Chou En-Lai Became A Controversial Figure

Press, 18 October 1978, Page 2

Chou En-Lai Became A Controversial Figure

Chou En-Lai was one of the founders of the People’s Republic of China and its first Prime Minister.

As its expert on foreign affairs—a function for which he was qualified by his cosmopolitan upbringing and travels abroad —he became its principal diplomat and spokesman.

Unlike Mao Tse-tung and Liu Shao-chi, the other top Chinese Communist leaders, who were born into peasant families, Chou En-Lai came from Mandarin stock and his many-sided character reflected the varied nature of his background.

He was a compound of Chinese aristocrat, Confucian scholar, student of Western living and Marxist dialectician.

For Western observers he was a most controversial personality, being labelled in turn “fabulous,” “moderate,” “Westernoriented,” “orthodox” and “double-faced.”

Always neatly dressed in the simple suit, with highbuttoned collar, worn by Chinese leaders since Dr. Sun Yat-sen, he was a handsome man with a graceful carriage and a youthful appearance which belied his age and hard revolutionary life. When well into his 60’s he was still slim and erect, his straight black hair hardly touched with grey. Like other Chinese leaders, he kept himself trim with physical exercises or wrestling. He had a well-modulated though high-pitched voice and great personal charm. Those who met him seldom failed to be impressed by his affability and apparent good will.

During the Communists’ long and bitter struggle with the Nationalists, his persua-

sive manner, his particular appeal to the officer class and his genius for imbuing an army with political discipline made him Mao Tse-tung’s most valuable collaborator in winning over and absorbing hostile army units. While Mao Tse-tung and Liu Shao-chi were recognised as the theorists and planners among the leadership, Chou was recognised as the administrator.

He could work far into the night for months on end and diplomats and visitors to Peking learned to expect invitations to meet him to arrive in the early hours, when he had just finished his daily task. He was happily married to Ten Ying-chao, whom he met when they were both students and leftist agitators at Tientsin University. They had no children. Beyond that little was known about his personal life, which was untouched by personal scandal. He was methodical in his habits, drank occasionally, but did not smoke.

Born in 1898 at his family’s country home at Hwai Yin, near Shanghai, Chou En-lai was sent at the age of 15 to study in Tientsin and acquired his knowledge of English at Nankai Middle School and University, an Americansponsored institution After the fall of the Manchu empire in 1911 he was drawn into the radical student movement and was sent to prison for taking part in the students’ riot of 1919. '

Having graduated from Nankai University in 1920, he joined one of the “work and study” groups going to Europe to complete their education by learning Western ways. In 1921, in Paris, Chou En-lai helped to form the European branch of the Communist Party of China. When he returned to China in 1924, the Communists were still co-operating with the Kuomintang, the Nationalist Party formed by Dr. Sun Yatsen which was in control of southern China but bitterly opposed by the northern war lords. Soon afterwards he was appointed Secretary of the Kwantung branch of the Communist Party and Director of the Political Department of the Whampoa Military Academy in Canton (founded by Sun Yat-sen to build up the Kuomintang armed forces along Soviet lines) whose Commandant was then Chiang Kai-shek.

When Chiang Kai-shek, who succeeded Sun Yat-sen on his death in 1925, launched the famous northern expedition against the war lords in 1926, Chou En-lai was political commissar of the crack First Army. But soon the Party sent him to Shanghai, where he formed shock troops from the ranks of the Communistheld unions and with their help carried out an insurrection ahead of the Nationalist advance in March, 1927. Having entered Shanghai to find it already in the hands of the Communists, who had organised their own workers’ police patrols, Chiang Kaishek turned on them, outlawed the workers’ organisations and executed any of the leaders he could find. Chou En-lai was taken prisoner, but managed to escape—apparently aided by an ex-officer who had been his pupil at Whampoa. Thus came Chiang Kaishek’s break with the Communists and the beginning of the feud which divided China.

Chou En-lai reappeared next at Nanchang and at Swatow as a Communist organiser before going to Canton where a rising enabled the Communists to hold the seaport for a few days in December, 1927. But that was virtually the end of orthodox communism in China—that is of Westerntype Marxism, according to which social revolution must come from the industrial workers.

For this China substituted its own brand of “home-spun” communism. The Communist cause eventually succeeded not through support from the cities, but because Mao Tsetung, the future master of China, had been quietly organising the peasants in a movement that was to result in the overthrow of General Chiang more than 20 years later. Chou En-lai was elected a member of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party at the Fifth National Congress held in Hankow in May, 1927. That same year, after Li Li-san—an orthodox Marxist believing that urban workers must be rallied before the peasants—had taken the leadership of the party he headed the Organisation Department of the Central Committee, whose main task was to strengthen the links between the party and the city workers.

In the summer of 1928 he attended the Sixth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party held in Moscow, at which he was elected a member of the Politburo and of the Secretariat. When a Soviet Republic was set up in the Kiangsi province in 1931, with Mao Tse-tung as head of the Government and General Chu Teh as military commander.

Chou En-lai was appointed Vice-Commander of the Military Affairs Committee.

Four “extermination campaigns” launched by the Nationalists against the Kiangsi Republic failed, but in 1934 Chiang Kai-shek mobilised larger forces and enforced a blockade which made the Communist position untenable.

Mao Tse-tung, Chu Teh and Chou En-lai then decided to leave and led 100,000 Communist soldiers, together with women, old people and children, on the famous “Long March” which lasted 12 months and covered 6000 miles. Chou led the most critical phase of the march—the crossing of the Tatu river—when a small band of volunteers traversed a swinging chain bridge under fire to establish themselves on the opposite side and thus enabled the main body to follow. At one stage he was himself captured but escaped with a price on his head.

The growing pressure exerted by Japan on China soon brought a change in the picture when, in December, 1936, Chiang Kai-shek was kidnapped at Sian by one of the war lords, Marshal Hsuehliang, who had vainly pleaded that the Nationalists should join with the Communists to resist the Japanese. The Communists then dispatched Chou En-lai to Sian to negotiate with Chiang who had no real choice but to meet their demands, which included a voice in the Central Government in Nanking. The result was that when the Japanese attacked China in July, 1937, they found Communists and Nationalists cooperating against them.

Chou En-lai went to Nanking as the Communists’ representative, but by 1940 the united front had broken down and he had to return to Yenan. From 1941 to 1944 the rival Chinese sides alternately talked peace and war and fought each other while the United States and their Allies tried to keep them together to resist the Japanese. In 1946 the civil war began again in earnest. By 1949 the Communist armies had taken control of the mainland. Only Taiwan and two offshore islands remained in Chiang Kaishek’s possession. Chou Enlai became Prime Minister, Foreign Minister and ViceChairman of the People’s Revolutionary Military Com-