More on Zhou Enlai

Lynn Pan had an interesting yet lyrical write-up of Zhou Enlai (周恩来) in her book Mao Memorabilia The Man and the Myth.

In it, Zhou was described as "the most intriguing Chinese communist leader who ever lived."

"Highborn and bred, he was an urbane and cosmopolitan patrician in a circle of clodhopping, coarse-grained provincials. He cast a spell on all who met him, Chinese and foreign; and so great was his personal charm, so gracious and cultivated his conversation and manner, that in his presence any aversion one felt for Chinese communism invariably withered."

Zhou was also said to have worked "to an unremitting schedule", all the while "measuring those around him as the fortunes of power conflicts shifted daily, trimming his sails to the swirling gusts of Chinese politics yet hiding his course in spite of rising hurricanes."

Pan continued: "It was easy for the Chinese people to love him, the exemplar of political loyalty whose lifelong and selfless devotion to the affairs of state was inspired and ennobled by patriotism. It is also easy, in hindsight, to have misgivings about him, to see in his allegiance to Mao too much subservience and too great a readiness to compromise."

"The story is told that when a Party cadre fulminated at the thought of having to consort with fascist butchers in the communists' second alliance with the Nationalists, asking: "Are we to become concubines?" Zhou's answer was, "We will become prostitutes if necessary." No surrender was too base if survival were at stake."

"If a single thread ran through Zhou's long career, it was his exceptional ability for political survival. Never to hanker for the number one position ensured that he remained number two until his dying day. This was the chief secret of his political staying power so high up the slippery sloped hierarchy. Another was his cultivation of a quality which one European observer has likened to water: utterly fluid yet absolutely resilient, taking the shape of whatever vessel it fills, yet never yielding "one single atom of its own nature."

"In stark contrast to Map, he expounded no theory, left no treatise on his thinking; and what he truly believed, where he stood politically, remains a mystery."

Pan added that Zhou knew never to stand up to or cross Mao. Zhou also "impassively endured the insults and enmities of people beneath his quality - Jiang Qing (江青) with Mao's endorsement, stopped at nothing to destroy him."

Pan asked: "What was it that made him abase himself? Was it his understanding of the terrible necessities of power? His determination to hang on to that power at whatever cost, not for the sake of power as such, but for the means it would give him to win? For win he assuredly did. He, not Mao, had the last laugh beyond the grave."

Zhou was also described as an "enigma to the end."

"What face, intent upon what truth, would the moon at the window show if he were glimpsed in the depth of night? The true face behind that handsome, polished exterior remains tantalizing, so elusive indeed that when we try to grasp it, it slips away from us into nothingness."