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Zhou Enlai: The Early Years

Chae-jin Lee, Professor of Pacific Basin Studies at Claremont McKenna College, competently exhibits the interplay of biography, history, and politics in his study of the young Zhou Enlai. While aware of the psychological approach to biography and noting how it has been used in assessing Zhou Enlai, Lee’s work focuses on cultural socialization and the various intellectual influences present in Zhou Enlai’s formative years. Lee rejects the view that the young Zhou Enlai was angry and sullen at his family’s misfortunes and being abandoned by his parents. Rather, the evidence shows that Zhou’s early life in a traditional extended family was generally supportive, warm, and positive. Although the infant Zhou Enlai was given up for adoption, the adoption took place inside his extended family and does not appear to have involved a break with his natural parents. In boyhood, Zhou received a classical education. Lee views the traditional Confucian humanism, patriotism, and stress on harmonious relations received in boyhood as a key to Zhou’s later career. Following his father or uncles in their moves from Jiangsu to the Northeast also gave Zhou Enlai a sense of belonging to a larger nation and wider society than that known to most Chinese of his day. Lee extensively covers Zhou Enlai’s Middle School years, when he followed his family to the Northeast, then entered the Nankai Middle School in Tianjin, where he received a positive experience of one of China’s earliest and most successhl experiments in modem education. Headed by a Christian, Zhang Boling, Nankai was open to most Western influences. It also provided a network of contacts and friends, which later served to make Zhou a leader of Chinese student groups in Japan, and allowed him, at one point, to consider study in the United States. Student life in Japan gave Zhou his first taste of Marxism. While struggling with financial difficulties and a strange language, Zhou was unable to pass the university entrance examinations. However, the Russian Revolution occurred while he was in Japan, providing a topic of interest in the circles in which Zhou moved. Zhou also seems to have read the works of Kawakami Hajime, a professor of economics at Kyoto Imperial University, who presented a Marxism deeply tinted with Confucian values. His works also influenced the intellectual development of Li Dazhao and Chen Duxiu. While the May Fourth Movement broke out during Zhou’s Japanese sojourn, it does not appear that it prompted his return to China, or that Zhou played a leading role in it. Rather, Zhou’s return from Japan was a result of financial and academic disappointment. While Zhou’s public-spiritedness and patriotism led him to help found the Awakening Society in Tianjin, and ultimately led to a brief imprisonment, his role in the May Fourth Movement appears to have been that of participant rather than leader. Nor did his conversion to Communism date from the May Fourth era, but from his student sojourn in Europe during the 1920s. Zhou’s introduction to Communist cells in Europe -especially France -came via his network of Nankai classmates and fellow members of the Awakening So-