Chen Jian, Zhou Enlai: A Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2024)*

Chen Jian has written an impressive book. For decades to come, it will undoubtedly be the go-to text that scholars consult for questions related to Zhou Enlai. As Chen notes in the introduction, past scholarship on Zhou has tended to fall into two camps. The first group has stressed his political wisdom, moral integrity, and dedication to serving China and its people at home and abroad. This viewpoint has been especially widespread in China where the party-state has used Zhou’s exemplary character to craft a historical narrative that highlights the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) devotion to building China into a world power. A second group has taken a diametrically opposed stance and criticized Zhou, in Chen’s words “for his unfailing loyalty to Mao and Mao’s disastrous revolutionary programs” (Chen, 6). In this framing, Zhou is depicted not as the “moral example of the revolution” (Chen, 5). He is disparaged as a selfish hypocrite who prioritized his own self-protection.

In his monograph, Zhou Enlai: A Life, Chen seeks to produce an interpretation of Zhou’s life that does not fit into either of these frameworks. For Chen, it is too simplistic to just shower Zhou with praise or condemn his moral and political failings. Neither approach will lead to sufficient historical understanding of Zhou Enlai and the revolution to which he dedicated his life. Historians who engage in these moralistic readings miss the mark because, as Chen says, “a revolution is no sin” (Chen, 7), and revolutionary history cannot be reduced to morality. “Revolutions happen for a reason” (Chen, 7). For a historian such as Chen, the analytical task is to delve into source materials to determine what factors caused Zhou and others to take part in China’s revolution in all its complexity, from “the grand aim” of creating a new socialist human to committing “unspeakable violence against humanity” (Chen, 8).

According to Chen, only through a deep examination of available sources can historians “articulate the historical conditions…under which a revolution begins” (Chen, 9). Only then can we comprehend how Zhou and “his comrades made the revolution…[and] were remade by it,” and ultimately became “its prisoners” (Chen, 8). Only in this way can scholars “identify why, where, and how the revolution went wrong and ran counter to the goal of the revolutionaries— the liberation of the people” (Chen, 9). Chen thus immersed himself in Zhou-related source materials for two decades. This sustained engagement led him to conclude that “there exists no single or straightforward formula” that a historian can use to “tell and make sense of Zhou’s story” (Chen, 9). Rather, Chen realized that “Zhou’s life and career” epitomize “the dilemmas and tragedies of China’s revolutionary era” and embody “its deep paradoxes and enduring complexities” (Chen, 9).

To a certain extent, Chen’s empiricist approach is similar to much recent research on Maoist China which has placed a heavy emphasis on the contradictions, unintended consequences, and tensions between ideology and reality in Chinese revolutionary politics. Yet there is one huge difference between Chen’s book and most histories of socialist China published in the past decade or so. Most recent studies are firmly rooted in social, cultural, environmental, and economichistory. While they do not overlook high politics, it is not their primary focus. Their major analytical concern is the everyday problems, patterns, and prospects of different laborers, families, communities, officials, sexes, environments, and ethnic and religious groups.

This kind of interest in the complexity of social, political, cultural, and environmental dynamics is strikingly absent from Chen’s book. Although Chen does at different points discuss how party policies impacted large groups of people, he does so at a significant distance from the warp and woof of daily life. The only point of view he examines at length is the social world of political elites. Chen’s portrayal of CCP leaders, like many other histories of elites, makes it seem as if they spent nearly all their time on affairs of pressing political consequence and had little-to-no social or family life or interests outside of their work. By taking this analytical approach, Chen’s depiction of the social world of CCP leaders occludes the material support networks that went into maintaining their everyday lives of prestige, privilege, and power. While it may not be Chen’s intent, one consequence of his persistent concentration on the upper echelons of China’s party-state is that readers could easily come to think that party elites were the only people with agency in China’s revolution, and that everyone else in China was just a pawn in the plans, policies, and power games of the CCP leadership’s making.

Chen Jian is especially interested in the small group of elite men whose careers at the party-state’s apex were intimately entangled with Mao Zedong’s. This narrative focus certainly centers Zhou Enlai as the book’s core subject, but it seems at times that he also is not, and that occupying center stage instead is Mao himself, “buoyed by vast, unchecked, and unbalanced political power,” exercising his authority over Zhou and everyone else in China to fulfill his “utopian visions” of permanent revolution “fused with grand plans for political, social, and cultural transformation through prolonged mass mobilization campaigns” (Chen, 8).

This interpretation of Mao’s power over the Chinese revolution is emplotted in a revolution-as-disaster narrative. In Chen’s hands, this narrative functions as a literary motor pushing the story forward, giving meaning to the historical record and its significance. This plotline is so pronounced in the book that, in my view, it significantly undermines Chen Jian’s proclaimed intention to attend to the paradoxes and complexities of China’s revolution. The logic of this narrative frame is not at all complex, rather it is quite simple: China’s revolution was a catastrophe, and Mao’s political campaigns were a principal reason for this disaster. Reiterated at several junctures, frequently at the end of chapters, this argument often invokes two political campaigns launched as part of Mao’s continuous revolution – the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

While the Great Leap and Cultural Revolution are undoubtedly momentous episodes in China’s revolutionary period, their repeated mention leaves the impression that they are the primary prism through which the revolution and Zhou Enlai’s life ought to be considered. Of course, there are many scholars and journalists who have argued that this interpretation is correct, and that evaluations of China’s revolution can and should be reduced to the devastations of the Great Leap and Cultural Revolution. And yet, we could ask: what does the revolution-as-disaster narrative obscure? This question emerged particularly for me in the early chapters, where I often wondered at the summing up of Zhou’s early decades by Chen’s referencing of later events. This struck me as an anachronistic way of reading the past.

Through this authorial sleight of hand, the future disaster becomes the all-consuming endpoint of the narrative, turning the book into a work not of history, but of sci-fi horror as ferocious ghosts from the future somehow mystically travel back in time and haunt the past not just once, but several times, seemingly through some sort of time loops that enable them to repeatedly venture into and terrorize previous eras. Setting aside the magical realism at play here in Chen’s story, this narrative trick makes it seem as if all of Zhou’s biography were leading to the Great Leap and Cultural Revolution. When the revolution-as-disaster narrative is given such a central place in the book’s narrative arc, earlier periods in time lose their autonomy, agency, and comprehensibility on their own terms. It becomes hard to understand why Zhou and others might have supported the revolution in earlier phases or how revolutionary motivations were maintained over time. While the book takes up these issues, the revolution-as-disaster narrative often crowds out a more sustained examination.

To some extent, Chen Jian balances the revolution-as-disaster narrative by threading through the book another narrative common to histories of the People’s Republic of China: the “standing-up” story. This refers to Mao’s famous words at the PRC State’s foundation in 1949, “We, the Chinese, have stood up” (Chen, 281). This phrase is sprinkled throughout Chen’s text and thus also serves as a semantic engine. The standing-up narrative captures a powerful strain in Chinese nationalism and acts as a metonym for all the angst and anger of the Chinese population about foreign incursions and domestic turmoil in the century preceding 1949. It articulates the pride Chinese leaders and people had in finally relegating the troubled history of imperialist subordination to the past and establishing a new state-society nexus dedicated to rebuilding China on the world stage.

On the other hand, the standing-up narrative is perhaps too sweeping. Like the revolution-as-disaster narrative, this storyline obscures as much as it reveals. It amalgamates a huge chunk of time under a single banner while overlooking the wide variety of experiences that people of different ages and social backgrounds had of China’s Communist revolution. These experiences, as different scholars have documented, ranged from exhilaration, hope, and commitment to despair, resistance, compliance, and resignation.

Another historiographic tendency that Chen Jian shares with many other historians is placing revolution at the center of his narrative. Clearly the importance of revolution in the life of Zhou Enlai and other members of the twentieth-century Chinese elite should not be denied. However, it is arguable that war was as vitally important in their politics and life trajectories. Without a doubt, revolution and war were closely linked in twentieth-century China, as were war and the Chinese people’s drive to “stand-up.” Yet, when many historians of China narrate the last century, they tend to grant revolution center stage and relegate war to the background. This is in marked contrast to histories of twentieth century Europe or the United States which often foreground war in the making of nations, individuals, science, and other historical phenomena. In the past two decades, some historians of China – Rana Mitter, Hans van de Ven, Diana Lary, for example – have focused on the weight of war in modern China’s history. Even so, revolution remains the more dominant explanatory framework.

It could be that we may better understand Zhou’s choices and the historical conditions he faced by making war instead of revolution more central to his life and times. By foregrounding war, the violence of the Mao era appears less as a unique attribute of the period and more as an enduring element in Chinese politics from the early twentieth century onwards. War allows the Cultural Revolution to look less like an all-encompassing disastrous endpoint and instead it becomes legible as part of a century-long trend in Chinese history in which stark friend-enemy distinctions, extreme violence, a militarist political economy, and militarized approaches to state-society relations and resolving disagreements were the norm, not the exception. Seen from this standpoint, violence appears less as a unique product of communist revolutionaries. It appears instead as a prominent feature of mid-twentieth century Chinese politics, from warlord battles and the Guomindang’s annihilation campaigns against the CCP to the party’s militant activities to survive, take power, and build a revolutionary China. In this vein, I would suggest that the Cultural Revolution could be read as the last civil war in a long series of civil wars stretching back into the advent of modern history in China.

The Great Leap famine also appears in a different light when it is seen alongside the wars of preceding decades, in which government actors used starvation and ecological destruction as tools of statecraft. Mass death was a recurrence; numbness to huge losses of life became prevalent; and finding a way to move on amidst widespread devastation was not an abnormal experience of only a few people, but a normative touchstone in a nation that was heavily militarized for decades. By drawing these connections, I do not mean to downplay the consequences of the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution. Rather, I aim to suggest ways to rethink China’s twentieth century as an era of domestic and foreign wars.

Another facet of Chen’s book with which I had disagreements was the claim that the essential reason Mao Zedong was able to stay in power for so long was that during the Yan’an Rectification Campaign from 1942-1945, Zhou Enlai and “his comrades had handed Mao total power to make and define the revolution’s legitimacy narrative” (Chen, 224). From that point on, “the lofty cause of the Chinese Communist Revolution became centered on a single person’s ‘greatness’ and the supposed brilliance of his ideas” (Chen, 224), and no other CCP leader could “come up with an alternative grand legitimacy narrative for the Chinese revolution” than Mao’s theory of “continuous revolution” which combined Mao’s “Communist utopian vision with Chinese patriotism and revolutionary nationalism” and made “‘we, the Chinese, have stood up’” (Chen, 538) into its motto.

While it is true that Mao had commanding power over discourse during his tenure as the CCP’s top leader, I am less certain that his role as master narrator was such a decisive factor in his political longevity. I am inclined to say that a second factor Chen Jian emphasizes was more important – the party leadership “created no institutions to check and balance” Mao’s power. Although Mao’s narrative authority mattered, his position at the fulcrum of all major institutions was just as crucial, if not more so. This position gave him supremacy over all levers of state power at both the central and provincial levels.

Mao’s power over institutions helps to explain his continued dominance even when the discourse behind his policies became contradictory and disjointed. For instance, when Mao called on the People’s Liberation Army to suppress rebel factions during the Cultural Revolution, this policy shift went against his earlier decree to arm the students in precisely those factions. The Party’s propaganda apparatus engaged in semiotic gymnastics to paper over this contradiction. On the one hand, this shows that Mao’s role rendered narrative coherence less important in the production of Maoist ideology. What mattered more was how various narratives in Mao’s name were generated and how various factions mobilized Maoist discourse to advance competing and divergent interests of their own. On the other hand, one could argue that it was Mao’s power over the gun that mattered most in the suppression of Cultural Revolution factions, not his narrative hegemony. In addition, as many scholars have pointed out, including Chen Jian, the discursive contradictions and jumbles generated by policy shifts led many to lose faith in Mao and his closest advisors.  

According to Chen, Zhou played a crucial role in maintaining Mao’s leadership amid policy inconsistencies and the problems his tenure in power produced. As Chen illustrates, Zhou did not always agree with Mao and sometimes openly expressed disagreement. However, from very early on, Zhou decided to never challenge Mao’s supremacy. He genuflected partially because he lacked the “will and determination to rise to and maintain the position of the revolution’s supreme leader” (Chen, 72). Yet he also bent a knee because he determined after intense conflicts with Mao in the 1930s that the only way “to avoid another deadly clash” with a vengeful Mao was to embrace him “as the paramount leader” and never “pursue the party’s number two position” (Chen, 225). Zhou’s deference to Mao made him invaluable to the Chairman.

As a “man of action” (Chen, 92), Zhou was always there to take Mao’s ideas and turn them into concrete policies, to sense what direction Mao seemed to be moving and guide the ship of state in that direction. When Mao’s political campaigns generated conflict between different political factions, Zhou frequently stepped in, “demonstrated his prowess as a master compromiser” (Chen, 127), and worked to find common ground between competing interest groups. When Mao shifted quickly from one policy to another, Zhou did not dwell on the contradictions in Mao’s thinking or activities. Nor did he waver in his loyalty. He followed Mao’s orders, had state institutions implement them, and managed the consequences. Chen Jian asserts that “without Zhou” manning the essential levers of state machinery, “the big ship that was China, carrying hundreds of millions of passengers, might have sunk” (Chen, 589), especially during the Cultural Revolution.

In addition to claiming that Mao was the revolution’s master narrator, Chen also states several times that Mao was a master of party politics. Yet it is not entirely clear what counts as mastery. If the meaning of mastery is to survive a long time or stay at the party’s helm, then one could plausibly agree with this argument. Yet this is a low bar to evaluate mastery of the party-state. If one employs a different metric for mastery that places more stress on policy effectiveness, this claim stands on less firm ground. Chen’s evidence reinforces this latter view. In Chen’s telling, Mao appears not to be a strategic master. He looks much more like a political bumbler, as Neil Diamant has argued. Mao did not pass from one success to another. He implemented one policy after another in an ad hoc and often arbitrary manner.

Mao’s policies often generated unintended consequences, and so he stopped pursuing one policy and implemented another. This pulling of the party-state back and forth in a hodge-podge of policies appears to have led many people in China at the elite and grassroots level to experience Maoist governance not as masterful, but instead as inducing political whiplash, disorientation, and disillusionment. According to Chen Jian, Zhou was the key communist leader whose indefatigable work ethic and bureaucratic skill kept China’s ship of state afloat amid all the tumult caused by Mao’s policies. While this claim may be true, Chen does not offer enough evidence to back it up. I found myself wanting more information on how exactly Zhou kept institutions functioning on an everyday basis but also in troubled times. Chen keeps his narrative spotlight so narrowly focused on Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong that readers are offered relatively few insights into other party members Zhou interacted with, what sort of relationships they had, and how they worked together to put policies into practice and deal with problems.

One final narrative framework pivotal to Chen’s book is what I would call a revolution-as-revenge narrative. This framework is intimately connected with the revolution-as-disaster narrative that Chen weaves into the entire book. Chen asserts that Mao’s drive to undertake continuous revolution through huge political campaigns, especially the Great Leap and Cultural Revolution, were critical factors behind China’s revolution resulting in calamity. In this telling, another major factor was Mao’s personality. Suspicious and resentful, Mao made revenge into a motor of Chinese revolutionary politics. In Chen’s analysis, rancor and retribution play such a driving role in Mao’s conduct that one is left with the impression that his propensity for revenge was a fundamental plank in his long-term dominance over Chinese party politics and China’s revolution.

As Chen details at length, Mao was full of bile and spite and was not inclined to forget how certain people had wronged him. He rarely buried the hatchet, granted forgiveness, or moved on. He held onto grudges and kept their malice hanging over his comrades’ heads like Damocles’ sword, ever inclined to lash out at others for what they did today, what they did decades ago, and what Mao worried they might one day do to the revolution and his legacy. Zhou’s fear of Mao’s animus was also, as stated above, a major reason for his absolute allegiance even in the worst of circumstances.

Clearly, Mao’s resentment over wrongs, both real and imagined, was an integral factor in the Chinese revolution’s course. However, resentment is granted such a paramount place in Chen’s book, that it appears sometimes that the only motivator behind Mao’s actions was the venting of his spleen. Ideology fades into the shadows in this historiographic light; avenging grievances was what mattered. From this perspective, it can seem as though the political battles between Mao and others over the revolution’s direction were not fueled by differing views on how to build socialism, but by political passions that were more personal, poisonous, and at times profoundly petty. Chen’s past work has asserted the centrality of ideology in understanding China’s revolution. His magnum opus on Zhou Enlai’s life instead seems to suggest that revenge was not only a more powerful driver of Maoism, but angst about Mao’s vengeance was an enduring engine of Zhou’s politics.

*An abridged version of this review will be published on H-Diplo as part of a roundtable.

Covell Meyskens is Associate Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School. He researches the geopolitical, social, and environmental dimensions of security and development in modern China. His first book, Mao’s Third Front: The Militarization of Cold War China, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. He is currently writing his second book, The Three Gorges Dam: Building a Developmental Engine for China and the World.