Mao: The Unknown Story

Chou first encountered communism in Japan, where he arrived in 1917 as a nineteen-year-old student just as the Bolshevik Revolution broke out. He made his choice while studying in Western Europe, joining the Chinese Communist Party branch in France in 1921. There he became a fervent believer, and his dedication was reflected in his asceticism. Good-looking and attractive to women, he was far from indifferent to beauty himself. When he first arrived in France, he was constantly heard admiring its women. “What beautiful girls!.. The women here [in Paris] are so attractive,” he wrote to a friend back home. Soon he acquired a sexy girlfriend, with whom he was very much in love, but once he converted to the Red faith he did what many missionaries had done: he chose a wife not based on love but on whether she could be a partner in the mission.

Many years later, in a rare moment of candor, Chou revealed to a niece how he had picked his wife. He mentioned the woman with whom he had been in love, and said: “When I decided to give my whole life to the revolution, I felt that she was not suited to be a lifelong partner.” He needed a spouse who would be as devoted as he was. “And so I chose your aunt,” he said, “and started writing to her. We established our relationship through correspondence.” He entered a loveless marriage at the age of twenty-seven, with a 21-year-old zealot called Deng Ying-chao, who was noticeably plain and ungainly.

Tenacious and indefatigable, even impervious to cold, Chou was a good administrator and a brilliant organizer. Moscow spotted him, and gave him the crucial task of creating the Chinese Communist army. In 1924 he was sent back to China, where he soon became director of the Political Department of the Whampoa Military Academy, the Nationalists’ officer-training base founded by the Russians. Chou’s secret responsibility was to plant Communist agents among the higher ranks, with a view to taking over part of the Nationalist army when the time came — which he did in the form of organizing the Nanchang Mutiny in August 1927, after Chiang broke with the CCP. By the time the mutineers were defeated on the south coast, Chou was delirious with malaria and kept yelling “Charge! Charge!” He was carried onto a small boat by colleagues, and escaped to Hong Kong through seas so violent they had to tie themselves to the mast to keep from being swept overboard.

After that, he proceeded to Shanghai, where he ran the Party’s daily business from the beginning of 1928. He proved to be a genius at operating in clandestine conditions, as people who worked with him testify. That summer he went to Russia, where he met Stalin before the 6th CCP Congress convened there. He was the dominant figure at the congress, delivering no fewer than three key reports, as well as serving as the congress secretary. His domain was vast: he set up the Chinese KGB, under Moscow’s guidance, and ran its assassination squad. But organizing the Chinese Red Army was his main job.

Among the qualities that made Chou an ideal apparatchik were discipline and unswerving obedience to Moscow’s line, as well as slavishness. He could absorb any amount of caning from his masters. In future years, as prime minister under Mao, he was willing to abase himself repeatedly, using such toe-curling language that his audiences would cringe with embarrassment. He had already begun producing humiliating self-criticisms decades earlier. “I … would like the whole Party to see and condemn my errors,” he said in 1930, and pledged to criticize his “serious systematic errors” himself in the Party press. Once, at a meeting he attended, one of Moscow’s German envoys, perhaps spotting a streak of masochism in Chou, said: “As for Comrade En-lai, we of course should smack him on the bottom. But we don’t want to kick him out. We must reform him … and see if he corrects his mistakes.” Chou just sat there and took it.

Chou does not seem to have aspired to be No. 1; he was not a program-setter, and seems to have needed orders from above. He could also be long-winded. One of his subordinates in the 1920s remembered: “Once he started talking, he could not stop. What he said was clear, but not punchy … he would talk as if teaching elementary school children.” He could talk for seven or eight hours non-stop, boring his listeners so thoroughly that they would doze off.

Chou’s loyalty, combined with undoubted ability, was the main reason Moscow picked him to be chief Party leader from 1928, so it fell to him to deal with the dispute in the Zhu — Mao Army. On Moscow’s instructions, he wrote to the army on 21 August 1929, giving Mao full backing and rejecting all the criticisms. Mao, he insisted, was “absolutely not patriarchal.” Mao’s abolition of Zhu De’s post was judged correct. An-gong, the Party envoy who had spoken up against Mao, was recalled. He was soon killed in battle.