• • •
Zhou’s intellectual power and personal magnetism entranced many people who did not realize that these qualities went hand in hand with those of a ruthless political actor. Journalist Fred Utley said that Zhou was “hard to resist . . . witty, charming, and tactful.” Theodore White admitted to a “near total suspension of disbelief or questioning judgment” in his presence. A Chinese newspaperman in Japan said, “I should say he is the most impressive public figure I have ever met.”
Those who saw the ruthless politician and who were not taken in by him painted an altogether different portrait of Zhou. Walter Robinson, an assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs during the 1950s, once told me that Zhou, charming though he was, had killed people with his own hands and then departed calmly smoking a cigarette.
A United States official who had dealt with Zhou in the 1940s said, “You pronounce his name like Joe, and—well, that’s the kind of a guy he seemed to me, like a guy named Joe. I thought for a while we could split him away. Then all of a sudden I knew I was wrong. He wouldn’t agree that Monday was Monday unless it would help him.”
And a high-ranking Kuomintang negotiator once said, “At first, I was completely convinced that he was right, and there perhaps should be more concession on both sides of the negotiation. Then, as the days went by, I began to wonder if this man, however sincere he might be, was not totally blinded by his political prejudices. Finally, I came to recognize that there was not a grain of truth in him. . . . But in the end, I realized that it’s all acting. He is the greatest actor I have ever seen. He’d laugh one moment and cry the next, and make his audience laugh and cry with him. But it’s all acting!”
The two images interlocked, of course. Zhou would always act in accordance with the interests of his country and ideology, and ingratiating himself with foreign diplomats and journalists almost always furthered those interests. But should his interests require him to break a trust irreparably, he would part company unsentimentally. In our relationship Zhou faithfully kept to the letter and spirit of our agreements. He did not do so, however, for the sake of simple friendship. Rather, he formed the friendship for the sake of his interests.
Writing years after having known Zhou in Yan’an and now realizing that his absolute faith in Zhou had been misplaced, Theodore White brought both images into focus, stating that Zhou was “a man as brilliant and ruthless as any the Communist movement has thrown up in this century. He could act with absolute daring, with the delicacy of a cat pouncing on a mouse, with the decision of a man who has thought his way through to his only course of action—and yet he was capable of warm kindness, irrepressible humanity and silken courtesy.”
• • •
Combining as it did the personal qualities of a Confucian gentleman and the ruthless political instincts of a Leninist revolutionary, Zhou’s personality was ideally suited to his political role. Like an alloy of several metals, its fusion of elements was stronger than any one element would have been individually. The Communist system rewards masters of intrigue, but often consumes practitioners of compromise. Zhou’s political genius was that he could play successfully the roles of both infighter and conciliator.
A journalist once asked Zhou if, as a Chinese Communist, he was more Chinese or more Communist. Zhou replied, “I am more Chinese than Communist.” Zhou’s colleagues were all Chinese nationals, of course. But most of them were Communists first and Chinese second. Zhou deeply believed in his ideology as well, but it was not his nature to carry this belief to extremes.
Zhou’s Mandarin background also set him apart from his colleagues. His family had been rooted in the ways and manners of old China, its members maintaining their social position for centuries by training their children in the Chinese classics and placing them in positions in the imperial bureaucracy. Zhou renounced the philosophical cornerstones of Chinese society in his adolescence, but he could never rid himself of their cultural imprint, nor did he wish to. He always retained a certain respect for China’s past—for those elements of the “old society” that deserved preservation.
Unlike most Communist Chinese, he acknowledged repeatedly his indebtedness to his past and to his family. In 1941 he was speaking to a small crowd during a break in the negotiations to restore the alliance between the Communist and Kuomintang parties against the Japanese. For the Chinese in his audience, he struck a reverberating emotional chord when in a hushed voice he remorsefully expressed a personal desire to defeat the Japanese so that he could pay his respects at his mother’s grave: “As for me, the grave of my mother, to whom I owe everything that I am and hope to be, is in Japanese-occupied Zhejiang. How I wish I could just go back there once to clear the weeds on her grave—the least a prodigal son who has given his life to revolution and to his country can do for his mother.”
Also during the war with the Japanese, Zhou’s father, who seemed to fail in every venture he undertook, wrote to his now-famous son asking for money. Zhou obligingly sent him a portion of his meager salary. When his father died in 1942, Zhou ran an obituary in the Communist party newspaper in the manner required by family tradition, an act that must have raised more than a few eyebrows among his revolutionary cohorts.
Many years before our historic meeting in 1972, Zhou told a reporter that it was the fault of the United States that no formal relations existed between our two countries. Any American would be welcome in China, he said, but there would have to be reciprocity. He added, “There is a Chinese saying which runs: ‘It is discourteous not to pay a return visit.’ ” This, he underscored, was said “by Confucius, who was not a Marxist.”
It may seem discordant for a Communist Chinese leader to cite Confucius as an authority, but for Zhou the incident was wholly in character. His upbringing had imbued him with the qualities Confucius ascribed to the “gentleman” or “superior man” who ruled society—intelligence, dignity, grace, kindness, resolution, and forcefulness.
These qualities made Zhou remarkably effective in the personal relations of politics and helped him coexist with his rivals for fully half a century. According to Zhang Guotao, a one-time member of the Communist Chinese politburo, Zhou’s resiliency in intraparty politics and his success as a conciliator owed much to the fact that he was a “round” man: “He belongs in this category as one who is smooth in his dealings with society, who is good at making friends, who never goes to extremes, and who always adapts himself to the existing situation.”
His Confucian virtues also earned Zhou the abiding affection of the Chinese people. He was the only public figure who earned the appellation “our beloved leader.” His popularity was a unique force in Chinese politics, which became most evident at the time of his death. When a television newsreel showed Jiang Qing, who was Mao’s wife and an ultraleftist, disrespectfully refusing to remove her cap as she viewed Zhou’s body, a crowd at a neighborhood television set in Canton began chanting, “Beat her up!”
In his funeral oration Deng Xiaoping, who was Zhou’s chosen deputy, praised the fallen Premier so effusively that the speech became a political issue. The ultraleft called for a condemnation from Mao in a poster that read, “The verdict should be reversed.” Although Mao sympathized politically with the left at that time, he is said to have answered, “The people will surely oppose any attack on Zhou Enlai. The verdict on the memorial speech given at Zhou’s funeral cannot be changed. The people do not support the reversal of the verdict.”
• • •
As a Leninist revolutionary, Zhou often exercised power ruthlessly and cruelly. A friend from secondary school who met Zhou many years later observed that “his eyes were far colder; they had become the eyes of a man who could kill.” The history of Chinese politics and government is filled with bloodshed, but the tyranny of the Communist regime is in a category all its own. Mao, Zhou, and their comrades have been directly or indirectly responsible for the killings of tens of millions of their own people.
I became painfully fa
miliar with the utter brutality of the Chinese Communists during an around-the-world trip I took as Vice President in 1953. I was riding along the border area between Hong Kong and Communist China and stopped to talk to a farmer. He told me, “My wife and two children and I walked one hundred miles to freedom in the new territories in Hong Kong.” I asked why they went to such great lengths to leave Communist China. He replied, “My only brother was blind and had a farm next to me. Because he was blind he could not produce as much as the Communists required in order to pay taxes. The Communists took him away and shot him. We began walking to freedom.”
My interpreter told me a similarly sad story about a seventy-year-old woman who frequently crossed the waterway that runs along the border between the Hong Kong territories and China because she had land on both sides. “One day when she crossed, a Communist shot her down,” he said. “The first shot only wounded her. He walked up to her and pumped three bullets into her back.”
The Communist ideology inured Zhou to such heartless cruelty. Marxism-Leninism has a determinist view of history. Its adherents believe that history will inevitably lead to world communism and that it is their job to hurry history along. By viewing themselves in this way, they sidestep all considerations of morality because all the crimes they commit are simply deemed necessary for the furtherance of history.
A problem arises for the Communists, however, when they disagree among themselves. There is still no room for morality. There is also no room for compromise. This leaves a lot of room for violence. In a disagreement both sides cannot be right, and whichever one is wrong is “impeding the forces of history.” And that high crime often carries the penalty of death.
Yet Zhou preferred using his tactfulness instead of his ruthlessness in both his policies and his politics. As Prime Minister, Zhou carried out vast economic reforms, some of which were beneficial and many of which were harmful, without the social convulsions his rivals so often produced by forcing too many changes too quickly. Against the opposition of radicals who demanded the achievement of the millennium by the next week, Zhou pushed consistently for a program of gradual economic modernization.
In the shifting alliances of Chinese politics, Zhou used power quietly but to great effect. He never gave his colleagues the impression of wanting more power than he had. When a coalition formed around a hardliner who had Mao’s blessing, Zhou would work with his rival despite the distaste he felt for the new policies. He would lie low until the coalition degenerated into a deadlock in which his support became pivotal. At that point he would switch to an opposition faction with a more moderate line.
But if others escalated intraparty battles to violence, Zhou would follow suit. A morbid example occurred shortly after the announcement of the diplomatic rapprochement between the United States and China. It became evident that Lin Biao, who was the leader of the Red Army, had mobilized opposition to the summit. Zhou and his allies fought to suppress them. When it became apparent to Lin that he had lost, he boarded an airplane and tried to flee from the country. During our discussions, Zhou told me that Lin’s plane had been headed toward the Soviet Union, but had disappeared en route. He added that they had not been able to find it since. And then he just smiled.
• • •
The Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and early 1970s was perhaps the most trying ordeal Zhou endured in his years in power.
Mao feared that since the Communist victory in 1949 the nation’s revolutionary spirit and vigor had eroded and that the young people had gone soft. He decided that only in upheaval could China retain his revolutionary values. He called on the youth of China to struggle against the system, declaring, “When we started to make revolution we were mere twenty-three-year-old boys, while the rulers of that time . . . were old and experienced. They had more learning but we had more truth.”
The young people, many of whom were bitterly frustrated by the lack of opportunities in education and in the economy, responded with a vengeance, burning down schools and factories by the hundreds. Rephrasing the cliché that “revolutions always devour their children,” philosopher Lin Yutang commented, “In China it is the children who are devouring the revolution.”
The vaguely defined mission of Mao’s Red Guards was to disrupt the political and bureaucratic order. Zhou sat at the top of that order as Prime Minister. At the height of the Cultural Revolution, nearly half a million Red Guards surrounded the Great Hall of the People, virtually imprisoning Zhou. With customary aplomb he engaged his captors in a series of marathon meetings lasting three days and two nights, which aired their grievances and calmed their tempers. Soon thereafter the throng started disbanding.
When Kissinger returned from his secret trip to China in 1971, he told me that Zhou could barely conceal his anguish when speaking about the Cultural Revolution. This was not surprising. Zhou was a first-generation Communist leader who had fought in the revolution to achieve an egalitarian vision; he was also a leader who pushed for a program of gradual economic modernization. Therefore, part of him sympathized with the aims of the Cultural Revolution; the other part of him knew that if China was to meet even the most basic needs of its people and its national defense over the next decades, it would have to modernize its economy.
“A builder, not a poet,” as Edgar Snow once described him, Zhou must have anguished as he saw the fury of the Red Guards destroy his meticulously laid groundwork for modernization.
China may remember Zhou as the grand conciliator who held the party and country together, but the world will best remember him as China’s principal diplomat. He was his country’s Metternich, Molotov, and Dulles. An instinctive agility in negotiations, a command of the principles of international power, and a moral certitude derived from ardent ideological beliefs combined in Zhou with an intimate understanding of foreign countries, a long-term historical vision, and a wealth of personal experience to produce one of the most accomplished diplomats of our time.
Mao gave Zhou a fairly free rein in foreign affairs. Referring to specific international issues, Mao said at the outset of our meeting in 1972, “Those questions are not questions to be discussed in my place. They should be discussed with the Premier. I discuss the philosophical questions.” Our talks then touched on the whole range of issues on the summit’s agenda, but from a philosophic point of view. Most interestingly, throughout the rest of my meetings with Zhou, he often referred to what Mao had said as a guide for his own positions in negotiations.
Zhou was a central participant in two key diplomatic events that more than any others created today’s global balance: the Sino-Soviet split and the Chinese-American rapprochement. The controversy that brought about the break between China and the Soviet Union really boiled down to one major question: Who was going to be number one in the Communist bloc? The Soviet Union, as the first great Communist power, had enjoyed supremacy within the international Communist movement since 1917 and was doggedly determined to retain its preeminence. China may have been the second great Communist power, but, as Chinese, Mao and Zhou were certainly not willing to accept the rank of second.
The issue of primacy existed on the levels both of substance and of symbolism. When the Soviet Union was the only Communist country with nuclear weapons, its leaders could demand that the Chinese go along with their diplomacy because China depended on the Soviet nuclear umbrella for its protection. They also used their nuclear monopoly as a not-so-subtle threat; in the Communist world, the umbrella the Soviets hold over their allies is accompanied with a sword. It is not surprising, therefore, that the Chinese wanted to develop their own nuclear weapons. They asked the Soviets for technical aid, which the Soviets granted only reluctantly and later revoked.
On the level of symbolism the Chinese leaders felt that anything short of equality with the Soviets constituted kowtowing to the barbarians. After a meeting in Moscow in 1957, Zhou complained vehemently that Khrushchev should learn Chinese so that their talks would not always have to be conducted in Russian. �
�But Chinese is so difficult,” begged Khrushchev. “It’s no harder for you than Russian was for me,” Zhou replied angrily.
The bitterness of the dispute became known at the congress of the Soviet Communist party in 1961. Khrushchev sought a denunciation of Albania, which had stubbornly stuck in its Stalinist ways despite the Kremlin’s new line. As the official observer of the Chinese Communist party, Zhou opposed him. He may have reasoned that if independentminded Albania were denounced today, China might be denounced tomorrow.
Khrushchev responded by pushing a collective denunciation of Stalinism through the congress. Zhou then laid a wreath at Stalin’s tomb with an inscription reading, “The Great Marxist-Leninist.” Khrushchev, never one to be outdone in such matters, delivered a final slap by engineering passage of a resolution for the removal of Stalin’s body from the Lenin Mausoleum. Zhou walked out of the party congress, and the schism between the two countries became irreparable. “The ghost of John Foster Dulles,” Zhou said some years later, “has now taken up residence in the Kremlin.”
As a result of the Sino-Soviet split, China found itself isolated and surrounded by hostile powers by the late 1960s. Before making my final decisions on moving toward an accommodation with Peking, I tried to put myself in Zhou’s place. In virtually every direction he looked, he would see actual or potential enemies.
To the northeast he saw Japan. While the Japanese posed no military threat to China, their economic might gave them an awesome potential to do so in the future.
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