Some thank Zhou Enlai for saving China from Mao’s excesses

CHINA’S GRANDEST music academy this month unveiled a full-length, Western-style opera about Zhou Enlai. The puzzle is that it took this long. Opera is arguably the only art form big enough to capture the contradictions of this brilliant moral failure of a man, Mao Zedong’s prime minister for over a quarter century.

When Zhou died in 1976 he was beloved by Chinese who did not know him well. Vast throngs of Beijingers filled Tiananmen Square in the spring of that year to mourn him, risking arrests and police beatings to remember a leader they credited with moderating the worst excesses of that fanatical era. Their lamentations were also a coded attack on ultra-leftist zealots who were circling the ailing Mao, now that Zhou was gone. Some praise was merited. Papers published after his death show Zhou reporting rural starvation to the chairman—though without identifying the famine’s cause, namely Mao’s own policies. Documents show Zhou working to rehabilitate purged scientists and officials, if only because China’s economy needed competent managers. To this day, locals across China will point to a beloved temple and thank the former prime minister, often without hard evidence, for issuing orders that shielded the site from Red Guards. China’s music world owes Zhou a debt for encouraging propaganda works of some artistic merit, such as the revolutionary opera “The East is Red”, and for protecting performers from vicious cultural commissars.