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Le Siècle de Zhou en Lai: Le Mandarin révolutionnaire
Aucun peuple n'échappe à sa culture traditionnelle, en dépit des vicissitudes de l'Histoire. La structure du pouvoir, en Chine confucéenne, a toujours été double : l'empereur s'appuie sur un Premier ministre pour diriger le pays. De même, Mao Dzedong, chef suprême, s'appuiera pendant quarante ans, de 1935 à 1975, sur la compétence de Zhou Enlai. Ensemble, ils créeront la Chine moderne, opérant le miracle qui a changé non seulement le pays mais également l'histoire du monde.
Confucéen révolutionnaire, Zhou Enlai incarne la Chine séculaire tout en ayant été résolument moderne. Cet homme d'appareil, parce qu'il était d'abord un intellectuel pragmatique, fit preuve d'une ouverture d'esprit remarquable.
Les historiens ne cessent de s'interroger sur les relations de ce couple étonnant, Mao Dzedong et Zhou Enlai, - deux personnages exceptionnels - profondément différents, et qui ont cependant oeuvré ensemble si longtemps. Car jamais Zhou Enlai ne fut un serviteur soumis. Bien au contraire, il tint tête, il fut la plage de sable, en apparence passive, mais qui limite et contient la fureur des vagues : la démesure de Mao rencontra en Zhou la force calme qui sut l'infléchir et la borner.
Cet homme aimé de millions de Chinois, admiré dans de nombreux pays, Han Suyin l'a connu vingt ans, a passé de nombreuses heures en tête à tête avec lui, discutant de tous les problèmes de la Chine et du monde. Elle a recueilli les témoignages de centaines de collaborateurs de Zhou Enlai, qui ont travaillé avec lui pendant des décennies. C'est l'homme lui-même, dans toute l'ampleur de sa diversité, qu'elle fait revivre dans ce livre indispensable pour comprendre un des acteurs majeurs de notre histoire contemporaine.
Han Suyin est à la fois romancière (Multiple splendeur, La Montagne est jeune, La Cité des sortilèges) et historienne (L'Arbre blessé, Un Eté sans oiseaux). Née en Chine, elle a fait une carrière de médecin et a exercé quinze années en Chine et en Asie du Sud-Est. Ses livres sur la Chine sont utilisés dans de nombreuses universités de par le monde.
Confucéen révolutionnaire, Zhou Enlai incarne la Chine séculaire tout en ayant été résolument moderne. Cet homme d'appareil, parce qu'il était d'abord un intellectuel pragmatique, fit preuve d'une ouverture d'esprit remarquable.
Les historiens ne cessent de s'interroger sur les relations de ce couple étonnant, Mao Dzedong et Zhou Enlai, - deux personnages exceptionnels - profondément différents, et qui ont cependant oeuvré ensemble si longtemps. Car jamais Zhou Enlai ne fut un serviteur soumis. Bien au contraire, il tint tête, il fut la plage de sable, en apparence passive, mais qui limite et contient la fureur des vagues : la démesure de Mao rencontra en Zhou la force calme qui sut l'infléchir et la borner.
Cet homme aimé de millions de Chinois, admiré dans de nombreux pays, Han Suyin l'a connu vingt ans, a passé de nombreuses heures en tête à tête avec lui, discutant de tous les problèmes de la Chine et du monde. Elle a recueilli les témoignages de centaines de collaborateurs de Zhou Enlai, qui ont travaillé avec lui pendant des décennies. C'est l'homme lui-même, dans toute l'ampleur de sa diversité, qu'elle fait revivre dans ce livre indispensable pour comprendre un des acteurs majeurs de notre histoire contemporaine.
Han Suyin est à la fois romancière (Multiple splendeur, La Montagne est jeune, La Cité des sortilèges) et historienne (L'Arbre blessé, Un Eté sans oiseaux). Née en Chine, elle a fait une carrière de médecin et a exercé quinze années en Chine et en Asie du Sud-Est. Ses livres sur la Chine sont utilisés dans de nombreuses universités de par le monde.
624 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
11 people are currently reading
281 people want to read
About the author
Han Suyin
106 books104 followersHan Suyin (Pinyin: Hán Sùyīn) is the pen name of Elizabeth Comber, born Rosalie Elisabeth Kuanghu Chow (Pinyin: Zhōu Guānghú). She was a Chinese-born Eurasian author of several books on modern China, novels set in East Asia, and autobiographical works, as well as a physician. She wrote in English and French. She died in Lausanne, Switzerland in 2012.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 6, 2025
A few days ago, Jeff J. Brown as he commemorated Zhou Enlai on his Vlog said that all biographies of Zhou are essentially trash. This made me want to look at this book again to see if I overlooked that it was actually historical dreck. There are three key areas to help determine this: how the author depicts the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and Zhou Enlai's interactions with Mao Zhedong (but there is so much more in this book!). I’ll try to relate the first two briefly. Han Suyin was not an historical analyst, but began as a novelist. Her biography of Zhou is a narrative of a personal timeline of Zhou. It is densely detailed with a tremendous capacity to relate events tributary to the timeline. You are trecking through a blizzard of names, with a huge backdrop of the actions of world leaders at the time. Archives, publications, interviews and oral history and 11 face-to-face meetings with Zhou are the chief sources. There are biographical notes, and a very detailed index, most helpful when rereading the book or using it as a reference to the vast panorama of history it encompasses.
to add: The actions which Deng Xiaoping is credited with, a mixed economy as a needed step on an extended pathway of the revolution, the opening of China, were actually based on concepts forged by Mao and Zhou Enlai and expressed to the US Dixie Mission in Yenan in 1944. Further, members of the mission later tried to say they considered Mao and Zhou telling them that they were chiefly agricultural reformers as "guff". These assertions were dismissed by the US but they proved true. The the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were heavily concerned with agricultural and rural reform. From that time, everything China says is considered a lie by the US establishment unless they have a selfish motive for making an exception to that pattern.
The Great Leap is not covered in a contiguous block probably because of the constant focus on the public and personal life of Zhou. Among reciting anecdotes that fit the patterns of how western sources have highlighted human errors in the Leap is passing mention of some meaningful and enduring accomplishments of the Leap Forward: The full institution of collectivization (communes) and through them the very communist mass mobilization of the rural populations to revamp and extend water management and irrigation systems to cover more arable land. This in turn formed a basis of agricultural rationalization an immediate outgrowth of which (even before widespread mechanization was accomplished) was more intensive agricultural production management which then resulted in stabilization and improved the quality of rural life resulting in self-supporting school systems, chemical and fertilizer production and rural healthcare. The author probably didn't know or hear in her circles of the causes of the severe food shortages that are attributed to the Great Leap Forward: bad weather and pest infestations. This is confirmed in the study by Dongping Han (The Unknown Cultural Revolution) who notes three straight years of floods and droughts from 1959-61. Neither Han Suyin nor Dongping Han use the word “famine”.
The Cultural Revolution is described dispassionately, but it’s onset is forshadowed by the author’s description of what Zhou noted in his travels in around the country around the beginning of the Great Leap: evidence of a yawning disconnect between a comfortable and complacent young urban population and the hardscrabble to brutal life in the countryside. But the author doesn’t refer back to this in describing a chaotic Cultural Revolution despite the initiation of this period being based on Mao Zhedong’s similar but even earlier finding that there was a dangerously increasing centralized, bureaucratic and ossified party cadre combined with what would now be called a cultural divide between urban and rural and clearly a “generation gap”. Dongping Han provides an indication that to me means Mao might have stolen this take on the disparities in the quality of life of rural and urban populations from comments made in 1953 by a conservative social reformer, Liang Schuming. Mao singled Liang out for harsh criticism as a result. The varieties and magnitude of the excesses are the backdrop for the many twists and turns Zhou was forced into to keep the country together, falling as it sometimes did into the zealous clutches of Jiang Qing of the “Gang of Four” and estranged wife of Mao Dzedong. Obituaries of Han Suyin would typically refer to her unbending refusal to condemn the Cultural Revolution in her books. Her biography of Mao covering 1949-75 might be different, but in this biography she frames it in terms of a calamity that Zhou is left to deal with alone. So, as with the Great Leap Forward, any analysis of the Cultural Revolution’s ultimate effects is preempted by a tight focus Zhou and the politics at the top. The strength of her depiction of the Cultural Revolution is precise understanding of the choices Zhou was left with in dealing with the plottings of Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao, and to both acknowledge and attempt to moderate the ineluctable changes the Cultural Revolution produced such as the greater allocation of rural output to rural populations (made possible by the unheralded [by Han Suyin for one] change the Great Leap Forward brought). Central planning might have been more diminished than it was without Zhou interceding, for example. For a country fighting for strategic security (by aiding a costly war against Imperialism in Vietnam) with none but conventional deterrence this was survival.
This is a great book because of the breadth and very often the depth of coverage of the people and events that Zhou influenced or was affected by in his leadership with Mao in ensuring successes in the pathway of China’s achievement of domestic economic progress and global influence.
to add: The actions which Deng Xiaoping is credited with, a mixed economy as a needed step on an extended pathway of the revolution, the opening of China, were actually based on concepts forged by Mao and Zhou Enlai and expressed to the US Dixie Mission in Yenan in 1944. Further, members of the mission later tried to say they considered Mao and Zhou telling them that they were chiefly agricultural reformers as "guff". These assertions were dismissed by the US but they proved true. The the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were heavily concerned with agricultural and rural reform. From that time, everything China says is considered a lie by the US establishment unless they have a selfish motive for making an exception to that pattern.
The Great Leap is not covered in a contiguous block probably because of the constant focus on the public and personal life of Zhou. Among reciting anecdotes that fit the patterns of how western sources have highlighted human errors in the Leap is passing mention of some meaningful and enduring accomplishments of the Leap Forward: The full institution of collectivization (communes) and through them the very communist mass mobilization of the rural populations to revamp and extend water management and irrigation systems to cover more arable land. This in turn formed a basis of agricultural rationalization an immediate outgrowth of which (even before widespread mechanization was accomplished) was more intensive agricultural production management which then resulted in stabilization and improved the quality of rural life resulting in self-supporting school systems, chemical and fertilizer production and rural healthcare. The author probably didn't know or hear in her circles of the causes of the severe food shortages that are attributed to the Great Leap Forward: bad weather and pest infestations. This is confirmed in the study by Dongping Han (The Unknown Cultural Revolution) who notes three straight years of floods and droughts from 1959-61. Neither Han Suyin nor Dongping Han use the word “famine”.
The Cultural Revolution is described dispassionately, but it’s onset is forshadowed by the author’s description of what Zhou noted in his travels in around the country around the beginning of the Great Leap: evidence of a yawning disconnect between a comfortable and complacent young urban population and the hardscrabble to brutal life in the countryside. But the author doesn’t refer back to this in describing a chaotic Cultural Revolution despite the initiation of this period being based on Mao Zhedong’s similar but even earlier finding that there was a dangerously increasing centralized, bureaucratic and ossified party cadre combined with what would now be called a cultural divide between urban and rural and clearly a “generation gap”. Dongping Han provides an indication that to me means Mao might have stolen this take on the disparities in the quality of life of rural and urban populations from comments made in 1953 by a conservative social reformer, Liang Schuming. Mao singled Liang out for harsh criticism as a result. The varieties and magnitude of the excesses are the backdrop for the many twists and turns Zhou was forced into to keep the country together, falling as it sometimes did into the zealous clutches of Jiang Qing of the “Gang of Four” and estranged wife of Mao Dzedong. Obituaries of Han Suyin would typically refer to her unbending refusal to condemn the Cultural Revolution in her books. Her biography of Mao covering 1949-75 might be different, but in this biography she frames it in terms of a calamity that Zhou is left to deal with alone. So, as with the Great Leap Forward, any analysis of the Cultural Revolution’s ultimate effects is preempted by a tight focus Zhou and the politics at the top. The strength of her depiction of the Cultural Revolution is precise understanding of the choices Zhou was left with in dealing with the plottings of Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao, and to both acknowledge and attempt to moderate the ineluctable changes the Cultural Revolution produced such as the greater allocation of rural output to rural populations (made possible by the unheralded [by Han Suyin for one] change the Great Leap Forward brought). Central planning might have been more diminished than it was without Zhou interceding, for example. For a country fighting for strategic security (by aiding a costly war against Imperialism in Vietnam) with none but conventional deterrence this was survival.
This is a great book because of the breadth and very often the depth of coverage of the people and events that Zhou influenced or was affected by in his leadership with Mao in ensuring successes in the pathway of China’s achievement of domestic economic progress and global influence.
September 19, 2017
Probably the most underrated person of influence in the development of China and their diplomacy. The great book is written with amazing detail not only about Zhou Enlai but also about life and culture in China.
April 16, 2008
I read this book in Indonesian version that titled "Zhou Enlai, Potret Intelektual Revolusioner", published by Hasta Mitra. Very good writing by Han Suyin. It's recommended for every progressive activist.
November 29, 2016
Very detailed biography, though not as nuanced in its viewpoint as the Gao Wenqian biography of Zhou Enlai. Good portrayal of interactions between Chinese & Soviet leaders of the time (especially between Zhou Enlai & Khrushchev), but at times the book comes across as gossipy. The author also wrote "A Many Splendored Thing," upon which the 1955 William Holden film was based.
January 11, 2010
dibalik kejayaan china, ada sosok besar bernama Zhou en lai...
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews