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.

Zhou Enlai, China's first premier, is overshadowed by Mao, but Zhou's influence in his own time and since has been vast. Chen Jian shows Zhou using his political and bureaucratic skills and centralism to mitigate the damage caused by Mao's radicalism and argues that Zhou created conditions for the post-Mao reforms that have made China a superpower.

This book challenges long-established views that Mao Zedong became Chinese Communist Party leader during the Long March (1934-1935) and that by 1935 the CCP was independent of the Comintern in Moscow. The result is a critique not only of official Chinese historiography but also of Western scholarship, which all future histories of the rise of the PRC will need to take into account.

A biography of Zhou Enlai, one of the most important and yet debatable political figures in the Chinese Communist Party. The authors give an in-depth analysis on the complex personality and controversial actions of Zhou, both as a person and a leader of the CCP.

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 was one of the greatest statesmen of the twentieth century. Long overshadowed by the more visible - and charismatic - Mao Dzedong, he and his life and extraordinary accomplishments remain little recognized outside China, where he is still revered as the beloved father of the modern nation. In Eldest Son, Han Suyin brings this towering figure to life in a profoundly human and intimate portrait - the first full-scale biography of the late premier to be published in English. Between 1956 and 1974, Dr. Han conducted a series of eleven unprecedented interviews with Zhou, each of them lasting for several hours. Drawing upon these encounters, and on further meetings with his widow, his family and colleagues, as well as her unusual access to the Communist Party archives, Dr. Han presents a nuanced portrait of this deeply committed Chinese nationalist and Communist. Here is the full sweep of Zhou's remarkable life: his early schooling in Japan and Europe, his complex and loyal relationship to Mao, his historic meetings with other world leaders such as Khrushchev, Nehru, and Nixon which opened China to the global community. And Dr. Han gives us the private man as well as the public figure: his loving and formative marriage to Deng Yingchao, the murder of his adopted daughter at the hands of the Red Guards, and ultimately his painful battle with cancer. Like no other, Zhou's life is the history of modern China. Through the lens of his experience we see unfolding the dramatic, sometimes violent, decades of change: the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, the galvanizing Long March, the social convulsions of the Great Leap Forward, the violent excesses of the Cultural Revolution, andthe diplomatic rapprochement with the West in the 1970s. Dr. Han weaves these decisive events with the impressions and memories of hundreds of ordinary citizens from every sector of Chinese society to create a rich historical tapestry. Compellingly written, unique in its perspective, Eldest Son is masterful social history and an indispensable portrait of a legendary leader whose political legacy continues to influence the course of China today.

"Zhou Enlai was the most appealing of modern China's leaders. Through three decades of war and upheaval in China before the communist revolution, and for almost thirty years after it, his influence was decisive in shaping the course of events. Yet, despite his public prominence, the real man remained elusive. This is the first fully comprehensive biography of Zhou to appear in the West. Dick Wilson has been collecting information on Zhou ever since his first encounter with the Chinese Premier in 1960. Drawing widely on documentary evidence, memoirs, anecdotes and interviews with eyewitnesses to Zhou's career, he traces the intertwining personal and political strands of Zhou's extraordinary life, showing how he came to embrace communism, and how he alone of Mao Zedong's comrades survived in power."--Book jacket.