China's Supreme Actor

...Even inside China the sensation it created has been palpable, for it remains the first book grabbed by virtually every visiting Chinese delegation to the United States or Hong Kong—despite its heading the list of banned import items at Customs stations along China’s long borders...

...In his case, the my thmaking had a particular utility: It was crucial to his being fashioned into a positive symbol of the CCP’s great Chinese Revolution...

...Presidents, delivered an uncharacteristically schmaltzy report to the White House after his initial meeting with Zhou in Beijing in 1971: “He moved gracefully 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...

...Naval Academy FEW, IF ANY, political entities have been as enterprising in manufacturing myths as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP...

...The confrontation almost killed the ailing Zhou, who died less than three years later...

...His main objective, Gao states clearly in the Chinese edition, was to lay bare Zhou’s complete submission to Mao as his willing executioner...

...For A Myth about a man to be sustained of course, he has to be a good actor...

...Earlier there had been a masterpiece of mythmaking involving Zhou, known as the Greatest Snub...

...Reviewed by Maochun Yu Professor of history, U.S...

...None of that is sur prising, given Gao’s credentials...

...among other factors, the myth of Zhou as the Cultural Revolution’s tenderizer had to be preserved...

...The position gave him unique access to the ultrasecret personal and official files of Mao, Zhou and many other top Party leaders stored at the heavily guarded CCP Central Archives, some 20 miles to the northwest of Beijing...

...Gao Wenqian’s Zhou Enlai’s Later Years stands as a landmark achievement in demythologizing him...

...A more accurate title for the result would be “Zhou Enlai: A Selective Digest of Gao Wenqian’s Zhou Enlai in His Later Years...

...Dulles was said to have refused to shake the premier’s extended hand...

...Our revolution is a violent process through which one social class destroys the other...

...Since its emergence in 1921 under the aegis of Lenin’s Third International, for instance, the CCP has managed to successfully mythologize an abject flight into a heroic Long March that produced Mao Zedong as its supreme leader...

...By indicating the exact sources of various extremely rare and precious archival documents, they add tremendously to the work’s authoritativeness...

...In 1973, for example, Mao displayed paranoid jealousy toward Zhou, who had ambiguously approved Kissinger’s request to establish a military liaison between the Pentagon and the People’s Liberation Army...

...In other words, as one of the two or three principal players of the Cultural Revolution who participated in every major policy decision and signed every crucial arrest warrant, Zhou was also responsible for the violence and chaos...

...2) primary sources in volumes published by the Party Central Committee’s history documentary office...

...In his effort to portray the real Zhou during the Cultural Revolution with overwhelming evidence and keen analysis, Gao Wenqian did a superb job in his original Chinese volume...

...But they could not fully reflect the archival evidence...

...actor) put on an impressive performance inspired by the Greatest Snub...

...Of all such myths and mythologies, though, none has been as bizarre yet monumental as those relating to Zhou Enlai, Mao’s lieutenantand the CCP’smanager-in-chief for nearly 30 years...

...Yet Mao was indeed a master who had a penchant for torturing Zhou and making him suffer...

...The current international scrutiny of Zhou’s darker side, however, has been far more damaging to the nearly flawless mythology that distorted his CCP career—especially his role in the devastating Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1976...

...Zhou grasped it with a flourish, knowing full well that there had never been any Dulles rudeness...

...The notes illuminate roughly four categories: (1) archival documents, such as Zhou’s handwritten self-criticisms to Mao, and Mao’s comments on Zhou’s various confessions...

...A trained historian, Gao was for many years the Party Central Committee’s designated biographer of Mao and Zhou, with specific responsibility for writing about their lives during the Cultural Revolution...

...To make sure the Chinese premier was aware of the esteem in which he was held Kissinger personally told him how deeply moved he was “by the idealism and spiritual qualities of yourself and your colleagues...

...And on a wintry Beijing morning in February 1972, he and Nixon (the “I am not a crook...

...Although billed as a translation by Peter Rand and Lawrence R. Sullivan, that is something of a misnomer...

...In their “Note,” the translators tell us they used their “license” to “advisedly” eliminate academic material...

...He, in turn, was conveniently mythologized by Edgar Snow in Red Star Over China (1938) as the virtuous agrarian reformer leading the liberation of the oppressed Chinese peasantry...

...Instead, since Gao’s original book focuses largely on Zhou’s actions in the last 10 years of his life, the English version adds some banal chapters to make it a full-fledged “biography...

...An estimated 70 million Chinese lives were wiped out by this class struggle during the CCP’s binges of destruction spanning several decades after it came to power in 1949...

...If you can read Chinese, by all means get hold of it...

...Otherwise, wait for a better, more faithful translation of Gao’s important work...

...As Nixon stepped off Air Force One to begin his historic China visit, his hand was extended to counter the 1954 rebuff...

...President Richard M. Nixon called him “the greatest statesman of our era...

...It became an instant bestseller in the overseas Chinese book market, with over 30 editions already printed...

...Particularly irksome in the English version is the absence of the original’s extensive notes...

...To prevent the staggering body count from becoming its hallmark, the Communist movement needed a charmer, a voice of reason and persuasion, a reluctant participant in creating the violence, purges and general political persecutions who could present a humane face to those in the world who were outraged by Mao’s excesses and political absurdity...

...Later, both men reminisced profusely about their handshake redressing Dulles’ impertinence...

...But less than a fifth of the original is to be found in the English rendering...

...Zhou honed his thespian skills at Nankai High, where he won praise for playing female characters in the school’s productions...

...Henry A. Kissinger, the “realist” who served two U.S...

...Along with Mao, Gao shows, Zhou, despite selectively protecting those who had not run afoul of him in the past, was also partly responsible for the betrayals and deaths of comrades like Peng Dehuai, Liu Shaoqi, and He Long...

...Meticulous recent Chinese accounts by Wang Bingnan and Xiong Xianghui, Zhou’s top political and intelligence aides, who were in charge of his every movement in Geneva, have convincingly demonstrated the impossibility of any such incident...

...Accordingly, the Communist mythmakers both inside and outside of China massaged all these qualities in fabricating a public image of Zhou Enlai as the most impressive son of the revolution...

...We all know that revolution proved extraordinarily brutal, as Mao cherishingly instructed: “Our revolution is not a dinner party, nor is it an endeavor in the genteel art of embroidery...

...But no one has been willing and able to blame Zhou Enlai, publicly perceived as the tenderizer of Mao’s murderous policies, for facilitating, prolonging and deepening the Cultural Revolution...

...Professional outrage moved Gao finally to break with the Party line after he became lightly involved in the tumultuous 1989 pro-democracy events and was administratively punished...

...3) published secondary sources, mostly memoirs, by key CCP figures...

...Realizing the true picture of Zhou during the Cultural Revolution could not be presented in repressive China, Gao somehow fled to the United States with many of the notes he had taken as he read the voluminous secret files...

...No one, that is, until Gao Wenqian wrote his stunning Wannian Zhou Enlai (Zhou Enlai’s Later Years), published in Hong Kong in 2003...

...and (4) personal interviews conducted by Gao...

...Gao was also assigned the task of conducting officially ordered interviews with many surviving major figures of the Cultural Revolution, including Zhou’s wife and Mao’s security chief...

...There is no doubt in serious scholarly circles that the ultimate perpetrator of this catastrophe was Mao Zedong, who was obsessed with destroying all the possible challengers to his supreme power in the name of a “perpetual revolution” against the old, the reactionary and the revisionist...

...He made the decision to obey Mao absolutely during the Yenan years, in the late 1930s and early ’40s, when Mao launched a series of harsh purges against his political opponents...

...This powerful master-servant relationship forged Zhou’s role as Mao’s chief butler and enforcer of the Cultural Revolution...

...The hugely ambitious projects devoted to producing official biographies of Mao and Zhou did indeed result in the publications of several large volumes inside China...

...Allegedly he was humiliated by John Foster Dulles, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s secretary of state, at the 1954 Geneva Conference...

...Here he was appointed a visiting scholar at Columbia University and subsequently received funding from the Woodrow Wilson Inter national Center and Har vard University while writing his book...

...This became the prime example of America’s arrogance and hostility toward the genteel Communist Zhou...

...REGRETTABLY, the just published English edition, entitled Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary, is a major disappointment—to say the least...

...The furious Mao initiated a ferocious “line struggle” inside the Politburo against Zhou’s “Rightist capitulationism...