Simon Leys - The Hall of Uselessness - Collected Essays

2009

Zhou Enlai

ALONE among the Maoist leaders, Zhou Enlai had cosmopolitan sophistication, charm, wit and style. He certainly was one of the greatest and most successful comedians of our century. He had a talent for telling blatant lies with angelic suavity. He was the kind of man who could stick a knife in your back and do it with such disarming grace that you would still feel compelled to thank him for the deed. He gave a human face (and a very good-looking one) to Chinese communism. Everyone loved him. He repeatedly and literally got away with murder. No wonder politicians from all over the world unanimously worshipped him. That intellectuals should also share in this cult is more disturbing — although there are some extenuating circumstances.

Zhou was a compulsive seducer. I am of course not referring to his behaviour with women, which was always said to be exemplary and anyway should not concern us. What I mean is simply that, for him, it seems no interlocutors ever appeared too small, too dim or too irrelevant not to warrant a special effort on his part to charm them, to wow them, and to win their sympathy and support. I can state this from direct and personal experience, an experience that was shared over the years by hundreds and thousands of enraptured visitors — primary-school teachers from Zanzibar, trade unionists from Tasmania, Progressive Women from Lapland — not even the Pope had to cope with such time-consuming, bizarre and endless processions of pilgrims. He was also the ultimate Zelig of politics, showing tolerance, urbanity and a spirit of compromise to urbane Western liberals; eating fire and spitting hatred to suit the taste of embittered Third World leaders; displaying culture and refinement with artists; being pragmatic with pragmatists, philosophical with philosophers, and Kissingerian with Kissinger.

It should not be forgotten that besides these strange and absorbing social activities, he was also directing the entire administration of the most populous nation on earth. He personally solved a thousand problems a day, having to substitute in practically every matter for a timorous bureaucracy that was forever reluctant to make any decision or bear any responsibility. He dispatched the affairs of the state with the supreme efficiency of an old Daoist ruler who knows that one should govern a large empire the way one cooks a little fish. He seemingly never slept and still looked always relaxed. He could simultaneously display an exacting attention for minute details that was worthy of a fussy housewife, and a breadth of vision that awed the greatest statesmen of our time. Although he permanently occupied the centre of the stage, his public activity was still a mere sinecure compared with the other show — far more intense, absorbing and momentous — that was running non-stop offstage in the dark recesses of inner-party politics. There he had to perform incredible acrobatics in order to remain on top of the greased pole — eliminating rivals in a relentless power struggle, dodging ambushes, surviving murderous plots hatched by old comrades, and so on. His task became more and more superhuman as he had to lend single-handedly, for the benefit of a bemused international audience, an impressive façade of humanity, intelligence and sanity to a regime whose increasing cruelty, ineptitude and madness were finally to come out in the open during the last ten years of the Maoist era.

Zhou’s reputation may eventually suffer from the posthumous debunking of Mao (which is a paradox, as, in the end, Mao ruthlessly attempted to get rid of him). Still, some Chinese intellectuals are now probably being unfair when they describe him as having merely played Albert Speer to Mao’s Hitler. Zhou’s relation to his master did not reflect a straightforward subordination; the actual situation was far more complex. For many years before Mao reached supreme power, Zhou had actually been running the Chinese Communist Party behind the screen of a series of ineffectual or unlucky nominal leaders who were purged one after another. Zhou weathered these successive crises practically unscathed; from these early days onward, he displayed an uncanny ability for political survival that was to become the hallmark of his long career. He developed methods that made him unsinkable: always exert power by proxy; never occupy the front seat; whenever the opposition is stronger, immediately yield.

His unique skills made him forever indispensable, while simultaneously he cultivated a quality of utter elusiveness; no one could pin him down to a specific political line, nor could one associate him with any particular faction. He never expressed personal ideas or indulged in penning his own theoretical views. Where did he really stand? What did he actually believe? Apparently he had no other policies but those of the leader of the moment, and nourished no other ambitions but to serve him with total dedication. Yet the brilliance of his mind, the sharpness of his intelligence, the electrifying quality of his personal magnetism, eloquence and authority constantly belied the kind of bland selflessness that he so studiously displayed in the performance of his public duties; Zhou’s enigma lay in the paradox that, with all his exceptional talents, he should also present a sort of disconcerting and essential hollowness .

Twenty-three hundred years ago, Zhuang Zi, in giving advice to a king, made him observe that when a small boat drifts in the way of a huge barge, the crew of the barge will immediately shout abuse at the stray craft; however, coming closer, if they discover that the little boat is empty, they will simply shut up and quietly steer clear of it. He concluded that a ruler who has to sail the turbulent waters of politics should first and foremost learn how to become an empty boat .

History provides few examples of statesmen who were as successful as Zhou Enlai in mastering this subtle discipline. It enabled him to become the ultimate survivor. There was no limit to his willingness to compromise. Once, when the communists had to co-operate again with the nationalists, a local party cadre rebelled against this shameless fraternisation with fascist butchers and indignantly asked Zhou, “Should we become mere concubines?” Zhou replied coolly, “If necessary, we should become prostitutes.” Yet he was not seeking survival for survival’s sake; he survived in order to win. He combined utter fluidity with absolute resilience, like water, which takes instantaneously the shape of whatever container it happens to fill and simultaneously never surrenders one single atom of its own nature — in the end it always prevails. The contrast between the posthumous fates of Mao and Zhou is quite illuminating in this respect. Mao’s mummy was left to rot in a huge and grotesque mausoleum in the heart of Peking, as if better to witness from this vantage point the dismantling of all his policies. As for Zhou, once more, he vanished into thin air — quite literally this time, since he wisely requested that his ashes be scattered over the country — and beyond his death it is still he who is ruling today over China, through his own hand-picked successors.

Zhou made history for half a century and wielded enormous power over one-quarter of mankind; yet he apparently never succumbed to the temptation of self-aggrandisement and the lust for supremacy to which none of the other Chinese leaders remained immune. He withstood countless trials, crises, humiliations and dangers; he repeatedly served, with stoic loyalty, leaders who did not have his ability or his experience; and yet he never wavered in his commitment to Chinese communism. From where did he derive his spiritual strength? What motivated him? Like many bourgeois intellectuals of his generation, in his youth he was fired by intense patriotism. In his early twenties, while in Europe, he seems to have identified once and for all the salvation of China with the victory of communism. We know nothing more of his spiritual evolution. Zhou’s conundrum was thus compounded with a tragic irony: this man who generously dedicated himself, soul and body, to the service of China, ended up as the staunchest pillar of a regime that managed to kill more innocent Chinese citizens in twenty-five years of peace than had the combined forces of all foreign imperialists in one hundred years of endemic aggression.