Word: premieres
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Writing history is a dicey enterprise for Chinese scholars, and never more so than when the subject is a Communist Party figure like Zhou Enlai - China's Premier from the founding of the People's Republic until his death in 1976, and still regarded by the vast majority of Chinese as a saint. "Ordinary people thought he was a good man," says Gao Wenqian, once Zhou's government-appointed biographer and more recently the author of the revisionist (and unofficial) Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary, now available in a translation by Peter Rand and Lawrence R. Sullivan...
...book dispels the hagiography. He paints the Premier as thoughtful and scrupulous, yet so blinkered by loyalty to Mao that he sanctioned the arrest of his own brother. Most controversially, Gao challenges the official version of Zhou's role during the Cultural Revolution, during which an entire generation of Chinese intellectuals - including the author's mother - was purged and exiled to the countryside. Rather than mitigating the worst excesses of Mao's disastrous anti-rightist campaign - as the prevailing view holds - Zhou was an active, if not always enthusiastic, participant. Gao cites evidence in Zhou's own hand: "From...
...Premier was a conflicted, even tragic, figure. Zhou was raised in a scholarly family steeped in Confucian philosophy. He lived in Paris for a time and in later life favorably impressed world leaders, including, most significantly, U.S. President Richard Nixon, who described in his memoirs Zhou's "brilliance and dynamism." Zhou was everything Mao was not: cultured where Mao was crude, consistent where Mao was mercurial and stoic where Mao was given to flights of paranoia. How, then, did Mao come to so utterly dominate his second in command...
...apparently asked no less. Gao confirms an assertion made in Mao: The Unknown Story, the 2005 biography by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, that Mao purposefully denied Zhou medical care for the cancer that ultimately killed him. Gao even suggests that Mao may have ordered fireworks to celebrate his Premier's demise...
...Staging a successful World Cup is symbolic of Cambodia's sporting rebirth, says Chris Minko, 51, the league's full-time secretary general. Back in the 1960s, then Premier Norodom Sihanouk promoted Phnom Penh as the sporting hub of Southeast Asia, until Indonesia stole his thunder by staging a nonaligned version of the Olympics. Secret U.S. bombings and the Khmer Rouge did the rest. But Minko, a combative, shaven-headed Australian, wants to see Phnom Penh back on top. The first step is victory on Dec. 2, which Minko hopes will help reclaim Cambodia's stature as a sports power...