Zhou Enlai Research Articles

LT. COL. WALTER GORDON HARMON, ‘AN OLD CHINA HAND’

Gordon Harmon was born in China in 1900 and after the First World War served in the Salt Revenue Guards for a number of years. After the outbreak of WWII he was posted in a liaison role to the centre of Chinese government in Chungking. There he worked with Chiang Kai Shek's Nationalist Intelligence Service. But he also had quite close links with Chou En-Lai, who was also in Chungking at that time. The extent of his more general relationship with the Communists is unclear, but he seems to have reported fairly extensively on their plans and intentions. Harmon has left a very detailed record of a conversation with Mao Tse-tung in 1946 which seems to suggest that he had met Mao a few times before.. It was Mao who apparently said to Harmon “I am not interested in Hongkong and I will certainly not allow it to become a bone of contention between your country and mine”

‘The law has no conscience’: The cultural construction of justice and the reception of Awara in China

Abstract In 1955 members of the Indian People’s Theater Association, a group closely associated with the Communist Party of India, travelled to China as part of a cultural exchange between the two countries following the state level meeting between Zhou Enlai and Jawaharlal Nehru in 1954. Their visit saw an ‘Indian film week’ in which Hindi films were screened throughout China, most notably the 1951 Raj Kapoor film Awara, remembered fondly by many Chinese growing up in the later 1970s–early 1980s Reform period as Liulangzhe. This article situates Awara in the history of Chinese cinema, as a leftist text that depicted a fellow third world nation also engaged in constructing an alternative to the western experience of modernity.

Diplomacy As Theatre: Staging the Bandung Conference of 1955

AbstractAs a significant ‘moment’ in twentieth-century international diplomacy, the rise of post-colonial Afro-Asia at the Bandung Conference of 1955 is replete with symbolic meanings. This paper proposes a conceptual approach to understanding the symbolic dimension of international diplomacy, and does so by ruminating on the newly unearthed Indonesian material on the Bandung Conference. To this end, ‘diplomacy as theatre’ is introduced as an interpretive framework to re-cast the conference as a theatrical performance, in which actors performed on the stage to audiences. Focusing on the city of Bandung, this paper reconstructs some examples of the ‘performative’ dimensions of international diplomacy, and elaborates on the notion of ‘staging’ the city and the role played by the people of Bandung, including the significance of conference venues, as well as the impromptu creation of a ritual citation that contributed to an iconic ‘performative act’ during the conference. Sukarno, Nehru, Zhou Enlai and Nasser all understood the importance as performers in their role as new international statesmen, representing the esprit de corps of the newly emergent post-colonial world. In deconstructing the symbolic, it will become evident that the role played by Indonesia significantly influenced the underlying script of the diplomatic theatre which unfolded at Bandung.

Finding Freedom: Human Rights in the Political Economy

The question of how best simultaneously to achieve and reconcile the twin desirable goals of good governance and economic prosperity has long been a focus of philosophical inquiry -- from Ancient Greece (and before that, Ancient China), through the European Enlightenment, to present times. In the modern (post-war) era, a new and important ingredient has been added to the mixture that binds economic and socio-political well-being -- international law. Many aspects of international law have played their part, but the discipline of greatest interest, if not significance, has, arguably, been international human rights law. This paper focuses on the different roles that so-called universal rights and freedoms are said to play in forging, sustaining and destroying the relationship between economic and social well-being, and analyses what are and will be the consequences for the political economies of the West and China. Though certain conclusions are drawn as to the significance of the agency of human rights, the paper suggests that it may yet be -- as, reputedly, Zhou Enlai believed was the case regarding lessons learnt from the French Revolution -- too soon to say.

“A Personal Reflection on Norodom Sihanouk and Zhou Enlai: An Extraordinary Friendship on the Fringes of the Cold War”

“A Personal Reflection on Norodom Sihanouk and Zhou Enlai: An Extraordinary Friendship on the Fringes of the Cold War” Julio A. Jeldres (bio) I was sixteen years old when I first read about Norodom Sihanouk1 and Cambodia. Jacqueline Kennedy’s visit to Cambodia in November 1967 had been widely reported by the press in my homeland, Chile, where her assassinated husband was greatly admired. Through Jackie Kennedy’s visit to Cambodia, I became interested in Norodom Sihanouk’s fascinating life, totally unaware that, years later, our paths would cross and I would become his private secretary. My Cambodian friends often tell me that it was my destiny. In 1967, I wanted to know more about Cambodia. Since there was no information available, I wrote to the Cambodian mission at the United Nations. I found it unbelievable, but four months later I received a handwritten letter back from Sihanouk himself. That began our friendship, which was first conducted through correspondence.2 After Sihanouk was deposed in March 1970, I discovered that the local New China News Agency branch in Santiago, Chile, carried copies in Spanish of all of Sihanouk’s statements made in the Chinese capital a day earlier. It didn’t seem to make sense that a Communist regime would extend such courtesies to a former monarch. This led me to one aspect of Sihanouk’s political life that I found especially intriguing: his association with Chinese premier Zhou Enlai. This relationship seemed to be a very special one between the head of state of a Buddhist kingdom and the prime minister of [End Page 323] a Communist state. As a novice in international affairs, I knew little about how relationships operated between states, yet it still seemed strange to me that a ruler who claimed to be descended from the kings of Angkor had a unique relationship with the political leader of a country ideologically opposed to monarchical government. I sought to gain a better understanding of the Sihanouk-Zhou friendship when I began researching my first degree in Melbourne, Australia. However, in those days there was little written about Cambodia’s relations with China, as attention was mainly focused on the ongoing conflict ravaging Vietnam. During this period, I continued to correspond with Sihanouk as circumstances allowed. Then, in 1981, I met Sihanouk for the first time during a visit to North Korea, a trip he organized for his “young Chilean friend” when Sihanouk was the honored guest of President Kim Il-Sung. The trip came about after I had informed Sihanouk—in one of my letters to him—that I had won a ticket in a raffle for a trip to Hong Kong. Sihanouk said that Hong Kong was not far from North Korea and that he would ask the North Korean president’s permission to receive me at his own residence in Pyongyang. Little did I know that this trip was going to change my life; the following year I joined the private secretariat of Sihanouk. I was initially based in Bangkok but often traveled to Beijing, where Sihanouk had, once again, established his headquarters following Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia. In Beijing I was able once again to pursue the topic that interested me: the relationship between Sihanouk and Zhou Enlai. In this essay, I trace the relationship between the two leaders from their first meeting at the Ban-dung Asian-African Conference in April 1955 until the last time they met, in August 1975, just before Sihanouk returned to Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge regime and lived for three years under house arrest. In Beijing, which again became my permanent base in 1988, I began mingling with a select group of Khmer speakers in the Chinese foreign ministry whose careers were directed toward managing China’s policies toward Cambodia and its immediate neighbors, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. In most cases, they served two or three postings at the Chinese embassy in Phnom Penh, then in Bangkok, Hanoi, or Vientiane, from where they followed those countries’ relations with Cambodia. Beginning as translators to the embassy or the ambassador, they rose in seniority up the diplomatic ladder and, in some cases, became ambassadors to Cambodia...

‘Making Green the Motherland’: greening the Chinese socialist undertaking (1949–1978)

‘Making Green the Motherland’: greening the Chinese socialist undertaking (1949–1978)

Study on Zhou Enlai's Outlook on Life and Its Contemporary Value

Zhou Enlai, in his whole life, served the people wholeheartedly, struggled for the lofty cause of communism, disregarded fame and wealth, dedicated selflessly, strove constantly for self-improvement and kept positive and optimistic. All of the above reflect Zhou Enlai's outlook on life. Today, studying his outlook on life has important value for contemporary university students in China to steer their own life better and establish Marxism scientific outlook on life.

The April Fifth Movement: Marking the Rise of Citizen Photojournalism in the People's Republic of China

The death of Chinese premier Zhou Enlai in January 1976 triggered the April Fifth Movement, during which hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens flocked to Beijing's Tiananmen Square to mourn the widely respected political figure and protest against the central government, which was then largely under the influence of the much-despised Gang of Four. The movement was suppressed, and the official media remained silent. Some protesters took the risk to photograph the event and preserve their negatives that today constitute an important historical visual legacy. Based on interviews with several photographers and a close study of their photographs and memoirs, this article explores the relationship between the April Fifth Movement and the contemporary history of photography in China. It claims that the movement, as a result of a conscious choice by these photographers, marks both the rise of citizen photojournalism and a renewal of the social documentary tradition in China.

Deng Xiaoping and the transformation of China

Perhaps no one in the twentieth century had a greater long-term impact on world history than Deng Xiaoping. And no scholar of contemporary East Asian history and culture is better qualified than Ezra Vogel to disentangle the many contradictions embodied in the life and legacy of China's boldest strategist. Once described by Mao Zedong as a needle inside a ball of cotton, Deng was the pragmatic yet disciplined driving force behind China's radical transformation in the late twentieth century. He confronted the damage wrought by the Cultural Revolution, dissolved Mao's cult of personality, and loosened the economic and social policies that had stunted China's growth. Obsessed with modernization and technology, Deng opened trade relations with the West, which lifted hundreds of millions of his countrymen out of poverty. Yet at the same time he answered to his authoritarian roots, most notably when he ordered the crackdown in June 1989 at Tiananmen Square. Deng's youthful commitment to the Communist Party was cemented in Paris in the early 1920s, among a group of Chinese student-workers that also included Zhou Enlai. Deng returned home in 1927 to join the Chinese Revolution on the ground floor. In the fifty years of his tumultuous rise to power, he endured accusations, purges, and even exile before becoming China's preeminent leader from 1978 to 1989 and again in 1992. When he reached the top, Deng saw an opportunity to creatively destroy much of the economic system he had helped build for five decades as a loyal follower of Mao--and he did not hesitate.

China since 1949 by Linda Benson (review)

Reviewed by: China since 1949by Linda Benson Xiaoping Sun (bio) Linda Benson. China since 1949. 2ndedition. Series of Seminar Studies in History. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2011. xliii + 190 pp. Paperback $29.20, isbn978-1-4082-3769-4. From a poor developing country in the mid-twentieth century to an economic powerhouse in the early twenty-first century, China has experienced dramatic changes over the past sixty years. What were the changes and how did they happen? What were their impacts on different sectors of the population? How does the understanding of China’s recent past enrich our appreciation of China’s position in the current world? In this astonishingly concise survey, Linda Benson [End Page 212]tackles these questions felicitously, weaving ordinary people’s lives, particularly of women and ethnic minorities, into major historical events to showcase the many faces, as well as many phases, of China’s political, economic, and social change. Benson centers the history of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on four major themes: the tension between traditional culture and revolutionary agendas, the disparity between rural and urban development, the uneasiness between regional/local power and central authority, and the tension between Communism and modernization. The unfolding of these tensions, oftentimes intersecting with one another, reveals the complexity of Chinese society undergoing these changes. The book contains three parts, with the first part offering an introduction (chapter 1) and a brief account of the geography and a historical overview focusing on the turbulent years from the late Qing to the 1949 revolution (chapter 2). The second section, chapters 3–10, chronicles major events that shaped recent Chinese society, ranging from political campaigns to economic reforms, from Maoist policies of leaping into a Communist paradise to Hu Jintao’s agenda of building a harmonious world. The last part, chapter 11, concludes the book with assessments of China’s achievements and challenges facing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In two brief chapters (chapters 3 and 4) covering the Mao years from 1949 to 1976, Benson clearly lays out the challenges of the new revolutionary state and attempts of the Communist regime in addressing these challenges. Chapter 3 does a particularly good job of explaining the power structure of the new administration and the relationship between the CCP and the military. The emphasis on land reform, the new marriage law, and the regional autonomous system sets the tone of the book, which gives particular attention to the agricultural sector, women, and minorities. If grouping the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution in one chapter (chapter 4) does support Benson’s claim that “periodization for the book departs from standard treatment in most texts on modern China” (p. 4), the departure actually appears in a simplistic and superficial manner. It makes sense to use the two major political disasters to demonstrate the failures of the radical Maoist attempts, but such treatment overshadows the moderate and yet important changes that helped to salvage China from the turmoil. For example, the reform led by Liu Shaoqi immediately after the three years of famine allowed a rapid economic recovery, and Zhou Enlai, in the early 1970s, had already started to rebuild the CCP and rehabilitate CCP members purged in the Cultural Revolution. Benson’s periodization tends to reproduce the party-line story of a radical transition from political turmoil and economic disaster of Maoist extremes into Deng Xiaoping’s miraculous economic reforms. While Benson’s brevity is admirable, indeed, these two chapters unavoidably fall short by omitting some important aspects of the Mao era that could have better assisted readers to understand the challenges and importance of post-Mao [End Page 213]changes. For example, it is unclear how the rural-based Communist regime established urban order in its early years. Therefore, readers may find it hard to understand how the social and political marks left on the urban landscape by the earlier attempts contribute to the phenomenon of a floating population during the reform era, such as the household registration system instituted in the 1950s and still important today. The rest of the book, chapters 5–10, tells the story of economic reform and social change...

Sport and politics in the 1980s: the Olympic Strategy

Sport and politics in the 1980s: the Olympic Strategy

Rising Powers, Rising Tensions: The Troubled China-India Relationship

��� Half a century after China and India fought a bloody Himalayan war, the two demographic titans have gained considerable economic heft and are drawing increasing international attention. Their rise highlights the ongoing shifts in global politics and economy. This growth has been accompanied by rising bilateral tensions, with Tibet remaining at the core of their divide and India’s growing strategic ties with the U.S. increasingly rankling China. Even as old rifts persist, new issues have started to emerge in the relationship, including China’s resurrected claim to the sprawling northeastern Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, almost three times larger than Taiwan. Booming bilateral trade has failed to subdue their rivalry. Although in 1962 China set out, in the words of Premier Zhou Enlai, to “teach India a lesson,” the real lesson that can be drawn today is that the war failed to achieve any lasting political objectives and only embittered bilateral relations. China has frittered away the political gains it made by decisively defeating India on the battleground—the only war it has won under communist rule despite involvement in multiple military conflicts since 1950. In fact, as military tensions rise and border incidents increase, the China-India relationship risks coming full circle. World history attests that genuine efforts at political reconciliation and bridge building can achieve more than war. This essay argues that the future of the Asian economic renaissance and peace hinges on more harmonious relations between the important powers, especially China and India. A fast-rising Asia has become pivotal in global geopolitical change. Asian policies and challenges now actively shape the international security and economic environments, while Asia’s rise serves as an instigator of global power shifts. Asia, paradoxically, bears the greatest impact of such power shifts. Consequently, the specter of a power imbalance looms large in Asia. At a time when it is politically in transition, Asia is also troubled by growing security challenges, apparent from the resurfacing of Cold War-era territorial and maritime disputes. Against this background, the tense relationship between the world’s two most populous countries holds significant implications for international security and Asian power dynamics. As China and India gain economic heft, they are drawing ever more international attention. However, their underlying strategic dissonance and rivalry over issues extending from land and water to geopolitical influence usually attract less notice.

Comment

Comment

Thomas Schlich, The Origins of Organ Transplantation: Surgery and Laboratory Science, 1880–1930, Rochester Studies in Medical History, Volume 18 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2010), pp. x + 355, £45.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-1- 58046-353-9.

Thomas Schlich, The Origins of Organ Transplantation: Surgery and Laboratory Science, 1880–1930, Rochester Studies in Medical History, Volume 18 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2010), pp. x + 355, £45.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-1- 58046-353-9. - Volume 55 Issue 4

China Buys American

China Buys American

Preparing the People for Mass Clemency: The 1956 Japanese War Crimes Trials in Shenyang and Taiyuan

AbstractThe lack of official government attention to Japanese war crimes during the Mao years has been widely acknowledged. Yet in the summer of 1956, years of preparatory work by Zhou Enlai culminated in the little-known and summarily dismissed trials of 1,062 self-confessed Japanese war criminals in Shenyang and Taiyuan. The extraordinarily lenient sentences given to 45 of the worst offenders – and wholesale pardons of 1,017 – were prompted by larger geopolitical considerations that effectively hamstrung PRC authorities from bringing the trials into closer alignment with previous ones in Europe and Japan. Zhou's determination to adopt a “policy of leniency” towards the Japanese prisoners, however, was sorely at odds with the sentiments of the general public. The need to prepare the people for a counterintuitive mass clemency saw a sudden and drastic shift in media discourse in 1954, followed by a series of remarkable cultural and intellectual campaigns that were designed to persuade the Chinese people that they should henceforth let bygones be bygones.

A Comment and Analyses about the Base of Zhou Enlai’s Diplomatic Thoughts and its Influence on China’s Diplomacy

A Comment and Analyses about the Base of Zhou Enlai’s Diplomatic Thoughts and its Influence on China’s Diplomacy

Cold War co-operation: New Chinese evidence on Jawaharlal Nehru's 1954 visit to Beijing

Drawing on declassified Chinese records of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's conversations with Mao Zedong and Zhou En-lai when he visited Beijing in 1954, this essay examines the conceptual underpinnings of Sino-Indian co-operation. The Cold War fostered co-operation between two countries that might have been expected to become rivals. In exploring the nature and limitations of the relationship, the essay shows how these leaders failed to understand that Asian countries might be as averse to Chinese or Indian hegemony as they were to Western imperialism.

The whirlwind of China: Zhou Enlai's shuttle diplomacy in 1957 and its effects

Zhou Enlai's shuttle diplomacy in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in January 1957 was an important link between Liu Shaoqi's visit to the Soviet Union in October 1956 and Mao Zedong's attendance at the Moscow Conference of World Communist and Workers' Parties in November 1957. Based on recently available Chinese and Eastern European archival sources, this article argues that Zhou's shuttle diplomacy achieved certain degree of success because it helped to consolidate socialist unity and strengthen the socialist bloc after the Polish–Hungarian Crises. For a brief period of time, Beijing became a second parallel ‘center of world revolution’.

Two Chinese Commentators on the Slow Progress towards a Law on Religions

Two Chinese Commentators on the Slow Progress towards a Law on Religions Roderick O'Brien (bio) 2010: The Legal Context In 1956, Liu Shaoqi, then President of China, said in his report to the National Congress of the Communist Party of China that the establishment of a complete legal system had become an absolute necessity.1 But priorities quickly changed for the Party, and establishing a legal system was soon openly criticised by Premier Zhou Enlai. The work of establishing a legal system was not begun until after the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. But it was not until more recent times that Jiang Zemin promised that China would have a complete legal system by 2010.2 In March this year, the Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, Wu Bangguo, promised that the work would be complete in 2010.3 However, even the basic framework is unlikely to be in place by the end of 2010, much less a fully complete legal system. This is particularly evident in the area of law relating to religion. In any country, it would be difficult to prepare and pass appropriate comprehensive laws, but in China, there are special difficulties which will be examined in this short paper. Part of this effort to establish a legal system has been the movement towards a more constitutional form of government. A key step was the establishment of the Legislation Law in 2000.4 According to the Legislation Law, future laws would be enacted according to a standardised process, and past laws would be brought into conformity with the Legislation Law. This process requires a hierarchy of laws: at the peak is the Constitution, then [End Page 374] the laws passed by the National People's Congress, and under the authority of those laws, there is provision for national administrative regulations, and below these, local regulations. The State Council Information Office published a White Paper on 28 February 2008 entitled China's Efforts and Achievements in Promoting the Rule of Law.5 The White Paper, composed of eight chapters and six appendices, "describes the Chinese people's protracted and unremitting struggles for democracy, freedom, equality and the building of a country under the rule of law". The document is well worth reading, for the insight it gives into the categories and assumptions of the Party in establishing legislation. Who should legislate for religion? The White Paper provides that: In accordance with the Legislation Law of the People's Republic of China, laws on the following affairs must be made exclusively by the National People's Congress and its Standing Committee: affairs involving state sovereignty, the formation, organisation as well as the functions and powers of state organs, the system of regional ethnic autonomy, the system of special administrative regions, the system of self-government of people at the grassroots level, criminal offences and their punishment, deprivation of citizens' political rights, mandatory measures and penalties involving restriction of the freedom of the person, expropriation of non-state-owned property, basic civil system, basic economic system and basic systems of finance, taxation, customs, banking and foreign trade, and systems of litigation and arbitration. But the National People's Congress and its Standing Committee have yet to legislate for the important question of religion, and to regulate the functions and powers of the state organs which control religion. This failure will be explained below. [End Page 375] The White Paper also points to the Constitution as the legal safeguard of freedom of religious belief: The Constitution stipulates that citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of religious belief. No state organ, public organisation or individual may compel citizens to believe in or not believe in any religion; nor may they discriminate against citizens who believe in or do not believe in any religion. The state protects normal religious activities. No one may make use of religion to engage in activities that disrupt public order, impair the health of citizens or interfere with the educational system of the state. Religious bodies and religious affairs are not subject to any foreign domination. However, individuals or religious bodies cannot freely interpret the Constitution: this power lies...