A new children’s film about Zhou Enlai reveals a lot about China today

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A new children’s film about Zhou Enlai reveals a lot about China today
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It is a deeply conservative country, even as it prepares to celebrate its revolution | China

It is therefore worth studying what China’s propaganda chiefs have in store for youngsters this summer. As usual, June 1st was marked this year in China as International Children’s Day, a festival of visits to museums, school picnics and wholesome games. A month later there will be a much larger event: celebrations on July 1st of the 100th anniversary of the party’s founding in 1921.

This year’s Children’s Day saw the release of a new patriotic film made especially for children. It depicts the pre-teenage life of Zhou Enlai, who was China’s prime minister from 1949 until his death from cancer in 1976. This brilliant, disappointing man is a puzzle for historians. To this day, many Chinese revere Zhou as a moderate who tempered Mao’s worst excesses, especially during the Cultural Revolution of 1966-76.

Biographies written in the 1990s by historians in the West, including Chae-Jin Lee, Barbara Barnouin and Yu Changgen, take a different view. They find that Zhou had a conventional Confucian education, which marked him for life. Nor do they agree that he was an angry rebel, noting his later, loving praise for his two mothers. Both were educated, tradition-minded daughters of scholar-officials.

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