Zhou enlai biography sample

About this eBook

A Financial Times Best Book of the Year

The definitive biography of Zhou Enlai, the first premier and preeminent diplomat of the People’s Republic of China, who protected his country against the excesses of his boss—Chairman Mao.

Zhou Enlai spent twenty-seven years as premier of the People’s Republic of China and ten as its foreign minister. He was the architect of the country’s administrative apparatus and its relationship to the world, as well as its legendary spymaster. Richard Nixon proclaimed him “the greatest statesman of our era.” 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 , Zhou received a classical education and as a teenager spe

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Zhou Enlai: A Political Life ,

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction
Formative Years ()
Childhood
Modem Education
Japan
The May Fourth Movement
Europe
Revolutionary Years ()
The First “United Front”
Defeat
Underground Work
The Red Base Areas
Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong
The Long March
Encounter with Zhang Guotao
The Second “UnUed Front”
Mass Mobilization
Underground and Intelligence Operations
Conversion to Maoism
Negotiations on Postwar Settlement
Civil War
Nation Building ()
The Imperial Palace
The Rise of a Nation
First Steps in Foreign Policy
The Korean War
Upswing in Foreign Policy
Development Models,
The Road to Cataclysm
Downturn in Foreign Relations
Cultural Revolution ()
From Poetry to Polities
Red Guards and Rebels on the Move
Repercussions on the Economy
Relations with the New Power Elite
Further Escalation
Was Zhou the Great Protector?
Ramifications for Foreign Relations
The Turning of the Tide
Lin Biao&#;s Disappearance
U

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Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary

About this ebook

Zhou Enlai, the premier of the People's Republic of China from until his death in , is the last Communist political leader to be revered bygd the kinesisk 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 removed -- so when Gao Wenqian first published this groundbreaking, provokativ 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