An epic life deserves an epic biography, and Chen Jian provides this for Zhou, who was probably the consummate diplomat of the twentieth century. Chen combs the vast literature on the Chinese revolution as well as primary sources in the archives of the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to give us a sympathetic but not uncritical portrait of the second most important figure in the struggle to free China from imperial domination and feudalism in the twentieth century, one that set the stage for its emergence as an economic superpower in the first quarter of twenty-first.
The world is most familiar with Zhou’s diplomatic performance, especially his…