Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary, A Biography

by Wenqian, Gao

• ISBN13: 9781586484156
• ISBN10: 158648415X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-10-29
• Publisher: Perseus Books Group

Summary

Zhou Enlai, the premier of the People's Republic of China from 1949 until his death in 1976, is the last Communist political leader to be revered by the Chinese people. He is considered "a modern saint" who offered protection to his people during the Cultural Revolution; an admirable figure in an otherwise traumatic and bloody era. Works about Zhou in China are heavily censored, and every hint of criticism is removedso when Gao Wenqian first published this groundbreaking, provocative biography in Hong Kong, it was immediately banned in the People's Republic.Using classified documents spirited out of China, Gao Wenqian offers an objective human portrait of the real Zhou, a man who lived his life at the heart of Chinese politics for fifty years, who survived both the Long March and the Cultural Revolution not thanks to ideological or personal purity, but because he was artful, crafty, and politically supple. He may have had the looks of a matinee idol, and Nixon may have called him "the greatest statesman of our era," but Zhou's greatest gift was to survive, at almost any price, thanks to his acute understanding of where political power resided at any one time.

Author Biography

Gao Wenqian is the former official biographer of Zhou Enlai at the Chinese Institute of Central Documents. He participated in preparing the official versions of Biography of Mao Zedong and Biography of Zhou Enlai, granting him access to highly classified archives of the Chinese Communist Party. Gao came to the U.S. in 1993 as visiting scholar at Columbia University. Later, he received funding from the Wilson International Center at Princeton University and Harvard University. He lives in Queens, New York.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. ix
The Kiss of Death	p. 1
The Making of a Revolutionary	p. 21
A Young Communist in Europe	p. 39
Building the Infrastructure of Revolution	p. 49
Birds of a Different Feather	p. 63
A Rising Star	p. 75
Trapping the "Chinese Khrushchev"	p. 89
"Preparing to Take the Test"	p. 105
"A Man of Both Sides"	p. 131
A Whirlpool of Absurdity	p. 149
No Exit	p. 165
Heir Pre-emptive	p. 183
Night Flight	p. 201
Whither China's Future?	p. 229
Long Knives	p. 237
From Duet to Duel	p. 249
Sick-Bed Politics	p. 263
The Final Battle	p. 275
Epilogue: More Power in Death than Life	p. 305
Author's Note	p. 311
Translators' Note	p. 316
Acknowledgments	p. 318
List of Sources	p. 319
Index	p. 331
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