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Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary

Wenqian Gao

Hardcover | Pages: 368 pages

Rating: 3.89 | 231 Users | 38 Reviews

Specify Regarding Books Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary

Title	:	Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary
Author	:	Wenqian Gao
Book Format	:	Hardcover
Book Edition	:	First Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 368 pages
Published	:	October 30th 2007 by PublicAffairs
Categories	:	History. Biography. Cultural. China. Nonfiction. Politics. Asia. World History

Commentary Concering Books Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary

Zhou Enlai, the premier of the People's Republic of China from 1949 until his death in 1976, is the last Communist political leader to be revered by the Chinese people. He is considered "a modern saint" who offered protection to his people during the Cultural Revolution; an admirable figure in an otherwise traumatic and bloody era. Works about Zhou in China are heavily censored, and every hint of criticism is removed—so when Gao Wenqian first published this groundbreaking, provocative biography in Hong Kong, it was immediately banned in the People's Republic. Using classified documents spirited out of China, Gao Wenqian offers an objective human portrait of the real Zhou, a man who lived his life at the heart of Chinese politics for fifty years, who survived both the Long March and the Cultural Revolution not thanks to ideological or personal purity, but because he was artful, crafty, and politically supple. He may have had the looks of a matinee idol, and Nixon may have called him "the greatest statesman of our era," but Zhou's greatest gift was to survive, at almost any price, thanks to his acute understanding of where political power resided at any one time.

Details Books Supposing Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary

Original Title:	Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary
ISBN:	158648415X (ISBN13: 9781586484156)
Edition Language:	English
Characters:	Zhou Enlai

Rating Regarding Books Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary

Ratings: 3.89 From 231 Users | 38 Reviews

Piece Regarding Books Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary

Banned in the People's Republic when it first appeared in Chinese in 2003, this interesting biography of Chinese premier Zhou Enlai focuses on his role, both good and bad, during the Cultural Revolution. As Deng Xiaoping is quoted in the book: "Without the premier the Cultural Revolution would have been much worse. And without the premier the Cultural Revolution wouldn't have dragged on for such a long time." Very enlightening view of Zhou's attempts to limit the excesses of the Cultural

This book is an edited translation of a Chinese book written by a Chinese historian (Gao Wenqian is the former official biographer of Zhou Enlai at the Chinese Communist Party Central Research Office for Documentation and director of the Zhou Enlai Research Group. He left China after the Tienanmen massacre and now lives in Queens, New York). So it can be a hard book to follow, even for someone interested in Red Chinese history, as a lot of things are taken for granted by the writer and others

The author of this book, Gao Wenqian, was in charge of official research on Zhou Enlai for the Chinese National Archives during the 1980's. After the Tiananmen Square incident, Gao became disillusioned with the Communist Party and left China for the US. He smuggled out his notes, and used them to write this biography of Zhou Enlai. (Zhou was the Premier (i.e., Prime Minister) of China from 1949 until his death in 1976.)The book is not a comprehensive biography of Zhou, and instead focuses mostly

Interested by East Asian history, especially of the contemporary Cold War. This book definitely called out to me, knowing somewhat of the role the former premier of P.R. China, Zhou Enlai played in the state's foundation with Mao Zedong up to the ping-pong diplomacy he initiated with the U.S. and former president Richard Nixon. I can only imagine if I read the Chinese version how much more we'd learn of Zhou Enlai. Like the short brief on the back cover of the book mentioned, Zhou is indeed a

Zhou Enlai was a much more complex actor in China's tumultuous existence under Mao than I previously had thought. Although he did a lot of good for the people and protecting China's cultural history, I feel that Zhou's conscious decisions not to stand up to Mao to protect his position w/in the ruling party, keeping his ability to deflect some of Mao's actions however lead to the rule Mao had for so long over China.

Zhou Enlai, the former chinese premier, was probably most known to the world as one of the architects of Sino-US normalisation of relation. That is also how I came to know him. Intelligent, charming, and politically astute, he managed to escape the fate that befell people around him, from the times of Chinese Civil War, Great Leap Forward up to the Cultural Revolution, when he came to be consumed by cancer. The most interesting thing to note from this book is his relationship with Mao Zedong.

Unfortunately, this book is just kind of boring. But then, Zhou was a politician and simply reading about political maneuvering isn't very interesting. Reading a 100 page summary would have been much more interesting.