Free Nixon and Mao by Margaret MacMillan

Communists in 1949. Mao Tse-tung proclaimed the People’s Republic in Beijing, and the defeated Chiang set up an alternative government on the island of Taiwan.
    In 1949, at the age of fifty-one, Chou became the new China’s first premier as well as its foreign minister. (Although he gave up the second post in 1958, he continued to supervise China’s foreign relations until his death.) He was as charming as ever. He lived austerely and simply, darning, legend had it, his own socks. He worked constantly, well into the night. No detail was ever too small for him. When he set up his new Foreign Ministry, he did his best to ensure that China’s newest diplomats, most of whom came from the military, acquired the knowledge and the skills they now needed, whether it was through lectures on international law or through diplomatic protocols. The trainees had lessons from the Soviets on how to wear suits and ties and how to dance, and sessions in a Beijing restaurant to practice eating Western food with Western-style utensils. Those who worked for Chou usually adored him. “He worked so hard,” remembered one of his interpreters, “paid attention to every detail, read all the reference materials so carefully.” It was not fair to blame him for supporting Mao, even in his more outrageous policies. “What could he have done otherwise?” 16
    Foreigners who met him generally found him delightful and deeply civilized. Dag Hammarskjöld, the Swedish diplomat who had been the U.N.’s second secretary-general, thought he had “the most superior brain I have so far met in the field of foreign politics.” 17 Henry Kissinger, usually quite critical, was completely entranced. “He moved gracefully,” said Kissinger of their first meeting, “and with dignity, filling a room not by his physical dominance (as did Mao or de Gaulle) but by his air of controlled tension, steely discipline, and self-control, as if he were a coiled spring.” 18 Kissinger, who was to have many hours of hard negotiations with Chou, found him “one of the two or three most impressive men I have ever met” 19 —and a worthy adversary. “He was a figure out of history. He was equally at home in philosophy, reminiscence, historical analysis, tactical probes, humorous repartee.” 20 Kindness, compassion, moderation—these were qualities both Chinese and foreigners saw in Chou.
    Yet he could also be utterly ruthless. He had become hardened during that long climb to power, as they all had. Chou had seen close friends die, and he had condemned others to death. As early as 1931, he had ordered the execution of all the immediate relatives of a Communist who had given up information in a police interrogation. 21 He was not just complicit in the repeated purges and killings in the Communist base areas; he helped to organize them. 22 In 1934, at the start of the Long March, when the Communists fled the Guomindang, it was Chou who decided who should be weeded out and executed as unreliable and who should be left behind to the mercies of the enemy. 23 In 1955, the same man who always thanked the crews on his planes let a whole flight be blown to pieces to flush out the Guomindang agents who had placed the bomb. During the Cultural Revolution, when his longtime bodyguard ran afoul of Mao’s wife, Chou did not lift a finger to protect him. 24 The man who was so gentle with children did not intervene when his own adopted daughter was carried off by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. She died of her beatings in prison. 25
    Did he really have no choice, as his interpreter suggested? Did he remember the advice of the scholar two millennia earlier who had said the small craft that comes close to the great barge should be empty so that the crew on board the bigger vessel will leave it alone to bob on top of the waters? 26 Or did he decide that he must survive for China’s sake? Throughout the calamitous attempts by Mao to transform China, Chou En-lai remained at