Zhou Enlai: The Early Years.

By Chae-Jin Lee. Stanford (California): Stanford University Press. 1994. vii, 241 pp. (Tables, illus.) US$315.00, cloth. ISBN 0-8047-2302-8.

THIS is possibly the first major biographical treatment which exclusively addresses the formative years of Zhou Enlai from his birth in 1898 through to his appointment as director of the Political Department of the Whampoa Military Academy in November 1924. The most extensive PRC treatment of these years is the 1989 PRC publication, Zhou Enlai zhuan 1898-1949. The latter is not cited but Lee's Stanford publication is a superior and more comprehensive account which ranges across Western, Chinese and Japanese research materials.

The author is keen to set the historical record straight. He establishes Zhou's birthdate as 5 March 1898. He, for example, disputes the suggestion that Zhou participated in specific student demonstrations in Japan. The author, however, is especially-interested in outstanding historiographical issues in the biographical treatment of Zhou Enlai. He suspects the "hagiographic" instincts of PRC biographers. In counterpoint, he provides a very detailed account of Zhou's evolutionary steps towards Marxism. My impression is that in recent years PRC historiography has become more explicitly interested in the effect of traditional culture on China's revolutionary leaders, hut Lee is at pains to show how tradition had a seminal affect on Zhou as the consummate humane gentle personality who lived up to the characters in his name, i.e., "the coming of grace." In this regard, Lee is especially in tune with pre-Cultural Revolution Western historiography.

Zhou's personal struggle to define end protect Chinese spirituality is made explicit in the account of his Nankai years. Indeed, Lee's emphasis on Zhou's personal focus on "sincerity moves things" may become quite useful in explaining Zhou's understanding of the revolutionary connotations of "self-reliance" and his latter espousal of Communist "workstyle." Apart from the related emphasis on Zhou's deliberately analytical sorting out the good and had in contemporary Western social and intellectual trends, there is no documented-premonition of his later fascination with empirical analysis.

Lee does not directly comment on Western speculation as to Zhou's "latent homosexuality," but he is careful and balanced in his qualification of the exaggerations of Freudian-Eriksonian psychoanalysis. Perhaps there is less care in the assumption that, since Zhou had no youthful predisposition to "rebellious acts," he was, therefore, more naturally inclined to reform than revolution.

This biography is a welcome addition for the growing research and literature on Zhou Enlai. Lee amply displays the craft of a senior historian, but I am not sure that this volume alone will solve all of the outstanding historiographical issues; and the reader is left hoping for a second volume which will detail how the traditional facets of Zhou's youth informed his more mature Party personality and leadership.