Zhou Enlai

The Enigma Behind Chairman Mao

Michael Dillon

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781788319300
• eBook ISBN: 9781786726667
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Enigmatic, Eminence grise, the 'power behind the throne' – these phrases sum up Zhou Enlai's long and varied, but always pivotal, political career in the Chinese Communist Party from the 1920s to 1970s.

Born in 1898, Zhou witnessed several of the most important events in China's modern history and was a close associate of both the nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek and communist leader Mao Zedong, whom he served under as China's first premier from 1949 until 1976. Zhou was also a major ally of Deng Xiaoping – a source, for example, of major influence on his 'Four Modernizations' in agriculture, industry, science and technology, and the military. He was thus the prime architect of China's drive towards superpower status and one of the key determinants of China's central role in the modern world.

Zhou does not conform readily to any of the stereotypes of communist leaders, Chinese or otherwise. Cultivated and urbane, he was a sympathetic and intellectual character, who was well-liked by non-communists, foreigners and his staff. He was one of the most complex figures in the politics of contemporary China, and certainly one of the most interesting, although his influence was never all that obvious. In this book, Michael Dillon restores him to his rightful place in history and analyses the role of a man who was 'a genuine statesman rather than just a political operator'.

Chapter 1

GROWING UP IN HUAI’AN, THE NORTHEAST, TIANJIN AND JAPAN: 1898–1920

Should we not then wish to be fully educated and become men of importance so that we are competent to undertake formidable responsibilities for the nation in the future? The foundation for such heavy responsibilities is in the three or four years at primary school. How should we, fellow students, strive towards this if we are not to be ashamed?¹

Zhou Enlai’s early years were spent in his home province of Jiangsu, in Manchuria which was increasingly under the economic and political influence of Japan, and then in the port city of Tianjin, with which he retained a lifelong connection. At the age of 19 he followed the example of many of his compatriots and set sail to study in Japan, the country that was simultaneously a model for China’s development and a threat to its independence.

Huai’an

Huai’an is an ancient city in the eastern province of Jiangsu, situated at the conjunction of the Grand Canal, which linked Hangzhou with Beijing, and the Huai River as it surges east. In the Ming dynasty (1388–1644) it was the home town of the novelist Wu Cheng’en who wrote Journey to the West (better known in the English-speaking world as Monkey). Under the Qing (1644–1911) it housed the yamen office responsible for grain transport to the capital and, before the rise of the railways, was an important communications node and regional commercial centre. Huai’an is in Subei (‘north Jiangsu’), a world away from Shanghai, the treaty port city that epitomized China’s modernization and development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Subei people, with their own dialects and local culture, were looked down on by the cosmopolitan and sophisticated population of Shanghai: many migrated to the metropolis, but they were treated as an underclass, content to live in shanty towns and work in menial jobs – ‘coolie labour’ such as pulling rickshaws, collecting rubbish and night-soil and heavy lifting on the docks.

Zhou Enlai was born in Huai’an on 5 March 1898, in a courtyard house in Fuma Alley. Fuma looks as if it should mean an auxiliary horse helping the leading horse pull a carriage or cart, but it also referred to the son-in-law or brother-in-law of an emperor. It is fanciful, but irresistible, to detect here a portent of Zhou’s future role, hitched to the wagon of the Chinese Communist Party, supporting its chairman but never becoming the supreme leader.

Huai’an was Zhou’s birthplace but the family’s official ancestral home (zuji), to which great importance is attached in China, was Shaoxing in Zhejiang province, where the Zhou family had been prominent for generations. The distinguished left-wing writer of short fiction and satirical essays Zhou Shuren – better known by his pen name Lu Xun – was born in Shaoxing and was part of this extended family, as Zhou Enlai acknowledged in an article for the Communist Party’s New China Daily to commemorate the second anniversary of the writer’s death on 20 October 1938.

The Zhou family

Zhou Enlai’s grandfather, Zhou Qikui, had moved his branch of the family to Huai’an. In addition to a large working population, Huai’an had a notable merchant class, running general stores or dealing in the renowned Shaoxing rice wine. Shaoxing also had a reputation for the education of minor officials who handled legal, fiscal and secretarial duties for the local bureaucracy. Officials from Shaoxing staffed the yamen offices of district magistrates throughout China, usually working behind the scenes, and the name ‘Shaoxing yamen advisers’ became a common term for junior officials, whatever their origins. It was as a magistrate’s assistant that grandfather Zhou Qikui came to Huai’an; he later moved to other counties as assistant magistrate and magistrate and ended his career as the head of a prefecture. While still a lowly magistrate’s assistant he had purchased the Fuma Alley house with his younger brother as the family home for his four sons which included Zhou Enlai’s father and his father’s brother. Grandfather Zhou died at the age of 50 leaving only the house. As he had not amassed great wealth, unlike many officials of his rank, the fortunes of the family were at a low ebb.

Zhou Enlai’s mother, Wang Dong’er, also came from a family of officials; her father, Wang Qingxuan, had served as magistrate in Huai’an’s Qinghe county. She had been educated for five or six years at a jiashu, a traditional primary school which only admitted members of the extended family; by all accounts she was intelligent and capable. Like most women of her background and class, she devoted her energies to her family, giving birth to two more boys after Enlai: Enpu who was a year his junior and Enshou five years later. The common first syllable of their given names identifies them as belonging to the same generation.

Zhou’s father, Shaogang, was honest and kindly but unworldly and often out of work. Before Zhou Enlai was even six months old he was adopted by his uncle Zhou Yigan, his father’s younger brother. Uncle Yigan had been married for less than a year and had no children but he had fallen seriously ill. The greatest of the ‘three violations’ of the Confucian code of filial piety is the failure to leave a descendant. The adoption reassured the dying uncle, and when he passed away within a few months Zhou’s aunt had a child to care for: the financial pressures on Zhou’s father were reduced.

Zhou’s adoptive mother was calm and gentle. She was from an impoverished Subei family and even at the age of 22 was exceptionally well read and an accomplished painter. As a young widow whose life outside the home was constrained by social convention, she devoted herself to her adoptive son and taught him to read and write the great poetry of the Tang dynasty when he was three or four years old (4 sui). He called her ‘mum’ (niang), and his birth mother was ‘godmother’ (ganma, literally ‘dry mother’). Zhou later attributed his learning and his ‘love of tranquillity’ to the fact that he hardly spent a day away from his kind and courteous adoptive mother until her death.

A Confucian education

In 1903 Zhou began to attend the family school, embarking on the familiar curriculum, the Three Character Classic and Thousand Character Classic, and one less familiar book, the Song dynasty anthology, Poems of a Child Prodigy (Shengtong shi). Extracts followed from the Analects of Confucius, the book of Mencius, the Great Learning, the Doctrine of the Mean and the Book of Poetry, providing a solid training in the classical language and Confucian thought of traditional Chinese high culture.

The following year he moved with his father and mother, his adoptive mother and younger brothers to his maternal grandfather’s house in Qingjiangpu, Qinghe county, transferring to another family school. He accompanied his birth mother when she was called on to resolve domestic disputes in this large and sometimes quarrelsome family, listening attentively to the antagonists before suggesting a resolution. It was, however, his adoptive mother’s fairy tales and stories of history that he recollected well into his adulthood. A move into another old family house followed in 1905 but he continued at the same school, and when he was seven or eight she introduced him to fiction. From his grandfather’s extensive library, he took Water Margin, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Biography of Yue Fei, Dream of the Red Chamber, Journey to the West (Monkey) and Flowers in the Mirror. The first three are adventure stories focusing on politics, military action and rebellion and were also firm favourites of many Communist revolutionaries, including Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. The other three are very different: Dream of the Red Chamber is the classic family saga; Journey to the West is a fantastic tale of the quest for Buddhist scriptures in India, and its political content is largely satirical; the early nineteenth-century Flowers in the Mirror is also a fantasy and bears some resemblance to Gulliver’s Travels but is unusual for its feminist themes.

Poverty and keeping up appearances

The family’s finances were in a parlous state. Zhou’s father brought in only 16 yuan a month from his menial job and his birth mother became ill from overwork and anxiety and died early in 1907. Zhou’s adoptive mother took him to stay for two months in the house of a cousin in Baoying, but the following July she succumbed to pulmonary tuberculosis. Zhou’s father moved to Hubei province looking for work and Zhou Enlai, who was only nine or ten years old, had to take his younger brothers back to the now dilapidated house in Huai’an. Zhou’s father and uncle were away earning a living, there was little money to spare and his father’s younger brother, Yikui, partially paralysed since childhood, was bedridden. In spite of his youth Zhou took the view that as the eldest able-bodied male he was in charge. The family owned only the house that they lived in, on which there was a partial mortgage, and there were forever creditors at the door. When his uncle sent money, some of the debt could be repaid; otherwise Zhou took his mother’s belongings to the pawnshop to keep the family warm and fed. He later recalled that he had maintained appearances in spite of their poverty and managed the family’s ‘external relations’, ‘remembering the birthdays and the anniversaries of the deaths of relatives, borrowing money to pay for appropriate offerings and going to their houses to kowtow’.

Zhou managed to continue attending a nearby school run by Gong Yinsun, a relative with a modern outlook. Gong, who had been to Japan, owned not only classic works of Chinese literature but also books and magazines extolling contemporary Western civilization which set in train Zhou’s political enlightenment. His studies, poetry, and games organized by the other children at the school, provided a temporary respite from the difficulties at home, but he was beginning to detest the hypocritical customs of the traditional Chinese family.

By the time he was eleven or twelve, his uncle Yigeng had been promoted in the Commissary Section of the Ministry of Finance in Liaoning province. Zhou had kept in touch with him by letter, and as Yigeng had no children he was delighted to invite his talented young nephew to join him in the northeast.²

Patriotic education in Manchuria

In the spring of 1910 Zhou Enlai left his remaining family and travelled to the northeast with a cousin who had been visiting Huai’an. Manchuria was a cold land of snow-capped mountains and dark turbulent rivers, in stark contrast to the gentle and warm countryside and the sheltered but stultifying family and school environment of the south. He settled in Fengtian (now Liaoning) province and enrolled in the grandly titled Yingang Academy, a newly opened modern primary school in Yinzhou (now Tieling).

It was the year before the collapse of the Chinese empire, and Manchuria was the ‘cockpit of Asia’ as the great powers competed for influence. China and Japan had been at war in 1894–5, primarily over Korea, but China’s defeat resulted in the loss of part of Liaoning to Tsarist Russia. In 1904–5 another war between Russia and the rising imperial power of Japan cost the lives of tens of thousands in Manchuria. Japan defeated Russia and took control of southern Liaoning, increasing its influence in Korea which it annexed in 1910. All Manchuria came under Japanese control when the puppet state of Manzhouguo was created in 1932.

An astute teenager like Zhou Enlai, living and studying in Liaoning between 1910 and 1913, could hardly avoid the mounting resentment at foreign incursions: the competing claims on Manchuria’s territory by Russians in the north and Japanese in the south and the potential threat of Japan’s increasingly aggressive imperial and colonial ambitions. In the autumn of 1910, after six months at the Yingang Academy, his cousin transferred him to the provincial capital Fengtian (now Shenyang), where a more advanced school had been opened. Renamed the Fengtian Dongguan Model School after the 1911 Revolution, it was a progressive institution with a curriculum that included moral education, Chinese language, arithmetic, history, geography, English, the natural sciences, singing, painting and drawing, and gymnastics. This was a revelation after the Confucian rote learning of the family schools. Zhou was hard working, polite and disciplined: he excelled in Chinese language and continued to read classical works such as Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji), the History of the Han Dynasty (Hanshu) and Leaving Sorrow or The Lament (Lisao), the poem by Qu Yuan (340–278 BC) that continues to appeal to young Chinese as a symbol of patriotism and the quest for justice. Zhou’s written exercises were often held up as models for the other pupils to emulate.

The students were regaled with stories about the current political crisis and legendary Chinese heroes. In the school holidays Zhou stayed in a village to the south of the city with one of his school friends, He Lüzhen. One of the decisive battles of the Russo-Japanese War had been fought nearby: on a hill behind the village was a monument to fallen Russian soldiers and on Smoking Dragon Hill to the east was a pagoda built by the Japanese. His friend’s grandfather took them to the battlefield and composed a poem about the effect of the fighting on him and the need for an old man to pass the torch on to the younger generation. The manuscript of this poem is in the Museum of the Chinese Revolution.

Zhou became an avid reader of the Fengtian newspaper Shengjing Daily. He followed local and national news and discussions of possible solutions to China’s crisis, inspired by two teachers. Gao Panzhi, a historian, had demonstrated his opposition to the Manchus by cutting off the hated queue or pigtail. He talked about the revolution against the Manchus, and they read essays by the radical writer Zhang Taiyan (Zhang Binglin), publications of Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary organization the Tongmenghui and Zou Rong’s celebrated anti-Manchu tract, Revolutionary Army, Geming jun. Zhou read other anti-Manchu writings, including Ten Days at Yangzhou (Yangzhou shitian ji), an account of the depredations wrought by the conquering Manchus in the southern Chinese city. A geography teacher called Mao was a reformer and introduced Zhou to the writings of Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, the leading contemporary political thinkers. Gao Panzhi’s revolutionary style appealed more to Zhou, and when news of the 1911 revolution reached the school he cut off his own queue to symbolize the break with the Qing regime although it was no longer dangerous as the Manchus had lost power.

An essay written by Zhou in October 1912, ‘Words of gratitude on the second anniversary of the founding of the Dongguan Model School’, is his earliest known composition. It was highly praised by his teachers and published in collections of model essays in 1913 and again in 1915. It not only demonstrates his ability in composition in the literary language but also acknowledges what he learnt from his teachers and school friends. He announced his aspirations to be a great man and to contribute to the resolution of the country’s problems, but modestly conceded that any success would be due to his education at this school. Sanctimonious and somewhat sycophantic, perhaps, but he was only fourteen and, however ‘modern’ his new school was, he had not yet cast aside his early Confucian training. His social conscience and commitment to national salvation were becoming apparent.

Zhou made friends readily in the northeast but was sometimes teased for his thick southern accent and for being a xiaomanzi, ‘rough tribesman’, a term the Manchu elite had used since the seventeenth century for the conquered Chinese of the south. He detested violence but would not take beatings lying down and fought back when he and his friends were attacked by older students. To deal with this, and the cold wind, sandstorms and a diet based on sorghum rather than rice, he took to running, football and a programme of exercises. Later in life he credited this regime for making him tough enough to face the vicissitudes that followed.³

Tianjin and Nankai School

In February 1913, Yigeng found new employment in the transport section of the Tianjin Changlu Salt Industry Company. Zhou, now fifteen, accompanied his uncle to Tianjin, northern China’s international port, and they set up home in a single-storied house in Yuanji Alley, Yuanwei Street.

Zhou’s immediate priorities were the examinations for entry into higher education. His target was Nankai School, originally the Yan family private school, and established in 1904 by Yan Xiu, a Hanlin Academician and Qing government official. Yan was a reformist, who favoured the abolition of the traditional Confucian imperial examinations; they were eventually discontinued in 1905. Nankai School offered a Western curriculum to prepare students for university entry, and in 1919 Yan Xiu and the school’s head teacher, Zhang Boling, who had inspected educational establishments in Japan and the West, created Nankai University, the most prestigious higher education establishment in Tianjin and still a highly regarded university.

Nankai School enrolled its students in the summer, by way of three entrance examinations in English language, Chinese language and mathematics. Zhou sailed through the Chinese examination, but as Nankai placed great emphasis on English he spent over three months at a crammer to improve his performance. He took the examination on 6 August 1913, was admitted on 9 August and later promoted to a higher class.

Zhou’s Nankai education was decisive for the trajectory of his life. He was a Nankai student from the age of 15 to 19; he lived in a student house and took part fully in the life of the school. He formed a close bond with the two students with whom he lodged; they rarely mixed with other students. He seldom returned home, even during vacations: some of his essays refer to homesickness and missing his family but that could be convention. Nankai was popular with home students but also with Chinese from overseas. Zhou’s background was more modest than most, and his family was hard-pressed to find the annu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• Preface: Life and Career of an Enigmatic Revolutionary
• Chapter 1: Growing Up in Huai’an, The Northeast, Tianjin and Japan: 1898–1920
• Chapter 2: French Lessons and Revolutionary Politics: 1920–4
• Chapter 3: Guangzhou and The Huangpu Military Academy: 1924–6
• Chapter 4: In the Eye of the Storm, Shanghai and Wuhan: 1927
• Chapter 5: Crisis for CCP and 6th Party Congress in Moscow: 1927–8
• Chapter 6: Jiangxi Soviet: 1931–4
• Chapter 7: Long March and Yan’an: 1936
• Chapter 8: Kidnap and Resistance: Xi’an 1936–7
• Chapter 9: Partners at War: 1937–45
• Chapter 10: Chongqing and Nanjing – War, Civil War and the Aftermath: 1937–43
• Chapter 11: Preparing for Power – Yan’an, Chongqing and Nanjing: 1943–6
• Chapter 12: Civil War to People’s Republic: 1946–9
• Chapter 13: Premier and Foreign Minister: 1949–55
• Chapter 14: From Rustic Stage to International Arena: 1954–5
• Chapter 15: The Intelligentsia and Internal Power Struggles: 1955–7
• Chapter 16: Asian Diplomatic Mission: 1956–7
• Chapter 17: ‘Rectification’ and ‘Rightists’: 1957
• Chapter 18: Into the Crucible – The Great Leap Forward: 1958
• Chapter 19: High Noon at Lushan: 1958–9
• Chapter 20: Famine, Drought and Recovery: 1959–62
• Chapter 21: Twilight of the Long March Leadership-Prelude to Cultural Revolution: 1962–5
• Chapter 22: Unnatural Disaster-Cultural Revolution: 1966–7
• Chapter 23: Descent into Chaos, Recovery and Final Years: 1967–76
• Epilogue: Zhou Enlai, The Lost Leader?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint