China’s Zhou Enlai: A Biography
By Chen Jian
Belknap Press
ISBN: 978-0674659582
840pp.

hou Enlai, who served as China’s prime minister for 17 years, has left his imprint not just on the history of China but on the history of the world. While he always operated under the shadow of Chairman Mao Zedong, he was the man who put China on the map of the world. Chen Jian, a professor of history at New York University and NTY-Shanghai, has penned his biography.

Zhou’s role in establishing Sino-Pakistani ties is well known in Pakistan. After its border conflict with India in 1962, China began to see Pakistan as a bulwark against India, with whom it had previously had friendly ties. After the September 1965 war, it began supplying arms and ammunition to Pakistan after the US suspended its military supplies.

In 1971, Pakistan would facilitate the establishment of ties between the US and China, and act as a gateway to Beijing for Dr Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s special envoy. Kissinger met with Mao and Zhou and laid the foundations for Nixon’s visit to China. Zhou thought that Kissinger was “very intelligent, indeed a doctor.” Years later, Kissinger would reciprocate the sentiments and write that Zhou was “one of the two or three most important men I have ever met.”

Early in life, Zhou took the time to learn English and read Adam Smith and Karl Marx. He also spent a good bit of time overseas in Manchuria, Japan, France, Germany and the UK. That gave him a perspective that would help him cement China’s ties with the world decades later.

His stay in Europe inspired him to pull China out of the chaos and poverty into which it had slumped. It also convinced him that the way to the future lay in communism and not imperialism. He became convinced that a better future would only be achieved through a people’s revolution, fully knowing that all revolutions have a downside, and are often accompanied by the massacre of millions.

A voluminous biography of China’s celebrated former prime minister, based on previously inaccessible documents, is also partly a biography of Chairman Mao Zedong and a history of modern China

When Zhou was 26 years old, he met Mao in Guangdong. He knew he did not have Mao’s charisma or utopianism, nor did he intend to head the Communist Party. He was content to be a man of action.

During the Long March of 1934-35, he became aware of Mao’s ambitions and realised that it would be tough to deal with him. In the years that followed, he came to respect Mao’s military genius, but also found him to be extremely abusive, not only to his subordinates but also to his peers.

Soon after independence in 1949, Mao declared that the new China would be a “republic of federation” comprising several autonomous regions. The Communist Party declared that regions such as Tibet and Xinjiang would have the right of self-determination and would, indeed, be free to separate from China. In due course of time, this proved to be nothing but chicanery.

A few years after independence, the Korean War broke out. China entered the war on behalf of North Korea. When the war ended three years later, the demarcation line that separates the North from the South had not moved much. However, that did not stop Mao and Zhou from claiming a glorious victory. Neither one said a word about the hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers who had died in the war.

In the years that followed, Mao, the ‘Great Helmsman’, would drag China into a series of convulsions: the Great Leap Forward, the Great Famine, and the Cultural Revolution of the Proletariat. Liu Shaoqi, a future president of China, noted that 70 percent casualties were due to human mistakes and only 30 percent by natural causes.

During the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards were given the freedom to go after any political figure who disagreed with Mao. They would vilify the person and physically and emotionally molest them. Even Zhou was not spared. Marx’s ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ had morphed into the dictatorship of a single man, in which no one was sure when they would fall victim to psychological torture and political purges.

The book brings out the fact that Zhou’s major success was in foreign relations, where the shadow of Mao did not fall on him. He rose to prominence at the Bandung Conference in April 1955, where he put forward a vision of unity between Asian and African countries. He said China would help countries that had suffered at the hands of the colonial powers transition to a bright future, but not impose its communist model of governance on them. Zhou said he had come to seek common ground, not to create division.

The book also makes clear that, to survive, Zhou had to live the life of a sycophant. It also quotes a correspondent of the New York Times who had interviewed him in the 1940s and then again in the 1970s and concluded that Zhou was one of the world’s greatest actors.

The book brings out the complex dynamics that prevailed between the Soviet Union and China. Mao and Stalin were ostensibly comrades in arms in the great struggle against US imperialism, but underneath that façade the reality was quite different. Indeed, at one point, Mao feared that the Soviet Union would obliterate Beijing with a nuclear strike.

The biography is extremely detailed, encyclopaedic at times, based on the author’s reading of previously inaccessible documents. The text is 690 pages long and it’s followed by 127 pages of notes. It is as much a history of China as a biography of Zhou, and partly that of Mao, as it seeks to shed light on their tempestuous relationship, a topic not often covered in other histories.

But it does have its shortcomings. It barely touches on Sino-Pakistan ties. Liu Shaoqi’s visit to Pakistan as president is not mentioned, nor is the September 1965 war. Even more surprisingly, there is no reference to the 1971 war and the secession of East Pakistan, and no insights on why China did not intervene on Pakistan’s behalf. There is barely any discussion of the Indo-China war of 1962 and no reference to the various Arab-Israeli wars that were fought during Zhou’s tenure. The narration is often tedious and stilted.

Even then, it is essential reading for those with a serious interest in world history.

The reviewer is the author of Rethinking the National Security of Pakistan: The Price of Strategic Myopia. X: @ahmadfaruqui

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, March 16th, 2025