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 polarised, 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.
More here.
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