The author, historian Chen Jian, who has taught at leading British and American universities and now holds a position at NYU Shanghai, based the study on declassified archival materials from multiple countries. Having read only the author’s extended preface online, I cannot claim a full account of the book’s arguments. But the preface alone is rich enough to provoke serious reflection on Zhou’s place in modern Chinese history.
As Chen Jian observes, Zhou was the most complex and least legible leader the Party ever produced. Mao Zedong’s brutality was brazen and unapologetic. Liu Shaoqi had political ambitions and a factional base. Lin Biao was arrogant and insubordinate. Zhou alone combined two things that seem contradictory: he gratified the ruler’s worst impulses, and he endured every humiliation without breaking. At every turning point in Party history, he behaved in ways that resist simple characterization.
How Zhou enabled the Mao era, step by step
In 1931, a senior Party operative named Gu Shunzhang, who ran the Party’s special intelligence apparatus, was captured and began informing on the leadership. Zhou’s response was swift and without hesitation: he ordered the killing of Gu’s entire family, nine people by some accounts, thirteen by others. The operation was carried out in a single night. It is difficult to reconcile this act with the image of the warm, urbane diplomat that Zhou later projected to the world.
At the Zunyi Conference of January 1935, held in Guizhou province during the Long March, Zhou publicly acknowledged errors in his military leadership and stepped aside. He threw his support behind Mao Zedong’s ascent to the top of the Party’s leadership hierarchy, then accepted a supporting role for the rest of his life. This act of political self-erasure had lasting consequences: once Zhou, the most capable potential rival, had yielded, no one else in the Party had the standing to challenge Mao. Zhou’s deference accelerated Mao’s consolidation of total power.
When Mao began his relationship with Jiang Qing and moved toward marriage, the union met resistance inside the Party. A special meeting of the Central Committee imposed a formal condition: Jiang Qing would be barred from involvement in Party decision-making after the wedding. Zhou was certainly among the senior figures who participated in that meeting and shaped that ruling. He later helped dismantle it himself during the Cultural Revolution, when promoting Jiang Qing became politically necessary. Expediency, not principle, governed his conduct.
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Throughout the civil war against the Nationalist government, Zhou served as Mao’s chief executive. Mao directed the broad military campaigns; Zhou managed Party organization, underground operations, relations with the Nationalist government, united-front work among centrists, and the CCP’s infiltration of Nationalist military and political institutions. By absorbing these responsibilities, Zhou freed Mao to concentrate on grand strategy. The victories that followed were as much Zhou’s work as Mao’s.
After the Party seized power in 1949, Mao moved to eliminate his most powerful colleagues in sequence. He purged the senior official Gao Gang in 1954, defence minister Peng Dehuai in 1959, and Party chairman Liu Shaoqi during the Cultural Revolution. At each juncture, Zhou stood with Mao. Without Zhou’s active support, these purges could not have proceeded as smoothly as they did. Zhou also had no real choice: to stand against Mao was to invite his own destruction.
When Mao launched the Great Leap Forward and its catastrophic production targets, Zhou raised what he called “anti-recklessness” objections, suggesting a more measured pace. He was criticized for it. His dissent was tactical: he framed his reservations as a corrective within Mao’s framework, not a challenge to it. Liu Shaoqi, by contrast, attacked Mao’s historical legacy directly, telling other senior leaders that a famine of such scale would be recorded by history as Mao’s responsibility. Liu did not survive. Zhou, having confessed his error and fallen back in line, did.
The Cultural Revolution could not have happened without him
When Mao positioned Jiang Qing as the ideological vanguard of the movement, Zhou was among the most active in promoting her. At mass rallies attended by hundreds of millions of people, Zhou led crowds in chanting slogans of tribute to Jiang Qing. For a figure of Zhou’s seniority and standing to subordinate himself publicly to someone who had been formally barred from political life a generation earlier was, by any measure, an act of deliberate self-abasement. He performed it without apparent reservation.
Mao’s role during the Cultural Revolution was to set direction and make decisions; Zhou’s was to run everything else. While Lin Biao held the military, Zhou controlled the economy, society, public administration, and foreign affairs. He also provided institutional legitimacy to the Central Cultural Revolution Group, the informal body that drove the movement’s most destructive phases. Without Zhou’s logistical and administrative support, Mao’s directives would have remained aspirations. The Cultural Revolution became a national catastrophe because Zhou made it function.
The fate of Marshal He Long illustrates this most starkly. Mao wanted He Long removed, but He Long habitually carried a weapon and a forced arrest risked a confrontation. Zhou personally went to He Long’s residence, reassured him that he was being placed in temporary protective custody, and promised to collect him personally once the situation was resolved. Zhou brought him home months later, as promised. He Long died in detention, almost certainly from deliberate mistreatment. When the Party posthumously rehabilitated He Long years after Mao’s death, Zhou attended the memorial service and broke down in open weeping before the assembled mourners.
How Zhou handled the Lin Biao crisis
When the Lin Biao affair finally exploded in September 1971, Zhou managed the crisis from the Great Hall of the People, acting on Mao’s instruction to let events take their course. But the sequence of events before the flight deserves closer attention. After receiving a tip from Lin Biao’s daughter that the family was preparing to flee, Zhou called Lin’s wife, Ye Qun, to warn her against any unauthorized flight, stating that takeoff would require the approval of himself and three senior military commanders. The call did not prevent the departure; it may have heightened the family’s panic and hastened it. Zhou’s precise role in those final hours, whether he was trying to prevent the crisis or manage its outcome, remains a matter of interpretation.
By that point, the rupture between Mao and Lin Biao was already irreparable. The two men had been sitting side by side on the rostrum at Tiananmen, staring straight ahead, no longer speaking. Zhou understood exactly what that silence meant. He remained, as always, on Mao’s side.
In the Cultural Revolution’s final years, Mao launched what became known as the “Criticize Lin Biao, Criticize Confucius” campaign. Among its targets was Zhou himself, accused of leaking state secrets during his negotiations with U.S. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger. The accusation was almost certainly pretextual. Mao, who was ailing and feared he might die before Zhou, appears to have wanted Zhou discredited and weakened before that happened. Zhou wrote self-criticisms. According to some accounts, he wept as he wrote them.
As Zhou was dying of cancer, he confided to his wife, Deng Yingchao, that much had passed between them that he had never found words for. Entering the operating theatre for what would be a final surgery, he insisted to those around him that he had remained loyal to the Party and to the people, and that he had never capitulated to anyone. That a man who had spent decades as the second most powerful figure in the world’s largest authoritarian state would feel compelled to defend his loyalty at the threshold of the operating room speaks to the specific quality of the life he had lived.
The Zhou paradox: enabler, survivor, or both
Across a career that spanned the founding of the Party, the civil war, the Maoist catastrophes, and the Cultural Revolution, Zhou’s defining quality was self-subordination in service of the system’s survival. He endured public humiliation, performed political rituals he privately understood to be absurd, and outlasted colleagues who refused to do the same.
Before Mao received foreign dignitaries, Zhou would sit in Mao’s chair first to verify that it was stable enough to hold him. Every instinct of personal dignity was suppressed in favour of service to the ruler.
Whether Zhou acted from genuine revolutionary conviction, from a calculated judgment that survival within the system was the only way to limit its worst excesses, or simply from fear, is a question only he could have answered. Chen Jian’s biography does not appear to resolve it, and may be right not to try.
The political culture of the Chinese Communist Party was shaped by two templates. One was Mao’s model of unlimited brutality and shameless will to power. The other was Zhou’s model of self-effacement, calculated submission, and complicity maintained through suffering. Party cadres at every level carry traces of both. Both templates remain active inside the Party today. Neither has been honestly examined, and neither has been named for what it is.
Chen Jian’s biography offers a serious starting point for that examination.
Note: The views expressed in this article are the author’s own. The article first appeared on the author’s Facebook page.
