Today is the Qingming “Tomb Sweeping” Festival, which is a day to honor the dearly departed. It’s also a day with political significance, particularly after the death of a popular leader. This post, originally published on the anniversary of Zhou Enlai’s death (January 8, 2007) looks at the legacy of Zhou Enlai and how the celebration of Qingming led to a major demonstration and crackdown in the spring of 1976.
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Perhaps no 20th century Chinese leader is as beloved inside China nor respected abroad as much as Zhou Enlai (1898-1976). Even so, Zhou remains something of an enigma. He is revered for being a rock in the storm of mid-century Chinese politics, holding fast to his integrity and working to moderate the excesses of the Mao regime as best he could. (It was Zhou who told the rampaging members of Mao’s Red Guards that the Forbidden City was off-limits in their destruction of all things “Old.”) And yet one wonders how Zhou could have watched as his closest friends and oldest allies, men such as Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi along with their wives and families, were cast aside and made to suffer–quite cruelly in the case of