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<b>A tragic backroom schemer?</b>
John Pomfret
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A new, critical biography of China's beloved premier, Zhou Enlai, has captivated the upper echelons of the country's academic and political world with its charges that dictator Mao Zedong denied Zhou critical health care that could have put off his death and set off firecrackers on the day he died in 1976.

Chinese authorities have banned the book, Zhou Enlai's Later Years, and people found possessing it are disciplined at work, academics said. 

Published in Hong Kong, the 615-page work is based on internal Communist Party documents and interviews with senior party officials. The author is Gao Wenqian, who worked for 13 years as a senior researcher in the Communist Party’s Central Documents Office before immigrating to the US in 1993. He depicts Zhou as a tragic backroom schemer, a puppet of his master Mao, and a man who was so imbued with a Confucian sense of duty that he did almost everything Mao asked him — including signing the arrest orders for his own brother and a goddaughter.

The book challenges the view that Zhou tried his best to save hundreds of purged officials during the Cultural Revolution, portraying him instead as an eager  participant in the ultra-leftist campaign during which hundreds of thousands of people were dispatched to the Chinese gulag. “Party documents show that Zhou only protected people after first checking with Mao, his wife Jiang Qing, Mao’s no. 2 Lin Biao and others,” Gao wrote. “If Zhou sensed any opposition to protecting someone, he would drop his protection.”

Even though Zhou died 27 years ago, criticism of him is taboo in China because, officially, he never made a mistake. “In a society troubled with corruption and facing a moral vacuum, Zhou is the last good Communist,” said Gao.

“This book takes him off his pedestal. I criticised what should never be criticised.”

Indeed, the government has already acknowledged that serious mistakes were
committed by Mao, founder of the communist state. It concocted a formula in
1980 that stated he was 70 percent correct and 30 percent mistaken — for
his disastrous economic policies and for unleashing the madness of the
Cultural Revolution.

The next greatest leader, Deng Xiaoping, spearheaded the movement in the 1950s to purge the party of “rightists,” ruining the lives of hundreds of thousands of lawyers and other professionals, officials acknowledge. Deng also ordered the 1989 crackdown on Tiananmen Square. 

China does not have a tradition of independent historical scholarship. In imperial China, historians worked for the emperor and wrote history to justify his rule. That tradition has endured during the Communist era and was bolstered by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Officials here say Moscow’s fate was sealed in part when then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev allowed Russian historians freedom to report on the excesses of Stalinism. 

“A book like this is sure to be banned in China,” said a senior party theoretician familiar with Gao’s work. “Can you imagine what the young people would feel if they read it? What the old people would feel if they read it?”

Everything Zhou did, according to Communist lore, was “for the people.” He was good-looking, brilliant, a master diplomat and a selfless struggler for the  communist state. Works about Zhou in China are heavily censored and every hint of criticism is removed. A compendium of articles from “The Second International Symposium on Zhou Enlai Studies,” published in 1999, was censored three times before it was published, sources said. 

Gao wrote most of the book during a fellowship at Harvard University. Chinese authorities got wind of Gao’s work and dispatched several officials to pressure Harvard to cut its support for him, Gao and others said. Among the officials were Lt. Gen. Xiong Guangkai, deputy chief of general staff of the People’s Liberation Army, and Liu Ji, an adviser to then-President Jiang Zemin, Gao said.

Officials also contacted Gao in the United States and hinted that his elderly mother could be hurt if the book was published, he said. Gao dedicated the book to his mother, who was jailed for seven years during the Cultural Revolution as a “counterrevolutionary.” She died before the book was published.

The book, which is only available in Chinese, was published last March and is considered a huge success. About 25,000 copies have been sold in eight printings
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