Perry Anderson reviews Chen Jian’s Zhou Enlai: A Life, in the LRB: …[T]he historian Chen Jian has published a monumental biography of Zhou Enlai that makes him the pre-eminent scholar of the contemporary Chinese diaspora. Today Zhou occupies a generally benign, if increasingly blurred position in the public memory of the West as an urbane diplomat who hit it off with Henry Kissinger, and is remembered mostly for a misunderstood reply about France (1968 taken for 1789). Beyond these stock images, little further is associated with him.
Chen’s new book, a comprehensive portrait of Zhou that took twenty years to research and write, will change that. Born in 1952 in Shanghai, Chen was fourteen when the Cultural Revolution broke out and was twice briefly imprisoned during it. He was in his early twenties when Zhou died. When campuses reopened in the late 1970s, he entered the universities of Fudan and East China Normal in his native city. In the mid-1980s he was awarded a scholarship to America, where he completed a PhD, got jobs successively in the SUNY system, at the universities of Southern Illinois, Virginia, Cornell, New York and NYU-Shanghai, with many visiting positions in Hong Kong, the UK and the PRC. When he began his research about Zhou in the new century, the field was not entirely empty. But earlier literature about him, overwhelmingly though not exclusively in Chinese, was for the most part highly polarized, presenting Zhou either as an admirably enlightened and progressive statesman, who helped to restore his country to its rightful place in the international community, or as an unconscionable (alternatively: guilt-stricken) servant of the blackest tyranny, accomplice of infamous crimes. Chen’s study supersedes these antithetical images. Rather than merely applauding or attacking Zhou, it sets out to understand him at a level no previous work has approached.
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Perry Anderson writes: Every modern revolution of significance, from 1789 to the present, has produced a diaspora. The exodus from Russia after the end of its ancien régime scattered minds of exceptional brilliance in the arts, humanities and social sciences across the West. In China, where the old order had a history thousands of years longer, and civil war preceded rather than followed the revolution that finished it off, the pattern differed, for two reasons. The first was that whereas in Russia the intelligentsia, a relatively recent phenomenon going back no further than the 19th century, had been from the start essentially oppositional to the regime, in China it had been integral to the imperial system of rule, recruited to state service by a long-standing examination system. The mandarinate might supply intermittent, sometimes requested, mostly unavailing, voices of conscience to the official order but never revolted against it. The Chinese Revolution, moreover, had been made against predatory foreign domination as much as against domestic oppression; and beyond the inherited reflexes of obedience it could appeal to national pride in the recovery of independence. Adhesion to the new order came more naturally to the lettered.
On the other hand, while the People’s Republic, proclaimed in 1949, achieved a decisive national sovereignty, and within a few months proved capable of clearing American forces from half of Korea, it had not accomplished full territorial unity. After making the revolution, the Communists were in no hurry to reappropriate Hong Kong from Britain, which they could have done within a day or two, preferring to leave it under British control as a valuable economic outlet to the world at large, mitigating complete diplomatic isolation of the regime by the West. That was a voluntary sacrifice. Involuntary was the survival of Taiwan – to which, after rout on the mainland, the Nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek, had fled – as an American ward after the Korean War had begun. Each of these exclaves permitted Chinese thinkers either already or eventually averse to the new regime passage to the world beyond, in most cases to the United States – where scholarly links had existed since prewar times, allowing some to migrate from the mainland before the arrival of communism.
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