Word: chou
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...explained to me how, when she undertook this ballet in the early 1960s, there was absolutely no precedent for using ballet to show military history, and almost no one would support her intent to establish it. In search of approval from among the leaders, she invited Premier Chou to attend a rehearsal of an early version, which he did. The weak spots that he pointed out they changed. To educate her dancers in the ways of the military, she decided to send them down to live with a PLA unit for some months...
...soon as she had released her order, Chou Yang announced from his high office in the Ministry of Culture that he was sending the very company she was working with to Hong Kong to perform Swan Lake! She was outraged but helpless. [Chou Yang reportedly maligned] The Red Detachment as an "infant in swaddling bands sucking its thumb" and an "ugly daughter...
...Nevertheless] she continued the revisions and finally accompanied the ballet on tour in the major cities. Back in Peking, she went with Premier Chou to another performance, which had been much revised. His calling it "real revolution" gratified her. After the final curtain she and the Premier went backstage to congratulate the dancers and musicians who had remained loyal to her throughout the battles of creation...
Nonetheless, Chiang Ch'ing immediately set about to join the small and weak local Communist Party. Leftist art circles were dominated, among others, by future Cultural Commissar Chou Yang, an orthodox party functionary. (Chou was eventually purged in the Cultural Revolution.) Chou and his coterie, Chiang Ch'ing recalled with great bitterness, kept her on the edges of the Communist organization during her four years in Shanghai. She never became a member of the secret inner-party circle. For a while the party placed her in a job as a night school instructor in a Y.W.C.A. literacy program...
...only brush with him was in 1954. She remembered standing among the leaders on the rostrum of the Gate of Heavenly Peace to review the parades, demonstrations, and fireworks that marked the state's fifth anniversary. Chou Enlai, always alert to proprieties, made a move to introduce Chiang Ch'ing to Khrushchev. Seeing what was about to happen, Chairman Mao stood up, walked over to Chiang Ch'ing (almost never did they appear publicly side by side), and brusquely escorted her away, leading her down one of the two alleys that ran along the sides...