Chou: The Man in Charge

PEKING looms as a summit wreathed in mystery and uncertainty--and not only because no one can predict its outcome with any certainty. China is still emerging from the throes of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and muffled convulsions continue in the highest reaches of the regime. Who, in fact, rules China? So far as is known, there is no vertical hierarchy, no line of succession. There is Chairman Mao, 78, the Chinese revolution's ever more remote deity. Then there is Premier Chou Enlai, 73, the government's chief--and almost only --public presence.

President Nixon thus pursues his negotiations with a two-man gerontocracy whose days must be numbered, actuarially if not necessarily in political terms. The passing of either man from the scene could mean an explosive end to China's fragile surface stability--not to mention any und3r-standings that Nixon might bring back from the Communist capital.

Nixon will be greeted by Mao in Peking, and at the end of the trip may see him again in Hangchow, the Chairman's usual retreat from the icy Mongolian winds that sweep down on the capital in February. But the man who will deal with the President on the issues is Chou, a brilliant, subtle, ruthless and endlessly flexible statesman who is at the apex of his extraordinary career.

At least in the world's eyes, Chou was already the commanding figure in China when the Nixon trip was announced seven months ago.

Since then his role in the country's affairs has grown even more decisive. The reason is the power struggle that came to a climax last September in a violent purge of hundreds of officials allied with Defense Minister Lin Piao, Mao's designated successor as party chairman and the No. 2 man in the hierarchy.

Bonapartism. Lin's fall and Chou's move to the forefront is the latest turn in the long and often murky history of political combat in Peking. The regime reached its peak of strength and unity in the years just following the 1949 takeover. But in the mid-1950s, Mao began launching his doomed experiments: the brief Hundred Flowers liberalization, which resulted in persistent "indiscipline" in the party ranks, and the Great Leap Forward, which was an economic fiasco. Mao's mistakes opened the way for challenges to his power by ambitious or disenchanted rivals. After the Great Leap stumbled in the late 1950s, Mao was rudely shouldered out of China's presidency by his own protege, Liu Shao-chi, who championed work incentives and other "revisionist" economic innovations that were anathema to Mao. Isolated in the party chairmanship, Mao looked for a means of regaining power--and found the army. With Lin Piao, the army chief, he planned the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which would use the exuberance of the youthful, radical Red Guards to shake up the party--and shake out Liu and his group.

Mao was not entirely successful.

Liu fell, but control of the party still eluded Mao's grasp. It passed instead to Lin Piao's now highly politicized army, which eagerly stepped in to take charge of the country when Red Guard rampages began to threaten total chaos.

Some China watchers speculate that Lin's downfall last September was at least partly related to the Nixon trip; according to this view, Lin bitterly opposed a rapprochement with the U.S. and argued instead for an accommodation with the Soviets. More likely, however, Lin was a casualty of what China Expert A. Doak Barnett describes as "Mao's strong impulse to build up a successor--and then turn on him, because he becomes too much of a competitor." Mao found key support among many unhappy army professionals. Under Lin, China's troops became postmen, plant managers, policemen--almost anything but soldiers. By last summer, says Washington Sinologist Ralph Powell, the Lin faction's grip on the country was so comprehensive that it seemed "China was on the verge of what in Marxist terms is known as Bonapartism." It was then that Mao struck back.

Enter Chou Enlai. As foreign diplomats in Peking have lately heard the story, Mao summoned

Chou at the height of the crisis. He asked Chou to take over complete direction of the country--party, army, economy and domestic affairs, as well as Chou's current preoccupation, foreign policy. Chou agreed on condition that he be given a free hand to move China as quickly as possible toward a more stable collective leadership--in effect, a post-Mao regime.

It is characteristic, when events run awry, for Mao to beat a brooding, temporary retreat--and to call in Chou, his confidant, fixer and chief executive officer, to set things in order. This time Chou had a formidable task before him. The Lin purge, it is now apparent, had virtually gutted China's central government. Of the 21 Politburo members elected in 1969, only eleven are in evidence. Fourteen of 15 vice premierships are vacant. Something like 200 of the army's most senior officers have disappeared; Lin's once powerful cabal within the party's military affairs commission, which was the key to his growing power, has been virtually obliterated. No replacements have been named for the purged chiefs of the army, air force and navy. At times, the now ubiquitous Chou appears to be something like the lone fellow on the battlements who runs from portal to portal, firing all the guns to make it look as if he had a full complement of troops behind him.

As yet, Western observers have no way of confirming the fantastic stories being circulated in Peking to explain the Lin purge--namely, that Lin had made attempts on Mao's life, and then tried to flee the country, only to be killed, along with his wife and son, when his British-built Trident jetliner crashed in Mongolia on the night of Sept. 12. Last week French legislators back from a Peking visit reported being told by Chinese officials that Lin was alive but "politically eliminated."

With the Tide. Preoccupied mainly with foreign policy and economic matters, Chou has hardly begun to try to put Mao's regime back together. He has brought some old, trusted comrades out of retirement, among them former Marshal Yeh Chien-ying, a Long March veteran, who was abruptly trotted up to the No. 4 position in the Politburo and has been on hand at Henry Kissinger's visits. Out in the provinces, where Mao was trying to put civilians back into key party positions (following his dictum that "the gun must never be allowed to control the party"), Chou has compromised. The soldiers are under pressure to "modestly learn from the people," as one slogan puts it, but they have not been levered out of the party committees, where they still hold sway over the civilians.

Chou's task is complicated by the fact that he has no political following. no power base other than his close, 40-year relationship with Mao Tse-tung. In the past, those have been assets. Chou has been on the Politburo for 42 years, longer (by three years) than Mao; this durability reflects his skill at avoiding passionate commitments to policies or dogma. In that sense, Chou is utterly unlike Mao. "Chou is a conformist," says Rand Corp. Sinologist Thomas Robinson. "He often swims with the tide. Mao wants to cause--and, if necessary, reverse--the tide."

"Time to Stop." Chou found the currents he wanted to swim with early in his life. Sun Yat-sen's democratic revolution against the crumbling Manchu dynasty was just getting under way when Chou (pronounced Joe) was born into a family of impecunious gentry in

Chekiang, a rural province south of Shanghai. As a teenager, young Chou organized a student society called Ching-yeh lo-chuen (meaning "Respect Work and Enjoy Group Life"). He studied Marxism in Japan, founded Chinese Communist youth groups in France and Germany. By the time he was 30, Chou was a full-fledged member of the Politburo. During the harsh Long March, Chou established his lasting relationship with Mao. When Mao swept into Peking in 1949, Chou was ready with plans for China's new Communist government. On more than one occasion during the early struggles with Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang, Chou personally ordered the execution of

Communist operatives--and sometimes their families, relatives and friends--who had collaborated with the Nationalists.

Americans have seen Chou most often as the regime's suave spokesman and negotiator. He was an instant hit with the American liaison team that went to Yenan in 1944 to coordinate war efforts against the Japanese. One member of the team, John Emerson, recalls that Chou was a charming regular at the ersatz Saturday-night dances. "The orchestra was a strange combination of a violin and Chinese instruments, and the senior officials would shuffle around with their wives on a makeshift dance floor.

Chou always participated with great enthusiasm and skill in these performances."

At times, however, Chou's Mandarin sense of decorum would assert itself. During cocktails at Emerson's house one evening, some of the Americans began to loosen up, and the call went out for more liquor to replenish Emerson's dwindling stock.

"It was the only time I saw Chou a little bit annoyed," Emerson says.

"He then began whispering to me that now was the time to stop."

Frail-looking and elegantly tailored, Chou seems sedate and almost epicene by comparison with the earthy, hard-living ex-soldiers who were his colleagues in building Red China.

Mao, for instance, is married to his fourth wife, Chiang Ching.

Chou, despite his silken sex appeal, has married only once. Small, soft-spoken Teng Yingchao, whom Chou met in Tientsin in 1919 during a street demonstration, is often at Chou's side when he hosts foreign dignitaries.

Chou is at his best in face-to-face negotiations, where his personal magnetism and his wit--low-key, ironic and topical--comes into full play. Those who have talked with him marvel at his ability to sit motionless for hours--often till dawn--moving only his head and his hands. In the Atlantic, Australian Scholar Ross Terrill described Chou in conversation: "Sitting back in a wicker chair, wrists flapping over the chair's arms, he seems so relaxed as to be without bones, poured into the chair, almost part of it, as persons seem part of their surroundings in old Chinese paintings." When Chou stands up, his visitors are often startled to find that he is about as tall and broad as, say, Dick Cavett. One American diplomat who recently saw him for the first time in years says: "It is really staggering how he has shriveled physically. He is 73. But for a Chinese he looks much older." Still, Chou works an 18-to 20-hour day, sleeps mostly in catnaps.

Outside China, there are few Chou haters. One U.S. diplomat who dealt with him in the 1940s says that he was "the smoothest liar I ever met. Whether what he told you was the straight truth or an out-and-out lie, he always projected total sincerity. And yet he was impossible to dislike." Chou's recent visitors have invariably found him immensely civilized, reasonably cosmopolitan and statesmanlike. Henry Kissinger, an unabashed admirer, says that "he is not a petty man. He has large views." To France's peerless man of all letters, Andre Malraux, the Chinese Premier is "neither truculent nor jovial: faultlessly urbane and as reticent as a cat."

"Good Job." Now that he is at the center of policy, domestic as well as foreign, Chou is politically exposed as he has never been before. The question is: Can his wit, charm and sheer ruthlessness hold China together? Should Mao die before him, Chou could probably administer, but would be unable to rule. Conversely, if Chou should die first, the aging Chairman would be a ruler without administrative power. Right now, Doak Barnett argues, Chou "has the advantage of being the only truly top survivor. He will probably make it, and do a good job of it."

Other experts concur, although they point out that Chou currently has plenty of built-in instability to deal with. On the present eleven-man Politburo, where he currently ranks No. 2, he can count on the backing of two other moderates--Yeh Chien-ying and Deputy Premier Li Hsien-nien. Trouble, though, is always present in the person of the relentlessly radical Chiang Ching (No. 3 in the hierarchy), who is backed by two loyal leftists. Mao, who is the remaining active member (the others are either very old or based far from Peking), can throw the balance either way. Western observers know the names--but not the inclinations or loyalties--of some younger men who appear to be rising through the party ranks toward the Politburo.

As a result, sinologists forecast a lengthy period of uncertainty for China, perhaps followed by a period of further regionalization. Even now, many large areas of the country are virtually autonomous. Eventually, some of the regional strongholds--Szechwan, say, or Manchuria--could produce leaders with claims to national power. All that is certain now is that the men at the center will not be Mao and Chou, but some other figures yet unknown.

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