Episode 77: RICHARD NIXON 1972 The Foundation of Peace (Special 50th Anniversary Edition) Discovering Zhou En Lai

To mark the actual 50th anniversary of the start of the week that changed the world. The week Richard Nixon landed in Peking , China and reestablished a relationship with Mainland China. We thought it appropriate to look to the other man who made this trip and the events within that week such a dramatic success. He was the man on the other side of the field, a man often in the shadow of Mao  in the story of opening relations with China. The books and attention is often on Nixon and Mao, but the man who made it all work was Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai.

Chairman  Mao was the great father figure of China. But it was Zhou Enlai who was the great diplomat of China. He was a man of enormous vision and also he was a man of an extraordinary ability to see problems and fix them with extraordinary skill. As we will learn on our next episode on the Shanghai Communique.  He knew how to smooth out the rough edges and make situations not only work but to bare fruit too. 

Zhou Enlai was originally the foreign Minister,  he was often the man chosen to deal with hostile powers, and was often called the world's greatest diplomat by many who dealt with him. Zhou Enlai was a strong advocate of modernizing China and he saw the outreach from the United States as an opportunity to achieve that goal, to develop a modern economy in China. 

He would be diagnosed with cancer later in the year of Nixon's opening to China and pass away in January 1976. When an attempt was made to remove memorial wreaths laid in his honor  from  Tiananmen  Square a riot broke out, something almost unheard of in China. Zhou Enlai had come under attack by folks in the  radical anti-Confucius campaign, but the ordinary people stood by his memory.  He was that well regarded by the people of China. 

To commemorate the historic moment, a half century ago, of the opening to China by President Richard Nixon we thought this the right moment to look at the man on the other end of the historic handshake that welcomed President Nixon to China. 

Our special edition of "Bridging the Political Gap" honors  Zhou Enlai,  and gives us all a chance to get to know the first Premier of the People's Republic of China. 

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