Zhou Enlai and the Opening to the West

Zhou Enlai and the Opening to the West PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 12

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Book Description
The February 1972 agreement between Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong and U.S. President Richard Nixon to normalize diplomatic relations fundamentally and dramatically altered the nature of U.S.-Sino relations and strategically changed the nature of China's role in the community of nations, The skillful, painstaking and at times brilliant diplomatic work of Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai that resulted in the opening to the West was perhaps Zhou's most remarkable diplomatic achievement in a long career marked by many diplomatic coups. The opening to the West laid the groundwork for China to reenter the international world order after a period of intense isolation. It also established the basis for China to be taken seriously as a player on the international scene. It was Zhou's finest hour. This paper suggests that classic European balance-of-power or ideologically driven visions modeled after Chinese revolutionary thought do not fully explain Zhou's strategy in managing China's approach to the West. A balance-of-power strategy may be a construct to explain the one significant result of the negotiations -- China building an alliance with the United States against the Soviet Union -- but it does not explain Zhou's grand strategy. Zhou's statecraft was not driven simply by a desire to create a new power balance against Moscow. Rather, Zhou's strategy was to attempt to reintegrate China in the international system by normalizing relations with the Western superpower on conditions that were acceptable to Chinese political interests at a time when China's leadership was fractured and the nation in disarray. Zhou's strategy reveals that he was a daring practitioner of realist diplomacy who viewed negotiating with the West as the means to achieve some measure of domestic stability and the re-establishment of China's economic well-being after a period of tremendous internal turbulence that brought China to the brink of social dislocation and disaster.

Zhou Enlai and the Opening to the West

Zhou Enlai and the Opening to the West PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 12

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Book Description
The February 1972 agreement between Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong and U.S. President Richard Nixon to normalize diplomatic relations fundamentally and dramatically altered the nature of U.S.-Sino relations and strategically changed the nature of China's role in the community of nations, The skillful, painstaking and at times brilliant diplomatic work of Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai that resulted in the opening to the West was perhaps Zhou's most remarkable diplomatic achievement in a long career marked by many diplomatic coups. The opening to the West laid the groundwork for China to reenter the international world order after a period of intense isolation. It also established the basis for China to be taken seriously as a player on the international scene. It was Zhou's finest hour. This paper suggests that classic European balance-of-power or ideologically driven visions modeled after Chinese revolutionary thought do not fully explain Zhou's strategy in managing China's approach to the West. A balance-of-power strategy may be a construct to explain the one significant result of the negotiations -- China building an alliance with the United States against the Soviet Union -- but it does not explain Zhou's grand strategy. Zhou's statecraft was not driven simply by a desire to create a new power balance against Moscow. Rather, Zhou's strategy was to attempt to reintegrate China in the international system by normalizing relations with the Western superpower on conditions that were acceptable to Chinese political interests at a time when China's leadership was fractured and the nation in disarray. Zhou's strategy reveals that he was a daring practitioner of realist diplomacy who viewed negotiating with the West as the means to achieve some measure of domestic stability and the re-establishment of China's economic well-being after a period of tremendous internal turbulence that brought China to the brink of social dislocation and disaster.

Zhou Enlai

Zhou Enlai PDF Author: Jian Chen
Publisher: Harvard University Press - T
ISBN: 0674296575
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 841

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Book Description
The definitive biography of Zhou Enlai, the first premier and preeminent diplomat of the People’s Republic of China, who protected his country against the excesses of his boss—Chairman Mao. Zhou Enlai spent twenty-seven years as premier of the People’s Republic of China and ten as its foreign minister. He was the architect of the country’s administrative apparatus and its relationship to the world, as well as its legendary spymaster. Richard Nixon proclaimed him “the greatest statesman of our era.” Yet Zhou has always been overshadowed by Chairman Mao. Chen Jian brings Zhou into the light, offering a nuanced portrait of his complex life as a revolutionary, a master diplomat, and a man with his own vision and aspirations who did much to make China, as well as the larger world, what it is today. Born to a declining mandarin family in 1898, Zhou received a classical education and as a teenager spent time in Japan. As a young man, driven by the desire for China’s development, Zhou embraced the communist revolution as a vehicle of China’s salvation. He helped Mao govern through a series of transformations, including the disastrous Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. Yet, as Chen shows, Zhou was never a committed Maoist. His extraordinary political and bureaucratic skill, combined with his centrist approaches, enabled him to mitigate the enormous damage caused by Mao’s radicalism. When Zhou died in 1976, the PRC that we know of was not yet visible on the horizon; he never saw glistening twenty-first-century Shanghai or the broader emergence of Chinese capitalism. But it was Zhou’s work that shaped the nation whose influence and power are today felt in every corner of the globe.

Zhou Enlai

Zhou Enlai PDF Author: Barbara Barnouin
Publisher: Chinese University Press
ISBN: 9789629962449
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
A biography of Zhou Enlai, one of the most important and yet debatable political figures in the Chinese Communist Party. The authors give an in-depth analysis on the complex personality and controversial actions of Zhou, both as a person and a leader of the CCP.

Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and the Evolution of the Chinese Communist Leadership

Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and the Evolution of the Chinese Communist Leadership PDF Author: Thomas Kampen
Publisher: NIAS Press
ISBN: 9788787062763
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 166

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Book Description
This book challenges long-established views that Mao Zedong became Chinese Communist Party leader during the Long March (1934-1935) and that by 1935 the CCP was independent of the Comintern in Moscow. The result is a critique not only of official Chinese historiography but also of Western scholarship, which all future histories of the rise of the PRC will need to take into account.

Zhou Enlai

Zhou Enlai PDF Author: Dick Wilson
Publisher: Viking Adult
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description


Zhou Enlai

Zhou Enlai PDF Author: Gao Wenqian
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 0786725982
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
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.

Zhou Enlai and the Xi'an Incident

Zhou Enlai and the Xi'an Incident PDF Author: Ruiqing Luo
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description


Chou En-lai and the Opening to the West

Chou En-lai and the Opening to the West PDF Author: Dallas G. Wilfong
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : China
Languages : en
Pages : 8

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Book Description


The Making of China’s War with Japan

The Making of China’s War with Japan PDF Author: Mayumi Itoh
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9811004943
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
This cutting edge study examines the career of Chinese politician and diplomat Zhou Enlai (1898–1976) and assesses his leadership role in the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) strategy against the Japanese invasion of China which established the foundation for post-World War II Sino-Japanese relations. It considers how Zhou dealt with Japanese imperialism during his midcareer, from the May Fourth Movement to the formation of the second United Front between the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the CPC against Japan, which paved the way for the Chinese victory in the second Sino-Japanese War. Addressing significant moments such as the Manchurian Incident and the Xi’an Incident, it provides a thought-provoking reexamination of Zhou’s involvement in the May Fourth Movement of 1919, the first national grassroots movement in the modern history of China calling for anti-imperialism and nationalism, and also of his time in Europe, as essential background to understand the birth of the CPC and Zhou’s role in it, as well as Zhou's collaboration with Zhang Xueliang, the culprit of the Xi'an Incident. Through an in-depth analysis of primary sources, including Zhou’s own writings, the oral history of Chinese officials, and newly declassified diplomatic archives, this work presents a comprehensive and accurate account of Zhou’s career against the backdrop of Japanese imperialism.

Zhou Enlai

Zhou Enlai PDF Author: Chae-Jin Lee
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780804723022
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
The longtime Chinese premier Zhou Enlai (1898-1976) is one of the most important, interesting, and appealing figures among twentieth-century world statesmen. Of him, Henry Kissinger wrote: "He was equally at home in philosophy, reminiscence, historical analysis, tactical probes, humorous repartee. . . . Zhou Enlai, in short, was one of the two or three most impressive men I have ever met." Yet his biographies - both Chinese and non-Chinese - have paid scant attention to how Zhou Enlai acquired and developed his notable intellectual and behavioral attributes. This book asserts that the rich and diverse personal, educational, and political experiences of Zhou's formative years established clear patterns for his future personal and political orientations. It divides Zhou's early life into four phases: his upbringing in Jiangsu province and Manchuria (1898-1913), his education at the Nankai Middle School (1913-17), his experience in Japan (1917-19), and his political activism in China during the May Fourth era and in Europe (1919-24). The commonly held view is that the young Zhou, abandoned by his parents, was an angry and difficult youth. Even though his early childhood was indeed disturbed by adoption, family tragedies, and frequent moves, the author shows that Zhou grew up in a warm, supportive family environment. His schooling at the Nankai School exposed him to Western, Christian, and scientific influences, but the author shows that he was also influenced by the neo-Confucian outlook of the school's founder. In Japan, Zhou encountered Marx's doctrines, but on his return to China in 1919 he did not immediately become involved in the May Fourth Movement. However, he gradually assumed a leadership position in student organizations and finally embraced Marxism as a means to save China. In Europe, he devoted himself to starting communist groups among Chinese students in France and to organizing a united front between communists and Chinese nationalists. The method of his subsequent revolutionary activities was thus firmly established. In addition to substantiating the facts of Zhou Enlai's early years for the first time, the author sets Zhou's experience in the broader historical context of the challenges and opportunities facing the Chinese youth of his generation, notably the host of new ideas and events such as nationalism, Marxism, the Bolshevik Revolution, World War I, and the May Fourth Movement. The book contains 27 illustrations, most of which are photographs that are published here for the first time outside China.