This book comprises a range of Chinese primary documents as well as interviews in Beijing detailing the policies, principles and methods used by Zhou Enlai to sustain his practice of diplomacy as a committed revolutionary in the pursuit of China's "independence and self-reliance".

Zhou Enlai and the Foundations of Chinese Foreign Policy offers a comprehensive survey of China's foreign relations from 1949-76, while focusing on the significant role which Zhou Enlai played. Through in depth analysis, the book explores the formation of Zhou Enlai's world view and his conduct of Chinese diplomacy throughout all the critical periods of the People's Republic of China. This study makes it possible to understand some of the most important and persistent factors aside from political ideology that have shaped China's foreign policy decisions and will be very useful to students of international relations and Chinese foreign policy.

Zhou Enlai, the premier of the People's Republic of China from 1949 until his death in 1976, is the last Communist political leader to be revered by the Chinese 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, provocative 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 supple. He may have had the looks of a matinee idol, and Nixon may have called him "the greatest statesman of our era," but Zhou's greatest gift was to survive, at almost any price, thanks to his acute understanding of where political power resided at any one time.

The founder -- Shadow diplomacy -- War by other means -- Chasing respectability -- Between truth and lies -- Diplomacy in retreat -- Selective integration -- Rethinking capitalism -- The fightback -- Ambition realized -- Overreach.

Kuo-Kang Shao here offers a comprehensive survey of China's foreign relations from 1949-1976, focusing on the significant role played by Zhou Enlai.

The February 1972 agreement between Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong and U.S. President Richard Nixon to normalize diplomatic relations fundamentally and dramatically altered the nature of U.S.-Sino relations and strategically changed the nature of China's role in the community of nations, The skillful, painstaking and at times brilliant diplomatic work of Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai that resulted in the opening to the West was perhaps Zhou's most remarkable diplomatic achievement in a long career marked by many diplomatic coups. The opening to the West laid the groundwork for China to reenter the international world order after a period of intense isolation. It also established the basis for China to be taken seriously as a player on the international scene. It was Zhou's finest hour. This paper suggests that classic European balance-of-power or ideologically driven visions modeled after Chinese revolutionary thought do not fully explain Zhou's strategy in managing China's approach to the West. A balance-of-power strategy may be a construct to explain the one significant result of the negotiations -- China building an alliance with the United States against the Soviet Union -- but it does not explain Zhou's grand strategy. Zhou's statecraft was not driven simply by a desire to create a new power balance against Moscow. Rather, Zhou's strategy was to attempt to reintegrate China in the international system by normalizing relations with the Western superpower on conditions that were acceptable to Chinese political interests at a time when China's leadership was fractured and the nation in disarray. Zhou's strategy reveals that he was a daring practitioner of realist diplomacy who viewed negotiating with the West as the means to achieve some measure of domestic stability and the re-establishment of China's economic well-being after a period of tremendous internal turbulence that brought China to the brink of social dislocation and disaster.