18 Julai 2025
Hakika usaidizi na umahiri katika diplomasia wa Humphrey Herson Polepole na John Pombe Joseph Magufuli uliisaidia sana awamu ya 5
Awamu ya sita ya rais Samia imejaa machawa aina ya Prof. Palamagamba Kabudi, William Lukuvi ambao hawana uelewa wa maana pana ya umuhimu wa diplomasia aliyotumia John Magufuli kwa msaada wa Humphrey Herson Polepole
Tuangalie jinsi uongozi mwingine wa juu wa taifa la China ulivyonufaika na diplomasia :
Mwanadiplomasia Zhou Enlai na kiongozi Mao Zedong walishiriki uhusiano mgumu na wa kudumu unaotokana na malengo yao ya pamoja ya kimapinduzi na utegemezi wa pande zote. Zhou, mwanadiplomasia na msimamizi stadi, aliunga mkono mara kwa mara uongozi wa Mao, hata alipokuwa akikabiliwa na changamoto za kutofautiana kisiasa. Muundo huu wa kusikiliza hoja mbadala tunduizi ulisaidia kuunganisha nguvu za Chama cha Kikomunisti na kuunda sera za awali za China.
Hapa kuna mchanganuo wa uhusiano wao:
- Malengo ya Mapinduzi ya Pamoja:
Wote wawili Zhou na Mao walijitolea katika mapinduzi ya kikomunisti nchini China, na walifanya kazi kwa karibu ili kufikia malengo yao.
- Uongozi wa Mao:
Zhou mara kwa mara alikuwa na uwezo wa kuhoji mamlaka ya Mao, hata alipokuwa hakubaliani na sera zake lakini aliendelea kuhudumu . Uaminifu huu ulikuwa muhimu kwa kudumisha umoja wa Chama cha Kikomunisti kutokana na kiongozi Mao .
- Nguvu za ziada:
Ustadi wa utawala na kidiplomasia wa Zhou ulikamilisha maono ya kimkakati ya Mao na haiba yake. Zhou alikuwa muhimu katika kutekeleza sera za Mao na kujenga serikali mpya.
- Msaada wa Kisiasa:
Uungwaji mkono wa Zhou ulikuwa muhimu wakati wa harakati za kisiasa na kugombea madaraka. Mara nyingi aliwakinga kifua wengine kutokana na ghadhabu ya kiongozi Mao na kusaidia kukabiliana na hali ngumu.
- Ushirikiano wa Kudumu:
Licha ya kutokubaliana na changamoto za ndani ya siasa cha chama, Zhou na Mao walidumisha uhusiano wa karibu wa kufanya kazi katika maisha yao yote. Uaminifu na umahiri wa Zhou vilikuwa muhimu kwa mafanikio ya Mao.
The Curse of the “Good Premier”
Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong’s second-in-command, has been lionized as a moderating force who held back Mao’s excesses. But does he deserve that reputation, when he also enabled them
Chillingly, Zhou flattered and lavished gratitude onto Mao, even though the Chairman had ordered doctors to withhold surgery from Zhou — treatment which may have prolonged the life of the Premier, who was Mao’s second-in-command.
Zhou Enlai (right) and Mao Zedong (left) pose for a picture in 1945, during the war between China and Japan. (
AFP/Getty)
Mao and Zhou consulted with and depended on each other, but also secretly plotted and fretted over who would die first. The ultimate survivor hoped to shape the historical “verdict” on the other, defining a complex dynamic which was a key factor in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s existential struggles.
Zhou so feared being criticized by Mao that he was embarrassingly sycophantic. His letter presented Mao with a self-critical summary of his career, but before he could complete it Zhou died, on January 8, 1976, at the age of 77. Eight months later, Mao too passed away, plunging China into a dramatic power struggle in which reformist Deng Xiaoping emerged the winner, leading China onto the path of economic modernization.
Succession, the Achilles’ heel of Zhou and Mao’s relationship, is once again on people’s minds in China (if not their lips). Many Chinese yearn for another “good Premier,” a phrase many Chinese used to refer to Zhou.
Yet someone who might fulfill this hope today remains nowhere to be seen. The current Premier, Li Qiang, assumed the post last year, and so far is known best for his deference to General Secretary Xi Jinping. His recent predecessors would, at times, speak to champion the poor and marginalized. But Li has fewer chances to speak at all.
Last March, the Premier’s annual press conference — normally the climax of each session of the National People’s Congress, or parliament, since the 1980s — was abruptly cancelled until further notice.
Not long ago, Beijing almost had someone like a “good Premier.” Li Qiang’s predecessor, Li Keqiang, was popular, though eclipsed by Xi and bureaucratically weak. His fans nursed secret hopes that he would emerge from his boss’s shadow. Those hopes collapsed when Li Keqiang retired in March 2023. In October last year, he died unexpectedly. Officially, the cause was a heart attack while Li was swimming, yet skepticism abounds.
An “underground” digital-only document circulated in cyberspace, citing “abnormal circumstances” around Li’s death. “Why was Li sent to a traditional Chinese medicine hospital instead of an emergency room that was closer by?” said one Chinese source who requested anonymity as he showed it to me on his electronic device. It’s title is simply
Him (他).
Many Chinese still remember Zhou as the original “good Premier.” They credit him with shielding thousands of victims from persecution, or worse, during the Cultural Revolution, when ultra-leftist extremists held sway. Half a century after he died, beatific imagery of Zhou is still hard to escape.
Tour guides at palaces and museums explain that he protected cultural relics from destruction by rampaging Red Guards. In sprawling flea-markets, his iconography is almost as omnipresent as Mao’s. Yet middle-class Chinese admit they’re ambivalent. “Zhou’s reputation has been tarnished in recent years, especially among intellectuals,” one Chinese member of the intelligentsia told me. “I confess that I cried when Zhou died. He was the one who had given us hope.”
For decades, Zhou has been perceived as the CCP’s compassionate empath, scrambling to contain the excesses of his paranoid, abusive boss.
The paradox of Zhao’s relationship with Mao is on full display in Chen Jian’s impressive biography
Zhou Enlai: A Life (Harvard University Press, 2024). For decades, Zhou has been perceived as the CCP’s compassionate empath, scrambling to contain the excesses of his paranoid, abusive boss.
Mao had the leadership skills and killer instinct, but needed Zhou’s organizational talent and attention to detail. Zhou could mesmerize guests at a dinner party.
But it was Mao’s fiery rhetoric and “animal magnetism” — as the late US president Richard Nixon put it — that drew cheers and tears from thousands in Tiananmen Square as they gathered to honor their leader.
This co-dependence wasn’t just a magnetic pull between opposites. It was symbiotic: the
yin of Zhou required the
yang of Mao — or so Zhou seemed to think. The two were locked in a perpetual cycle of mutual admiration, suspicion and need.
Foreign perceptions of Zhou can veer into hagiography. He is seen as the consummate diplomat whose charm, good looks and people skills lead him to stunning achievements, such as the Sino-US rapprochement of the 1970s.
Henry Kissinger famously described Zhou as “one of the two or three most impressive men I have ever met,” while former U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld said Zhou possessed “the most superior brain I have so far met in the field of foreign policy,” according to
The China Diary of George H. W. Bush (2008). Zhou was “the only really good man we’d met in China,” said journalist Martha Gellhorn after she and her husband Ernest Hemingway secretly met him in 1941. (Revealingly, Hemingway saw Zhou as slippery.)
Chen Jian’s strong suit is Chinese-language material, including his own interviews, and the book is a prodigiously researched narrative. It is difficult to imagine a more comprehensive chronology of what Zhou did, when and with whom. Chen steers clear of speculating much about “why?”; those motivations, he writes, were locked inside Zhou’s “innermost world.” Nonetheless, the book mentions several factors which may have influenced Zhou’s actions.
With a historian’s care, Chen poses these as questions, not declarations, and invites us to draw our own conclusions.
Exploring Zhou’s dark side is like a criminal investigation, with the sordid corners of China’s political landscape as the crime scene, and Zhou increasingly seen as a suspect. How big was the conspiracy? Given the symbiosis between Zhou and Mao, who was the real mastermind? As Chen reminds us, some key documents remain classified.
Others are said to be lost, including hundreds of letters Zhou exchanged with his wife. Chen himself, loath to be judge and jury, claims there are “no definitive answers on how Zhou’s position in history would be illustrated and defined.”
For those yearning to peek into that “innermost world,” however, Chen offers some insight. Zhou had once been Mao’s superior in the early communist cause, but a series of events — some relatively small, such as a bold battlefield decision that paid off for Mao — persuaded Zhou that the leader of China’s revolution needed the cutthroat ambition which Mao displayed.
By increments, Zhou began to support and defer to Mao. Chen writes that Zhou was “more a man of action than of ideas,” lacking Mao’s “utopian idealism and charisma,” summarizing:
What differentiated Zhou and Mao was not Zhou’s absence of ideas or vision, but his lack of the requisite will and determination to rise to and maintain the position of the revolution’s supreme leader.
Their symbiotic relationship ultimately led to tragedy. Mao became ever more destructive, and Zhou was unable to break free from his evil twin. Zhou seemed obsessed with
not being named Mao’s official heir apparent, because so many had met painful fates.
His obsequiousness seeped into mainstream consciousness after a Chinese-language book,
Zhou Enlai’s Later Years (晚年周恩来) by Gao Wenqian, was published in the 1990s and later
translated into English.
It was banned on the mainland, but Chen credits Gao with complicating public perceptions of Zhou inside China that used to be two-dimensionally positive.
Zhou Enlai in the 1940s with his wife Deng Yingchao (center) and adopted daughter Sun Weishi (right).