周恩来Zhou Enlai （Chou Enlai)

Cassie, welcome back! We've missed you. :) A hint on inserting HTML into a new thread...you have to use the "HTML Editor" in the upper right of the new thread box.

oops, Calkins, Thank you so much! Thank you for helping me correct those pictures' html. I have missed you guys too. How are you? Are you still use skype?

We have "heroes" in the West who similarly escape popular criticism domestically but who are reviled internationally. The latest who comes to mind is Ronald Reagan, for whom the national airport is named, and under who’s approving eye and funding the genocide in Central America was committed. Zhou was a figure who was admired at home AND abroad. For some reason, even after the modern renunciations of Soviet-style, Mao’ist communism, Zhou has completely escaped the criticism of Mao in the modern Chinese imagination. Perhaps that is because Zhou didn't overtly engage in the despicable crimes of Mao, nor did he lead Mao's explicitly immoral lifestyle; perhaps it's simply that Zhou has served as the sentimental and nostalgic symbol of the 'good communist'. Jung Chang, in her "Unknown Story of Mao"--a book that couldn’t have been written in China--paints a picture of Zhou that is far from flattering: "..the real Chou was not the suave diplomat foreigners saw, but a ruthless apparatchik, in thrall to his communist faith. Throughout his life he served his Party with a dauntless lack of personal integrity". Zhou was a "slavish" Soviet boot licker. In later years as Mao's prime minister, under the regime self-criticism the Party puritans engaged in, "he was willing to abase himself repeatedly, using such toe-curling language that his audiences would cringe with embarrassment". It will be interesting to see if Zhou ever gets his just desserts, either at home or abroad; more likely, he’ll just have public works named after him.

laodai, I don't think you have any inkling how extraordinarily ungracious you appear hijacking casie's thread in order to express opinions which are so dogmatic and hostile in tone. Eg. you imply that Zhou Enlai ought perhaps to be "reviled", you assume that he should have "his just desserts", you even draw parallels in your first paragraph between him and "genocide". And this is based on what? An extract from a book written by Jung Chang, an embittered "cultural revolution survivor" who has been a Londoner since 1978 and has not done a single thing whatsoever to contribute to the development of China which people like casie are benefitting from today? laodai, I am all for freedom of speech, and unrelenting critical enquiry, but your post does give me the impression that you may have taken on some very colourful writing and adopted it as your own without submitting it to the same critical tests as you expect for Premier Zhou or Mao or Reagan.