Zhou Enlai served as China's premier for twenty-six years — navigating Mao's purges, the Cultural Revolution, and the opening to Nixon while somehow remaining indispensable to a leader who destroyed everyone else around him. He was a revolutionary, a diplomat, a spymaster, and the most skilled political survivor of the twentieth century. Whether his survival required moral compromises that disqualify him from admiration remains China's most sensitive historical question.

This episode traces Zhou from his mandarin-class childhood through the revolutionary underground, the Long March, the diplomatic triumphs, and the Cultural Revolution years when staying alive meant watching colleagues be destroyed.

• Zhou's elite education, his Paris years, and his role in the Communist underground
• The Long March, the civil war, and the dip ...