Nixon and Mao (6 page)

Chou went back to a China full of anger directed against the Western powers for, as the Chinese saw it, betraying them. The end of the First World War, in which China had participated on the victorious Allied side, had brought hopes that the great powers would be true to their own publicly stated principles and help China rule itself and safeguard its territory. Instead, the Allies had decided, at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, to award former German possessions in China to their ally Japan, despite the fact that China had also been an ally of the victorious powers, and that the West had repeatedly professed to be fighting for principles of democracy and justice. The decision was based on cold calculation: China was weak and Japan was strong. It produced huge anti-Western and anti-Japanese demonstrations in Beijing on May 4, 1919, which then spread across China.

The collapse of the 1911 republic into warlordism and the burgeoning threat as Japan tried to bring China under its control stimulated an intense artistic and political ferment, which came to be known as the May Fourth Movement. Writers and scholars moved beyond criticizing their leaders and attacked the whole of the old order, which, they argued, had got China into its present miserable straits. Reverence for the past and obedience to authority had trapped the Chinese in outmoded and useless ways of thinking and acting. The time had come, the radicals argued, for China to become modern, to follow, in the language of the time, Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy. The Allied betrayal of China at the peace conference helped persuade many that Communism and its promise of a classless democracy, not capitalism and liberal democracy, was the best hope for China. Moreover, radical change at home, they hoped, would make China stronger abroad.

Chou enrolled at the university in Tianjin but spent most of his time on political work. His revolutionary activities brought him his first term in jail and his first encounter with a fifteen-year-old who was one of the leading lights of the local Girl Students’ Patriotic Association. Deng Yingchao would become his wife seven years later. Chou may also have met at this time another, slightly older revolutionary: Mao Tse-tung, the man whose faithful subordinate he would one day become.
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In 1920, Chou sailed for France on a work-study program to learn more about the world outside China. For the next three years, he eked out a living writing articles for Chinese papers and working at menial jobs. He also wrote faithfully to Deng. “I haven’t made a single female friend,” he assured her, “and I have no intention of having one in the future.” From his base in France, Chou managed a considerable amount of travel—to London, which he did not like, and to Germany, which he found more congenial. Increasingly he made a name for himself among his fellow Chinese, as an organizer, writer, and revolutionary. (The French police eventually got wind of his activities, but only six months after he had returned to China.) In the summer of 1922, he helped found a European branch of the new Chinese Communist Party. Although he could not know it, he was preparing himself for his future management of China’s foreign affairs.
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Chou came home to China in the summer of 1924. Warlords were running the country, but in the south a new political movement was growing. Sun Yat-sen’s Guomindang, or National People’s Party, was, as its name suggested, nationalist and, in those days, a mix of radicals and workers on the one hand and the propertied classes on the other. The party was building new branches and creating its own army with support from the Soviet Union, which saw this as a way to strike at the imperialists. The Soviets ordered the tiny Chinese Communist Party to cooperate faithfully with them. Let the Guomindang unite China and kick out the Western powers, and then the Chinese Communists, the revolutionary experts in Moscow asserted, could overthrow the bourgeois forces represented by the Guomindang and have a proper socialist revolution. Chou, although this was later played down in accounts in China, worked tirelessly for the coalition and, indeed, ended up virtually running the Guomindang’s military academy.

He also found time to marry Deng Yingchao, herself by now an experienced revolutionary. Perhaps there was some love involved, but their relationship seems to have been more a political partnership. Chou apparently told a niece years later that he had given up a woman he loved because he needed a revolutionary comrade: “And so I chose your aunt.” Deng, like Chou, was prepared to commit herself wholeheartedly. When she became pregnant shortly after their marriage, she had an abortion. “We felt,” the couple said later, “a child would interfere with our work.” She had miscarriages later but never her own children. Like many of the revolutionary wives, she paid a price. In the early 1930s, she came down with tuberculosis and had to be carried on a litter for much of the Long March when the Communists fled through the Chinese countryside from their former allies, the Guomindang.
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At the end of the 1920s there seemed to be a moment of hope for China: the Guomindang, now under the leadership of Chiang Kaishek, managed to bring most of the country under at least nominal control. China at last had a central government that worked. In response, possibly because they felt guilty about their years of exploitation of China, most of the foreign powers started to give back the concessions they had wrung out of China over the previous century; Japan alone held back. The Communists were not there to share in the triumph because Chiang Kai-shek turned on them as soon as he no longer needed their help. By the end of 1927, the Communist organization, which had been strongest in the cities, was shattered and thousands of Communists had been killed or thrown in jail. A few scattered groups remained at large, out in the countryside, where they lived hand to mouth like bandits. Chou, with a substantial price on his head, went underground in Shanghai and, with what was left of the Communist Party’s organization, managed to escape the Guomindang’s attentions until the start of the 1930s.

The Communists’ disaster was made worse by incompetent and impossible instructions from Communist International headquarters in Moscow. The Soviets, however, invariably laid the blame on the Chinese Communists themselves. Chou somehow managed to avoid the repeated purges of the Chinese leadership. He made abject self-criticisms to the Communist Party whenever necessary. In 1931, as the Guomindang hounded the remaining Communists, Chou and his wife abandoned Shanghai for the relative safety of a Communist guerrilla base in south-central China where Mao and others were trying to hang on. Over the next four years, as Guomindang troops closed in, Chou maneuvered adroitly through the shoals of vicious internal party struggles, managing to choose the winning sides. At the beginning of 1935 he threw his support behind Mao. Perhaps he did so out of conviction, or perhaps, as a recent biography of Mao suggests, because he was blackmailed into doing so: in 1932, Guomindang newspapers had published a notice in which Chou renounced Communism, and although Chou denounced the story, almost certainly truthfully, as a fake, Mao held it over him for the rest of his life.
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Chou became Mao’s faithful lieutenant, never bidding for supreme power himself or joining with those who dared to disagree with Mao. As he said in 1972, in one of his last and most humiliating self-criticisms, “I have always thought, and will always think that I cannot be at the helm and can only be an assistant.”
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In 1976, toward the end of his life, as the attacks from the radicals around Mao were mounting, he refused to go into the operating room until he had finished a letter to Mao saying that he had never betrayed the party.
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His survival in the recurrent savage and bloody intraparty struggles won him a comparison to a popular Chinese doll that always righted itself when it was knocked over.

While the Communists struggled to survive, the Guomindang appeared to be consolidating its power and starting to build a new China. Chiang Kai-shek, the young soldier who had emerged as Sun Yat-sen’s successor, and the Guomindang might have brought the remaining warlords under control and finished off the Communists; they might have built a proper infrastructure for China, with roads, airfields, railways, heavy industries, and a sound educational system; they might in time have been a good government. They never had the chance. At the start of the 1930s, the Depression hit the world. China itself, as a largely agricultural economy, was spared the worst of the economic downturn, but it could not escape the impact on international relations. The Western democracies, including the United States, which had helped maintain a stable international order in the 1920s, turned inward, preoccupied with their own problems. Unfortunately, nations like Germany and Italy took a different tack: to secure what they needed, whether territory or influence, and by force if necessary. The Japanese, too, moved down an increasingly nationalistic and militaristic road—necessary, so many of them thought, to protect Japan from the indifference of the great powers. In 1931, Japanese militarists seized Manchuria outright and the world did little to stop them. From 1931 onward, the Japanese maneuvered to extend their sway into the parts of China south of the Great Wall. The Guomindang was forced to divert its resources to dealing with the Japanese threat.

In 1937, Japanese armies invaded China proper, eventually bringing the whole of the rich coastal area into a new Japanese empire. The war with Japan, which was in time absorbed into the Second World War, cut short the prospect that the Guomindang would bring stability and prosperity to China. It also opened the door to the rapid growth of the Chinese Communist Party. Without meaning to, the deeply conservative Japanese militarists saved Communism in China. The Guomindang was distracted from what was an increasingly successful campaign to wipe out the Chinese Communist Party, and the Communists themselves were able to tap into a burgeoning Chinese nationalism. When the Second World War ended, the Communists controlled much of the countryside north of the Yangtze and had a formidable army. In 1946, after fruitless talks brokered by the United States, the two sides embarked on a civil war, which ended with the victory of the Communists in 1949. Mao Tse-tung proclaimed the People’s Republic in Beijing, and the defeated Chiang set up an alternative government on the island of Taiwan.

In 1949, at the age of fifty-one, Chou became the new China’s first premier as well as its foreign minister. (Although he gave up the second post in 1958, he continued to supervise China’s foreign relations until his death.) He was as charming as ever. He lived austerely and simply, darning, legend had it, his own socks. He worked constantly, well into the night. No detail was ever too small for him. When he set up his new Foreign Ministry, he did his best to ensure that China’s newest diplomats, most of whom came from the military, acquired the knowledge and the skills they now needed, whether it was through lectures on international law or through diplomatic protocols. The trainees had lessons from the Soviets on how to wear suits and ties and how to dance, and sessions in a Beijing restaurant to practice eating Western food with Western-style utensils. Those who worked for Chou usually adored him. “He worked so hard,” remembered one of his interpreters, “paid attention to every detail, read all the reference materials so carefully.” It was not fair to blame him for supporting Mao, even in his more outrageous policies. “What could he have done otherwise?”
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Foreigners who met him generally found him delightful and deeply civilized. Dag Hammarskjöld, the Swedish diplomat who had been the U.N.’s second secretary-general, thought he had “the most superior brain I have so far met in the field of foreign politics.”
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Henry Kissinger, usually quite critical, was completely entranced. “He moved gracefully,” said Kissinger of their first meeting, “and with dignity, filling a room not by his physical dominance (as did Mao or de Gaulle) but by his air of controlled tension, steely discipline, and self-control, as if he were a coiled spring.”
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Kissinger, who was to have many hours of hard negotiations with Chou, found him “one of the two or three most impressive men I have ever met”
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—and a worthy adversary. “He was a figure out of history. He was equally at home in philosophy, reminiscence, historical analysis, tactical probes, humorous repartee.”
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Kindness, compassion, moderation—these were qualities both Chinese and foreigners saw in Chou.

Yet he could also be utterly ruthless. He had become hardened during that long climb to power, as they all had. Chou had seen close friends die, and he had condemned others to death. As early as 1931, he had ordered the execution of all the immediate relatives of a Communist who had given up information in a police interrogation.
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He was not just complicit in the repeated purges and killings in the Communist base areas; he helped to organize them.
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In 1934, at the start of the Long March, when the Communists fled the Guomindang, it was Chou who decided who should be weeded out and executed as unreliable and who should be left behind to the mercies of the enemy.
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In 1955, the same man who always thanked the crews on his planes let a whole flight be blown to pieces to flush out the Guomindang agents who had placed the bomb. During the Cultural Revolution, when his longtime bodyguard ran afoul of Mao’s wife, Chou did not lift a finger to protect him.
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The man who was so gentle with children did not intervene when his own adopted daughter was carried off by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. She died of her beatings in prison.
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Did he really have no choice, as his interpreter suggested? Did he remember the advice of the scholar two millennia earlier who had said the small craft that comes close to the great barge should be empty so that the crew on board the bigger vessel will leave it alone to bob on top of the waters?
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Or did he decide that he must survive for China’s sake? Throughout the calamitous attempts by Mao to transform China, Chou En-lai remained at his post. He worked extraordinary hours and kept a grasp on an extraordinary range of issues. Perhaps without him, China would have gone even further into anarchy than it did during the Cultural Revolution.