The definitive biography of Zhou Enlai, the first premier and preeminent diplomat of the Peopleâs Republic of China, who protected his country against the excesses of his bossâChairman Mao. Zhou Enlai spent twenty-seven years as premier of the Peopleâs Republic of China and ten as its foreign minister. He was the architect of the countryâs administrative apparatus and its relationship to the world, as well as its legendary spymaster. Richard Nixon proclaimed him âthe greatest statesman of our era.â Yet Zhou has always been overshadowed by Chairman Mao. Chen Jian brings Zhou into the light, offering a nuanced portrait of his complex life as a revolutionary, a master diplomat, and a man with his own vision and aspirations who did much to make China, as well as the larger world, what it is today. Born to a declining mandarin family in 1898, Zhou received a classical education and as a teenager spent time in Japan. As a young man, driven by the desire for Chinaâs development, Zhou embraced the communist revolution as a vehicle of Chinaâs salvation. He helped Mao govern through a series of transformations, including the disastrous Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. Yet, as Chen shows, Zhou was never a committed Maoist. His extraordinary political and bureaucratic skill, combined with his centrist approaches, enabled him to mitigate the enormous damage caused by Maoâs radicalism. When Zhou died in 1976, the PRC that we know of was not yet visible on the horizon; he never saw glistening twenty-first-century Shanghai or the broader emergence of Chinese capitalism. But it was Zhouâs work that shaped the nation whose influence and power are today felt in every corner of the globe.
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