The Zhou Enlai Effect: How the Premier Played a Key Role in Us China Relations

Jeffrey Zhu

Dr. Yi Sun

Hist. 372

19th May 2012

The Zhou Enlai Effect:

How the Premier played a key role in US China Relations

History remembers leaders, General MacArthur, presidents, FDR, dictators, Hitler, because they are the men that influenced the events that unfolded that people read in history books today. However, what history does not mention are the right hand man that was there with the FDR’s, the Hitler’s, and the Mao’s. The men that stood beside the great leaders influence the leader’s course of action or policy they take. Right hand men such as the man on Mao Zedong’s right Premier Zhou Enlai, whom without the Premier there would be no communist China today, and the historical visit in 1972 by President Richard Nixon would not have happened. Premier Zhou Enlai was the key to China’s future as a young nation back in 1960 and to a world power after the Nixon visit in 1972, for the key roles he played in getting China on the right path and Nixon to China, as French ambassador Etienne Mana’ch put it, “the hour of Zhou Enlai has come.” (Suyin 1994, 367)

Zhou Enlai “was born in that last year [of the Boxer Rebellion, 1898], in a prosperous town in Jiangsu Province, north of the great trading port of Shanghai.” (MacMillian 2007, 32) Zhou’s father was a lowly official and Zhou did not spend much time with his immediate family raised by, “the widow of one of his uncles, a woman he always called, and “Mother.” (MacMillian 2007, 33) Zhou Enlai did not become interested in politics until he found the works of Marx in his years of high school in Tianjin and eventually, “enrolled at the university in Tianjin, but spent most of his time on political work.” (MacMillian 2007, 37) Zhou became enthralled with Marxism, because he felt, “the Western powers for, as the Chinese saw it, betraying them.” (MacMillian 2007, 36) A betrayal that Zhou felt was mainly due to imperialism the west has shown in China, and as China, after the fall of the Qing in 1911, fell into warlordism, chaos was the flavor of the day. Although warlordism seemed to have subsided due to the Nationalist party under Jiang Jieshi, and the control he had over the country, however WWII started in China in 1937 and China divided amongst to factions, the Nationalists and Mao’s Communists. Jiang was desperate to rid the country of the communists even before dealing with China’s common enemy, Japan, this proved to be a costly mistake, as Jiang began to lose the support of the Chinese people. As the Guomindang persecuted the Communists throughout the 1930s, Zhou decided finally in 1935 to throw his support behind Mao Zedong and in 1949, four years after World War II, China became a one party state, The Chinese Communist Party.

Once