A BUILDER, NOT A POET

Henry Kissinger once called him "the greatest statesman of our era." Indeed, few men in the 20th century did more than Chou En-lai to forge the Chinese revolution and to change the shape of international politics. Chou was for a quarter-century the overseer of China's vast governing bureaucracy. As the chief architect of China's foreign policy under Chairman Mao Tse-tung, he charted Peking's course of independence from the two superpowers, creating in the process a new world center of power and influence. Suave, shrewd and enduring, he advanced the cause of China with Metternichian dexterity and a flair for the dramatic gesture. When he died of cancer last week at the age of 77, Chou left behind him a life of extraordinary achievement as revolutionary, soldier and administrator of the world's most populous nation.

Among the dedicated and often fanatical men who led the Chinese Communist Party, Chou was unique. Mao, though a poet and an intellectual, was also a soldier who had much in common with the rough, parochial peasant comrades who forged the revolution. By contrast, Chou was silkenly urbane, almost a throwback to the old Mandarin bureaucrats of imperial China. His courtly manners and experience in the ways of the world made him, outside China, a symbol of Oriental patience and guile. U.S. Secretary of State Kissinger was not the only Western diplomat who, after a treasured cup of tea with Chou in Peking's Great Hall of the People, came away convinced that China's Premier was "one of the most intelligent men I've ever met." For decades, he enjoyed instructing Westerners in the intricacies of Chinese politics. Recalls Author Theodore H. White, who knew Chou in the 1940s: "The greatest compliment he could pay anyone was to say, 'Aha! At last you're beginning to understand China.'" Unlike Mao, Chou was not a theoretician, but rather a kind of inspired pragmatist--"a builder, not a poet," as his old friend Journalist Edgar Snow put it. Nevertheless, he was a supporter of certain of the doctrines of Mao, especially the Chairman's lifelong campaign to prevent the revolutionary leadership from hardening into a new "revisionist" ruling class. Over the years, Chou became China's indispensable man, an administrator whose control over the governing bureaucracy gave him the key to the day-to-day operations of the country, thereby allowing Mao to play the important but sometimes detached role of spiritual guide, dedicated to inspiring revolutionary spirit.

Despite his frail physique, Chou was seemingly inexhaustible. Like many other leaders of the Chinese revolution, he liked to work through the night. Visitors to China, even in recent years, were often ushered into Chou's presence after midnight, finding him tireless and perpetually alert in conversations that lasted until daybreak. His wife Teng Yingchao, a prominent revolutionary in her own right, admitted that she was unable to persuade him to slow his exhausting tempo even after his declining health forced him to delegate some responsibility to his heir apparent, Vice Premier Teng.

In the wake of the chaotic Cultural Revolution of 1966-69, Chou was the man who returned the economy to order and tried to build a stable political leadership based upon a shrewd balancing of China's party factions. In foreign policy, China, under Chou's leadership, finally acquired the seat on the U.N. Security Council that had long been held by Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists on Taiwan. The following year, he welcomed President Richard Nixon to Peking. That capped what may have been Chou's most significant foreign policy achievement: the celebrated, though sometimes exaggerated rapprochement between the U.S. and China. It was an event that symbolized China's emergence as a potential superpower; for Chou, it ensured his historic reputation as one of the 20th century's masters of statecraft.

Chou's adult life was entirely taken up with hard political infighting, and his capacity to survive became legendary. Born in 1898 into a well-to-do Mandarin family, he quickly got involved in the revolutionary movements that swept China as the tottering Manchu dynasty came to an end. A slight, somewhat effeminate youth, Chou studied at a Western-style high school in Tientsin and spent two undergraduate years in Japan. Returning to China during the cultural ferment of the May 4 Movement in 1919, he founded a study group called the Awakening Society and got his first taste of revolution in street demonstrations against the corrupt, warlord-dominated Peking government.

Chou then spent four years in a "work and study" program in France, where he was converted to revolutionary Marxism. Arriving in Paris in 1920, he fell in with other Asian nationalists, including Ho Chi Minh, whom he described as "my big brother." They were beginning to dream of creating Communist societies in their countries. Chou did a stint as a worker in a Renault factory and also lived for a time in Germany.

In 1924 Chou returned to China during the brief Soviet-sponsored alliance between Sun Yat-sen's Kuomintang and the Communists and served as political director of the Whampoa Military Academy, run by a young Nationalist ramrod named Chiang Kaishek. As Chou rose in the Communist hierarchy, gaining Politburo membership in 1927, conflict between him and Chiang became inevitable. The final break came in Shanghai in April 1927. Chou helped organize a workers' takeover of the city in preparation for the arrival of Chiang's troops. When he arrived, Chiang promptly launched an anti-Communist coup in which thousands died. Chou was one of the handful of Communist leaders who eluded Kuomintang police and managed to flee the city.

That marked the nadir of both Chou's career and the Chinese Communist movement. With Chiang relentlessly pursuing Communists, Chou went underground, probably in Hong Kong, eventually turning up in Moscow; then, after about two years in Shanghai, he went surreptitiously to the Communists' rural base in Kiangsi province, which was headed by Mao Tse-tung. At first there was some friction between the two as they competed for leadership within the party. But eventually they formed a unique, remarkably productive collaboration that lasted more than 40 years.

One of their most momentous challenges was the famed Long March of 1934-35 to a new rural base area in Yenan in North China; Chou survived only because he was carried on a stretcher for the last segment of the journey. There was also the long, shaky ceasefire with Chiang's Kuomintang, beginning in late 1936, when imperial Japan tried to conquer China. It was in this period that Chou got his first taste of international diplomacy. As Communist liaison man with the Nationalists in China's wartime capital Chungking, Chou employed his considerable skills to impress foreign diplomats and journalists with the vigor and idealism of the Yenan revolutionaries.

These skills were exercised on a broader, worldwide stage after the Communists defeated Chiang and forced him to flee to Taiwan in 1949. Chou was Mao's obvious choice to become Minister of Foreign Affairs as well as Premier in the new Chinese Communist government. He forged the early, close alliance with the Soviet Union, helped negotiate the 1953 cease-fire in Korea, and played a crucial role at the Geneva Conference in ending the French Indochina war in 1954. (There, in an incident the Chinese leader never forgot, American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles refused to shake his hand.) Chou's efforts to forge new contacts for China with the nations of the Third World led to his brilliant performance at the 1955 Bandung conference in Indonesia, where he identified China's interests with those of the newly independent countries. In a lesser-known initiative, Chou tried in 1955 to improve relations with a then hostile U.S. by announcing China's willingness to begin negotiations with the Americans for "relaxing tension in the Far East."

Through it all, Chou remained a committed nationalist who put the interests of China above all else. He backed the bloody suppression of a 1959 uprising in Tibet. Earlier, according to unconfirmed reports, he masterminded the 1931 execution of the entire family of a party member who had informed on some fellow Communists in Shanghai. As Premier, Chou presided over some of the Communists' most ruthless policies, including the killing of hundreds of thousands of landlords during the land reforms of the early 1950s.

Chou's instincts for survival, honed during his long years as a revolutionary, served him well during the Cultural Revolution, when, at one point, he was branded the "rotten boss of the bourgeoisie" and his offices were besieged by 100,000 slogan-shouting Red Guards. Eventually, he formed alliances with regional military commanders concerned about law-and-order, subtly consolidated the moderate forces, and--eventually with Mao's blessing--managed to impose control over the rampaging radicals. In 1969 Chou emerged at the peak of his powers, acting as both Foreign Minister and Premier; he ran the country almost singlehanded while the shattered party apparatus slowly pulled itself together and Mao increasingly withdrew from day-to-day administration.

His plans and programs for China's continued growth and stability were ratified by the leadership at last year's National People's Congress. Thanks in large measure to Chou's gift for conciliation and management, China was on the verge of a new era at the time of his death. The economy had been restored to health and was expanding steadily.

The country was a major oil producer with a potential for becoming a ranking petroleum exporter. The collectivized agricultural system was putting out an unprecedented 275 million tons of grain a year.

Nonetheless, China remains in many ways a poor country--as Chou frequently reminded foreign visitors.

"Never quote me as saying anything is easy here," he told Snow in 1960. "We have taken the first step, that's all." If China today seems to be taking a second step or perhaps even a third, Chou, more than any other man, deserves the credit. It is inevitable that future historians, looking back on the transformation of China since 1949, will call that era the Age of Mao. But with almost equal justice, it could also fairly be called the Age of Chou.

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