his cosmopolitanism, his cordiality, and his diplomatic flair for the benefit of his Communist comrades. He did his work well, for those who had any association with him came away most impressed with his personal talents and came away believing that those in Yan’an were serving the war effort and Chinese society more adeptly and more energetically than were the Kuomintang group in Chongqing.

After World War II, the CCP-Kuomintang cooperation came to an end, and old conflicts arose, creating civil war. Despite the material advantages of the Kuomintang, it lost the support of the Chinese people, who saw the CCP as the organ to lead China to a better life and a more secure status internationally. On October 1, 1949, the Communists, through the mouth of Mao, announced the creation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Zhou became the premier as well as the foreign secretary. The former office he would hold until his death in 1976; the latter he would assign to another in 1958, but he would still be present at any major contact with a foreign dignitary.

Zhou, as the premier and head administrator of the new nationwide government, held the responsibility for putting into order policies and instruments of rule. Policies, programs, and agencies that had been used effectively in the “liberated areas” (as the territory under rule of the Communist base in Yan’an was called) were now extended into all of China. The peasants were urged to form cooperatives and to attack the large landowners; Chinese entrepreneurs were asked to turn over their enterprises to public ownership; imperialist holdings were confiscated; Chinese intellectuals were cajoled and encouraged to support the “new.” It was Zhou who stood forth in making the pronouncements and the encouragements. He expounded the new laws for the equality of women. Zhou used all the talents that he could muster through counseling, persuasion, encouragement, and force to rally Chinese of all classes and categories to support the new system of Chinese Communism and Chinese national unity. By 1951, at the age of fifty-three, the premier pronounced a new constitution and moved on to announce the start of Five-Year Plans. Zhou was instituting Marxism in China with finesse, flair, and success. The people’s support expanded, agricultural and industrial production grew, diets improved, and diseases decreased.

Mao, ever the philosophical and revolutionary visionary, used his prominence to direct China toward major changes in 1957 and again in 1966. Zhou, the ever-loyal administrator, made Mao’s ideas public. In 1957, it was the Great Leap Forward ; in 1966, it was the Cultural Revolution . Both brought upheaval to Chinese society; both were formally announced and supported by Zhou. Both saw major reorganizations of the Chinese power centers.

After the failure of the Great Leap Forward, Mao, although keeping his title and public eminence, had lost power. Others were able to wrest the control over policymaking, and Zhou stood in support. Mao, however, would not stand by for long. In 1966, through the announcement by Zhou, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution. Leaders in communes, in factories, in art, in education, in government, and even in the party were ousted, criticized publicly, and sent to live in the countryside. Mao led the upheaval; Zhou joined the new crusade, but he tried to keep some semblance of order and stability as the disruption of the Cultural Revolution proceeded for ten years, 1966-1976. It seems that Zhou’s levelheadedness made a mark, for the system still survived when he died in January, 1976.

Zhou’s diplomatic talents were as demanding as his domestic administrative ones. Zhou was not only the prime minister of the new republic but also the leading actor in the foreign ministry. He carried the title of foreign minister from 1949 until 1958; he continued to be China’s leading spokesperson in that area until his death, trying to gain for his country acceptance by the world community. Zhou was able to make headway in this respect at the Geneva Conference in 1954 and the Bandung Conference in 1955.

From its foundation in 1949 and during the Cold War, the PRC had to rely on an alliance with the Soviet Union, an alliance that was not overly cordial from the start and one that devolved into a break and increased bitterness after 1961. Zhou’s diplomacy at Geneva and at Bandung did bring solid relationships for China from other countries, even though they were of lesser stature, and he tried to build on these bases by traveling to numerous countries. He continued in his attempts to gain China’s entry into the United Nations and to have formal diplomatic recognition from the United States.

In 1971, the PRC was voted membership in the U.N.; in February, 1972, U.S. president Richard M. Nixon visited China, although full relationships were not established between the two countries until January, 1979. Zhou did not live to see the outcome of these relations; he died on January 8, 1976.

Significance

Zhou was a transitional figure in twentieth century Chinese society. He was born into a family of status and had been inculcated with the values of old China; however, early during his adolescence, he came to be educated in schools that taught modern subjects. Both of these exposures guided him for the rest of his life. He believed that China should reassert and reestablish itself as the “middle” kingdom that it had been throughout most of its early and long history, and he decided that it could only be done via the communist route.

Although China had difficulties in finding the type of communism it would follow, Zhou, as the head administrator and directing diplomat, tried to keep his society functioning during these oscillations and continued to press for China’s acceptance in the world community. Zhou’s persistent and stabilizing influences left their mark during his lifetime and after. Mao was hailed as the “helmsman” in his later years; Zhou was the ballast, although not so entitled. Where Mao was the domineering patriarch, Zhou was the warm, loving, and stable matriarch, if viewed from the perspective of the traditional Chinese society.

Bibliography

Barnouin, Barbara, and Yu Changgen. Zhou Enlai: A Political Life. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2006. A comprehensive biography examining Zhou’s complex personality and controversial decisions and actions.

Fang, Percy Jucheng, and Lucy Guinong J. Fang. Zhou Enlai: A Profile. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1986. A complete biography that is mostly favorable, and it includes information on Zhou’s private life not found elsewhere.

Fitzpatrick, Merrilyn. Zhou Enlai. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1984. This work is just forty-eight pages long and covers all major events of Zhou’s life.

Hsu Kai-yu. Chou En-lai: China’s Gray Eminence. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968. Hsu was the first of Zhou’s biographers. The book is well written and has an abundance of information from a favorable viewpoint.

Kampen, Thomas. Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and the Evolution of the Chinese Communist Leadership. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2000. Analyzes the power struggles within the Chinese Communist Party from 1931 through 1945, when Zhou and Mao had risen to positions of party leadership. Challenges traditional views of the CCP’s development.

Keith, Ronald C. The Diplomacy of Zhou Enlai. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. A solid study of Zhou’s work in diplomacy, showing how he was a Communist and a nationalist.

Roots, John McCook. Chou: An Informal Biography of China’s Legendary Chou En-lai. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978. Another rare biographical overview of Zhou’s life and legacy.

Wilson, Dick. Zhou Enlai: A Biography. New York: Viking Penguin Press, 1984. This is a book written in the style of a journalist, with much emphasis on personal acts and foibles.

Zhou Enlai. Selected Works of Zhou Enlai. Vol. 1. Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1981. This is a collection of some of Zhou’s writings from 1926 to 1933. A rare English-language collection.