Zhou Enlai: A Life
Chen Jian
Belknap Press: 2024
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Zhou Enlai was not a man prone to emotional outbursts. As the first premier and foreign minister of the People’s Republic of China, two positions he held from 1949—the first until his death in 1976 and the second until 1958— he almost invariably projected self-control. His cool was all the more remarkable given that he spent most of those years under severe emotional strain, in the fickle and combustible atmosphere permeating the higher echelons of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

But even Zhou had his limits and, in a meeting with his aides in late 1971 or early 1972, something snapped. One of them later recalled the premier’s tears “turning into a cry”, his lament getting louder until “he wailed, choked with sobs”. The exact causes of this uncharacteristic meltdown remain unclear, but in his thoughtful and meticulous new biography, Chen Jian, a professor of history at New York University and NYU-Shanghai, speculates that Zhou might have begun to feel the weight of history. Then seventy-three and overworked, he had long been serving as cat’s paw to Mao’s disastrous social experiments. Had the guilt become overwhelming? The self-loathing for failing to oppose the chairman unbearable? Or was it the realisation that he had turned his back on the ideals of his youth?  We will probably never know, but Chen makes a strong, albeit implicit, case that Zhou largely had himself to blame.

• Tags: Chen Jian, China, Issue 37, Martin Laflamme, Zhou Enlai