Today is Qingming Jie, the annual grave sweeping day, and also the 35th anniversary of the April 5 Τiananmen Incident. 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. Qingming remains a day of political significance, something not lost on the Chinese state security apparatus.
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Perhaps no 20th century Chinese leader is as beloved inside China or 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 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 the terminally ill Liu–to satisfy Mao’s revolutionary vision. What sorts of machinations and compromises were necessary to linger in power while those around him were being swept away?
Is our lasting image of Zhou Enlai to be the smooth, urbane diplomat showing up for talks in Geneva in a tailored-suit, silk tie, and a fedora, exchanging quips about the French Revolution? Or will it be the Zhou Enlai 
standing on top of Tiananmen with a red armband and a little red book, screeching in a high-pitched hysterical frenzy, “Long Live Chairman Mao!” as hordes of fanatical teenagers chant in the square and the Chairman looks on in approval?
Perhaps my favorite image of Zhou is footage from Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. As the US President blathered on about ‘friendship and mutual respect,’ the jaded premier shifted in his chair, unable to contain a mighty yawn. Zhou’s work with Kissinger was done and in the books. That had been the important part.
Or, perhaps, he was simply tired.
After all, it was during that summer that Zhou was diagnosed with bladder cancer. While he maintained a rigorous schedule of duties (Mao himself was far too ill to appear in public), Zhou in his mid-seventies must have sensed that the end was coming soon. In 1975, as the cancer spread, he sought to rehabilitate his long-time political ally Deng Xiaoping from exile.
It is telling that in their final political acts, both Mao and Zhou brought forth their chosen successors. For Mao, it was Hua Guofeng: stable, solid, unwilling to deviate from any course set by the Great Helmsman. Mao was not going to tolerate the emergence of any Krushchevs in China after he was gone.
Zhou backed Deng Xiaoping, whose pragmatic policies of modernization and economic development would steer China on a radically different course. Perhaps it is Zhou’s ultimate legacy that it would be his own ally, the diminutive Deng, and not any lackey of Mao’s, who would ultimately lead China into the new era.
But in the early days of 1976, the future direction of the PRC was far from certain. On January 8, Zhou Enlai finally succumbed to the cancer that had ravaged his body for
four years. Upon hearing the news, the country went into a state of deep mourning, an outpouring of emotion that surprised many while angering an important few. From Mao there was only silence. There were no condolences sent to Zhou’s widow (the equally talented Deng Yingchao) and the Chairman was conspicuously absent from the state funeral held a week later. In fact, Mao had not seen Zhou in many months. The Chairman was sick and, more than that, was increasingly surrounded by a cabal of sycophants in league with Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing.*
While Jiang Qing disliked Zhou, she loathed Deng Xiaoping, and it was Deng who delivered the eulogy at the funeral. It was Deng who praised Zhou for his warm heart, his hard work, and his plain and simple lifestyle. Not the sort of rhetoric to inspire controversy, but Jiang Qing and those around Mao considered Deng’s laudatory remarks to be thinly veiled criticism of Mao. In all probability, she was right.
April 4, 1976, was the eve of Qingming, the annual festival to remember the dead. Thousands of ordinary Chinese, from all walks of life, went to Tiananmen Square to place wreaths, posters, banners, flowers, and placards at the base of the Monument to the People’s Heroes–all in honor of Zhou Enlai. The pavement was covered with remembrances, both a vast display of grief and a not-so-subtle jab at those who remained in power. 1976 marked ten years of Cultural Revolution, the people were tired, and with the death of Zhou they felt they had lost one of the only leaders who truly cared for them.
The next day, thousands returned to find the square empty. No flowers. No posters. No wreaths. Nothing. It had all been swept away in the