INTELLIGENCE REPORT LEADERS OF COMMUNIST CHINA IV. CHOU EN-LAI

• Document Type: SPECIALCOLLECTION
• Collection: The Nixon Collection
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): 06928140
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: U
• Document Page Count: 29
• Document Creation Date: February 23, 2022
• Document Release Date: February 11, 2022
• Publication Date: September 1, 1971

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�ftnfidential-
EO 13526 3.3(h)(2)
EO 13526 6.2(d)
DIRECTORATE OF
INTELLIGENCE
Intelligence Report
LEADERS OF COMMUNIST CHINA
IV CHOU En-lai
-Confidenhati �
CR R 71-5.4
September 1971
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WARNING
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PREFACE
This report is the fourth in a series of
in-depth biographic studies of Communist China's
top leaders. The series fills a gap in our bio-
graphic coverage of China's senior leadership.
This report was prepared by the Central Reference
Service and was coordinated within CIA as appro-
priate.
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CON EN
EXclUd
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declossifica
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BIOGRAPHIC BRIEF
Chou En-lai is a member of the triumvirate
ruling in Peking today. Although 73 years old, he
is the only one of the top three with sufficient
vigor to conduct the day-to-day affairs of the
nation. For protocol purposes Chou acts as Chief
of State. As Premier, he has run the government
since the People's Republic was established in 1949.
Foreign affairs, which he conducts with consummate
skill, has long been his particular specialty. He
is more than just an able administrator and diplo-
mat, however. His status has been enhanced since
the Cultural Revolution (1966-68), and he now
exercises a strong influence on a wide range of
domestic as well as foreign policy matters. In
1970 he was put in charge of the task of rebuilding
the Communist Party apparatus, thus making him de
facto secretary general. In short, Chou serves as
Mao Tse-tung's chief executive of the country and
of the party.
Chou has reached his present position of
eminence after decades of struggle and subtle com-
promise. He joined the Chinese Communist Party in
1924, but it was not until 1935 that he gave his
support to Mao Tse-tung, to whom he has been stead-
fastly loyal ever since. Chou has remained in the
inner circle of leaders continuously since that time.
Chou En-lai is well-known abroad, where he has
long been the best salesman of Peking's accomplish-
ments and policies. He is known to be a tough,
patient negotiator, while his evident talent, charm
and flexibility enhance his effectiveness as a
diplomat.
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PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA
Member, Standing Committee,
Politburo, Chinese Communist
Party Central Committee;
Premier, State Council,
People's Republic of China;
Chairman, Chinese People's
Political Consultative
Congress
Chou En-lai, now in
his early 70's, is the
third-ranking Chinese
Communist Party (CCP)
leader and the most
active member of the
inner circle of leader-
ship. He is known
abroad as China's lead-
ing diplomat, but he is
her leading statesman as
well, having been Premier since 1949 and the
senior nonmilitary CCP figure since 1966. Minis-
ter of Foreign Affairs for the first decade of the
regime, he resigned the post in 1958 but has re-
tained a leading role in foreign policy formation
and a flim grip on its administration.
CHOU En-lai
(0719/1869/0171)
Chou communicates reasonableness to his
hearers, and this, with his charm, has made him
the most popular Chinese Communist leader abroad.
Chou's popularity at home is also considerable.
What he lacks in charisma is partly offset by
affability and other more homespun political
qualities. He is a proponent of social order,
stability and a productive economy. He worked
to curb extremism during the Cultural Revolution
between 1966 and 1968. Chou also adroitly managed
to ride out the more extreme leftist swings of
the political pendulum, however, and never openly
appeared to lose the confidence of Mao Tse-tung
and Lin Piao. Militant Maoists who tried to
attack Chou in the spirit of revolutionary
criticism found him beyond reach.
CONFIDENTIAL
GROUP I
Excluded from automatic
downgrading and
deciastification
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Principal Positions
Chou is a member of the Politburo of the Ninth
Central Committee (CCP-CC) and of its elite Stand-
ing Committee. This committee consisted originally
of Mao, Lin Piao, Chou, and two lesser lights,
ideologist Ch'en Po-ta and security figure K'ang
Sheng, but may now consist only of Mao, Lin and
Chou. Chou does not sit on the Military Commission
of the CCP-CC, headed by Mao and Lin, but his
personal influence with its members is undeniable.
China's first and only Premier, Chou since 1949
has presided over the civil administration of the
country--foreign affairs, civil government at lower
levels, economy, security, and, to a degree, military
affairs. (In 1967, for example, he gave direct
orders to regional military authorities.)
Since 1954 Chou has also been chairman of the
Chinese People's Political Consultative Congress
(CPPCC), a national assembly of persons nominally
representative of all occupational sectors, classes
and preexisting parties in China. Now a rubber-
stamp organization, the CPPCC is historically senior
to the National People's Congress (NPC), whose
chairman is Chu Te.
Relations with Lin and Mao
Chou has been outraAked by Lin Piao, Mao's
designated successor, since 1966. There is little
reason to consider Chou's status as markedly inferior
to that of Lin; Mao would scarcely have established
Lin in second position without the agreement of
Chou, the man whose support Lin needs most. Second
rank--that of the heir apparent--is a delicate
position, and there is reason to suspect that Chou
has for many years deliberately spurned it,
believing that he can operate more effectively in
the number-three slot.
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IN STEP WITH MAO. MAO, LIN AND CHOU AT FEBRUARY
1968 CULTURAL REVOLUTION MEETING
Chou and Mao are the sole surviving members
of the pre-1928 CCP-CC. Between 1928 and January
1934, a period when Mao was excluded from the CCP
inner circle, Chou was at times much more influen-
tial than Mao. In their post-1928 activities Mao
and Chou appeared as two strong leaders who worked
often in separate and conflicting spheres, during
a particularly trying period. It was between
early 1931 and early 1933 that party headquarters
moved from Shanghai to Kiangsi. Chou was on the
Politburo at most times, working with leaders who
were more or less at odds with Mao.
Chou's own relationship with Mao was obscure
until the historic January 1935 conference of the
party at Tsuni, at the start of the retreat to
the northwest called the Long March. At this
conference Chou gave his full loyalty and public
deference to Mao, who emerged for the first time as
undisputed leader of the CCP. Since then the two
men seem to have had a uniquely personal private
relationship in which they have apparently meshed
their respective talents.
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Chou has remained firmly established in Mao's small
entourage of fully trusted helpers. In foreign
affairs, especially, he has spoken with particularly
great authority.
Personal Stature
In the 1949-66 period, Chou was chiefly an
administrator, but he emerged from the 1966-69
Cultural Revolution as Mao's chief executive in
party as well as governmental affairs. He has
entirely reclaimed the reins of governmental con-
trol from the encroachments of party administrators
after 1956. Within the party he is now more influ-
ential than at any time since the early 1930's, and
he is currently engaged in the delicate task of
putting together a new party apparatus.
Chou has proved his administrative competence
and political toughness in over 40 years of service,
beginning in 1924, when he first joined the CCP
as an already experienced activist. He tends to
come forward in such times of stress as the present.
Early Life
Chou En-lai was born around 1898 in Shaohsing,
Chekiang Province, of an upper-class family. In
1913 he entered the American-sponsored Nankai Middle
School in Tientsin. Graduating in 1917, he, like
Mao and others, became involved in the students'
political study movements that matured during the
May Fourth Movement of 1919 and became the seedbed
of the CCP.
Chou "studied" in Japan and again in China in
1917-18. From 1917 on he was increasingly pre-
occupied with political agitation and apparently
ceased serious study. He went to France in late
1920 for a stay that lasted until 1924 and included
a visit to Germany.
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Political Commissar, 1924-35
Chou joined the CCP in Canton in 1924. His
first party assignment was as secretary of the
Kwangtung provincial party headquarters. In the
Kuomintang (KMT)-CCP united front of 1924-27, he
held several important KMT positions and earned
Chiang Kai-shek's regard. He was instrumental in
placing Communists far and wide within the KMT mili-
tary forces as political workers.
In 1925-26 Chou served as
acting director of the Politi-
cal Department of the Whampoa
Military Academy, of which the
youthful and dynamic Chiang
was director. Chou was also
secretary there to the Russian
adviser, Gen. V. K. Bleucher.
In March 1926 Chou was arrested
for clandestine Communist
activity; although he was re-
leased by Chiang's order, his
removal from the Whampoa Acad-
emy followed. Chiang allowed
Chou to continue as an instruc-
tor at the KMT's Peasant
Movement Training Institute in
Canton. Mao Tse-tung, also an
effective participant in the
united front, served as the
institute's last director
during May-October 1926. This
was their first known working
association.
AS A YOUNG SOLDIER
Chiang also retained
Chou in a military cadre train-
ing role. At the same time, in
the winter of 1926-27 Chou was
in charge of all CCP operations
within Chiang's National Revolutionary Army, as the
campaign against local warlords called the Northern
Expedition began. When the united front began break-
ing apart and the CCP restructured itself, Chou became
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head of the newly established Military Department
of the CCP around the end of 1926.
After leaving Canton, Chou went to Shanghai to
aid in the forthcoming seizure of the city by
Chiang Kai-shek's forces. After Chiang made his
historic break with the Communists in April 1927,
Chou was arrested and sentenced to death but either
escaped or was released.
Chou then made his way to Wuhan, where he joined
the Central Committee and Politburo during the Fifth
National Congress of the embattled CCP, held in
April 1927. As reverses mounted, Chou helped Chu
Te plan and execute the unsuccessful Nanchang
uprising of 1 August 1927, at which the Red Army
was born. Again fleeing, Chou went to the East
River area of Kwangtung and subsequently into under-
ground activity in Hong Kong and Shanghai.
By that time, Chou was a veteran indoctrinator
and organizer and had recruited many future leaders.
Present associates whom he knew in the years from
1918 to 1924 include party elder Chu Te, economic
planner Li Fu-ch'un, and the brilliant general
Nieh Jung-chen. Among those who have since suffered
purge was Teng Hsiao-p'ing. All five of the aging
marshals who in 1971 are Mao's vice chairmen of the
CCP Military Commission were in 1926 students or
political instructors at Whampoa under Chou's
direction. Two of them, Nieh and CCP Military Com-
mission Vice Chairman Yeh Chien-ying, are still
among China's active leaders.
In 1928 Chou went to the USSR, where he was a
Chinese delegate to the sixth congresses of both the
CCP and the Comintern. He was reelected to the
CCP-CC and to the Politburo and was retained as head
of the CCP Military Department. He returned to
China in 1929, following brief attendance at the
cadre school in Moscow then known as Sun Yat-sen
University.
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Between 1929 and the spring of 1931 Chou worked
with the Soviet-influenced Li Li-san group in Shang-
hai, which called for "urban uprisings," and with
the fragile Ch' en Shao-yii (Wang Ming) apparatus of
young Russian-trained cadres. He was not associated
with Mao then.
In early 1931, however, KMT pressures drove Chou
out of Shanghai and into the peasant-oriented Kiangsi
environment dominated by Mao Tse-tung. The associa-
tion of Chu Te and Mao Tse-tung, dating from 1928,
received a form of party sanction at the November
1931 Juichin Conference. Mao became chairman of the
Kiangsi Soviet established by the small, beleaguered
Communist force rusticating at Juichin, and Chou
was elected to the new government's central executive
committee.
In the years from 1931 to 1935 the Mao-Chou
relationship was strained by the impatience of the
Moscow-trained student leaders, supported by Chou.
Until forced to yield at the Tsuni Conference
(January 1935), this faction resisted the guerrilla-
minded, defensive views of Mao.
Prior to 1935 Chou had held several senior
military posts. He had been a member of the Central
Revolutionary Military Council since November 1931;
political commissar of the First Front Army,
succeeding Mao, since August 1932; political com-
missar of the entire Red Army--mostly the troops
of the First Front Army--since May 1933; and vice
chairman of the Central Revolutionary Military
Council since January 1934. At Tsuni, however,
Chou yielded to Mao the position of Red Army
political commissar. Mao became head of the Mili-
tary Affairs Committee, with Chou a vice chairman.
(The committee and the council were soon merged, and
Chou remained a vice chairman into the late 1940's.)
United Front Work, 1936-49
Chou's wartime career revolved around the
second united front, a Comintern-stimulated frame-
work of KMT-CCP cooperation against the Japanese.
Chou became the senior CCP negotiator with the
Nationalists.
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The 1936 Sian Incident became the cornerstone of
Chou's wartime career. In December 1936 Chiang
Kai-shek was kidnaped at Sian, in Shensi Province,
by Nationalist-connected military rebels, whom
Chou had previously induced to stop fighting on
Chiang's behalf against the Communists. Chou and
several associates negotiated with the rebels for
Chiang's release. This episode led to suspension
of KMT operations against the Communists and
initiated the negotiation of CCP-KMT collaboration
against the Japanese. After early 1938 Chou assumed
a permanent role as the chief CCP liaison official
with the Nationalist regime in Wuhan and then in
Chungking. As a token of their sincerity, the
Nationalists readmitted Chou to the KMT and made him
a member of the ruling military body of free China.
In September 1939, as the Russians and Japanese
were terminating their miniwar, Chou went to Moscow
where he remained for several months. He returned
to Chungking in June 1940 for a 3-year stay. Lin
Piao joined Chou in 1942-43 for serious military
talks with the Nationalists.
Chou returned to Yenan in mid-1943, and in
1944 he began preparatory work aimed at creating
a coalition government with the KMT to avert a
civil war. US Ambassador Patrick Hurley added his
influence to help keep the coalition negotiations
going into early 1945. Through him Chou secured
Chinese Communist representation by party elder
Tung Pi-wu at the April 1945 San Francisco Conference
on International Organization, which established the
United Nations.
These efforts proved impossible, and fighting
between Colludunists and Nationalists, never entirely
nonexistent, expanded in August 1945, even as Chou
and Mao were in Chungking negotiating with Chiang
Kai-shek over the shape of postwar China. The
negotiations failed and civil war broke out in
earnest, leading ultimately to a Communist military
victory. Chou returned to Yenan in November 1946
and was occupied with party and military questions.
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MAO, A JAPANESE FRIEND, AMBASSADOR HURLEY, CHU TE
AND CHOU IN YENAN, NOVEMBER 1944
He was with Mao after the Communists evacuated Yenan
in March 1947 until Mao went to Peking in 1949. In
late March 1949 Chou offered surrender terms to a
Nationalist delegation that had sought negotiations.
Their rejection ended for him a 25-year career of
united front work with the KMT.
Despite having originally borne the Soviet
trademark, the united front as a political device
for cooperation with non-Communists is one of Chou's
preferred methods. He learned to use it in the
1920's and worked effectively through it in the
1930's and 1940's to cooperate with, then .use, and
finally undermine the Chinese Nationalists. The
new regime was founded in 1949 on the basis of a
united front of all domestic political groupings
and interests, embodied in the CPPCC. This wide-
spectrum body legitimized the People's Republic of
China, and under a "Common Program," which had been
drafted under Chou's direction, served for 5 years
as China's only "legislature."
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Chou used the united front concept again in
the mid-1950's in his initially promising contacts
with "Third World" countries, and again in 1970-71,
with the winding down of the Vietnam war, in dealings
involving the front groups of Cambodia, Laos and
South Vietnam.
Premier and Diplomat 1949 On
In 1949 Chou oversaw the staffing and establish-
ment of the government and the creation of a Foreign
Service. On 1 October the new government was
inaugurated, and Chou assumed an array of positions
suited to his wide-ranging responsibilities--member
of the Central People's Government Council (CPGC),
Premier of the Government Administration Council
(GAC), Minister of Foreign Affairs, Vice Chairman of
the Chinese Revolutionary Military Council (RMC),
executive board member of the Sino-Soviet Friendship
Association, chairman of the Foreign Policy Committee
of the Foreign Ministry, and honorary chairman of
the Chinese People's Institute of Foreign Affairs.
The Premier then began wide-ranging diplomacy
pertaining to the forging of trade and economic
agreements, to the Korean war, to Indochina, to
the status of Taiwan, and to UN relationships. His
most important diplomatic service was to support
Mao in negotiations with
Stalin In early 1950
he concluded a set of
Sino-Soviet agreements
capped by the 14 Febru-
ary Sino-Soviet Treaty
of Friendship, Alliance
and Mutual Assistance,
providing for joint
military action to re-
pel aggression by Japan
or "any state allied
with Japan-" From
June 1950 to July 1953
he was preoccupied
with the Korean war,
but he went twice to
STALIN, CHOU AND MALENKOV AT PACT
SIGNING CEREMONY IN MOSCOW, 1952
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Moscow in that period, once in August 1952 with a
military and industrial delegation, and again in
March 1953 for Stalin's funeral.
Supreme legislative, executive and judicial
power was at this time--1949-54--exercised by the
CPGC, chaired by Mao personally as Head of State.
Chou attended most of its 34 meetings in those years,
beside chairing 224 sessions of his own GAC, and
thus was an important decisionmaker.
In January 1953 Chou was appointed to chair
the committee to draft the new 1954 state consti-
tution establishing the NPC, a rubber-stamp legisla-
ture, alongside the CPPCC, which remained the
representative but powerless organ of the entire
Chinese people. The new NPC reorganized and
civilianized the central government and placed the
State Council over the governmental organs. Chou
retained both the Premiership and the Foreign
Ministry. The CPPCC was enlarged and continued
with Chou as its Chairman. (The CPPCC was enlarged
again in 1958 and in 1964; it has not met since
1964.)
Chou's 1954-55 diplomacy established him on
the world scene as a would-be spokesman of the Third
World countries in what came to be known as the
"Spirit of Bandung."
Prior to the April-July 1954 discussions on
Korea and Indochina at the Geneva Foreign Ministers
Conference, China concluded economic and cultural
agreements with Mongolia and North Korea. At the
Geneva Conference, Chou made China a signatory to
the agreement that ended hostilities in Indochina.
Returning via India and Burma, he signed trade
agreements and began to publicize the Five Prin-
ciples of Coexistence. Because they appeared first
in the preamble to the Sino-Indian treaty on trade
with Tibet, Chou shares credit of authorship with
the late Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
The principles are mutual respect for territorial
integrity and sovereignty; nonaggression; noninter-
ference in internal affairs; equality and mutual
benefit; and peaceful coexistence in international
relations.
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The principles are still useful to him in
arguing China's strength, independence, elevated
revolutionary purpose, and self-restraint. His
participation in devising this formula required
neither inventiveness nor courage. "Peaceful
coexistence" was a vogue phrase of the day, already
much used by the Soviets. The "principles" were
in part an expansion of terms of foreign inter-
course previously voiced by Mao before the takeover
at a preparatory meeting of the new Political Con-
sultative Conference on 15 June 1949:
We are willing to discuss with any
foreign government the establishment
of diplomatic relations on the basis
of the principles of equality, mutual
benefit, and mutual respect for ter-
ritorial integrity and sovereignty,
provided it is willing to sever rela-
tions with Chinese reactionaries...
and adopts an attitude of genuine,
and not hypocritical, friendship to-
wards People's China.
Chou therefore was loyally expressing Mao's policies
in this formula and was not taking a personal
initiative.
In the fall Chou completed the negotiation
with Soviet Premier Khrushchev of an end to the
last symbols of Russian imperialism, a set of
special privileges in Manchuria and Sinkiang, and
secured the expansion of Soviet assistance to China.
Reacting to US leadership in the formation of
the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization in late 1954,
five countries called a 29-nation Afro-Asian Con-
ference at Bandung in Indonesia for April 1955.
Chou turned the conference into a personal triumph,
making himself and China the champions of anti-
imperialism, independence and neutralism.
The Hungarian revolution of 1956 interrupted
for Chou an auspicious goodwill tour of South and
Southeast Asia. Chou was at first publicly critical
of the Soviets ("great-nation chauvinism") before he
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expanded his trip to include visits to Moscow,
Warsaw and Budapest. The tone of his statements
then changed swiftly to remarks supporting bloc
solidarity, papering over any public offence to the
Soviets by his earlier words. This unanticipated
event nevertheless gave China its first chance to
question the political dominance of the USSR in
world Communism and to act in the role of a media-
tor between the USSR and its satellites.
Pressure from Teng Hsiao-p'ing
The 1956 CCP constitution, presented by Teng
Hsiao-p'ing, was non-Maoist in tone and altered
the decisionmaking machinery. Replacing Chou in
intraparty influence was the energetic and incisive
Teng, then in his fifties but a rising star who
became CCP First Secretary and Politburo member in
1954 and General Secretary of the CCP-CC in 1956.
A new policymaking organ, the Politburo Standing
Committee, replaced the old Secretariat that had
previously acted for the Politburo. Its members
were those of the Secretariat--Mao, Liu Shao-ch'i,
Chou, Chu Te and Ch'en Teng (Lin Piao was
added in 1958).
In the CCP structure a new, elected administra-
tive Secretariat was constituted to interpret policy
and to manage the expanding CCP and its evolving
relationships with the government. Chou was not
a part of the new Secretariat; the new instruments
of CCP control were not of his devising and did
nothing to conserve his previous influence. One
of the quirks of the Eighth Central Committee,
elected in 1956, was that Chou could remain the
third-ranking member of the Politburo while slipping
to fifth place on the new CCP-CC, after Mao, Liu,
Teng and Chu Te, because the rankings were based on
votes. Liu Shao-ch'i, the CCP chieftain, gained
preeminence over Chou and by 1957 was recognized as
Mao's probable successor.
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Teng began to get into foreign affairs in the
late 1950's. By 1961 he was displacing Chou in
various dealings with the North Koreans and espe-
cially, though probably not completely, with the
Soviets. In December 1963 Teng became Acting
Premier while Chou was on a 3-month tour abroad.
By then it was beginning to be rumored that Teng
was engaging in anti-Chou activity. A seasoned
Hong Kong observer noted in May 1964 that Teng, as
"one of the hardest of the hardliners" in both
domestic and foreign policy, seemed to be moving
into new responsibilities and authority in govern-
mental affairs. To him, Chou, speaking for flexi-
bility and against conceit in foreign affairs,
seemed out of contact with Mao's "doctrinarian
aides."
Resignation from the Foreign Ministry
In early February 1958 Chou unexpectedly re-
signed from the Foreign Ministry. He retained his
leading role in foreign affairs, however, relin-
quishing only the formal responsibilities of the
post to his old associate Ch'en I.
Troubleshooting, 1958-65
The Great Leap Forward of 1958 disrupted
economic administration and planning--areas of con-
cern to the Premier--but he was guardedly in favor
of its goal of speeding up iron and steel produc-
tion, and he is now known to favor mass geographic
dispersion of industry as well. In the ensuing
3-year slump, Chou picked up much of the burden of
repairing the damaged economy and became a spokesman
for revisions of priorities and quotas.
With the onset of Sino-Soviet difficulties
and with the misfiring of domestic campaigns,
policy planning became complex, and the momentum
of China's essentially anti-Western diplomacy
slowed while foreign policy toughened. After 1959
Chou was trying to paper over adverse situations
originating in the bitter Sib-Soviet competition
for international support. In January and February
1959, in the last glow of Sino-Soviet amity, Chou
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attended the 21st CPSU Congress in Moscow and
secured from Khrushchev what was to be the last
installment of Soviet aid to China.
By 1961 China was clearly competing with the
USSR in aid offers to other countries. Chou walked
out of the 22nd CPSU Congress in October 1961,
breaking with Khrushchev, over criticism of Albania,
China's client in Europe.
In dealings with China's neighbors Chou had in
the preceding 2 years forged a number of boundary,
friendship and aid treaties and had traveled ex-
tensively on goodwill missions. Only with India
did accomodation elude him until in October 1962
a brief Chinese punitive campaign ensured borders
located in accordance with China's views.
Normally prescient, Chou miscalculated in
starting out to construct a second diplomatic
triumph like that of 1955 during a grand tour of
Africa and the Middle East in 1963-64. With Foreign
Minister Ch'en I he visited Albania, the United
Arab Republic and nine other African countries
between December 1963 and February 1964 to promote
a second Afro-Asian conference that would exclude
the Soviets and strengthen Chinese influence in the
Middle East. Unaccountably, Chou defeated his own
purpose upon his return from Africa in February
when he upset the leaders of the countries he had
just visited by announcing that "revolutionary pros-
pects throughout Africa are excellent."
By fall, after China had exploded her first
atomic bomb on 16 October, Chou issued a call for a
summit conference of all countries to ban the use of
nuclear weapons. In November he went to Moscow,
in the aftermath of Khrushchev's ouster, but he
accomplished little.
Both internal and external affairs turned
difficult for China in 1965. The downfall of the
Sukarno regime in Indonesia and the possible
escalation of the Vietnam war were incontrovertible
signs that Chinese foreign policy was at the point
of failure. Serious dispute over military plans
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aggravated intraparty political disagreement, which
sharpened in November when an impatient Mao allowed
the first blow of the Cultural Revolution to fall
on the Peking CCP Municipal Committee. It must be
assumed that Chou was close to these developments
from his place on the Politburo Standing Committee.
Cl-IOU AND SUKARNO, APRIL 1965
Chou made four trips in 1965, all between 22
March and 7 July, keeping his hand in Middle
Eastern and South Asian developments. He went to
Romania, Algeria, Egypt, Pakistan, Burma and
Indonesia in March and April. Later in April he
was in Djakarta for the 10th anniversary of the
Bandung Conference. In June he went back to Egypt;
he was also there during the first 10 days of the
Boumediene regime in Algiers. He and his entourage
were particularly disappointed that the Afro-Asian
conference so long in the planning was slighted by
Chou's erstwhile African friends, undercut by the
USSR, and finally canceled because of the downfall
of the planned host government, Ben Bella's Algerian
regime.
Chaos and Reconstruction, 1966-69
The last efforts of the CCP machine of Liu
Shao-ch'i and Teng Hsiao-p'ing to take the inita-
tive in Cultural Revolution campaigning were
unsuccessful in the spring of 1966. Liu, Teng
and the CCP Secretariat were effectively eliminated
by August, leaving the People's Liberation Army
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(PLA) and the Maoists in control. The State Council
was also dismantled as though it were a CCP organ,
but Chou was not blamed for its deficiencies.
Chou stood with Mao from the start of the
Cultural Revolution, resisting Liu and Teng and
collaborating with Lin Piao. He maintained his
options with the ultraleftists who thought they
were obeying Mao, and his reported conflicts with
Chiang Ch'ing (Mao's
wife) never came to
the point of a break.
Chiang, for example,
broke with the
ultraleftist May 16
Group in September
1967 to defend Chou
against the group's
attempt to seize the
reins of foreign
policy. Chou's rela-
tions with leftists
were nonetheless
periodically precarious.
In July 1966, well
before the Red Guards
burst forth, Chou helped
guide and modulate
revolutionary student activity. The August Central
Committee plenum confi/med him, again, in third
place behind Mao and Lin Piao. Chou attended all
eight of the mass rallies held in Peking between
18 August and 25 November and spoke at three.
Speeches in which he urged "production first" aroused
the anger of certain Red Guards, and numerous central
organs under his authority were attacked in late
1966.
WITH CHIANG CHtING (MAO'S WIFE)
AT A PEKING RALLY IN APRIL 1967
As an unofficial adviser to the Central Cultural
Revolution Group headed by Ch'en Po-ta and Chiang
Ch'ing, and as Premier, Chou began in January 1967
to mediate between the myriad factions that emerged
everywhere to participate in setting up "revolu-
tionary" gOvernment. With varying degrees of
success he defended many leaders, including Vice
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Premiers Li Hsien-nien, Li Fu-ch'un, Ch'en I and
Hsieh Fu-chih, but he was not able to prevent many
demotions and forced retirements.
Chou himself was publicly attacked; one wall
poster accused him of protecting Vice Premier Li
Hsien-nien and demanded (metaphorically) that Chou
be "burned alive." Chou could offer placatory
self-criticism but he could also turn admonitory; in
April he bluntly said that criticism of himself
was injudicious.
By the end of April Chou had assumed direct
management of the State Council staff offices for
foreign affairs, finance and trade, and agriculture
and forestry, as their leadership came under political
attack.
Serious trouble developed in Canton, and Chou
went there in April, ostensibly to oversee prepara-
tions for the opening of the Canton Trade Fair. He
also lent support to the hard-pressed Huang Yung-
sheng, commander of the Canton Military Region,
who was beset by youths arriving from Peking to
help the local Red Guard factions.
On 14 July Chou was in Wuhan, since February a
scene of bloody factional struggles, which were
strangling that key industrial center. Having
attempted to secure agreement on a solution autho-
rized by Peking, he left on the same day and was
followed in Wuhan by two Peking emissaries. They
continued the attempt to convey what a Japanese
reporter called Chou En-lai's four-part instructions
One of those instructions censured a powerful force
that on 20 July provocatively arrested the emissaries,
with the support of the Wuhan military Region com-
mander. Chou flew back to Wuhan on the same day,
dramatically replaying his 1936 role in Chiang
Kai-shek's kidnaping, to issue the orders that
secured the release of the detainees. The event
shocked the Peking leadership and became a Cultural
Revolution turning point, leading first to more
turbulence and then to suppression of disorder.
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Chou never went to Shanghai, Mao's preserve,
but he kept his hand in the Canton situation. He
directed negotiations in Peking with provincial
groups until in November a "preparatory group" for
the Kwangtung Provincial Revolutionary Committee
could finally be formed. Many other provincial
revolutionary factions also utilized Chou's media-
tion in 1967-68. The burden on him eased only when
policy became less permissive in the fall of 1967
and the provincial factions began to get into line.
A natural community of concern existed between Chou
and the regional military commanders to see order
reestablished, even if there were no visible bonds
of personal commitment as a group.
Through his ceaseless activity Chou seemed at
times to have become the chief executive officer
of the Cultural Revolution to the extent of even
ordering military actions. The year 1968 became
one of intense governmental reconstruction. Many
decisions on economic matters, foreign policy and
administrative rebuilding fell to Chou, the indis-
pensable man. His third-ranking position was under-
scored by the Ninth Party Congress in April 1969,
which ended the anti-CCP phase of the Cultural
Revolution. After the congress, K'ang Sheng was
charged with the job of rebuilding the shattered
party apparatus. He failed to do so, and in 1970
the task was given to Chou.
During the Cultural Revolution, Red Guard
"diplomacy" seriously injured Peking's foreign
relations. Diplomacy was in abeyance following
the recall to China of all but one Ambassador early
in 1967. Foreign delegations continued to arrive,
however, and Chou made time to meet them and ex-
plain events to them. In August 1967 Red Guards
disrupted the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and went
to such extremes as burning the British Mission.
The latter event shocked even some radicals, and
thereafter Chou managed to protect the integrity
of the foreign affairs establishment fairly well
from further attack.
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Recent Activity in Domestic Affairs
Since early 1970 there has been continuing
pressure on the May 16 Group, a radical group of
ultraleftists that flourished in 1967 and made
Chou their main target. Official pressure on this
group matured into an unpublicized but intense
campaign, and a principal figure of the group,
Yao Teng-shan was supposedly sentenced to death
in June 1971.
Chou's position seemed firm in January 1971,
when he was reported to be closely involved in can-
didate selection for the long anticipated National
People's Congress. Serious controversy over
policy issues continues, but the informal community
of interest, whether or not it can or should be
called an alliance, continues between Chou and the
regional military commanders and is the present
basis of internal stability.
Recent Activity in Foreign Affairs
Chou returned the first group of Ambassadors
to overseas assignments in May 1969. He left China
for the first time in 3 years when he went to Hanoi
in early September for the funeral of Ho Chi Minh.
CONFERRING WITH KOSYGIN ON BORDER TALKS, 1969
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Next, conferring in Peking, Chou and Premier Kosygin
set up Sino-Soviet border talks that began in Octo-
ber. In January 1970 Chou resumed contacts with the
United States in Warsaw after a 2-year interruption,
and in March he made a 3-day visit to North Korea
to terminate a long period of coolness in Sino-North
Korean relations.
Chou's 1971 diplomacy began with a focus on
Indochina and has gone forward to direct dealings
with the United States on a broad range of outstanding
issues, including UN representation. Characteris-
tically, Chou played the leading role in the first
"people's diplomacy" initiative toward the United
States in April 1971 by allowing an American table
tennis team and accompanying journalists into China.
Contacts with the US Government culminated in the
visit of presidential adviser Dr. Henry Kissinger to
Peking in July 1971 for talks with Chou. One direct
result of Kissinger's visit was an invitation ex-
tended by Chou to President Nixon to visit China
before May 1972.
In June Chou achieved some harmonization of
party and state relationships between China and
Romania when Premier Ceausescu visited China for
8 days. Chou made lavish efforts to erase the
memory of impatient behavior that, untypically,
had marked a visit he made to Bucharest in 1966.
Position in Mid-1971
In May 1971 Chou began his third year of party-
state administration under the Ninth Party Congress
mandate. At hcae he has begun to defuse some of
the political and economic issues that beset the
regime. His leadership in foreign affairs appears
to have launched a new phase of conciliatory,
highly visible diplomacy around the world. He
seems to be resuming personal relations with the
United States of the type he had in the Chungking
period (World War II).
The pattern of the Premier's present activity
shows that he is approaching policy formation and
planning by degrees and systematically. As he
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works issues into potentially soluble forms, the
probability is that he is preparing to present
highly persuasive and moderately impressive foreign
and domestic policy packages to the NPC, whenever
the hard-fought delegate selection process is
finished and the time is propitious.
Style
Chou's purposes, to foreigners, seem to combine
respect for the CCP with loyalty to Mao and with
ordinary patriotism.
Chou gets along well with almost everyone and
is an effective mouthpiece for Chinese Communist
policies at home and abroad by being pleasant,
realistic and undoqmatic.
The people who have learned to take Chou at
his word include those who discounted his warnings
that China night enter the Korean war under certain
circumstances and those in India who discounted
China's readiness to attack the Indian Army in 1962.
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Family
Teng Ying-ch'ao, Chou's wife, was born in 1903.
She has been one of the top women Communists since
she joined the CCP in 1925, the year in which they
married.
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