After Zhou Enlai’s death in 1976, his widow Deng Yingchao, a senior CCP official in her own right, produced a diary she said contained her husband’s private reflections on a life of political compromise. She repeatedly pushed the Party leadership to accept it as an official historical document. The diary portrays Zhou as a man tormented by guilt for enabling Mao Zedong’s worst excesses. But given what the historical record shows about Zhou’s actual conduct, the diary reads less like a genuine confession and more like a carefully constructed effort to shift blame away from a man who was a willing participant in decades of political violence.
Zhou Enlai died as he had lived: behind a wall of secrecy. In his final days at the hospital, he and Deng Yingchao held almost no substantive conversations. He left her no final words. According to accounts from the period, he feared Mao Zedong had bugged his hospital room. For a man who knew he was dying, this level of paranoia reveals something about the system he had helped build, and about the depth of distrust that defined even the most senior relationships within the Party.
Zhou’s obsession with secrecy was lifelong. At one internal meeting, he told colleagues: “Secrecy is no small matter. Don’t go home and blurt things out because you’re in a good mood.” He added: “My wife is a veteran Party member and a Central Committee member. But things she shouldn’t know, I don’t tell her.”
Deng Yingchao herself confirmed this in a 1982 memoir published in People’s Daily. She wrote that after their marriage, they were rarely together, and that Zhou never told her where he was going, what he was doing, or how long he would be away. “He kept his mouth shut tight,” she wrote. “There were many things we kept secret from each other.”
The diary Deng Yingchao produced after Zhou’s death raises more questions than it answers
In ordinary life, a diary is a private space for honest reflection. Under CCP rule, diaries became dangerous. Citizens learned that private writings could be seized and used as evidence of political disloyalty. Some people stopped writing honestly. Others turned diaries into tools of political positioning. The Party’s own state media regularly published fabricated diaries to construct model citizens.
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Against this background, the diary Deng Yingchao produced after Zhou’s death is difficult to take at face value. She claimed it contained detailed discussions of Mao Zedong and his political legacy, material she said Zhou had shared with her during his final illness. This is hard to reconcile with Zhou’s documented personality. He was a man so consumed by operational secrecy that he refused to share basic information with his own wife. The idea that he would have left behind written criticism of Mao, material that could have destroyed him if discovered during one of the Party’s endless purge cycles, strains belief.
According to a report in Cheng Ming magazine, in October 1978 Deng Yingchao formally asked the CCP Politburo how she should handle what she described as “relevant archival materials.” Ye Jianying, speaking on behalf of the Politburo Standing Committee, told her: “There’s a great deal of work right now, and it’s complicated. You should hold onto them yourself.”
The framing is revealing. Deng described her own personal diary as “archival materials” and actively pushed the Party to take possession of it. A genuine private diary does not need to be submitted to a government body. A document designed to shape a political narrative does.
Deng did not give up. In July 1981, after the CCP’s Sixth Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee, she raised the diary again, effectively pressing the Party leadership to take a position on whether Mao or Zhou bore greater responsibility for the disasters of their era. Hu Yaobang, the general secretary at the time, responded on behalf of the Politburo Standing Committee: “The Standing Committee and some Politburo members have all read it. It’s still more appropriate for you to keep it, considering multiple factors: Party unity, the Party’s image, and the official assessment that Mao’s record was seventy percent achievements and thirty percent mistakes.”
The diary remained under the control of the Politburo’s confidential documents bureau after Deng Yingchao’s death. In March 2004, the CCP unsealed it. According to those who reviewed the contents, the diary recorded what Deng claimed were conversations with Zhou during his final illness, in which he reflected on his career and expressed regret for making “unprincipled compromises” at critical moments in the Party’s history, compromises he said had contributed to historical catastrophes.
This framing is itself a kind of deception. With a few carefully chosen words about “abandoning principles” and “making compromises,” the diary shifts the entire burden of responsibility onto Mao while presenting Zhou as a reluctant accomplice tormented by conscience. He emerges with the reputation of a man who died regretting his mistakes, rather than a man who was complicit in them from beginning to end.
A diary that its owner insists other people must read is not a genuine diary. It is a political instrument. That is why Deng Yingchao spent years trying to get the Party to accept it.
Zhou Enlai’s actual record: Exporting grain while millions starved
Whatever the diary claims about Zhou’s private anguish, his documented actions tell a different story. During the Great Famine of 1959 to 1961, when tens of millions of Chinese citizens starved to death, Zhou Enlai personally ordered massive grain exports.
In 1958, China’s net grain exports totaled 2.66 million tons, roughly in line with normal trade patterns. According to the 1983 China Statistical Yearbook, people in multiple provinces were already dying of starvation by early 1959. Zhou was fully aware of the situation. He ordered the export of 4.19 million tons of grain that year. In 1960, with mass death occurring daily across the country, exports still reached 2.65 million tons.
The arithmetic is damning. The 1959 grain harvest had already fallen by 25 million tons compared to 1957. Even with zero exports, there would not have been enough food. Yet exports increased by 2.24 million tons over 1957 levels. That 2.24 million tons, roughly 4.5 billion jin, would have fed 30 million people for six months, enough to survive from the autumn of 1959 to the summer of 1960. Instead, local officials, having inflated their production numbers to satisfy political pressure from above, surrendered what was in reality the peasants’ survival rations as “surplus grain.” The CCP then shipped it abroad to earn foreign currency.
Zhou chose to stockpile gold rather than buy food for starving citizens
By 1960, the CCP’s fiscal deficit had reached 8 billion yuan, and the regime was forced to import wheat from abroad to prevent total collapse. This required foreign currency. One option was to sell China’s gold reserves on the international market. Zhou rejected this. “Gold cannot be sold,” he said. “We need gold as our backing.” He insisted that “every single U.S. dollar we spend must be carefully considered.”
The regime continued purchasing tens of thousands of taels of gold annually, shipped back to China by special aircraft, every year through 1970. The people were starving and the Party was hoarding gold. The gold was for the regime’s survival, not theirs.
Zhou knowingly sent colleagues to their deaths on the Kashmir Princess
In the spring of 1955, Zhou Enlai was scheduled to lead a CCP delegation to the Bandung Afro-Asian Conference in Indonesia. The plan was for the delegation to fly from Hong Kong to Jakarta on April 11 aboard a chartered Air India plane, the Kashmir Princess.
Zhou changed his plans at the last minute and traveled separately, flying from Kunming through Rangoon to Jakarta. The rest of the delegation boarded the Kashmir Princess as scheduled. Four hours after takeoff, the plane exploded. All eight Chinese officials on board, including Huang Zuomei, the head of the Xinhua News Agency’s Hong Kong bureau, and three foreign journalists were killed.
The day before the flight, on April 10, the CCP had warned British colonial authorities in Hong Kong about a threat to the aircraft and requested security measures. After the explosion, Beijing publicly blamed British negligence and accused Kuomintang intelligence agents of carrying out the attack.
Hong Kong police conducted an extensive investigation that initially produced no leads. The case was ultimately solved using intelligence provided by the CCP itself, which identified the Kuomintang’s Hong Kong intelligence station as the organizer, named the operatives involved, and specified that the bomb had been shipped from Keelung, Taiwan.
This raised an obvious question that investigators found deeply troubling: if Zhou Enlai knew enough about the plot to warn the British authorities and to change his own travel plans, why did he allow the rest of the delegation to board the plane? Zhou, who had founded the CCP’s intelligence apparatus, sacrificed 11 Chinese and foreign colleagues, including his own driver, to maintain the appearance that the original plan was unchanged, thereby protecting himself. Zhou reportedly described this afterward as “a feint to the east while attacking in the west” and “sacrificing a chariot to save the king,” Chinese chess terminology for using expendable pieces to protect the most important one.
Zhou Enlai’s relationship with his adopted daughter ended in her death during the Cultural Revolution
Zhou Enlai and Sun Bingwen were comrades in arms. When Sun was killed, he entrusted his daughter Sun Weishi to Zhou’s care. Zhou formally adopted her, though the relationship was more intimate than the public record acknowledged, a fact Deng Yingchao was aware of.
In October 1950, Sun Weishi married Jin Shan, a prominent actor and director at the China Youth Art Theater. Zhou reportedly tried to prevent the marriage and refused to attend the wedding.
In December 1967, during the Cultural Revolution, security officers arrested Jin Shan on suspicion of espionage. Sun Weishi was subsequently arrested and imprisoned in Qincheng Prison, the CCP’s facility for high-ranking political prisoners. Beginning in March 1968, she was subjected to sustained abuse while in detention. She died on October 14, 1968, the anniversary of her wedding to Jin Shan.
After the Cultural Revolution, it emerged that the arrest warrant for Sun Weishi had been signed by Zhou Enlai himself. Her persecution had been driven by Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife, but Zhou had personally authorized it. Zhou’s relationship with Sun Weishi made her a political liability, and he sacrificed her to protect himself.
Zhou ordered the massacre of an entire household to eliminate a defector’s connections
Zhou Enlai was the architect of one of the CCP’s most notorious early killings: the extermination of the family of Gu Shunzhang, a senior Party intelligence operative who defected to the Kuomintang in 1931.
Zhou personally led a team of operatives to Gu’s home and oversaw the killing of everyone present: Gu’s wife, his parents-in-law, the household’s servants and driver, and friends who happened to be visiting. Kang Sheng, who later became the CCP’s feared intelligence chief, participated directly. At the time of the raid, more than a dozen of Gu’s family members and associates were playing mahjong.
Among those killed was Si Li, a man who had saved Zhou Enlai’s life. Si Li had been Zhou’s student at the Whampoa Military Academy. His brother was a Kuomintang general, and Si Li had used his brother’s position to rescue Zhou during the Kuomintang’s 1927 purge of Communists. Zhou killed him precisely because Si Li could identify him, turning a debt of gratitude into a reason for murder.
The diary’s version of Zhou Enlai cannot be reconciled with the historical record
Deng Yingchao’s diary presents Zhou Enlai as a man who, in his final days, agonized over a career of compromises forced upon him by Mao. The diary records him saying: “I once again made a subjective, politically wrong choice,” referring to his role at the Zunyi Conference in 1935, where he helped consolidate Mao’s control over the Party. The diary claims Zhou said he regretted “carrying the sedan chair for Mao” and “enabling Mao’s lifelong leadership.”
On the surface, these read like the reflections of a man confronting his own failures. They are something else entirely: a carefully constructed narrative that repositions Zhou as Mao’s victim rather than his willing partner. By framing every act as a “compromise” or a moment of “abandoning principles,” the diary transfers all moral responsibility to Mao while leaving Zhou with nothing worse than regret.
The historical record tells a different story. Zhou exported grain while millions starved. He sent colleagues to die on a plane he knew was targeted. He signed the arrest warrant for his own adopted daughter. He personally directed the killing of an entire household, including a man who had saved his life. These were not the acts of a man forced into compromises. They were the acts of a man who understood power and used it without hesitation.
Zhou Enlai understood exactly what history would eventually reveal about him. His request that his ashes be scattered at sea was a precaution against the Chinese tradition of desecrating the graves of the condemned. And Deng Yingchao’s diary was the final move in a lifelong campaign of image management: a document engineered to ensure that when the record was unsealed, it would tell the story Zhou wanted told, rather than the one he had actually lived.
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