Zhou Enlai : a biography /

Zhou Enlai has always held a charmed place in western assessments of Chinese communism as the urbane Prime Minister who always knew what to say, and a Chinese version of the politically sensible center. Wilson, a biographer of Mao, does nothing to alter this picture. From his origins in a mined bourgeois family through his schooling in Japan and France, his involvement with communist organizing in Europe and in the Chinese Revolution at home, and his Steady guidance of the Communist administration, the outlines of Zhou's life have been pretty well known, despite his reluctance to publicize the details. Wilson puts a lot of emphasis on his family, which had a history of public service and fantasies of a mandarin life for Zhou. He was actually given over for adoption by his natural parents to his father's brother--which has created a lot of confusion, especially since Zhou used to refer to his natural and his adoptive mother interchangeably. His adoptive father and both of his mothers died early in his life, and we hear that he was stingy toward his surviving natural father in later years. Wilson doesn't overplay the suggestions of rejection to account for Zhou's rebellious future, but he does note it down--along with Zhou's apparent indifference to women and the frequent characterizations by others of Zhou in his student days as effeminate. This mixture is circuitously linked to his tireless capacity for work and his studied reluctance to assume a position as leader, preferring the secondary role for which he seems to have been so well suited. Wilson shows that Zhou didn't always give in to Mao--particularly during the rapid development phase of the Great Leap. During the Cultural Revolution, he tried to keep the Red Guards on target, with the aim of revitalizing the party, but almost became a casualty of Red Guard excesses himself. Zhou survived then, as he always did; but Wilson says he never regained his vigor thereafter. Zhou was a western-style moderate, Wilson thinks; and the truest representative of the gradual modernization of China promised by the Chinese Revolution. A less western view of Zhou is still needed; but this version, if too predictable to shed any light, replaces John McCook Root's 1978 Chou as the biography of choice. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.